Devil's Night with Catherine Corcoran

Astonishing Legends Network. Disclaimer. This episode includes the usual amount of adult language and graphic discussions you've come to expect around here. But in the event it becomes an unusual amount, expect another call from me. Hey everybody, welcome back to Scare It All the Time. I'm Chris Collari. Oh, I'm Ed Ficola. This is Catherine Corcoran. We'll get to that in a minute. And this week, we are getting ready for Halloween by investigating what happens the night before the tricks and treats are traditionally set to begin. Depending on where you grew up, you might know October 30th, or Halloween Eve, as Mischief Night, Devil's Night, or something considerably harder to explain to the police, like Goosey Night. If you've never heard of any of those, consider yourself, or at least your lawn, home, and property, extremely lucky. Steeped in rumor and urban legend, the night before Halloween is a playground for pranksters and idiots and teenagers and vandals. The sun is setting early, and the nights are long enough to really do some damage before the sun comes up again. So today... On October 29th, we are going to dive into the history of the night before Halloween. We'll find out why people once wanted to abolish something known as Corn Night, how a town tried putting children in charge of other children, and what happened when the tricks got so bad that thousands of adults banded together to take back their streets. So bring the pumpkins inside, keep an eye on your front door, and join us for a night of extremely questionable holiday traditions. This is Devil's Night, and it's time to get scared. What are we? Scared. When are we? All the time. Join us. Join us. Join us. Now it is time for. Time for. Scared. All the time. Hey guys, just a quick bit of housekeeping before we dive into this episode. Ed and I just want to say thank you so much for listening to all of the stuff we've been putting out for the month of Too Many Treats. We took a couple of bigger swings this year on different pieces of audio and different bonus episodes. And we weren't sure what the response was going to be, but so far it has been amazing. So I hope that you've really been enjoying it. If you have really been enjoying it and you've enjoyed getting this supersized amount of scared all the time in your life and want to continue to have that much scared all the time in your life, make sure to join our Patreon over at patreon.com slash scared all the time. We've got everything from ad-free early release episodes to bonus episodes and bonus shows, live shows, and even a button of the month club where, that's right, once a month, you can get a handmade exclusive button based on something from the show from Ed and I to your door. So every subscription over there counts. Our patrons are the lifeblood of this show. You know who you are if you're listening. We truly couldn't make the show without you. So thank you to everyone who's already joined, and we can't wait to welcome the rest of you. We'd also love it if you could like, share, and subscribe on Spotify, Apple, YouTube, wherever you listen to the show. If you leave a five-star review for us, we might read it in our housekeeping. And that brings me to the last thing I want to do, which is to read one of my recent favorite five-star reviews. This one from Erroneous Monk. The title of the review is Lake Baikal, which I think is the deepest lake in the world, if I'm not mistaken. So this might be erroneous, his way of letting us know that he'd like us to maybe do an episode on Lake Baikal, maybe. Anyway, all that wind up big five star review here. Quote, it's good, y'all. So thank you, erroneous. Thank you for leaving the five star review. Thank you to everybody who's been listening and supporting the show. And with that, let's bring Catherine Corcoran out and get into Devil's Night. Hey everybody, welcome back to the show. We aren't alone in our journey through Devil's Night today, thank God. We've got a guest who knows her way around a horror movie and grew up in a place that celebrated the night before Halloween like nowhere else. She's a writer and a producer. You might know her as Dawn in the original Terrifier or as Lauren in Troma's Return to Newcomb High movies. She's also a podcaster herself with horror talk show Scream Dreams under her belt, which she hosted with Barbara Crampton and Dead Meat James. So, Catherine Corcoran, welcome to Scared All the Time. What an honor. What a privilege. I'm so happy to be here. I'm so glad we're finally getting to do this. You've been on the guest list for a while. I know. I think I blew you guys off once. I'm so sorry. I totally forgot about it. Different way to say that. Just because I said I was busy. No, it was really rude of me, and I am so sorry to say. No, it's all good. We've been going back and forth on schedules and topics, and we finally landed on Devil's Night because Catherine... you grew up in a place with one of the kinds of Devil's Nights we're going to be talking about, Mischief Night. Yes. So tell us a little bit about that. I mean, I don't know how it is for everyone. I never even, like, I never heard that it was called anything other than Mischief Night until I left the Philadelphia area, which is like where I'm from. So for us, Mischief Night was, the night before Halloween, it was considered like when the spooky things would actually happen. Like it was less Halloween. It was like, it happens here. And it was more like a prank thing. So like your house would get toilet papered or egg. I was always kind of hoping it would happen to me, but I guess like it never really did eat probably because either I didn't annoy people enough. I was just weird and awkward or I didn't have enough friends. Like one of the two, my sister, it happened to every year. Because she was like kind of popular in like the Mean Girls thing. So like that would happen. But I guess either like I dodged that by being like too awkward and weird. Yeah. If you're awkward and weird, you get a year of bullying. If you're popular, you get one. Evening of bullying. What happened to your sister on Mischief Night? Oh, toilet paper and eggs. Like the cars. And my mom was so pissed. It would happen every year to her. And she would wake up my sister and be like, get up! And make her go outside and take it down. I think my sister actually did it to other people, too. Yeah. As she got older and stuff. I feel like if you get the mischief night, mischief on you, you turn around and then push, you know, hurt people hurt people. Yeah. We would do these things that were much more innocent in elementary school, which were on mischief night, which were like ghosts. ghosting we called it long before that was like a thing you could do to someone you were dating. Like where, so we'd make these little baggies, it was like very innocent and sweet, of like candy and you would put a ghost on and like, you've been ghosted or whatever and you would like knock on their door and run away. And then if you got one you had to do it to someone else. So we would do like, it was mostly just like fun things inside, you know? Yeah. It wasn't like a bag of flaming shit or whatever. But when you got older, it became like a bag of flaming shit. And that's innocence lost. Yeah. So like, yeah, it is innocence lost. So it's so deep. It really is. Um, but also like where I grew up, uh, in the Philadelphia area has one of the best, um, Philadelphia is one of the best haunted houses in the country. Which one? It's called Terror Behind the Walls. It's the Eastern State Penitentiary. Whoa, yeah. I've been to the penitentiary, but not to the. Yeah, and you have to sign a waiver because people have, like, heart attacks and, like, and they can touch you. And that's a cool thing. There's, like, I dated people who worked in there. And even on the first, like, earliest movies, they made, like, effects artists would come out to work on that haunted house, like, around Halloween if they weren't employed. Because it's so... And there's a lot of, like, supernatural stuff that people would talk about experiencing in there that were working the event. And then a lot of stuff like a route. So like, as you go outside of Philadelphia, that kind of like permeates there's, it's very like, especially the suburbs of Philadelphia are very like, cinematic and idyllic like trees and as much of the east coast is. So a lot of that stuff kind of permeates. It is beautiful out there. It is very much Halloween town in general. It's one of the things I missed the most when I was, when I was living in LA, it was not, I would go back for Halloween instead of Christmas because I missed the fall that much. I feel like that we were talking about how, when I first got here, about how, you know, I grew up loving Halloween. I was such a spooky kid. And like, as I got older and Especially, I really noticed it after I moved to LA. I stopped loving it as much. It became stressful. And maybe that's the privilege of it kind of being your job. Every day is Halloween. But like... There's no reminder of it. There's no fall. There's no leaves. Yeah, there's no like... So you doesn't feel... It feels like work and less like magical. Yeah. This guy really did go back like every Halloween to Pennsylvania. And I was like, oh, those trips will satiate him. He clearly won't move, right? He wouldn't move there full time. It's funny. I literally am just putting this together right now because... Two of the projects that I've worked on that have gotten kind of the furthest down the line are actually me trying to come to terms with not having the holidays that I used to have. There's 12 Deadly Days, which Ed worked on a decade ago this year, which was my attempt to write a Christmas horror comedy in California with no snow. Oh, cool. One of the best notes I've ever gotten. We'll talk about that later if you want. And then I, the pilot never got picked up to a show, but I did a Dia de los Muertos pilot a few years after that that was me being like, what is Halloween to me not on the East Coast? I'd never put this together before. It feels very, like, out here, it feels almost, it feels very consumerism and less, like, I don't know, there's like a spiritual energy. It sounds crazy on the East Coast around Halloween that you feel around the fall. When you're here, it feels very plastic. Yeah if that makes sense well I know I would suggest maybe I'm making this theory up as I go right now but I wonder if that has anything to do with the fact that on the East Coast literally everything around you is dying and And here, plastic is going up. Like, it feels literally plastic because it's just decorations and masks and costumes. Yeah, no, exactly what I'm saying. You know what doesn't feel plastic? The glass bottles of Harito's Minaragua. Oh! Yeah, so. Sponsor break. Before we get too deep into this, let's open these with our Minaragua-provided