3

Trick or Treat
in the New World

In 1845, a disease known as potato blight began to ravage the staple food crop of Ireland. Over the next seven years, approximately one million Irish would die, and another million left the country, many sailing to America. Scottish emigration to the United States was also high, with nearly half a million Scots settling in the New World during the latter half of the nineteenth century.

As these impoverished newcomers were crossing the Atlantic, changes were also occurring in the middle and upper classes on both sides of the ocean. Victoria ascended the throne in June 1837, and during her 65-year reign, Britain experienced prosperity, peace (for the most part) and significant advances in technology and medicine. In America, the influx of Scotch-Irish immigrants coincided with the rise of the middle class, who were anxious to imitate their British cousins. Victoria herself spent Halloween in 1869 at Balmoral Castle in Scotland, and her experience there was widely reported:

As the shades of evening were closing in . . . numbers of torchlights were observed approaching the castle . . . Dancing was commenced by the torch-bearers dancing a ‘Huachan’ in fine style, to the lilting strains of Mr Ross, the Queen’s piper . . . After dancing for some time, the torch-bearers proceeded round the Castle in martial order, and as they were proceeding down the granite staircase at the northwest corner of the Castle, the procession presented a singularly beautiful and romantic appearance. Having made the circuit of the Castle, the remainder of the torches were thrown in a pile at the south-west corner, thus forming a large bonfire, which was speedily augmented with other combustibles until it formed a burning mass of huge proportions, round which dancing was spiritedly carried on. Her Majesty witnessed the proceedings with apparent interest for some time . . . 1

It’s probably no coincidence that the first mentions of American Halloween celebrations began to appear shortly after this account, and were invariably linked to the growing middle class (albeit as a child’s entertainment). A short story printed in a popular ladies’ magazine of 1870 painted Halloween as an ‘English’ holiday celebrated by children, and describes a transplanted family’s party in depth. As the children arrive, they must enter the house by stepping over a broom, placed there to keep witches out. The children tell fortunes by burning nuts, pouring hot lead into water and reading the shapes formed therein, laying out cards, and choosing among the luggie bowls (which have now been replaced by a basin of water, a pan of ashes and the wing of a goose, the last indicating marriage to an old man). The youthful revellers also play snapdragon (a game in which children try to snatch bits of dried fruit or wrapped fortunes from a dish of flaming alcohol), pull taffy and make ‘fate cakes’ (small cakes made in silence and then placed under the pillow to invoke dreams). Finally, the story’s heroine, a young lady in love named Nell, walks backwards down the stairs only to be surprised by a kiss from her beau. The story limns Halloween as both charming and vaguely exotic, and after appearing in the popular Godey’s Lady’s Book and Magazine, it undoubtedly led to many copycat parties among its readers.

Some of the fortune-telling rituals that crossed the Atlantic remained popular in the New World long enough to take on a distinctly American flavour. Luggie bowls, for instance, are recorded at American parties as late as the Second World War, when they no longer held simply clean and dirty water, but were filled with red, white and blue-coloured water and named for different branches of the armed services; thus a girl might discover the military affiliation of her future beloved. ‘Kaling’, nut-burning and apple-paring all found a new home in America, usually with slight variations.

Immigrants brought other traditions with them as well, including some that were dying out in the Old World. Bonfires, for instance, were held in America, albeit on a reduced scale. A Good Housekeeping article of 1908 describes a Halloween party in which boys were costumed as ghosts and placed around a bonfire, and one boy dressed as the Devil pretended to grab them and throw them into the flames.2 It’s easy to see why this did not become a regular Halloween tradition.

Some customs were literally reversed on crossing the Atlantic: in American versions of Halloween cabbage-pulling, the fortune-seeker might be required to venture into the cabbage field backward. A more ghoulish American version demanded that the seeker pass through a graveyard on the way to the field. Cabbages also remained popular in pranking, and in parts of Canada and the U.S., the night before Halloween (which became the prime night for mischief) was known as ‘Cabbage Night’ or ‘Cabbage-stump Night’, the latter based on the practice of hurling cabbage stalks. Apples found favour in America as well: apple juice became a standard item at Halloween celebrations, often served with doughnuts, popcorn and pumpkin pie.

In America, the word ‘corn’ came to refer to maize, which is harvested in late autumn. Corn-husking contests were sometimes a feature of early American Halloween parties, and to this day American Halloween decorations often include decorative ears of corn (known as ‘Indian corn’) or corn stalks.

Another common American Halloween icon also derived from the harvest: the scarecrow. Scarecrows, which are traditionally figures made of old clothing and straw, serve an important function throughout the growing year, driving birds away from crops; but by late October, once the harvest has been completed, their usefulness is over. Despite ‘Feathertop’, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic tale of 1852 featuring a witch who brings a scarecrow to life, there’s little evidence that scarecrows figured prominently in Halloween celebrations prior to 1900. It’s likely that the scarecrow largely became a Halloween icon thanks to the efforts of early twentieth-century pranking boys, who frequently employed the figures in their night-time scares (often after replacing the head with a glowing jack-o’-lantern). Indeed, many of the early postcards that depict scarecrows either show them in the service of a mischievous young lad (who is usually holding it up behind a window to scare a girl), or show the would-be prankster being inadvertently frightened by his own creation. Scarecrows went on to become popular Halloween decorations, and folklorist Jack Santino has noted that, although sometimes referred to as ‘harvest figures’, they are almost always combined with Halloween imagery – witches, ghosts, skeletons, jack-o’-lanterns – in yard decoration, creating what he calls a ‘folk assemblage’. They have also served as the basis of Halloween costumes and are popular scares in modern haunted attractions.

Contemporary Halloween scarecrow.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Halloween in America was in the process of acquiring what would become its most popular icon: the jack-o’-lantern carved from a pumpkin. The legend of Jack, the blacksmith who outwits the Devil, appears in hundreds of variants throughout both Europe and America, and typically ends when Jack dies and, being denied entrance to either Heaven or Hell, instead wanders the earth with his way lit only by an ember held in a carved-out turnip. In Britain, children had carved Halloween lanterns from large turnips or swedes, and in Scotland there are contemporary reports of masked youngsters carrying carved, lit turnips (called ‘neep lanterns’) and going from door to door asking, ‘Please help the guisers.’ At the village of Hinton St George in Somerset, a strange, Halloween-like festival called Punkie Night falls on the fourth Thursday of October, and involves children carving intricate designs into the skin of the mangelwurzel, a large beetroot-like vegetable normally grown as cattle feed. The children parade through the village streets singing this song:

It’s Punkie Night tonight,
It’s Punkie Night tonight,
Give us a candle, give us a light,
If you don’t you’ll get a fright.

