The Book:
Halloween: From Pagan Ritual to Party Night
By Nicholas Rogers
Oxford University Press
2002
The Talk:
Now the urchin hath his fun,
The reign of terror’s now begun,
For Hallowe’en is here.
In his book Halloween: From Pagan Ritual to Party Night historian Nicholas Rogers tells the story of how the October holiday transformed over the centuries from a sacred Celtic rite to Halloween as we know it.
Most people are aware that Halloween has pagan roots. But what I found most fascinating about Rogers’ book is that between the druidic era and today there was a really long stretch—about 500 years or more—when Halloween was mostly known as a night when adolescent boys roamed around in packs and terrorized everybody.
A good season for light extortion
How fit our well-rank’d Feasts do follow
All mischief comes after All-Hallow
In pre-industrial times, community life centered around agriculture. The end of the harvest marked, essentially, the end of the work year, and the community was focused on enjoying the abundance of food and preserving it for winter. The holidays we know today as Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years used to be all mashed up and blended together. Each region and locality had its own traditions. Roasting chestnuts was a common Halloween activity. Thanksgiving looked a lot like Christmas. Christmas looked a lot like Halloween: Carolers begging from door to door, bands of revelers carousing in the streets, dressed up in costumes. And all these seasonal holidays occurred on different days, depending where you lived.
After the harvest was done, local boys were free. When slaughtering happened, they could get a bladder, make a ball, and play ball games. But it sounds like mainly they were free to roam, while girls stayed at home.
It was also prime begging season. The pantries were full, and the weather was getting cold. The purses of the rich were loaded with the equivalent of “end of year bonuses.” And I get the sense that the begging was a tad aggressive. Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas had elements of “misrule,” when groups of poor and working class people would dress up like mock-wealthy people, get really drunk and rowdy, crown one of their own as mayor, and pound on the doors of the rich, asking for food and drink. Rogers describes it as “a ritual of enforced charity by the laboring classes as winter set in.”
Halloween was particularly a night for adolescent boys to enforce charity. Boys would go into their home attics and put on whatever old clothes or rags they could find. They would create masks out of wicker or blacken their faces in soot or burnt cork. (It was sometimes referred to as Blackman’s Night.) Sometimes they would fill socks with soot or flour so they could hit random bystanders.
There was clearly an undertone of “we aren’t asking, we’re telling” when a group of teenage boys showed up at your door with wicker masks on, swinging socks full of soot. People who didn’t give money or food to the boys found their property vandalized. Rogers describes Guy Fawkes night in the early 19th Century:
In Yorkshire, gangs of youth ranged the streets, striking doors with bags of stones and shouting, “Fift’ o’ November, we’ll mak’ ye’ remember."
Street chaos
It was also a night for boys to mete out rough justice, targeting people that were not well-liked in the community (or simply not well-liked by the boys). Into the early 20th Century, Halloween was occasionally a night for terrorizing ethnic neighborhoods. Rogers describes how in 1934 “400 revelers armed with stones and stockings rioted in Harlem, black against white, until the police intervened.” He also describes incidents involving Chinese and Japanese immigrant communities as well.
But more often the mayhem was general. In New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia, around the turn of the century, gangs of boys would chase women down the street in “soot bag attacks.” They would unhook street car poles to disable them or grease trolley car tracks. Trash cans would be dumped down stairwells. Cast iron gates would be stolen. In the 1920s new automobiles had their windows soaped and their tires deflated. Rogers writes:
On a typical Halloween spree in interwar North America, fences were destroyed, signs and gates removed, roads barricaded, trolley cars immobilized, street lighting smashed, and outhouses tipped over. One eminent historian of Canada assured me that in his more youthful days in the 1930s he turned over as man as fourteen outhouses in one night of Halloween pranks.
Vandalism was well-understood as the point, the spirit of Halloween. Rogers writes:
As Walter Pritchard Eaton noted, when reminiscing of his mid-nineteenth-century childhood, “apple bobbing and trips down the cellar with a lighted candle and a mirror to see your future spouse were all very well for girls and ‘dress up’ parties. But they weren’t the essence of Halloween,” at least for boys. That essence was “robbery, destruction, arson.”
Happy Halloween?
As Rogers tells it, the 1920s and 30s marked a cultural turning point for the holiday. Community organizations like the Lions and Kiwanis, as well as women’s groups and churches, began to offer programs to get young people off the streets—carnivals, street fairs, vaudeville shows, costume contests, dances, and parades.
Around this same time “trick-or-treating” grew in popularity as an activity for younger children. No longer an act of petty gang extortion, it was a moment for little children in adorable costumes to eagerly open their bags for an equally eager adult to give them a goodie. Rather than asking for money or bread, trick-or-treating became a highly anticipated exchange facilitated by a growing consumer candy industry.
In other words, by mid-century, Halloween had been infantilized to a large degree through a coordinated effort of parents, community organizations, and commercial industry in order to make the holiday safe for communities, private property, and profitable for business. It was no longer a night for adolescent boys, but rather a night for little boys and girls. The kings of the night had been dethroned.
As a result, later in the century, the worries of Halloween changed, from roving vandalism by male youths to public panics about protecting children from strangers who might put something dangerous (razor blades, heroin, etc.) into their trick-or-treat bag. The threat was no longer the boys outside the house; it was the adult inside the house.
Devil’s Night
Although pranks and tricks still happen on Halloween, today is nothing like centuries past. Rogers notes that by the 1960s “much of the mischief formerly associated with the holiday had ebbed.” And yet there’s one episode from 1980s Detroit that I had never heard of before.
Plagued by decades of racial violence and economic decline, Detroit in the 1980s drew international attention for its massive urban fires during the Halloween season. A significant number of abandoned buildings made it easy for arsonists to set fires and get away with it.
The night before Halloween night was known as “Devil’s Night” in Michigan, when the fires would start. In 1983, there were 1,000 fires started in Detroit over the three night period. In 1984, there were 840. Rogers writes, “About 750 minors, of whom over 90 percent were male, were arrested during the Halloween season in 1986.”
The number of fires were brought down over several years through a concerted community-wide effort of volunteers to end the mass arson within their city.
The social and economic situation was obviously more complex than Halloween traditions alone, and yet the basic dynamic of the situation was similar to the old Halloween: The night holiday, with a hint of dark “misrule,” provided an easy way for adolescent boys to act concurrently, which easily overwhelmed law enforcement. And it was only brought under control through long-term community-wide action.
Halloween’s ghosts
Today the “spirit of Halloween” is a spirit of personal creativity and imagination, fueled by Hollywood horror and popular entertainment more generally. Much of the magic comes from thinking up a costume idea that expresses yourself in some way, creating or buying it, and showing it off—at a party, in the street, or on social media. So far from the attic trunk of rags.
The elementary school does its costume parade. The churches do their harvest parties and trunk-or-treats. The bars and clubs are packed with young partygoers dressed up in everything from blood and gore to cartoon characters to political satire. Older adults decorate their yards with loveable ghosts or adorable witches. Haunted houses are multi-hour, professional-grade, Hollywood-level affairs (and pricey).
How far we’ve come from those Halloween boys, running, shouting, wild in the dark.
Related:
Pass the turkey, hold the pilgrim
10 reasons Santa is Episcopalian
Looking back at 'Devils Night' in Detroit (WXYZ Detriot, October 2021)
Halloween - Robert Burns (YouTube)