bottle openers. Hell yeah. Let me open this so you hear it. There it is. I'll let it that nice. Ed, you want to open? Get that going near the end. Are we going to toast? Oh, yeah. Oh, we can. Okay. Stopping us. Cheers. Minaragua. Delicious. Perfect. Thank you. It is good. Oh, look. Did you see those bubbles come up after? Yeah, no. It's fizzy as hell. Wait, hang on. Oh, wow. Yeah, I should do the same. Can you hear that, audience? Yeah, it's fizz fest. Fizz test. If the mics don't pick it up, Eddie's just going to drop in like fizzy bubbles that wave. Yeah, fizzy that wave, dude. So anyway, yeah, so it's plastic in California. So I'm from the East Coast as well. Yes. Wait, to where? Where are you guys from? Wait. I'm from Connecticut. You're from Connecticut. Oh, Connecticut is amazing. It's very pretty at that time of year. Where in Connecticut? Just outside of New, well, Fairfield County. Okay. But then now my family lives outside of New Haven. I, my. Family, we spend Thanksgiving in Newtown, Connecticut. Okay, yeah, I'm very familiar. My aunt was always growing up and that is like, I love it. And then where are you from in Pennsylvania? Hershey. No, did we talk about this? Yes, I think we have. Okay, I was like, we've talked about this before. Well, that's how I knew that you had grown up near Philadelphia, because anybody who was out here from Pennsylvania, I was like, friend, friend, friend. I have a deep connection to. Yeah, we must have, because my dad went to that boarding school. Yes, yes, that I forgot, but yes. Your dad had no parents? Well, it's funny that you even know that. Most people don't know that. He knows everything about Hershey. Yeah. He had we had my dad's father died in the Vietnam War. And my my grandmother. This is a crazy story. So we'll get back to like this. But basically, my grandmother got no government aid because of how the government was operating at that time. And she could not raise all eight children by herself after losing her husband and having the income and just the mental turmoil of all of that. So my dad's one of eight, so he is the youngest of the older half. So the older half got the state funding to go to Hershey Boarding School, which was a boarding school that Milton Hershey had created for orphaned and underprivileged children. And then... The other half. And then he like stayed at home and then they all moved back to Philadelphia. In the same house that my aunt lived in up until a couple years ago before she passed. The same like townhouse they all went to high school in. They all lived in the same house. My parents are both one of seven. How many is your parents? One of what? My parents are both one of two. My mom had one sister and my dad had one brother. And then your sister decided to... Try and even the scale. It's a very, like, East Coast, giant Irish Catholic, like, family. Yeah, my parents are half Irish, half Italian, like, across the. Yeah, same. So funny. Speaking of, Ed, did you have a name for the night before Halloween? Mischief Night. So you did call it. So maybe it is, like, an East Coast thing. Yeah, yeah, it was Mischief Night, and it was toilet paper, it was eggs, it was, like, I don't know, bologna on people's cars or whatever, depending on what you hated them. Bologna. There was some meat that I never did. Because once I heard what it did, I was like, I don't want to eat part of that. What did it do? It would irreparably damage the paint on the car. It would just be like a meat-shaped... Like, messed up paid job. Oh, fuck. Do you think it was, like, there's, like, an oil or, like, an acid in bologna? I have not looked into how processed our processed meat is, but I imagine, yeah. It's processed with alien blood. Yeah, I mean, ironically, I'm sure DuPont worked on both the meat and the paint. It was a conspiracy. Yeah, I don't know, but I never did it. But I know that was, like, a thing. And then, you know, I'm not a Halloween person. I'm, like, famously not a Halloween. Infamously to our audience, but famously to everyone else. Because I grew up, do you remember the croup? Like having the croup? It's like a very, it's like an acute asthma issue that only happens in like cool fall weather. Like it really like triggers it. And so you would like, your lungs would close up, basically. Oh, no. And so it's like Halloween was like the perfect time period for that. You were like, every time is mischief night, every day. Well, it's just if mischief is. In your lungs. Yeah, yeah. Mischief is mainly central. Yeah. So my mom would take me out during the day at Halloween and like tell our neighbors in advance. Oh, my God, that's so sad. And I'd be in my little costume. And then like I'd go and hang in the door. And then, you know, my friend's parents knew. what was happening, and then I'd be dressed as Superman, Batman, whatever, and then they'd be like, here's your candy, but then my friends would be in the background in the mudroom being like, you fucking loser. Oh my God. No wonder you don't like Halloween. Don't care for it. You're like, oh, the spooky stuff is not, that's awful. It didn't happen every year, but there was plenty of years where like, I'm going out and I'm putting my coat on over my costume and I'm going, and then it would just be like me, like my parents running steam in the bathroom, like, breathe in. So it, you know, so it wasn't every year. And that's something that you do. You develop a lot of people develop out of it. So like my young underdeveloped lungs, that was the case. But then as I got older, how old were you when it like stopped? I don't remember. You know, when's the last time you pick up your kid? You know what I mean? What do you mean by that? Like lift up your kid, like hold your kid. Oh, I see. At some point, the kid starts walking. You don't do that no more. I know, but like would you, like if it had stopped, would you have like gone out with your, that's what I'm saying, like go out like normal time with your friends? Yeah, but that would have, it would have been like high school age and it's a little late to be. I went trick-or-treating my senior year of high school. I was very serious about it. I don't know about that. But we did do mischief nights. I went up until 19. grade or 10th grade? Yeah, I think we were probably still doing it around 9th. Senior year is madness. I think we, like, it was part of it. We were like, no one will take this from us! They're like, what are you? And you're like, I'm a senior in high school. And they're like, only one of those we got tonight. What are you? We just did it anyway. We were like, no one will take this. And then it was so hilarious, because we had our But like, gosh, the like dichotomy of that is like we have our pillowcases full of candy. Pillowcases, for sure. We're like in half kind of sexy costumes because we're like trying to test the boundaries. But then we're like, then I'm calling my parents to lie to say like I'm sleeping at someone's house and we're having like a party where there's like booze. Right, right. After we've just gone trick or treating. Like the dichotomy of it is so funny. It is interesting at that age where it, I mean, well, this will lead us down a whole other road, but that's part of why I think the, original Halloween is so powerful because it's about the age where the innocence meets the reality of the world. Yeah. Anything that takes place kind of in that space is always pretty interesting. So good on you for keeping it alive, though. I mean, I think we're just so nerdy. We used pillowcases as well, but not as like a smoke screen. We didn't leave with a full pillowcase like it sounds like you did. Being like, oh, this is for the sleepover I'm going to. I'm bringing my own pillowcase. You know how the Johnsons are filthy. We put the candy in it and it was to a point where we would pride ourselves on it when we were younger in particular so much that we would be walking with hunchbacks. We were the last kids on the block. We took it so serious. Well, it's interesting. I kind of thought, Ed, that maybe you wouldn't have had a mischief night. I didn't. Yeah, we did. It didn't make it from Philly to Hershey. Interesting. There was no mischief night, although I do wonder if Hershey was weird where Halloween, at least most of my time growing up, was never actually on Halloween night. It was usually like they put it like the Thursday before or something. And it was always weird to me. But then as I was researching this episode, I was like, huh, I wonder if they did it to try to keep people from doing like a mischief night. Like if you move trick or treat back, maybe you won't have as many people going out and being crazy the night before Halloween and then nothing happens. I feel like Hershey, Pennsylvania gives a like, Salem vibe though in how it's kind of set up like especially like around even like the how old that amusement park is and stuff like that it kind of lends itself, especially, and it's candy. Like it lends itself to like Halloween. Yeah. I mean, it was, they have a great Halloween parade. Uh, the, a couple of like the main streets downtown are fully like when you walk down them, it's like being in the movie trick or treat or something like everybody's, you know, goes all out. There's great decorations. The trees are perfect. Um, it was always awesome to have Halloween there, but they're just, I think they tried to maybe keep it more innocent or something like there was never there was never much going on mischief wise or prank wise that. that I was aware of, at least. But I also, maybe I didn't run in the right crowd. But I will say, I think what you described earlier and what I experienced, it wasn't, other than the baloney thing or whatever. No, no, it's not crazy. It was all very playful. It was like, you'd wake up, you're like, my tree is covered in toilet paper. Yeah, I mean, I remember my mom was always very annoyed, but like, yeah. I do wonder, like, what is, we should have had someone out younger, like, as well. We should call in, like, In the age of ring cameras, is it still happening? Oh, I wonder. Because, you know, for sure, unless you were awake looking out your window. You know, yeah. You know what's so funny is I never did this on Mischief Night, but growing up, there was a girl who was so mean to me. Like, she would pick on me all the time, and she used to put gum under my car handle once I was driving. Whoa, that's crazy. And I knew it was her because she was the only one who chewed this, like, fruity type of gum, you know? And I would always, like, open my car and be like, man. That's a wild thing to do to someone. So they were, like, awful. So... So the revenge that happened was she had a sister. And when her sister went to college, I knew she was going to be gone. And I told one of my friends that like she was doing this to me and that she was mean to me. And he was so awesome. I can't say his name because I think he's like a teacher now at that high school. So he was like, fuck it. We're getting her back. Right. So in the middle of summer, because it's like college moving, they shared a car. The car was there. And we chewed, me, him, and one other guy chewed so much gum. And we put it everywhere, on the windshield, on the side. Of the thing. Holy shit. And it was like summer, so it like. Yeah, no, it's ruined. The car's ruined. And so, and I remember like getting this like Facebook message from her being like, you know. I don't know anyone else who would do this. And I was like, what are you talking about? Someone's been putting gum under my car. For years. For this is so crazy. Please don't reach out to me again ever accusing me of something like this. And I think like I moved away and then like, you know, I'm not in touch with anyone from high school really, like a handful, but he still lives in that area. And I think he would tell me he's like, he would go to parties and bars and she would be there and they would just be hanging out and he'd be like. He, he, he. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Try any good gum lately? Years later. Amazing. Probably should admit to that. It's probably a crime, but I feel like the statute of limitations on gumming someone's car when you're 17, 18 years old. Yeah, I'd never heard of Mischief Night until The Crow. The movie The Crow takes place on Mischief Night and In the movie, I don't know about, I've never read the comic books, but in the movie, the bad guy, Top Dollar, he's like an old, because he's like a gangster, you know, and they've all got their nicknames. And he's Top Dollar, I think is his name. And he, in the movie, I'm pretty sure he like invented Mischief Night. And so I just thought it was a thing that was made up for the crow for the longest time. You're like, Top Dollar doesn't live in this neighborhood. I don't know why we wouldn't have this. That, you didn't realize, that's so funny. You thought it was just made up for that movie. And that was, yeah, and I hadn't even, yeah, I never. Or that comic. Yeah, I'd never heard of it. Well, I think the reason that it happens, too, and that's the lore of, like, Mischief Night is that, like, it's the night before the veil is, like, the thinnest. So that's where all the, like, supernatural stuff happens. That's partially, I think, why he can, like, he resurrects. Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that's like part of it. Yeah. There's an irony there. Well, we're going to dive way back. In researching for this episode, I found that surveys have found that nearly three quarters of Americans have no name for the night before Halloween, which is, well, and the ones who do mostly can't agree what to call it. So statistically, the fact that you guys both had a mischief night is this is like we're breaking all the odds. I'm scared all the time today. Sure. Do you think it's. Like uniquely an American thing or does it happen elsewhere? Well. Funny you should ask. Funny you should ask. Great transition. We didn't plan that, guys. So the origins of Mischief Knight and Devil's Knight, which is sort of the umbrella under which we're going to categorize all of these different knights. A fully owned subsidiary of. Yes. Yeah. Mischief Knight, a fully owned subsidiary of Devil's Knight LLC. In England, they invented the predecessor of Devil's Knight, which confusingly sort of is Mischief Knight. but they invented their Mischief Night at completely the wrong time of year. So according to Time Magazine, the earliest reference to Mischief Night cited by the Oxford English Dictionary dates to 1790, though it's likely it stretches back even further. Atlas Obscura mentions that, quote, in her 2012 dissertation at the University of Bristol about the history of Halloween in Northern England, Karen Allen, not the actress, writes in an autobiography of labor advocate and writer Samuel Bamford, includes a description of mischief night that mentions pranks like pulling up fence posts and tipping over horse carts. Another really early description of these prank nights comes from Word Origins, a language history site that reproduces an account from the Sheffield Independent, published May 22, 1830. It says, quote, from the proceedings of a gang of lawless boys. Oh, shit. Lawless. Who had taken it into their heads that on particular occasions, such as May-een, so like the month of May-een, sort of like Halloween, but May-een. Okay. Or Mischief Night, as it was termed. Yeah, because everyone was like, I can't do that first one. That's confusing. We need a better name for that. They had taken it into their heads that they might commit the most serious depredations with impunity. But what's really interesting about all of these nights of freedom and jackassery is, as we just mentioned, they mentioned May Eve in that last passage because this mischief night had nothing to do with Halloween. It was connected to springtime and April Fool's Day more than anything spooky. Oh. Okay. I found a second accounting from a book called Yorkshire Notes and Queries published in 1888 that gives us a little more detail on this. It reads... There is an old saying that the first of April is the fool's day and that the last day of the month is the devil's. It is yet and perhaps always will be kept in remembrance. This silly custom of the first day and generations after our time, men and boys will be told on that day that their shoe bands loose or women and girls that their garter is coming down and thus be made into April fools. Wait. that you just tell people, hey, your guard is coming down. Yeah, sorry. And you're a fool. Yeah, I thought you were like, people were like army crawling around, like untying things and pulling down. No, no, no, no, no. They will be, I put maybe the emphasis. The last group was overturning apple carts and shit. Like people are comfortable getting their hands dirty. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no, this is just them like saying things to make, to trick people into thinking something. Is going wrong. A little got your ass. Mischief night is a night supposed by the imps of mischief. rough youths in parentheses, there's to do as they wish with their duty and pleasure combined is to go around in small gangs, bent upon doing all the mischief they can unobserved by anyone in authority or the owners they assail. So, uh, and there are a couple specific other pranks mentioned. Rainwater tubs are let off. So I assume like flipped over swillin tubs are upset and Doors are taken from their jimmers and carried into someone's outhouse. How do you not notice your door getting removed? That's like a big one. That is like you wake up and you go, I guess this is sort of a prank, but now I just live outside. Yeah, but to your point, I guess they're asleep. Yeah, but isn't that, I feel like it's a loud thing to remove. Well, if it's on an outhouse, it's not in the house. Oh, it's on the outhouse. Maybe, that's what I would think. No, well, it says carried into someone's outhouse. Oh, boy. Yeah, so it's like you're in your house. Your door's in the shitter now. Yeah, and it's like, how do you not wake up while that's happening? I guess people. People slept soundly back then. It's dark. They worked all day in the fields. That's true. Maybe good sedatives. Who knows? I just flew from Germany back to L.A., and I took a NyQuil. I was out the entire time. Just NyQuil? Yeah. Or was it like a German NyQuil? You weren't aware what you bought. No, no, no. It was definitely just NyQuil. But I don't know. Maybe I was just tired. But I don't know. All I have to say, so many things could have happened on that plane, and I had no idea. Various other methods of torment, this quote goes on to say, are carried out upon this night and pure damage in some places by some gangs gave place to defacement by others. Happily, the good old times in this respect are things of the fast disappearing present and mischief neat will soon live but in the remembrance of a few. Which didn't happen. Yeah, they were like, this will come to an end soon. Yeah, basically this guy is saying... Roving gangs of kids were like, hold my beer. Yeah, this guy is saying, this can't last. The world has become too chaotic. And the youth were like, perfect. That's exactly what we want. We're going to live in a world with no doors soon. With no doors. Everything is open. If there's one thing Mischief Night loves more than making men think their shoe bands have come loose and women think their underwear has fallen down... I think just the belt. It's a change of date. Over the centuries, this knight moved around the calendar, abandoning May Day in the spring and moving to November 4th, the eve of Guy Fawkes Night. Oh, shit. Oh, that makes so much more sense. Yeah. Guy Fawkes. kind of took Mischief Knight a little too far. I don't know if. He took it too far. It sounds like he was like. Took it to the right amount. Yeah. But everyone else was like, we should get closer to. Ed, for the listeners who maybe don't know who Guy Fawkes is, not to put you on the spot, you are a resident history buff. Sure. Do you want to walk us through just a brief. I can take you through what V for Vendetta taught me. He was a guy who tried to blow up Parliament, right? Yeah. That's all you need to know. He had a very, I guess, distinct facial hair. And people made masks of it. He's become like a symbol for like anarchy and justice. Anonymous hacking. That's the way that most people I think would maybe unknowingly be familiar with Guy Fawkes is the mask of Anonymous. And that face is based on the mask from the film V for Vendetta in which a character is playing the role sort of as a terrorist of Guy Fawkes. I have no idea what Guy Fawkes actually looked like. If he looked like anything other than that, I'll be pissed. Wait, hold on. Let's see. Guy Fawkes. It's going to be a painting or something. Yeah. But that's what he was kind. Of like in the way that we're all saying right now. like not don't actually, this is not a literal, this is a metaphor, but like, you know, blow it all up. Our, our governments are corrupt. Start from scratch, get rid of all of them. That was basically what he was doing. Yeah, he was like a, I guess like a Timothy McVeigh. Yeah. Yeah. He did have a heck of a mustache in most of the art from the time. Oh, right on. Yeah. The British still commemorate the occasion of November 4th with a whole holiday with, you know, around. By Fox Day, yeah. Yeah, built around bonfires and setting off fireworks. I mean, they don't blow up Parliament, but they make the sounds of. Blowing up Parliament. They make the sounds. So, yeah. Just keep them a little on edge, you know? Yeah, yeah. He was a real mischief maker. And Karen Allen, the previously mentioned historian, not the actress, suggests that November 4th had two huge perks. The nights were nearly three hours longer in the winter than the spring. That's