It’s Punkie Night tonight,
It’s Punkie Night tonight,
Adam and Eve wouldn’t believe
It’s Punkie Night tonight.3

In America, pumpkins – the large, bright-orange squash native to the New World and harvested in late autumn – had been carved into grinning faces for decades prior to the arrival of Halloween. In 1820, Washington Irving immortalized the carved pumpkin in his story ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’, and although the piece would later become a Halloween classic thanks to its combination of humour and fright, it made no direct mention of the day. In his poem ‘The Pumpkin’ of 1850, John Greenleaf Whittier links the pumpkin to another festival – Thanksgiving – but goes on to recall carving ‘wild, ugly faces’ in pumpkins lit from within by candles, and telling fairy stories by their light. Jack-o’-lanterns aren’t mentioned in most of the Halloween party descriptions from the 1860s and ’70s; an 1880 article suggests that they aren’t even as useful as cabbages at Halloween. But within a few years, the legends of Jack the Blacksmith, Washington Irving’s Ichabod Crane, turnip-carving from the Old World and the American tradition of cutting faces into the giant fruit would combine to create the jack-o’-lantern. In 1898, Martha Russell Orne, in her seminal pamphlet Hallowe’en: How to Celebrate It, suggested that a Halloween party should be ‘grotesquely decorated with Jack-o’-lanterns made of apples, cucumbers, squashes, pumpkins, etc.’ She also suggests creating ‘bogies’ from pumpkins:

A pumpkin is carefully hollowed out until nothing but the shell of the rind remains. One side of it is punctured with holes for the mouth, eyes, and nose, and made as nearly as possible to resemble a human face. A lighted candle is then fastened within, the eyebrows are put on with burnt-cork, and a demon-like expression given to the features . . . the bogie is put in a dark room, where the young people may stray on it unawares . . .⁴

Jack-o’-lantern carving, postcard, c. 1910.

Orne’s playful instructions seemed to catch on, not always to the satisfaction of teachers, who by 1906 were complaining, ‘Why should these carved faces always be made so ugly?’5 By the time of Games for Hallowe’en (1912), jack-o’-lanterns specifically carved from pumpkins were recommended for party decorations, table decorations, lighting effects and games; jack-o’-lanterns of pasteboard ‘should be made just large enough to fit over the gas jet’ (in this time prior to the widespread introduction of electricity).⁶

It wasn’t until Halloween had become established in America that it acquired most of its token animals. Only the cat had been present in Halloween lore previously, and usually in association with the witch. The Scots, for example, thought witches might turn cats into horses to ride on Halloween night, while in America one folk belief had it that a witch who boiled a live black cat on Halloween night and then washed the bones in a spring would receive a visit from the Devil, who would reveal to her the ‘lucky bone’ that would henceforth serve as her talisman. Edgar Allan Poe’s famed short tale ‘The Black Cat’ is now a Halloween classic, even though it makes no reference to the day itself, and cats figure prominently in twentieth-century Halloween folk art. Cats have recently been a source of concern at Halloween: in the USA black cats are believed to be stolen for use in occult rituals, and many animal protection agencies warn pet owners to keep close tabs on their black cats during the Halloween season.

The tie between bats and owls and Halloween is less clear. Both animals feature prominently in twentieth-century images of the festival, but neither has any real association with it prior to that; nor are they much mentioned in Celtic lore. It may be simply that both are nocturnal predators (which could explain why spiders, for example, are rarely featured in Halloween motifs). Bats may also owe part of their enduring popularity to Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), since Stoker created the myth of the vampire’s ability to transform into a bat. It’s also possible that the manufacturers of postcards and decorations who added the bat and the owl to Halloween iconography realized that many people genuinely found spiders and snakes too frightening to purchase in any form.

The only other animal featured prominently in nineteenth-century and earlier Halloween lore appeared virtually not at all from 1900 on: the horse. Horses, as the primary mode of transportation prior to the automobile, might carry witches, fairies or goblins on Halloween night. The Celts recorded horse racing as part of their Samhain festivities, and cavalcades were once a popular way to celebrate All Saints’ Day. The pooka might transform into a horse, as in the story ‘Mac-na-Michomhairle’, about a pooka who takes that form and emerges from a hillside each Halloween, describing the events of the coming year to those who encounter it. Witches would use an enchanted bridle on Halloween to transform young men into steeds so they could engage in ‘Hallowmass Rades’, Scottish witch revels held on Halloween. In Britain, the ghostly ‘Wild Hunt’ (led by the ‘Spectre Huntsman’) was thought to be especially powerful on Halloween night, and was said to include twenty black horses and twenty black hounds.

Halloween’s now-established colours of black and orange were also settled around this time. A few early twentieth-century Halloween decorating articles and guides suggest other colour schemes: for example, an article of 1912 on preparing a Halloween window decoration states that the day’s colours are ‘brown, yellow and white’.7 However, an article from just six years later affirms absolutely that ‘the colors for Hallowe’en are orange and black’.⁸ The earlier colours had emphasized harvest, but now the jack-o’-lantern, night and death had come to dominate Halloween’s colour palette.

As Halloween acquired emblems and a playful image, there was one area of the USA where Halloween was still celebrated as the more solemn All Saints’ Day. The French who came to New Orleans and other parts of Louisiana brought their La Toussaint customs with them, and All Saints’ Day was one of the most important days of the year in the nineteenth-century calendar. New Orleans tourist guidebooks of the period always remark on the city’s unique above-ground cemeteries, necessary because of the moist soil, and the 1 November celebrations that were considered one of the year’s two great festivals, the other being Mardi Gras. Families visited the graves of departed loved ones and cleaned and decorated the monuments. Vendors lined up outside graveyards, offering flowers and food. By the end of the twentieth century, the New Orleans observance of All Saints’ had considerably lessened, but nearby communities such as Lacombe and Lafitte were still vigorously celebrating with a night-time vigil, often conducted mainly by those of Creole descent. Louisiana remains the only state in America in which All Saints’ Day is a legal holiday.

By the beginning of the 1900s, American Halloween celebrations were starting to transform again. This time they reinstated more of the pranking of Irish celebrations. In rural areas especially, 31 October soon became an evening that was almost exclusively celebrated by mischievous young boys. A turn-of-the-century guide on boys’ crafts suggests:

This is the only evening on which a boy can feel free to play pranks outdoors without danger of being ‘pinched,’ and it is his delight to scare passing pedestrians, ring door-bells, and carry off the neighbors’ gates (after seeing that his own is unhinged and safely placed in the barn). Even if he is suspected, and the next day made to remove the rubbish barricading the doors, lug back the stone carriage step, and climb a tree for the front gate, the punishment is nothing compared with the sports the pranks have furnished him.9

This same book goes on to describe methods for constructing ‘bean-blowers’ (aka pea-shooters), goblin figures and several varieties of the notorious ‘tick-tack’, an immensely popular Halloween noisemaker. This toy, which consisted of a notched wooden spool on a stick, could be run over windows to create a startling loud rattle, and for almost half a century the tick-tack was practically synonymous with Halloween.

The Halloween black cat, postcard, c. 1910.

Emile Friant, All Saints’ Day, 1888, oil on canvas.

