Even if Halloween was slow to arrive in the department stores and stationers of America, not to mention its candy manufacturers, this by no means suggests that All Hallows’ Eve was a quiet occasion in its early years. Old Yankee harvest traditions and beliefs in witchcraft combined with the Halloween traditions of Irish immigrants to America, resulting in a day of spooky suppositions and puckish mischief.
October 31st was mostly known and celebrated as an inherently ghostly day, holding a “mystic and eerie significance” in both pagan and Christian cosmology, according to Yale anthropologist Ralph Linton, writing in 1951. All that supernatural activity allegedly lifted the veil that normally kept the secrets of the spirit world obscured from daily view, and in many circles it was thought that “every peasant implicitly believes that the fairies and other supernatural beings have double power over the destinies of mortals.” Divination party games were therefore popular, many using the fruits of the fall harvest and most directed at helping women figure out who Mr. Right might be. In these games, women “threw apple peelings over their shoulders to determine the initials of their future bridegrooms,” bobbed for apples, or predicted the future from bits of string or roasting chestnuts.
It was also known as a night for pranks. The anthropologist Cindy Dell Clark, in an examination of social norms around modern Halloween, notes that in a 1975 column for Redbook magazine, Margaret Mead expressed nostalgia for the mischief nights of her youth, when kids could play out the sense that “Halloween was the one occasion when people could safely invoke the help of the devil in some enterprise.” Mead recalled a Halloween celebration characterized by harmless pranks, and looking back from the mid-1970s, complained that the holiday’s pranks had taken on a sharper, more destructive aspect.
Mead was perhaps glossing things over a bit in remembering her childhood Halloweens as full of harmless antics. Teenagers in the 1970s, armed with eggs and toilet paper, couldn’t hold a candle to pranks of the early 1900s, including a Connecticut incident in which pranksters loaded a wagon with trash, set it on fire, and pushed the whole lot downhill toward trees, setting them ablaze; and another in which boys “managed to suspend a sleigh from a two-story building and perch another awkwardly by the roadside.” And Linton painted a terrifying mental picture about early holiday celebrations, noting that “the prevalence of indoor plumbing has taken much of the sport out of Halloween.”