true. So plenty of extra time for Mischief Night shenanigans. And Guy Fawkes Night was already about burning effigies and general chaos anyway, so why not? It seemed like a good place as any to put it. We won't go too far down this rabbit hole, but... All roads eventually do lead back to Halloween, and Atlas Obscura notes that Guy Fox Knight is probably influenced by Samhain. Samhain eventually turned into All Hallows' Eve, which became known as Halloween, and Guy Fox Knight has been mourned by some British writers as a lost British tradition. overrun by the imported American Halloween traditions. And that's going to happen. That's our main export. So I think with immigration patterns, it just kind of like all. Reverse immigration patterns. Well, yeah, they think they're saying that like some older British writers feel like because of Samhain's influence on the original Guy Fawkes Night, that sort of was their version of Halloween. And then the American version just like ate its lunch. Well, I could see how like it... Because, okay, so like a lot of these like holidays that we celebrate, come from these like pagan holidays that dealt with like solstices and harvests and things like that. That and the branding around that from like the Catholic church was that, or like any sort of like, you know, religious, you know, conservative movements was that like, oh, these are like, see, they're like witches. It's like barbaric. They're dancing around a maple. They're lighting things on fire. And like, it became like branding as like, this is evil. And we were just talking about how like the day after Halloween in the Catholic church, is All Saints Day, which is clearly a very specifically placed thing. In the same way that Christmas, if you look at if Christ existed when he actually was born, was definitely not in December. It's kind of just to like, see, this is the devil day, and this is not, so it makes sense that they'd be like, see the one where they're burning things on fire also happens right now. That's the Halloween one. Yeah. As this seasonal mischief spread around the world, it shows up in American records. But you start seeing immediately local names attached to Devil's Night or Mischief Night. Very few places could agree on what to call it. Like local names like Mischief Night versus Devil's Night. Like locally people had their own word. I thought you were going to say, like, Mischief Night brought to you by Macy's, like local businesses. It has their names to it. It's like Pride. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like Target has a whole, like, line of pumpkin shirts. Let's get on it, Target. Come on. Get the black and orange out. Get on everything else. One of the oldest mentions in America of a night like the European Mischief Nights is Cabbage Night. Stop it. Which is as strange as it sounds. What? Word Origins quotes a Trenton, New Jersey newspaper from November 1st, 1861. Last night was the holiday we know as Hallowe' Eve, or popularly in this latitude as Cabbage Night. They decided to add the whole latitude they thought was doing Cabbage Night. They were like, what are we, like, well, okay, why do they call it that? They were throwing cabbages? So, yes, this quote ends with- We're living in abundance. That year. It's the opposite of the potato family. An influx of cabbage. That's why the Irish cave here, you wouldn't believe, they have so much food, they're throwing it around. Like at each other, putting in people's tailpipes. Cabbage is a very Irish thing, you know what I'm saying? Yeah, corned beef and cabbage. Yeah. Well, the last line of this quote is my favorite. We noticed sundry boys armed with cabbages. What does sundry mean? Many. Many. Like many groups of boys with cabbages. Boys armed with cabbages. What a visual. So I guess they're like beaming people with cabbages. Yeah, so we're going to get to this in just a second. So I couldn't find many other references to a cabbage night anywhere in America. They sure thought people were saying it a little, anything above that latitude or whatever. I do always find it interesting, and this has happened so many times in the research for this episode, but lots of episodes where the oldest reference I can find to something is, is in a newspaper or, you know, a broad sheet or something where they're talking about something in a way that clearly it was around for some length of time before that, but there's just no surviving mention of it, which is always so like, this feels like, you know, Whoever wrote this sounds like they were talking to people who knew what Cabbage Night was. Yeah, every one of these articles could very well have started with like, well, as you well know. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And everyone's like, well, now I do. I did find a transcript from a public radio show called Away With Words from July of this year. And the host discusses the term Cabbage Night with a caller from New Milford, New Jersey, who remembers having a Cabbage Night growing up. So the host asks, why is it called Cabbage Night? Caller. Because people would throw cabbages at doors and not just any cabbages. They would throw rotten cabbages or a variety known as skunk cabbage, which can smell as bad as like rotten meat and other gross things. Host, interesting. Caller. So, you know, young men, they'll still do any kind of mischief they can get away with. Or even if they can't, they'll still do it. So they they throw it at the door kind of. So you hear boom, boom, boom. And of course, you go to the door and you open up and there's a pile of stinking cabbage. Post. Interesting. The caller also mentions at one point in California, quote, they like to do it with fireworks, pretty much fireworks for every holiday. Well, that's not good out there, is it? No, sure isn't. Oh, it's terrible. Throwing fireworks at people's doors? Well, no, I think they just mean that. Fireworks are launched on every holiday in California. I found one other mention of Cabbage Night from an 1879 report from Montpelier, Vermont that describes... The capital sick. The cabbage scene of 1879. Quote. Projectors and projectiles, cabbage head and cabbage stumps were out in their usual strength and eloquence. Sundry strings were strung across sundry streets. Sundry door yards and lawn decorations were displaced and nobody was killed. Which makes me wonder if sometimes people were. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And nobody was killed. It's an odd thing to mention. And blessed are we for the first year in many. Yeah, that no one died. And blessed are we who have survived the cabbage bird. And we thought Pumpkinhead was a dangerous beast. Cabbage Man is out there. Cabbage in the Capitol. Why haven't they made that slasher yet? I can't imagine. I'm so ready for it. Cabbage Head. That was a big hit, which is to say this evening. What was the big hit? Cabbage Night. Oh, Cabbage Night. Cabbage Patch Kids. One of the largest toys ever made. Has that entered the public domain yet? Have we, like, made the. Cabbage Patch Kids? The Cabbage Patch Kids horror movie. You know what I'm saying? I think it's, like, from the 80s. Let's go a little bit of time before it becomes public domain. You know how there's, like, the Pooniverse? Have we entered into. Oh, well, actually. That's like the children of the cabbage. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. I don't understand what you guys are saying right now. Well, some of what you're talking about is... Is this like Rule 34 stuff? No, no, no. It's the horror version of that. If the public domain on it has expired, there is a horror movie version of it. So there's like 50... Not 50. This is a gross exaggeration. But there's quite a few Mickey Mouse or Steamboat Willie horror movies... because it's... Now public domain. Yes. And that's why Winnie the Pooh now has a horror movie. And so realistically, it's only a matter of time until Cabbage Patch Kids enter the public domain, at which point the children of the cabbage. is a real possibility. And you already have this, like, evening that works for it. Yeah, yeah. Hey, give me back my hat. Don't throw me at a door. Yeah. The numbers people are like, man, we are really seeing some box office receipts from Montpelier, Vermont. I don't understand. There's also, I think, a... The guy who eats spinach? What's his name? Popeye. Popeye. There's a Popeye horror. Movie, too. There is. That insane movie's set is still wherever the fuck that was shot. The entire town that they built there, it still sits in Morocco or something? Oh, for Popeye. For Popeye. Wait, they shot the Popeye horror movie in Morocco? No, no, no. He was the original. The Robin Williams. Oh. Shelly Duvall. A truly unhinged movie, but they built like a full-size Popeye town, like fake insane, crazy. And it's still there? It still sits exactly where it was left, you know, the whole thing. Wow. You know what was crazy? So I know some places like in Morocco, Tunisia, where movies in like 70s and 80s would build a set, a lot of them. Yeah, I think Star Wars still has stuff. Yeah, they would get left. I found the most random... It wasn't the set, but uh important piece of a set years ago i was on like a little birthday trip to there's this there's like a tortoise reserve a little bit outside the city. Yeah that's the most crisp sentence i've ever. Fucking heard you can stay there and meet the tortoises and everything and it's a great little place and Just in the back corner of this weird tortoise reserve in the middle of the desert were the, at least as noted and what appeared to be, the gates from the Dino De Laurentiis remake of King Kong. What? Yeah, just sitting there. And I was like, did they shoot something? Like, there's no explanation. Did they just never take the, like, it's so wild to me. Cheaper to not pack it up and bring it home, I guess. Yeah, or like, just take the find. Like, whatever, you know. Bizarre. I mean, we're recording this. Fuck it. 15 minute walk if you're thinner than me away from La Brea Tar Pits. Yeah. And that is essentially just left there. It's like, yeah, we dug a bunch. We got all the oil we wanted. Anyway, this is the cities now. I just found that out. I had no, I've lived in LA now for like three and a half, four years. And I never knew what the hell that was. I was like, what the tarp? There's just pits of tar in LA? And everyone was like, well, kind of. Yes, but it was like, someone explained to me that it was fossils. I had no idea. Yeah, it was a private enterprise drilling for oil and stuff. And then they were like, it's Los Angeles' problem now. Enjoy it. Look for some fossils. We're not cleaning up any of this. On an earlier episode this year, we talked about the history of the tar pits briefly and everything that they've pulled out of there fossil-wise. And one of the things I loved that I learned was that they have pulled one human skeleton out of the tar pits. And it was a girl, I'm going to mess up the exact dates, but it was like a 7,000-year-old body and it had a skull fracture. And so there's a question as to, did this person fall or were they killed or pushed and then dropped? Probably murdered, yes. So it's like this, I mean, like a thousands-of-year-old murder mystery that will never be solved in any meaningful way, but it's just like, That's crazy. And that should also be a horror movie. Somebody call Universal. 