Not everyone saw Halloween mischief as simply the fun-loving but ultimately harmless sport of young boys. As pranking became more widespread, it became more of a problem. Simply disassembling a gate – in fact, the name ‘Gate Night’ replaced Halloween in many areas – was one thing, but disassembling the gate and then moving it into the centre of town where it might be piled in the middle of Main Street with dozens of other gates was more troublesome. In the 1920s, Halloween pranking spread into the rapidly expanding major urban areas, and became out-and-out vandalism. Although the simple pranks of the past – switching shop signs, or flinging a sock filled with flour at a man’s black coat – were still practised, so were far more destructive activities, including breaking windows, tripping pedestrians and setting fires. In 1933, during the height of America’s Great Depression, destructive Halloween prank-playing was so virulent that many cities dubbed that year’s celebration ‘Black Halloween’. Vandalism was now described as the work of ‘hoodlums’ rather than mischievous boys, and included sawing down telephone poles, overturning automobiles, opening fire hydrants to flood city streets and openly taunting the police. Local governments that were already struggling economically were overwhelmed, and many considered banning Halloween altogether.

Fortunately, more practical alternatives proved to be effective: towns and civic groups such as the YMCA and the Boy Scouts began to offer boys other ways to celebrate Halloween, including parties, parades, costuming, carnivals and contests. Schools took an active role in entertaining children at Halloween, and soon there was an entire cottage industry based around writing holiday booklets aimed specifically at children and teachers. These books were popular from about 1915 until 1950 (when trick or treat took over, in other words), and included poetry recitations, one-act plays, pageant suggestions and other theatrical performances that would presumably occupy young minds for the week leading up to Halloween, and would thus keep them from contemplating pranking. Some of these pieces, in fact, specifically addressed the problem of pranking, albeit in a charming manner that theoretically would appeal to children. Take, for example, the short play ‘Making Jack-o’-lanterns’ from The Best Halloween Book (1931), which includes this dialogue between two boys as they work on their pumpkins:

HAROLD. I think I’ll go over the tracks and scare the Widow Mitchell a little. We did that last year and had a lot of fun.

BILL. It wasn’t so much fun when she told the principal about it and we all lost our recesses. Let’s think of something different.

HAROLD. I’d like to do something with mine that would bring pleasure to some one instead of injury. There must be some good that can be done with jack-o’-lanterns.10

After Harold’s abrupt change of heart, the boys decide to present their jack-o’-lanterns to a poor family that cannot afford their own.

Chambers of commerce and other merchant associations also took an active part in distracting would-be Halloween pranksters. An article of 1939 that appeared in an official publication of the Rotary Club touted decreased pranking (due in part, of course, to activities sponsored by Rotary Clubs across the USA), and described how store-owners had succeeded with everything from paying for parties to bringing rowdy boys to a boxing ring on Halloween night. Rotarians in Calexico, California, described their Halloween ‘mirthquake’:

First, a noise parade of costumed school children led by their teachers; next, an interval of field contests – tugs of war, a sandbag race, a fifth-grade football classic; a greased-pigcatching contest – then free tickets to a theater.11

Window-decorating contests, costume contests and even renting trains to carry rural pranksters to town were all cheaper than repairing mass vandalism, and youngsters seemed eager to participate as well.

One town took the pranking problem so seriously that it ended up becoming the town’s identity: Anoka, Minnesota, claims to have been ‘the first city in the United States to put on a Halloween celebration to divert its youngsters from Halloween pranks’. Tired of waking up on 1 November to find their cattle roaming on Main Street, in 1920, Anoka’s civic leaders instituted a programme of Halloween parades, giveaways and bonfires. In 1937, twelve-year-old Harold Blair arrived in Washington, DC, with a proclamation naming Anoka ‘the Halloween Capital of the World’. The insignia on Harold’s sweater is now embedded in one of Anoka’s downtown sidewalks, and the town has continued to hold both the title and the celebrations. A combination of parades and contests spans the week preceding Halloween and boasts 40,000 participants.

While teachers kept troublemakers occupied in school and merchants made towns safe again, parents created diversions at home for their mischievous offspring. Thanks to the Depression, however, money in the late 1920s and early ’30s was scarce, and parties weren’t cheap. One solution was for neighbours to pool resources and create the ‘house-to-house party’ in which groups of children were led from one house to the next, each home hosting a different themed activity. This would soon evolve into another tradition, perhaps the most cherished of all American Halloween rituals.

An Anoka Halloween button from 2007.

Trick or Treat

While it’s tempting to draw connections between the New World’s institutionalized begging ritual and earlier, Old World traditions such as the masked house-to-house performances of the Grülacks or the Strawboys, Guy Fawkes begging or souling, trick or treat probably sprang out of more recent antecedents. In New York City, Thanksgiving, now celebrated in the USA with a traditional turkey dinner on the fourth Thursday of November, was compared in the 1870s with Guy Fawkes Day. It had become a rowdy festival of thousands of boys organized in crews (similar to the Guy Fawkes crews who still parade in Lewes each year), who were rewarded with gifts of money. Costumed children were also recorded going from house to house and begging food.

Even more similar to trick or treating was a Christmas custom called ‘belsnickling’. Derived from a German mumming tradition known as Peltztnickel, belsnickling was performed in the eastern areas of the USA and Canada, and consisted of groups of costumed participants moving from house to house, offering small ‘tricks’ in exchange for treats of food and drink. In Nova Scotia, the belsnickling performers deliberately frightened young children, who might be asked if they had been good before being rewarded with a treat. In one version of belsnickling, those whose houses were visited by the costumed revellers were required to guess the identities of the disguised guests, and had to hand over a treat to anyone they couldn’t identify; this same custom appears in some early descriptions of trick or treat, lending credence to the possibility that it derived from its Christmas cousin. In fact, the earliest recorded usage of the actual phrase ‘trick or treat’ in connection with Halloween comes from Alberta, Canada, where in 1927 a newspaper article reported on pranksters demanding ‘trick or treat’ at houses (although no mention of costuming is made). By the 1930s, the phrase in connection with Halloween and costumed children seemed to be working its way down through the northern USA, as states like Oregon reported that ‘young goblins and ghosts, employing modern shakedown methods, successfully worked the ‘trick or treat’ system’.12 One of the first national mentions of trick or treat appears in an article of 1939 entitled ‘A Victim of the Window-Soaping Brigade?’, which both refers to ‘trick or treat’ as ‘the age-old Halloween salutation’ and makes it plain that the practice was a method of subverting rowdy pranking.¹³ Still, it wasn’t until after the Second World War – when rationing was over and luxuries like candy were once again readily available – that trick or treat finally spread throughout the entire USA.

As trick or treat replaced pranking, it seemed that the day now belonged almost entirely to pre-pubescents. Adults might occasionally dress in costume for parties, but for the most part they were expected to spend Halloween passing out candy to masked children. How was it that even the young adults of Robert Burns’s classic poem no longer actively celebrated the day?

The answer to that may best be found in two unexpected areas: retailing and Prohibition.

