Before trick-or-treating became the holiday's tradition, pandemonium ruled the day. WBUR's Andrea Shea spoke with candy historian Susan Benjamin who ventures back to a time when Halloween saw children raging through the streets doing untold amounts of damage.
A Halloween scene with children bobbing for apples is printed on this Tuck postcard from early 20th century published in London, England.
So Benjamin went digging through old Boston Globe articles dating back to the late 1800s and early 1900s. “What I found was reporting that went everywhere from hysteria to humor to fears,” she said. “And what's really funny about it — and sort of disturbing too — is that all these antics were happening with kids who just raged through the streets. And, as the reporters tell us, did untold amounts of damage.
Devilish kids also got their kicks pulling fire alarms. In the countryside, Benjamin said, barns were set ablaze. Back in the city, they lit fires in playgrounds. The Boston Globe listed a slew of 1923 events in Brookline: By the mid to late-1920s, Benjamin said newspaper reporters began covering the need for change, “focusing on what individual towns were doing to make sure that the kids had someplace to go and would stop disturbing all the rest of community life.”
But Benjamin said all these parties came with a downside because “somebody had to host them.” To the relief of many a parent, trick-or-treating entered the picture.
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