7,000 years? That's public domain. Yeah. Anyway, fear not, all ye no-cabbage-havers. If you wanted to cause chaos in the Midwest and found your leafy greens woefully out of season, you had a much more popular regional option. Corn night. All right. In my mind. Whipping cobs of corn at people seems like a great way to do some serious damage. Most of the references I found describe more throwing kernels than entire cobs, although I wouldn't put that past any of the hooligans that we've met so far. Just like windows of like half corn, like smashed and like speared through it. That's the like, the kid, the I love corn kids villain origin story. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, Word Origins notes an 1882 complaint from the Wellington Enterprise in Ohio, though interestingly, this is from way after Halloween. But the complaint that they lodged read, Halloween celebrations are a relic of the Dark Ages and ought to be abolished. November 9th or Corn Night, which consists of ringing doorbells and throwing a shower of corn into the face. They open the door in this version. Throwing a shower of corn into the face of the one who opens them, we trust, will not be a very paying business in Wellington. That's actually, I think, how I would handle it happening to me, too. I would take to the news to be like, whatever this is, whatever occurred this evening, I would hope it's done. All right, hear me, please. It stung when I was hitting the Facebook board. I have welts. It went just everywhere. It wasn't even popped. Yeah. The other major piece of evidence for Korn Knight comes from that same Cabbage Knight caller. who follows up with this riveting exchange. The caller said, devil's night, goosey night, corn night, picket night, all of these are various terms for this. Host, yeah? The host is completely unenthused. Caller, yeah, corn night involving throwing little kernels of corn, you know, just pelting the windows. Host, yeah? And then when you step out onto the porch, it makes like an awkward crunch, like you're stepping on insects. Well, good to know. The worst part. Yeah, the worst part. Crunch, crunch. It does seem like corn night became popular in parts of Pennsylvania as well, although it was referred to as tic-tacking, which is a reference to the sound the colonels would make. if you threw them against people's windows. Sure. I guess as opposed to the screams when you threw them in people's faces. I mean, corn is plentiful in this country. So I could see how they got to that. Yeah. You know what I, though, just found out also? Fun fact. So each stalk of corn, each stalk you see in a corn field, that only grows one ear of corn. Yeah. All that work for one ear. Yeah, but corn is actually really easy to grow. So it's like, you know. My neighbor in Brooklyn, Hernan, we shared a backyard space. and we would grow produce in exchange. And I remember he had corn, but he only had two stalks. Because it was a small backyard. It's a lot of real estate in the home garden. Yeah, for just two years of corn. He's like, when we have this barbecue, man, this corn's going to be so good. Two pieces. I found a few funny newspaper clippings about corn night and tic-tacking here. First one, headline, Halloween morning, few gates off their hinges. And then a really- Where are the gates, bro? Are they in the port-a-potty somewhere? Are they in someone's outhouse? Outhouse. Yeah. A subhead that is not explained, yet the small boy was pretty much in- Small boy? The small boy was- They saw him do it. Was pretty much in evidence. I don't know what that means. Which means that we saw your ass. Pretty much, though. Pretty much. He was too small. The article says, although last night was Halloween Eve, the younger generation of the city failed to do much mischief in the way of gate stealing, tic-tacking, and other pranks well known to the, quote, kids who take the part of little ghosts on Halloween Eve. Chief Leeper had placed a number of extra officers on the force last night to keep the young merrymakers in line and prevent them from destroying property. Otherwise, the officers were instructed not to molest the little fellows in their sport or Halloween tricks, which is a terrible. Choice of words. It's a terrible choice of words, but I kind of like the sentiment. Yeah. Unless they're pulling the fucking gate off. Let him throw some corn tonight. Well, this guy was not on board with corn night. This is a different article. Quote, then there was the night we were tic-tacking this old guy who got pretty tired of it all and came out with his shotgun. Fair enough. He used it, too. As one does in the United States. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I tried to go to the news and tell you guys in a kind of passive-aggressive way that this should end. And here you are, three years in. Still not pop. Yeah, now you're the ones who are going to pop. Yeah. We'll see what sound you make when you get hit with this tic-tac. Damn. He used it too because I was lying in a ditch at his feet and the shot rang out just over me. Into the air, I presume, as no one yelped. I'd be yelping no matter where that slug went or whatever. Hits an ear. Hits like a kernel of corn and it does pop. And it tic-tacs all over his house. He's like, no, no, I've become the tic-tacker. But the kid was in a ditch. I guess he was trying to hide. I think so. Yeah. Pennsylvania has a few versions of nights like these. The next one I found is from Schoolkill Haven, PA and referred to as Chalk Night in the literature. According to The Call newspaper on November 1st, 1901, headline carried to extremes. Some disgusting results of Chalk Night observances. Authorities should act on the matter. The article says chalk night was observed to its fullest extent in town on Monday night and the limit was far overstepped by some of our young folks in carrying on the fun. Chalk marks were observed everywhere the next morning. Some of these being of a most. shamefully indecent and disgusting character. Oh my God. Lots of penises. I think that's what they're getting at. And then there's a bunch of business owners complaining about the chalk marks on their carriages. I mean, come on, it's chalk. It's chalk. We can wash this away. That was very thoughtful of them. Like we're going to vandalize, but only. In high school, I also got a, not to keep making this about me, but in high school, I also got a Saturday detention for vandalism. But all I had done was there was a front desk and the lady had a cup of rice that she kept her pens in. And I was bored at like driver's ed after school and like made some flowers with the rice on like the desk. And they called it vandalism. And I got a Saturday attention, which I thought was so, like you literally can sweep it up. Also, was not cooked. Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's like a, not a religious practice, but there are people who like, that's like a meditation. It's like just doing art and like. Yes! Laying out sand or rice or. Oh, you like meditating? You can meditate for 45 minutes a Saturday. No, it was a whole day. It was like full breakfast club. It was a whole day. Oh, wow. The worst, it wasn't connected to Mischief Night or anything at our school, but the craziest prank my senior year, some juniors actually pulled it off, was we had this, someone had donated, so we were the Hershey Trojans, and there was a wooden Trojan statue that someone had donated and was like in a glass case, and there was like a little. You probably want to check that before you accept it, right? Isn't that like the. Whole history would indicate? Yes. I don't know who they would have sent into our school and maybe the Milton Hershey kids would have come in and taken over but there was like a little door that you accessed through the auditorium to get in so the janitors could like clean the glass or whatever and somehow some kid's hid in the auditorium overnight, got in through the door, cut the statue's head off, and then made off with it. They never caught who did it, and they never found the head, and they ended up replacing the statue eventually. It was, I guess, kind of a fucked up thing because it was, I don't know who made the statue. I'm sure it was a heartfelt gift, but also I was like, I feel like most of those people usually get caught when it's that. Big of a... Yeah, and the fact that it's never resurfaced. Yeah. So someone just did it for the love of the game and then kept it a secret. Yeah, exactly. Well, but again, that's like pre, we had cameras in my high school. It was newer. There were two high schools and ours was like the newer one and it did, it was like early days of cameras all over schools. Ah, yes. So that did make it harder to get away with things. Yeah. We would do like senior pranks where they would like, the big one that everyone would orchestrate in like text message threads and stuff was like rubber band drops. Like, so if you, you would just leave, like, because the myth was, I don't even know if this is true, but you would like, in the middle, there was like a center area where all the like, you know, everybody converged kind of a quad type thing. And it was, if, if you dropped a shitload of rubber bands, they couldn't, like, just sweep them up. They would get stuck. Because it's friction. It's rubber. They would get, like, stuck in the broom, so it would take forever. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, and a pod reflection, that's actually really cruel to, like, the janitors. Who did nothing. Yeah, it absolutely is. Like, you're trying to get back at your teachers who, like, are not affected by this at all. Well, yeah. You know? What the janitors should have done is gone to the teachers and be like, you clean it up. You know, like the kids are mad at you, not me. So you do this. Those are like senior pregs. But I was having corn, rice, chalk. That's like fairly like. They're low stakes. Yeah. Well, the adults in these towns, though this was all very, very low stakes, were pretty annoyed that things sometimes would get out of hand. And they were also annoyed that When it came to trying to enforce order, you didn't have a ton of options because they're kids. So, like, you weren't going to mass arrest kids. You weren't going to throw them in the back of the police wagon. And that was their first mistake. You think they should be chaining up the kids? They should have started sooner. What they say is, like, it's going on your permanent record. Yes. I would like to go and ask for mine. I've always wanted to do that. Like, walk back and be like, I would like to see my permanent record, please. Like, where is it? There's a setup for, I don't know if it's a sci-fi comedy or something, but permanent record where someone discovers, like, the permanent records building. And it's where everything bad anyone's ever done is, like, kept in this, like, mysterious permanent records place. Because that's what they tell you. It's on your permanent record. And you're like, oh, my God. For the rest of my life. I never heard it at my school. And I was in trouble all the time. But I do know it from movies and television and stuff. Oh, we always heard that. And it would be like, it will follow you for the rest of your life. So maybe because of Catholic school, they think that the permanent record is a higher order. Someone else is judging you over us. Yeah. Like, you don't want to be on their permanent record, dude. By the way, for bringing this up, at Catholic school, we had Halloween, but you could dress up. It was one of the days you didn't have to wear a uniform. Oh, cool. But the one rule was you couldn't dress as a public school student. So you couldn't just come and wear your normal clothes. Oh, my God. That's so weird. Yeah, yeah, yeah. How dare those heathens? They're like, if we're going to give you this day, you got to do it. You got to celebrate Halloween. Yeah. You're like, oh, what am I going to do with this Cartman t-shirt I bought? So some cities tried to figure out how to get all of this under control. And they basically ended up accidentally inventing trick-or-treating. It was originally started as something called Beggar's Night. By the late 19- Kind of a more accurate title. Please, sir. Yeah, yeah. Can I have a full-size bar? And this was in the late 1930s, and things had gotten so completely out of hand across North America that some municipalities actually considered banning Halloween entirely, but a lot of local leaders just didn't want to deal with the blowback of outlawing a children's holiday without at least trying something else. Oh, my God. We've given them nothing else but long-hour jobs. Yeah, yeah. So enter Des Moines. A city historical document claims that more than 500 police calls came in during Halloween 1938. And as a result, the city decided to hand the reins of the holiday over to a recreation official named Catherine Krieg. She helped promote a program called Tricks for Eats, wherein children went door to door and performed a small trick, song, poem or other bit of entertainment to get a treat. Oh. And by the early 40s, youth vandalism and pranks decreased significantly, and that tradition proved so successful that then Tricks and Eats, which had popularly become Beggar's Night at that point, spread to other parts of Iowa and Ohio. Spread to other parts of Iowa and Ohio. The whole time, though, there was another solution attempted in 1909, one that I am shocked never caught on. Instead of trying to catch the kids committing crimes... They just turned the kids into cops. This actually happened. Oh, that's the youth. Great. Let's go, Will. Halloween in 1909 fell on a Sunday, which meant Saturday night, the best night of the week next to Friday night, was Mischief Night. And the Omaha Daily News announced Witches Revel Day Early and issued a stern warning. Jail for all boys who celebrate. Jail. Directly to jail. Finally, a town who gets it. 100 extra cops to hold down the lid. Destroying property and endangering life not tolerated. Greasing streetcar rails, especially barred. That is wildly dangerous, I would imagine. People take that as public transit. That's also actually really strange because now in Philadelphia, if you're from Pittsburgh, you probably know this. the sports teams are so, like, the fandoms are so intense that people scale, like, light poles and things like that. Sure, yeah, go birds, I guess. So when, like, something is happening, they go, grease the poles! Grease the poles! Oh, so that people can't do it. Yeah, and, like, it's actually become, like, a thing where, like, because they'll fall and they'll get hurt, but it's, like, a thing that the police do. Yeah. Which is really, like, full circle in a way. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think, I think, You know, I couldn't find any direct connections to this, but I think part of the reason these knights, whatever they were called and however silly they were, the reason they got such bad reputations is because it does seem like in a lot of cities, you know, one guy might be doing corn night, but another guy is doing Greece, the public transportation night, and there's buses flying off, there's streetcars going into buildings. Yeah, there's a lot of like, it's not the same by any means as there are a lot of cops, but it's that like, look around, you could rob City Hall. Like, there's our people taking advantage. In the third Batman movie. Oh, I was talking about the third Die Hard movie. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But like, yeah, you're probably right. People take advantage. And also, I think a lot of the leniency here is, Is that it's kids. Yeah. Like, if you replace kids with full-ass adults and kept the stories exactly the same, you're living in a nightmare. Yeah, it's the purge. You're living in the purge. Yeah. Well, it was actually across the river in Council Bluffs, Iowa, that some enterprising officials hit an idea so crazy it just might work. The article continues, quote, 300 boy policemen sworn into service. Sworn in? They fucking work there? They were the Nazi youth. Council Bluffs, sworn into service. Those are sharp looking little uniforms. Yeah, right? We just handed these out to the kids for a reason. They were sworn into service by Chief Richmond of Council Bluffs and went on duty this afternoon. Armed with full authority of the police department and decorated with badges showing that authority, the youngsters sallied proudly forth in battle with the evils of Halloween. Wow. So this seems like. Not today, devil. Not tonight. I'm shocked they didn't give them guns. Well, it was the afternoon, though, they started. So they want them to stop by the factory where they're trying to unionize. Stop that and then go look for kids stealing fences. Yeah. Stealing doors. Yeah. Check the outhouses. There's no record or evidence of how the night turned out, but I assume that's because the body count was so high that they just burned the records and said never again. That is a really funny idea of burning the records. I love that they literally put it on the kids. They were like, we're going to militarize you. It just seems like, I mean, even though it's clearly being done to some degree in tongue in cheek, it seems like a really bad idea. Of those 300 kids, at least 10 of them are like, You're giving me a badge. You're saying this is official. It's in the newspaper. and I'm already trying to get into trouble tonight. Like, what? It seems like something that's like Lord of the Flies meets the Stanford Prison Experiment on Halloween night. Which is kind of that reality show we always talk about with the Kid Town USA or whatever. Oh, yeah. There was a reality show on, like, Fox or NBC. Oh, yes. Oh, my God. The fact that that even existed and nobody has been put in prison is insane. Yeah, like, there's, like, the kids run the town. Yeah. And it was like, where's the antibiotics I'm too young people are getting hurt like immediately it's wild the bullies take over they hold the food but you think. About it it's literally like I was thinking about that this week it's like the fact that they still allow frats to exist is insane like that's so it's one of the most like it's like oh let's just give 18 year old boys like run of. Like yeah they got to create their little their own governorship like. Yeah like of like We're surprised that this is a bad idea, like bad things happen. It's really, it's terrible. And I mean, if nothing else, I hope frats are, there's some reforms coming, but you know, God, not in this country. Seems unlikely. Anyway, you'll be shocked to know that giving children the powers of the police did not end Halloween crimes. By the 1920s, we can find Mischief Night being reported as a whole separate occasion in southeastern Pennsylvania, which brings us back to that Philadelphia tradition. Word Origins reproduces a piece from the Chester Times in 1924. And Chester is just is a little town southwest of Philly. The paper describes this. Mischief Night is not on the calendar of special occasions, but last night was so designated by hundreds of youngsters in the lower wards of the city. who staged a premature Halloween celebration and struck terror into the hearts of the more timid motormen on the lines of the SPTC, which operate in that section, and motorists and also many businessmen. who had their wares on display outside their premises. Oh, you can't do that. You gotta put it behind a fucking. Wares on display. Yeah, yeah. If last night's pranks are an indication of what might be expected to happen tonight, some parts of the city will resemble a place struck by a tornado tomorrow morning. Several signs were removed last night, discarded autos placed on trolley tracks, and many a housewife answered a knock at the door last night only to find she'd been fooled. I know which one of those sounds the worst putting cars. On the train tracks. Yeah, that's probably again. Not on par with a ding dong ditch, but also. This is, I don't think this happens at Halloween as much, but definitely happens around Christmas time in Philadelphia. I know New York city and probably New Jersey too. The, have you ever seen. The Santa bar crawl? No, that's a whole other episode of horrors. No, um, the, uh, A lot of times it's like a very old school like Irish Catholic and Italian Catholic thing to put the setup of like the manger outside. Sure, yeah. Nativity sets or whatever. Yeah, nativity sets. They'll steal the baby out. The baby Jesus. I don't care for that. They steal it all the time. I understand why. I'm not trying to. That's, like, a thing. I mean, it's not done. It's usually a couple months later. And, like, I don't think many people have their nativities all year round. Sure. But, like, they will. Or, like, they'll behead the, like, if you have, like, St. Francis or, like, Jesus in your yard, that gets beheaded year round. Yes. I mean, yeah. You can't have nice things. You can't have weird grown-up dioramas in your yard, I guess. Yeah. The Philadelphia Inquirer's Archive has accounts of Halloween Eve being called Mischief Night in the 1930s, too. So while some histories place its American beginnings in the Depression or World War II, the Chester account gets us there way earlier. And when it spread into New Jersey, that's the only place that I found that was so popular that I found at least two sources who were surprised