The Edwardian era was prosperous, and leisure activities were plentiful. In the Victorian age, Halloween parties for youngsters had involved a considerable amount of adult participation: invitations, costumes and decorations were made days in advance and required the knowhow of mothers and fathers. But as the twentieth century dawned, paper goods companies catering to party-giving hostesses sprang up, and by the 1910s companies like Beistle and B. Shackman had begun to produce and import pre-made decorations, taking some of the burden off adults. Dozens of small booklets outlining activities for Halloween parties were published, and the Dennison Company introduced a line of annual decorating guides called Bogie Books that gave detailed instructions on how to use Dennison products to quickly and attractively decorate for Halloween parties. For about a decade, Halloween parties for adults were probably as popular as those for children, with the latter being held in the afternoons and early evenings to accommodate the later gathering for the adults.

Then, in 1919, the U.S. Congress passed the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, and liquor was banned – or at least driven into the shadowy haven of speakeasies. Although Dennison continued to publish the Bogie Books, adult participation in parties took a serious blow when liquor became absent.

By this time, though, Halloween had become too popular to die easily. In the era between gas and electricity, between communicating via letters and the widespread use of telephones, one artistic form of staying in touch blossomed: picture postcards. Postcards were printed celebrating places, people and events, and holidays were no exception. During this golden age of postcards, over 3,000 Halloween cards were produced, and the fantastical, colourful design of these cards worked to codify and solidify Halloween icon ography. Jack-o’-lanterns were featured prominently, often anthropomorphized into playful vegetable-headed men; the seasonal, merry orange fruit even appeared on some cards in the costume of a king, showing how the pumpkin had risen to prominence as Halloween’s leading icon. Depictions of witches were plentiful, taking two forms: the classic wizened hag bent over a bubbling cauldron, attended by a faithful black cat (and possibly servile imps), or the lovely young, heavily sexualized witch, often dressed in crimson and seated on a broom. However, though the witch, black cat and jack-o’-lantern all sound like images of the modern Halloween, these cards still show a festival in transition, as many of them depict the fortune-telling games still being played at parties of the time.

Vintage postcard that seems to be a parody of the popular character ‘Buster Brown’, c. 1910.

By the 1930s, another popular graphic art aimed at adults was capitalizing on Halloween: the pin-up. Hollywood studios frequently presented their attractive starlets in provocative outfits as they posed for leading photographers, and for October the ingénues might be dressed as witches or posed with pumpkins. During the Second World War, the popularity of pin-ups increased, thanks to overseas servicemen who were hungry for a glimpse of anything female, and Halloween pin-ups occasionally incorporated military imagery as well.

A youthful witch on Halloween, postcard, c. 1910.

Overall, though, the period between the two World Wars saw Halloween move through a cycle from adult and children’s parties to pranking to ritualized trick or treat. During the Second World War, rationing put a slight dampener on the home celebrations, but when the war finally ended, trick or treat had infiltrated virtually every area of America, spurred on by a huge boom in developing new suburban neighbourhoods. It had become the pre-eminent activity of Halloween. The fortune-telling customs of earlier eras were discarded, and the young people who had once enjoyed practising those games were now confined to either the occasional costume party or handing out treats with older family members.

In the 1940s and ’50s, Halloween imagery and merchandising changed to reflect the new institution of trick or treat. The Bogie Books ceased publication in 1934, and the popularity of postcards declined sharply as telephones became commonplace (just as the heyday of pin-ups passed with the end of the Second World War). The new retailing trends catered to trick or treat, and so emphasized candy and costumes. In the past, costumes had been relatively simple homemade affairs, and had often utilized the image of the outsider: costumes for gypsies, hobos, bandits and pirates were all easy to produce, requiring little more than old castoff clothing and a few accessories. However, as manufacturing techniques changed in the 1950s and facilitated silkscreening on cheap rayon or vinyl, and as plastic production allowed the creation of inexpensive, colourful masks, shop-bought costumes began to replace the traditional homemade outfits. The popularity of the new medium of television was exploding, and costume manufacturers played on this, licensing such beloved small-screen figures as Howdy Doody, Kukla and Ollie, and comedienne Lucille Ball. Old favourites like witches and ghosts were still popular, but a ghost costume made simply from a white sheet was passé, as mass-produced ghost costumes included ghoulish masks and costumes featuring stylized, colourful graphics. The new costumes were safer, too, made from flame-retardant materials. In the past, too many children had suffered as a result of parading in flowing costumes with lit lanterns, as was the case with four-year-old starlet Caryll Ann Ekelund, who had appeared in the Shirley Temple film The Blue Bird and who died in 1939 after her Halloween costume caught fire from a jack-o’-lantern. Unfortunately, every Halloween still sees reports of revellers who become burn victims after a homemade costume catches fire.

Candy companies didn’t really begin to target Halloween heavily until trick or treat. Candy had first made its appearance at American Halloween parties in the form of taffy that children could pull as part of the entertainment. The first mass-produced candies that were popular at Halloween were tiny sugar pellets that served mainly to fill festive, brightly coloured containers. However, a candy first manufactured in the 1880s and finally mass-produced in the 1920s would soon become the preferred Halloween sweet: candy corn. Originally designed to imitate an individual corn kernel, its festive colours (orange, yellow and white) and cone shape captivated consumers. The colours and corn shape connected it with autumn and harvest, and soon that connection led to the autumn’s main candy purchasing event, Halloween. Candy corn is still a favourite American Halloween item, now produced largely by Brach’s Candy Company, who estimate that Halloween accounts for three-quarters of its annual candy corn sales. Candy corn’s design has led to both a panoply of spin-off products for Halloween, including costumes and candles, and candy corn produced in the colours of other celebrations, such as ‘reindeer corn’ in red, white and green for Christmas. Candy corn has even inspired its own day: 30 October is (in the USA, at least) National Candy Corn Day.

As trick or treat’s popularity exploded in the post-Second World War era, adults found it far easier to hand out individually wrapped sweets than the apples, nuts, popcorn balls and homemade candies that had been given out in earlier days. Despite the perennial popularity of candy corn, chocolate soon became the preferred sugary treat. By the late 2000s, Halloween – after lagging behind Valentine’s Day and Easter for decades – finally became the top U.S. holiday in terms of chocolate sales, with sales in 2009 reported at 598 million pounds of candy earning $1.9 billion in sales.14 Leading manufacturers Hershey’s, Mars and M&Ms not only began to produce new products specifically for the Halloween season, but for some time have been creating very specific Halloween-themed marketing campaigns. As Hershey’s spokes -person Jody Cook notes:

All holidays are important, but we strive to make people think of Hershey’s when they think of Halloween. Every year we come out with new packaging, designs or products to keep the excitement around what Hershey’s is offering.15

A supermarket Halloween candy display in 2011.

By the 1950s, other industries had begun to capitalize on trick or treat as well: grocers printed branded trick or treat bags, meat producers gave out kits and booklets that included cut-out masks, motion picture and television companies produced Halloween cartoons and episodes, and even adult products like cigarettes featured trick or treat and Halloween imagery in their magazine and newspaper print ads.

Two of the most popular accessories for any trick or treating child were the jack-o’-lantern treat collector and the noisemaker. In the past, children venturing between houses on a dark October night might have carried a small papier mâché jack-o’-lantern holding a candle within; by the 1950s, trick or treaters in need of illumination could be equipped with plastic battery-operated pumpkins that also served as treat collectors. Finally, the illuminated aspect of the plastic pumpkins was dropped altogether in favour of a large, lightweight treat container.