to find out that the rest of America wasn't also celebrating Mischief Night. Whoa. Some of these accounts from New Jersey include pumpkins dropped from tall apartment buildings and firecrackers thrown at passing cars. One of those cars turned out to be a police cruiser, which brought the night that year to a rapid end. A friend looking back describes the firecracker throwing as fairly harmless stuff. And that's the phrase that I think is doing a lot of work on Devil's Night, the fairly harmless. Yeah. The definition of what you have as harmless is kind of the crux of the problem here. The pranking is left up to just whoever decides to go out that night. Sure. Could be baloney. It could be baloney. I could put you a whole house in a fucking outhouse. Part of the reason. I just did the door. That's harmless. Part of the reason. He's like pushing. Board by board. All right, you're a heavy sleeper. We've been talking. Everybody says you sleep a lot. You're going to wake up. You're just going to have a mattress. You took that NyQuil. Yeah, you took that NyQuil, Rip Van Winkle. Part of the reason that Devil's Night has made the airwaves of scared all the time is because in Detroit, the question of how far people would take the night before Halloween became a very, very, very big problem. First, a strange little detail, the same issue of the Chester Times that we just discussed has a report from the neighboring town of Eddystone that says the night preceding All Halloween Eve is known among the juvenile population as Devil's Night. So the name Devil's Night was already in use in Pennsylvania in 1924, despite what Top Dollar would have had me believe. But Detroit is where Devil's Night became infamous. The Detroit Historical Society describes a mid-century version that has all of the pranks that we've discussed already, but by the late 70s, The city's economy had started to collapse, the auto manufacturers were on their heels, and the restless people of Detroit took a lot of their frustrations out on Devil's Night. Alex Klaus at Outlier Media went back through the Detroit Free Press archives and found a 1978 Devil's Night report that tallies 99 windows smashed on 72 city buses, 84 homes vandalized, and 8 cases of arson. The problem became, over the next few years, as more and more homes emptied out, those arsons became the main way of celebrating Devil's Night. Oh, jeez. There was so much of a pattern that ultimately the Centers for Disease Control eventually started studying Detroit's response to citywide disasters, basically. Their report looks back at the years leading up to 1984, and by then. The destruction had spread across the three days leading up to Halloween. That's too long. The total for those three days was 810 fires, which means roughly, I'm not good at math, but I tried to do some, 810 fires spread across 72 hours means that a fire was getting set about once every five minutes. So the city was like burning down on Devil's Night. Got you. I love you. Jesus. It's important to have industry, any industry, somewhere. Yeah. The Historical Society pointed out that fires could spread from the vacant properties into other buildings. People were injured and killed. And just the fact that an arsonist would pick the empty houses to burn down didn't mean that people weren't getting, you know, caught up in these fires that were being. No, yeah. I think coming out of, like, the L.A. Fires, too. Exactly. It's like, I don't care what you're lighting on fire. Yeah. Like, embers be zipping and they're going to land on stuff. Yeah. Chicago fire, you have to build alleyways after. Didn't they also lift... Was it the San Francisco fire that they lifted the city after? Or no, the earthquake that they lifted the city after. I don't recall anymore. We do a lot of episodes. Yeah. Anyway, the fires became so notorious that people started traveling to Detroit specifically to see them. A Mental Floss article describes Nobi Shigemoto, a producer for Japan's Asahi TV... going and bringing a camera crew in 1986, and it was already his second year covering the Devil's Night Fires. Yeah, because his first year he was able to sell to the Godzilla people. He'd be like, you need disaster footage? I got tons. You can't pay for this. There were also visitors known as fire buffs who came to watch the blazes and the firefighters at work. One of these is identified as Kenneth Clippinger, a data processing consultant who drove in from Illinois. Yeah. These are people who should be observed on their drive out. You said you're a fire buff. Yeah. The city was furious about all the media coverage. They tried to do whatever they could to get people's eyes off of the fact that their city was burning every year. They tried to get news outlets to avoid using the name Devil's Night and use the less dramatic names. Halloween period instead. Halloween period. Good luck. This is the media you're talking about. I'm just like thinking about all the menstrual cycle jokes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. The blood of the lamb on the door. Like, I just like. Like Boston Burns the same night, like they're synced up. Yeah. So. The fires got so bad that in 1985, Detroit put together a coordinated campaign that involved city departments, neighborhood organizations, and thousands of residents. They went out into the city. They removed all the abandoned cars, cleared discarded tires, emptied large trash containers. They had volunteer patrols to make sure that nobody was setting arsons at all. They did all kinds of activities that was sort of like the early beggar's night, except they ramped it up to movie marathons, dances, carnivals, anything to like get people to go do something. I kind of like this solution. It seems great. The city-wide carnival, basically. Yeah, and also cleaning things up. It's kind of like raking the forest to not have wildfires happen. Well, isn't that kind of what Detroit has done recently to revamp it? They've done a lot of artist grants and installations and studio spaces and things like that, murals. Philadelphia does that, too. We were just watching Barbarian the other night. It's a plot point of that. I forgot that the lead, the girl, the test, the woman in that movie, Um, is in Detroit specifically for. Like a documentary program. Yeah. Yeah. Made about people who take the like abandoned homes. Yeah. They do that in, um, in Bushwick where I lived in Brooklyn too. It was, it's actually amazing. It's this thing called, uh, uh, Bushwick open studios. And like you get, you get a, uh, an art space to kind of create in like, like for very cheap or like a grant or whatever. Provided that twice a year you open it to the public and everyone come in and see your work. Yeah, it's like a 501c. Yeah. I remember when Pat used to live in Bushwick a million years ago, pre-Uber. I'd have to always call the Bushwick taxi place. It wouldn't even be one ring. It'd be like, hello, Bushwick. I know now, I. Haven't been since I moved right after the pandemic, but apparently now it's just like... it's basically Williamsburg. It's like hipster central, but that's what. The days are numbered for those artists. Yeah, no, it's true. Like the only reason that was able to happen was because it was such a, an area that had so much had been abandoned. Yeah. And I, one of, one of the ways I realized that I had heard of Devil's Night specifically is that, It's the name of D12' s album that dropped, right? So Eminem was part of a rap collective called D12, and they released a record called Devil's Night. And I was always like, what is Devil's Night? It's this, because in Detroit, where they're from, it was so famous. That that's why they named the record. I hope our episode coming out doesn't, like, inspire people to start it up again, right? When Detroit's trying to fix itself. I mean, please don't. We're all like kind of transplants and have gone through the LA fires. Let's not do that again. As we've always said, never do anything that you hear about on this show. And look, the success of fighting Devil's Night or how successful Detroit has been at fighting Devil's Night would kind of go up and down over the years. When they instituted this campaign to clean up the city and put on a carnival, the CDC found that by the early 90s, just a few years later, their Halloween fire totals were back within the range expected for an ordinary three-day period. and not once every five minutes. Is the Detroit baseball team the Angels? No, they're the Detroit Tigers. Oh, never mind. I thought that was like a rebrand. I don't know. Are you sure? I was wondering if it was like a rebrand. You know what I mean? Like an Angels, like, you know what I'm saying? Yeah. Around that time. Because there were teams at transplant. There was like the St. Louis Rams became. Yeah. It's probably not. I don't know shit about sports. Yeah. I didn't say Tigers with confidence. They are known as the Tigers. Known as? That means it's the name of the team. Well, no, I know, but I'm just trying to see. If there's a sports team called the Angels? Well, there is. There's the Anaheim Angels. The Anaheim Angels, which is in here. Is that what the Angels in the outfield mean? Movies about? Yeah, exactly correct. I don't know. That's the team for sure. I don't know what happened there. Disney owned the Anaheim Ducks for a while. Yeah, the Mighty Ducks and the Angels in the Outfield were clearly two movies made to promote the professional sports teams that Disney owned at the time. Yeah, Disney owned all of Anaheim. Oh, I didn't know that. Yes, the Anaheim Ducks. Yeah, but I don't know. And they actually wore the Mighty Ducks uniforms for a bunch of years and they're rad. Yeah, I don't know how that happened, actually. I guess Disney just decided they were going to own Anaheim, basically. I think they pretty much do. Interesting. Anyway. So, yeah, and it looks like they've always been called the Detroit Tigers. Sorry, I was really, I was a reach. That's okay. I was like, wow, a cultural revamp across media. No, turns out. Turns out they didn't think that far. Well, they didn't even think as far as 1994 because in 1994, they had a huge setback on Devil's Night and got the three-day Halloween. Devil's Night relapse, man. Devil's Night relapse, the Devil relapse. Like you do. They went back up to 354 fires over those three days that year. And it's the same year that they recorded a drop in volunteer participation. So it was very clear that. Yeah, you clean it up this time. Well, it was very clear that the number of volunteers in the anti-arson campaign sort of was what was keeping people from causing arsons. Like when people stopped volunteering, the fires just went straight back up. So then, you know, they picked it back up in 95 and in 96, they had the federal government join them, the FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, all joined the patrol to try to keep Detroit from burning. And ever