Noisemakers were the descendants of the tick-tack. Where earlier sound-producing toys had largely been homemade out of wood (the ‘horse fiddle’, which consisted of a wooden wheel with four or five wooden slats spun around it, was another popular creation), the new noisemakers were mass-produced in metal and featured eye-popping graphics in vivid hues. Trick or treaters had the option of very loudly announcing their arrival at a house by shaking a rattle, banging a tambourine, blowing a horn, squeezing a clicker or cranking a ratchet. Carl B. Holmberg, an Associate Professor of Popular Culture at Bowling Green State University, has suggested that noisemakers provided children with ‘ritual empowerment’ by allowing them to produce the irritating loud sounds they were normally forbidden from making. Holmberg also indicates that the use of Halloween noisemakers faded as they were supplanted by ‘atmospheric’ sounds: that is, home -owners who began to include prerecorded sound effects and spooky music with their seasonal yard displays.16 However, the use of Halloween noisemakers has recently returned in the haunted attraction industry, as actors working in Halloween mazes are now frequently supplied with either simple noisemakers, such as tin cans full of coins, or higher-tech devices, like special gloves with steel plates.

Vintage Halloween ‘clapper’ noisemaker, c. 1950.

Noisemakers were not the only sign that trick or treat had not been entirely successful in stifling the pranksters’ spirits. In the mid-twentieth century a new phenomenon appeared: pranking on 30 October, the night before Halloween. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when or where this new custom began, but it’s probably no coincidence that there are almost no references to it prior to the 1940s – when trick or treat arose, in other words. Displaced pranking found a new home on the thirtieth, and under a variety of names, including ‘Devil’s Night’, ‘Goosey Night’, ‘Mischief Night’, ‘Cabbage Night’ and ‘Damage Night’. There are nineteenth-century British references to Mischief Night, but they refer to 30 April, not 30 October, even though the description is startlingly similar:

All kinds of mischief were then perpetrated; water-tubs were overturned, door handles tied securely fast, shopkeepers’ signboards exchanged, and other unmentionable freaks performed, until the establishment of regular police put an end to these vagaries.17

Mischief Night has more recently referred in Great Britain to 4 November, the night before Guy Fawkes Day. The name Devil’s Night is now most associated with the city of Detroit, Michigan, where it led to massive instances of arson in the 1980s (297 Devil’s Night fires were recorded in the city in 1984). In the mid-1990s, a combination of urban renewal and volunteer efforts brought Detroit’s arson problem under control, but other cities have also reported multiple incidences of arson on 30 October, including some in Great Britain. Mischief Night/Devil’s Night crimes have also recently been linked to racial tensions.

Trick or treat also had a positive side effect for at least one charity: in 1950, an American couple convinced a few neighbourhood children to collect money for the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF), and the practice became so popular that in 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson named 31 October National UNICEF Day. The UNICEF trick or treat programme remains popular, and has helped raise relief funds for such recent disasters as the Indian Ocean tsunami and Hurricane Katrina. UNICEF also touts ‘the extraordinary empowerment and pride a child experiences’ while securing donations during trick or treating.¹⁸

Certainly the empowerment aspect of trick or treat was a large part of why it became such a popular annual pastime for many children. Charity aside, for one night a year, American youngsters were allowed to put aside their usual identity, encouraged to become a beloved character, allowed to parade around after dark and make noise, and be rewarded by adults. It’s probably no coincidence that trick or treat shot to prominence in the 1950s, the same decade in which over-protective parents and crusading psychologists began to complain about violent comic books and rock ’n’ roll. Halloween guaranteed children at least a small release from repression, even if only for one night.

Costumed adults dispense candy to trick-or-treaters in Beverly Hills, California.

So did what author David J. Skal has called ‘Monster Culture’.19 In October 1957, Screen Gems released to television a package of 52 horror films from Universal; the blanket title was ‘Shock Theater’, and the roster included such classics as Frankenstein, The Bride of Frankenstein, Dracula, The Mummy and The Wolfman. A year later, an agent and horror movie collector named Forrest J. Ackerman began editing a magazine called Famous Monsters of Filmland, which featured short pieces on various horror films and was heavily illustrated with photos culled from Ackerman’s extensive collection. ‘Monster Culture’ was generated, and soon Halloween was awash with Dracula, Frankenstein and other monster movie masks and costumes. A night out trick or treating often ended with returning home for a monster movie, and ‘Monster Culture’ also led to such influential Halloween works as Bobby ‘Boris’ Pickett’s hit song ‘Monster Mash’ of 1962, and the rise of the horror show host or hostess. ‘Monster Culture’ has also contributed heavily to Halloween haunted houses, and has even resulted in one attraction dedicated solely to the classic movie monsters: Cortlandt B. Hull’s Witch’s Dungeon Classic Movie Museum in Bristol, Connecticut, which features detailed life-sized recreations of Boris Karloff as Frankenstein’s monster, Bela Lugosi’s Dracula, Lon Chaney Sr as the Phantom of the Opera, and even Hull’s great-uncle Henry Hull as the eponymous lead of 1935’s Werewolf of London.

Given trick or treat’s almost universal suburban popularity, its emphasis on representations of outsiders, and the way it empowered its participants, it was perhaps inevitable that trick or treat was about to experience a backlash. Adults, it seemed, were unwilling to grant their children that power after all.

In 1964, a New York housewife named Helen Pfeil was upset at the number of trick or treaters whom she thought were too old to be demanding candy, and handed them packages of dog biscuits, poisonous ant buttons and steel wool. Within three years the urban legend of children being given apples with hidden razor blades surfaced, and parents began to worry about Halloween. Stories of anonymous psychos hiding everything from arsenic to LSD in Halloween treats became rampant, especially following the case of eight-year-old Timothy Mark O’Bryan, who died in 1974 after eating a cyanide-laced ‘Pixie Stix’. That little Timothy’s murder was eventually linked to his father, Ronald Clark O’Bryan, didn’t matter in the public imagination; the fear of the madman who was out to poison children on Halloween had already been introduced.

Trick or treat, however, refused to die. Alternatives were soon found: hospitals provided services on Halloween night to check children’s candy, even going so far as to offer the use of their x-ray machines. Shopping malls and merchants capitalized on the fear by giving out Halloween treats and promoting a ‘safe environment’ for children. Local zoos created trick or treat events, with stations set up around their grounds to provide different treats. And educational programmes taught children to throw away any unwrapped treats, including apples and nuts.

As trick or treat became more gentrified, folklorists and sociologists heatedly debated its merits. In his essay ‘Trick or Treat: Pre-texts and Contexts’, Tad Tuleja notes how children now often costume themselves in the packaging of a favourite food or product, and adds:

Far from encouraging communalism or redistribution, the ritual certifies, and even models, competitive vigor: the successful trick-or-treater is a budding entrepreneur, whose packaging and legwork have provided personal income.20

If, by the twenty-first century, the average American child couldn’t even explain the ‘trick’ part of the phrase ‘trick or treat’, this was not the case in Britain. As trick or treat began to increase in popularity in Britain, so did pranking. In fact, in 2004 the British supermarket chain Asda decided to ban sales of eggs to teenagers in the weeks leading up to Halloween. ‘We’ve said that we’re going to be more vigilant and we’re not going to be selling eggs to under-16s’, stated a spokesperson for the giant retailer.²¹

Halloween for Adults

As trick or treat was beginning to decline, or at least to be brought under (corporate) control, other factors were also beginning to tilt Halloween celebrations back towards focusing on adults. Many of the baby boomers who had been so fond of trick or treating as youngsters – specifically, those who had been children in the 1950s, the golden age of trick or treat – seemed reluctant to give up celebrating it. And in the 1970s, as peoples of colour, women and gays sought equal rights, Halloween was inevitably pulled into the quest for progress.

From the ‘Jocular Jinks of Kornelia Kinks’ series of postcards: ‘Gran’pa done say dat his face it am old / So I’se give him dis new one and hopes he won’t scold’, 1907.

Halloween has had a long and difficult history in regards to nonwhites, especially African Americans. In the 1920s, when African Americans were stereotyped as easily frightened and super stitious, Halloween books suggested parties, costumes and decorations featuring ‘darkies’, ‘mammy’ or ‘rastus’. Even Halloween books aimed primarily at children perpetuated racist stereotypes – 1936’s Halloween Fun Book, which features recitations, plays, songs and games for children, includes a poem entitled ‘A Darky’s Halloween’, written in exaggerated dialect and depicting a pair of African Americans as ‘two little darkies half-dead with fright, / Who had forgotten ‘twas Halloween night’.22 The Ku Klux Klan, when brought before Congress in 1921, tried to equate their tall, pointed cowls to Halloween masks.²³ In a 1965 hearing, they stated that their tactics of harassment and vandalism ‘should always have a humorous twist . . . and should be in the nature of Halloween pranks’.²⁴ Throughout the twentieth century, there are incidents of Halloween rowdyism that led to crimes perpetrated by whites against blacks. Sometimes, as in the Halloween murder of a young African American man in Corinth, Mississippi, in 1959, months of racial violence and tension followed. Halloween racism continued into the twenty-first century: in 2001, white students at Auburn University in Alabama held a Halloween party in which they dressed as members of the Ku Klux Klan and staged the lynchings of other white students in blackface. After they posted photos on the Internet, 185 students were suspended.

One incident from Southern California’s Long Beach area put a different spin on Halloween racial tensions in 2006: on Halloween night, three white women aged between nineteen and twenty-one who were visiting a neighbourhood known for its extravagant Halloween decorations were attacked by a number of black teenagers who hurled pumpkins and racial epithets. Eventually eight defendants were convicted of felony assault with a hate-crime enhancement (a ninth was convicted only of assault), and sentenced to probation and house arrest.

Halloween and gay culture, however, seem to have been a far more convivial mix. The celebration, of course, had always been a sanctuary for cross-dressers. Note, for example, these lines from Charles Frederick White’s poem ‘Hallowe’en’ of 1908: ‘The women dressed in men’s attire / The small girl, too, quenched her desire / To get into her brother’s pants’.²⁵ By the late 1930s, nightclubs around the U.S. were holding Halloween contests for ‘female impersonators’. However, it wasn’t until the 1970s – just a few years after the Stonewall riots in Greenwich Village, a pivotal moment in the history of the gay rights movement – that the Greenwich Village parade began and quickly brought gay participation in Halloween into the spotlight. In 1991, in an essay about the parade, folklorist Jack Kugelmass noted, Halloween’s ‘recent revival as an American adult festival speaks less to the possibility of religious enchantment than it does to the license the event provides’,26 and certainly in the 1980s the Village Halloween Parade emerged as a decadent festival of Mardi Gras-like proportions. Begun in 1973 by puppeteer Ralph Lee, the parade’s proximity to Christopher Street, the heart of New York’s gay culture, practically ensured that gay participation in the event would grow. On any given Halloween, among the parade’s 60,000 marchers will be drag queens, large articulated puppets, marching bands and every conceivable costume from gladiators to religious figures to giant walking condoms. The event, which draws two million attendees and is viewed on television by another million, bills itself as ‘the nation’s largest public Halloween celebration’ and has become a major cultural landmark for New York. In recent years, the parade has sought to convey a more family-friendly image, emphasizing a ‘safe, celebrative environment’.²⁷

But gay-oriented Halloween celebrations have hardly been confined to New York: Southern California’s West Hollywood began its own ‘carnaval’ in 1987, and the Halloween event now draws half a million visitors. The community blocks off a lengthy section of Santa Monica Boulevard and holds live musical performances and contests, although most of the festivities are confined to gawking at the amazing array of costumes.

San Francisco’s history of gay-themed Halloween celebrations has been somewhat more troubled. Prior to the 1980s, most of the festivities involved drag queens and their escorts going from bar to bar to display their complicated costumes. However, as the event migrated to Castro Street and grew in size, so did the attendance of ‘fag-bashers’, or anti-gay protesters. The city tried to counter this by offering its own official party, which only resulted in two distinct celebrations occurring simultaneously. Unfortunately, the Castro celebrations continued to result in violence, and after a gunman opened fire in 2006, wounding nine, authorities began to practice a ‘zero tolerance policy’ on Halloween night.

Another group on the fringe of American culture has also claimed Halloween for itself: Wiccans and neo-pagans. In contrast to the stereotypical (largely Catholic and medieval) portrayal of the witch as a minion of Satan, modern witches, who returned to the root word wicce when they named themselves, tend to follow a belief system that is benevolent, centred in earth worship and free of infant sacrifice. There are also a wide variety of other neo-pagan beliefs, all of which are polytheistic and which include Shamanism, Druidism and systems based on Norse or Egyptian beliefs. The modern neo-pagan movement first began to organize in the 1960s, and came to public awareness with the publication of Margot Adler’s influential study Drawing Down the Moon (1979).

Because the term ‘neo-pagan’ encompasses so many different belief systems, there are a wide range of practices on 31 October. Halloween is a major festival for most neo-pagans, and may be referred to as ‘Shadowfest’, ‘Ancestor Night’ or Samhain; it’s typically a New Year’s celebration, although some groups – such as Druids – may reserve the winter solstice for that occasion. For Wiccans, 31 October is one of the eight major Sabbats, and is celebrated with a ritual that acknowledges both the presence of the ancestors and the transfer of power from the Mother Goddess (who rules during summer) to the God, who will hold sway until the following Beltane (1 May). Wiccans may also incorporate modern Halloween iconography such as the jack-o’-lantern into their rituals, and follow the more solemn observation with a festive party. Many neo-pagan groups celebrate around bonfires, and acknowledgement of deceased loved ones usually plays an important role in celebration. The spirits may be called to join in the festivities, or devices such as crystal balls and scrying mirrors may be employed in an attempt to communicate with those who have passed beyond. Most neo-pagan groups also have special foods, herbs and stones associated with the festival.