since then, it's more or less been... I didn't know. That was, like, related to Devil's Night, though. I knew, like, things about, like, there's, like, books that are, like, Detroit Burns and things like that. Well, I think, I'm sure they've had other arsons and other fires, but it seems like, at least in the late 80s and early 90s, there was a real explosion in Devil's Night, no pun intended, but a real explosion in Devil's Night fire activity. It's kind of wild. It's kind of, like, it's kind of crummy, actually. It's super crummy. It's, like, the crummiest thing you could do that evening. Like, throw corn. Be somebody. Be someone. Have some dignity. The last Devil's Night that we're going to touch on is technically a mischief night from Camden, New Jersey in 1991. So Camden, New Jersey hit their breaking point on mischief night in 1991. They were expecting trouble because mischief night had grown over the decades and the chaos had gotten increasingly more intense to the point that that the city's plan for Mischief Night 1991 ran 37 pages and was called Operation Pride. Well, there's a lot going on there. I assume like pride in their city or something. Yeah. Takes on a different connotation now. But every police officer was assigned to duty with patrols concentrated in areas considered especially likely to have problems. and the firefighters expected maybe a slight increase in calls, but they got a lot more. The first call came in around 6.30, and much of the activity was concentrated in North Camden. Children interviewed afterward told the Courier-Post that neighborhood teenagers had been bragging about plans for the night. They also had a 37-page outline. Operation burn this town to the ground. Some of the groups setting fires wore black clothing and ski masks. One elementary school student told the paper, quote, I thought they were just going to throw eggs. I didn't think they would go this far. I didn't think the eggs would be filled with kerosene. They ultimately. Water balloons of kerosene is an insane thing for kids to like for kid arson. Right? Yeah. Again, don't try it. Don't. We didn't say it. We didn't say it. You didn't hear it from us. Fill your water balloons with non flammable. Don't fill any water balloons. bankrupt the water balloon industry. Honestly, there's a lot of little pieces of plastic from the water balloons. We should find a better way to do that. Yeah, you can kind of wreck the earth. Yeah. Well, ultimately, these fires. Just spray kerosene on kids with a super soaker instead. Think about the earth. Ultimately, these fires wrecked Camden. They had 165 firefighters on duty and dozens of outside companies staged to help, but the city was still overwhelmed. Essentially, on a regular night, they could handle three house fires at once. On Mischief Night 1991, they had between 12 and 15 structure fires burning at the same time. As the blazes spread, families lost row homes and stores vanished overnight. Oh, row homes. Yeah, that's not helpful. As one resident, Mary Stiegel, put it after losing her house, all this for fun, and now I don't have a home. So that is why Mischief Night or Devil's Night has made it to scare it all the time. Because even though it began as a very innocent, fun, prank-filled holiday, it escalated through the 90s into something on par with basically terrorism. That sounds like basically. That fully is. You know what's so wild about all that is like not what you were saying. This is like that's all like Philadelphia adjacent. So like. Like Camden is over the bridge. You can walk it. It's not far. And Trenton is also not far at all. It's like 20 minutes. Like if you're going to New York City, sometimes it's faster. Instead of taking Amtrak from Philly to New York, you could also take. uh septa to trenton yes yeah yeah it's all kind. Of like you've seen the way your city handles wins. That's true it makes so much sense we we are violent we set things on fire. When you're happy so yeah this makes so. Much sense yeah and i do wonder i actually in hindsight i should have done a little more editing on myself and put camden 91 before detroit 94 because i wonder if the Mischief Night in Camden may have inspired some of the insanity that went on in Detroit in the 90s as well. But yeah, so that is Devil's Night, which brings us to the fear tier. Catherine, the fear tier is where we rank our fear of the topic on a scale from 1 to 10, 1 being not scary at all, 10 being the scariest thing you can think of. And as our guest this week, you can place your fear of Devil's Night on the fear tier first. I feel like it's like a five, solid five, because it's mostly innocent, but it could go, it's like a 50-50 shot that you're into terrorism. So I feel like, I feel, you know. That's what the manosphere is hoping, by the way. We're right down the middle, because I'm not scared of it until you light my house on fire. Right. Yeah, yeah, because a row house, I was saying, what makes it so brutal earlier is all those homes are connected. There's no separation, so. Ed, what about you? I'd go at least a five. To your point, you could move into a neighborhood where it's corn-based, or you could move into a neighborhood where it's flame-based, and it's still a tough hang. Yeah, it's really like you don't know which Pokemon village you're going into or whatever. There's going to be a different vibe depending on. Yeah, five seems like a good place. It's like the Russian roulette of. Of town holidays. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, you can flip the coin. It comes up nice or a terrible time. I'm going to go two rungs lower than you guys. I'm going to put it at a three because... I feel like. Because you long for it? No, no, no. Not because I long for the streets to run red with blood and the buildings to burn. No, that you're looking to join them, I'm saying. No, not that either, but because at least in my research, it seems like for the most part... It's been quelled? It seems like things are. They thought that in 91 and 94. The volunteers are dropping off steadily. I have not heard of a Devil's Night volunteer. I desperately want to find a t-shirt on eBay though. If they had like a Devil's Night crew, Devil's Night volunteer. I bet you it would be sick looking. Like little visors, like vests they wear and stuff. Yeah, it's giving... Crossing guard? Yeah, no. Like, I hope, it probably doesn't look like this at all, but like the ones in Stranger Things, the D & D. The Hellfire Club? Hellfire Club. I've never even seen that show, but I know that because of like targeted places. Yeah, that t-shirt's sick. Yeah. Looks cool. There does seem to be... I. Probably wouldn't mention fire on the volunteer shirt, though. That's true. Yeah, you don't want to stimulate your entry or anything. There is a Devil's Night Firefighter t-shirt, but I don't think it has anything to do with. Like someone just made it as a gag? Yeah, then there's a vintage 1990s Night Stalker's 160th Soar Bad Moon Rising tee. There's a lot going on there. Yeah, I think the Night Stalker in that sense is. Is that Richard whatever? Richard Ramirez. No, I think that's just what they... for some strange reason named their group. They named themselves the Night Stalkers, I think. That seems a little counterintuitive. Seems, yeah, like you're really gonna be scaring people off. Yeah, we're here as part of the Son of Sam Volunteer Fire Brigade. I'm going to call the... You know what you should call? The Night Stalker. Well, listen, if any of you guys do know of where we could get or if you could send us official Detroit Devil's Night volunteers. Or Camden. We'd accept Camden as well. Anywhere in the country where people had to take to the streets to stop people taking to the streets. We want... Your merch. You can head to our website, scaredallthetime.com, and you can find our mailing address, and you can send us those shirts if you do, please. Thank you very much. So, yeah, I put it at a three. I don't think it's very likely to happen, but, again, you never know. You could get caught in it at any night before Halloween anywhere in the country. Upwards of a three- to four-day window, depending where you live. That's true. It could go on for a whole week. Mm-hmm. A week of too many treats. Before we wrap up, Catherine, do you have anything that you want to plug? Where can people find you? Oh, I'm not really good at the social medias, but every once in a while I go through a phase. I'm instacatherine on Instagram and tiktokcatherine on Instagram. And creativecatherine on naming.com. I'm subcatherine. Substack. Not anywhere else. I want to make a substack. I haven't gone around to it yet. A lot of things I write that I don't publish. Maybe one of these days. I run a company called Fairstream Pictures. We'll get our website together at some point. Go check out stuff that we're doing there maybe. Maybe join a mailing list. Maybe at some point I'll do something about that. But, yeah, usually I will eventually post on the social medias when I'm doing things. Cool. That's a good thing. Same with us. Same with me. Yeah, well, we try to keep the scared all the time social medias going as strong as we can. And so, guys, I think that brings us to the end of our Devil's Night. If you enjoy what you hear and this is your first time listening, leave a five-star review. We'll sometimes read it at the beginning of the show. We like to check out what people are saying. Also, join the Patreon if you have not yet. It's incredible. Ed likes to call it the best bang for your buck in the podcasting business. And I don't think he's wrong. As a member of a lot of Patreons, we do a lot. And Ed handprints all of the merch himself. So he is constantly looking out for you guys, making sure that you get the best price on everything. So join the Patreon. Check out the merch store. Keep listening to the show. Follow us on YouTube. Until next time, I'm Chris Colari. And I'm Ed Ficola. The show is Scared All the Time. And this was... Catherine Corcoran. Let's do that again. Until next time, I'm Chris Colari. And I'm Ed Ficola. And this. Catherine Corcoran. And we will see you next time here at Scared All the Time. Bye-bye. Scared All the Time is co-produced by Chris Killary and Ed Ficola. Written by Chris Killary. Edited by Ed Ficola. Additional support and keeper of sanity is Tess Feifel. Our theme song is the track Scared by Perpetual Stew. And Mr. Disclaimer is. And just a reminder, you can now support the podcast on Patreon and get all kinds of cool shit in return. Depending on the tier you choose, we'll be offering everything from ad-free episodes, producer credits, exclusive access, and exclusive merch. So go sign up for a Patreon at scaredallthetimepodcast.com. Don't worry, all scaredy cats welcome. No part of this show can be reproduced anywhere without permission. Copyright Astonishing Legends Productions. Good night. We are in this together. Together. Together.