Wiccans also created their own Halloween mecca: Salem, Massachusetts, now hosts one of the largest community-wide Halloween celebrations in the world. In 1692, Salem was the site of one of the most famous witch trials in history – nineteen people were hanged as witches, and the trials served as the inspiration for Arthur Miller’s classic commentary on 1950s McCarthyism, The Crucible. Salem became inextricably linked with the word ‘witch’, and in 1971 Laurie Cabot opened the first shop in Salem specializing in Wiccan materials. In 1982, the Salem Chamber of Commerce inaugurated ‘Haunted Happenings’, a weekend-long celebration of Halloween that exceeded expectations; now, area hotels book up a year in advance, and Wiccans continue to be a significant part of the event. Salem has built on the notion of being a ‘magical’ destination, especially at Halloween. Christian Day, a witch and the owner of the Salem shop Hex, suggests that people are drawn to Salem at Halloween ‘because they want magic in their lives’.28

The ‘Haunted Happenings’ now extend for the entire month of October and include tours, cruises, film screenings, street markets, celebrity appearances, séances, magic lessons and trick or treat for children, performed excerpts from The Crucible and Samhain rituals on 31 October. The ‘Haunted Happenings’ website also lists ‘Year-round Halloween attractions in Salem’, which include murseums, galleries and tours.

Trial of George Jacobs of Salem for witchcraft.

The adult reclamation of Halloween that took place in the 1970s culminated not with a group based on ethnicity, sexual orientation or religious belief, but with a single film. In 1979, a low-budget thriller grabbed moviegoers all over the world by the throat: John Carpenter’s Halloween did not just become one of the most successful independent films ever made and the progenitor of a whole new sub-genre – the slasher film – but also presented Halloween in such a terrifying light that it was a wonder anyone would want to celebrate it after seeing the film. Carpenter’s movie, based on ideas by producer Irwin Yablans and a script Carpenter co-wrote with Debra Hill, created two iconic characters: Michael Myers, the silent killer who escapes from a mental institution during Halloween and wreaks havoc on his hometown of Haddonfield, Illinois; and Laurie Strode, the virginal and resourceful ‘final girl’ who manages to survive Michael’s rampage. The film played knowingly on its viewers’ affection for Halloween by incorporating pumpkins, costumes, masks, popcorn, scary movies on television, children and suburbia; but whereas films like Steven Spielberg’s E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) painted Halloween with a warm, nostalgic glow, Halloween turned beloved icons into signifiers of terror. A young boy’s clown costume was now what the pre-adolescent Michael Myers wore on his first massacre; a jack-o’-lantern wielded a knife on the film’s one-sheet poster; and – in the strangest and funniest twist – a rubber mask of Star Trek actor William Shatner became a killer’s menacing disguise. Halloween spawned not only its own sequels and remakes, but an entire cycle of ‘holiday’ horror films, including My Bloody Valentine, April Fool’s Day and of course Friday the 13th. None of those films, however, could boast such adept use of a festival’s imagery, or such an impact on the celebration they purloined.

Throughout the 1980s, trick or treat continued to limp along, but there was no question that Halloween had arrived as an adult festival. In 1983, America’s third-place beer company, Coors, decided to counter their competitors’ sales on Super Bowl Sunday and Memorial Day by ‘creating a new beer holiday’.29 Their first two Halloween campaigns (which featured the forgettable ‘BeerWolf’ and ‘Silver Bullet Bar’) were hardly runaway smashes, but in 1986 they hit on the formula for success by hiring ‘Elvira’, the curvaceous horror-movie hostess played by comedienne Cassandra Peterson. Fuelled by life-size cardboard cutouts of Elvira (which were frequently stolen by store employees), Coors sales surged, and by 1995 Elvira had gained the moniker ‘Queen of Halloween’. Thanks to the Coors/Elvira campaign, Halloween had soon surpassed Super Bowl Sunday and St Patrick’s Day in beer sales.

German lobby card from Carpenter’s Halloween.

Halloween wasn’t only being reclaimed by urban adults, however; suburban homeowners were also making it their own by investing heavily in decorations. In the past, decorations had been simple and hand-crafted. A few carved pumpkins, perhaps a scarecrow and some hay bales (more representative of Halloween as a harvest celebration than a horror celebration), and some cutout figures had been the extent of most yard displays. Companies like Beistle and Dennison offered a small yearly selection of cut-out figures (black cats, skeletons, and witches were the most popular), banners and window decals. A few enterprising souls went further, adding some hanging ghosts made from sheets, tombstones carved from wood or Styrofoam, or, for the very ambitious, actual manne quins turned into monsters or corpses. But for the most part, Halloween lagged far behind Christmas in terms of home and yard decorations.

A Spirit Halloween store, Burbank, California, 2011.

But in the 1980s, as Halloween surged in popularity with adults, it also became more commercialized. Extravagant decorations began to appear in drug stores and supermarkets, and decorations got a big boost in 1983 with the appearance of Halloween seasonal stores. That year, a San Francisco dress shop owner named Joseph Marver decided to fill in his October slump by offering costumes, and the business was an immediate hit. The following year he rented a temporary space in a mall, and his sales went through the roof. Thus were born the seasonal Spirit Halloween Stores, which Marver sold to Spencer Gifts in 1999, and which operated over 900 stores in 2011. Although Marver started with costumes, the Spirit stores (and other seasonal Halloween stores) soon expanded to include home decorations, and homeowners began to take the same interest in Halloween decorating that they had traditionally shown at Christmas. Adult interest in Halloween was also spurred on by the mass merchandising of such popular media franchises as Star Wars, Star Trek and of course Halloween and A Nightmare on Elm Street, and soon parents could dress their tot in a Smurfs costume and decorate their yard with a realistic life-size figure of Freddy Kruger. By 1999, almost 30 per cent of America’s consumers spent money on Halloween decorations, and in 2001 Americans spent nearly $1 billion on them.

Many of these home decorators weren’t just creating a casual display in their yards: instead they were putting on actual walk-through shows, with miniature versions of the mazes that had begun to appear during the Halloween season in the 1970s. And as homeowners began to produce more and more elaborate seasonal displays, so did the more professional maze producers. In fact, what no one foresaw in the 1980s – or even the early 1990s – was another transformation in Halloween that was just around the corner. By the twenty-first century, Halloween would still be celebrated with trick or treat, parties and yard decorations, but it would also become virtually a global industry.

Halloween Haunts

It’s hard to pinpoint the exact origins of what is now known as the ‘haunted attractions industry’, but it probably had its rough beginnings in the 1930s, when parents, anxious to divert the attention of pranking boys, created events like ‘trails of terror’. This description of a ‘trail of terror’ from a party pamphlet of 1937 sounds uncannily similar to scenes that are standard in contemporary haunted houses:

An outside entrance leads to a rendezvous with ghosts and witches in the cellar or attic. Hang old fur, strips of raw liver on walls, where one feels his way to dark steps . . . Weird moans and howls come from dark corners, damp sponges and hair nets hung from the ceiling touch his face . . . At one place ‘Tige’ who is a guard dressed as a dog, suddenly jumps out at him, barking and growling . . . Doorways are blockaded so that guests must crawl through a long dark tunnel . . . At the end he hears a plaintive ‘meow’ and sees a black cardboard cat outlined in luminous paint . . . 30

The guidebook also suggests that different parts of the maze may have different themes: ‘Ghouls Gaol’, ‘Mad House’, ‘Tunnel of Terrors’ and ‘Dead Man’s Gulch’ are mentioned. Other tips from this pre-Second World War guide include a chair wired to deliver a mild electric shock, the rental of a creepy abandoned house to hold the event in, and ‘Autopsy’, in which guests are seated before a backlit screen behind which fake surgery is performed.

The first haunted houses staged outside of home parties all seem to have been charitable events, often produced by groups like the Jaycees (a civic organization dedicated to promoting business skills among young adults). In the early 1970s, the Christian group Campus Life staged successful haunted houses across the nation. These attractions combined many of the techniques of the ‘trails of terror’ with heavy amounts of gore and many enthusiastic actors, and guests typically queued for one to three hours for an experience that lasted between fifteen and 30 minutes.

Many contemporary ‘haunters’ – those who create haunted attractions as a year-round profession – point to one single attraction as the one that most inspired them: the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland in Anaheim, California. The Mansion opened on 9 August 1969 after more than a decade of planning. It had first been conceived of as a walk-through attraction, but concerns over moving large masses of guests quickly through the Mansion led to the use of the ‘Omnimover’ ride system, small clamshell-shaped cars that could each pivot 360 degrees, directing the guests’ attention to an exact scene. After Walt Disney died in 1966, the two artists put in charge of completing the Mansion, long-time ‘Imagineers’ Marc Davis and Claude Coats, differed on the artistic direction of the attraction: Coats felt that guests would want genuine scares, whereas Davis favoured a lighter, more comedic approach. In the end, they compromised, with the first half of the ride concentrating on atmosphere and a few shocks, while the second – set first in a ballroom, then a cemetery – featured humorous singing ghosts and a knee-rattling caretaker.

What made the Haunted Mansion so successful and so influential, however, was not its similarity to haunted houses and ‘dark rides’ (that is, tawdry carnival haunted houses) of the past, but its use of startling new technologies and effects. Ghosts were no longer simply sheets hung in a tree, but were instead actual shimmering translucent figures that moved, spoke and sang. A witch wasn’t just a rubber-masked figure bent over a fake cauldron, but a completely realistic bodiless head floating in a crystal ball, conducting a complex séance. Projections, the use of ‘ghost glass’ (which magicians had employed for decades) and pneumatics provided the astonishing effects, and the Mansion also featured intricate sets, beautiful artwork (including paintings that change from tranquil to horrifying), original music and sound effects, and superb voice acting, especially from narrator Paul Frees. The Mansion was an unqualified hit, and soon spawned copies in other Disney theme parks.

But its influence moved well beyond the confines of amusement parks. Edward Douglas, who works with partner Gavin Goszka under the name Midnight Syndicate to create soundtracks for haunted attractions, calls the Haunted Mansion ‘the granddaddy of what we do!’, and adds that it was ‘the very first haunted house that started it all, and certainly the soundtrack that started it all for what we do.’31 As both domestic and professional haunted houses gained popularity throughout the 1990s and the 2000s, the haunters who had grown up with the Haunted Mansion sought out more advanced technologies for their own Halloween haunts.

One other Southern California amusement park also contributed to the history of haunted attractions: in 1973, Knott’s Berry Farm, located near Disneyland in Orange County (about 30 minutes south of Los Angeles) offered one night of Halloween-themed attractions, mainly by adding set dressing and actors to their existing ‘Calico Mine Train’ ride. The idea proved successful, and the Knott’s ‘Halloween Haunts’ were soon expanded, with most of the 160-acre park being converted for the month of October. In the 1980s, the Halloween events included celebrity stage shows by comedic performers like ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic and Elvira. Knott’s continued to add mazes and staff to the annual event, and they now boast more than a dozen custom mazes, over 1,000 cast members and state-of-the-art effects and makeup. Knott’s employs year-round maze designers who have generated their own followings on websites and Internet message boards. When Knott’s debuted a maze based on the film The Grudge 2 in 2006, it made history not just for its intricate audio-animatronic characters (which included a complete mechanical figure of the film’s ghost girl crawling torturously down stairs), but for its cross-marketing campaign, which served to raise awareness of both the film and the maze.

Knott’s Scary Farm promotional photo, 2000.

In addition to mazes, ‘Knott’s Scary Farm’, as the Halloween Haunts are also referred to, also employs the use of ‘scare zones’, large themed outdoor areas through which visitors must pass to reach other parts of the park. In 2011, Knott’s featured four scare zones: ‘Carnevil’, ‘Ghost Town’, ‘Necropolis’ and ‘Gypsy Camp’ (in which werewolves attack a troupe of gypsies). Scare zones have become popular parts of other Halloween theme parks as well.

After Knott’s and Disneyland introduced the concept of the major amusement park haunted house, other tourist destinations followed suit. Universal Studios in Orlando introduced ‘Fright Nights’ in 1991, then in 1992 changed the event’s title to the current ‘Halloween Horror Nights’, which launched at Universal’s Hollywood location in 1997. Universal became the first haunted attraction to feature a star celebrity maze designer when they brought horror writer, filmmaker and artist Clive Barker on board in 1998 to design ‘Freakz’. Barker eschewed the usual masks purchased from catalogues in favour of custom-designed characters and sets, and went on to design other attractions for Universal in succeeding years. In one interview on his own fascination with Halloween mazes, Barker defined their wide appeal:

When people come out of the Clive Barker Halloween Maze they’ve had blood, screaming, madness and monsters. They’ve survived. There is a sense of, ‘I came out the other end of this and I survived.’32

Given the success of the seasonal makeovers for existing amusement parks, it was inevitable that an attraction would finally appear that existed only as a Halloween theme park: in 1991, entrepreneur David Bertolino introduced Spookyworld to New England, calling it ‘America’s Halloween Theme Park’. Although Bertolino sold Spooky World in 2004, in 2010 the park joined with another haunted attraction, Nightmare New England, and continued their tradition of mazes, a ‘monster midway’ and celebrity appearances by horror film actors and musicians. For several years, Spooky World touted its number one attraction: not a maze or a movie star, but ‘Mouse Girl’, an actress named Ruth Phelps who let some 200 live mice run over her body while she lay in a large box.

Once the amusement parks had established the notion of the successful seasonal haunted attraction, haunters all over the country followed suit, producing bigger and better attractions every year. By the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, there was officially a haunted attractions industry that was claiming sales figures of over $6.5 billion a year. Thousands of for-profit haunted houses sprang up all over the country, ranging from simple mazes set up in parking lots to multi-storey adventures that took an hour to walk through. Haunted houses have become the new thrill ride: ‘You get the rush without the risk’, says David Rudd, dean of the psychology department at Texas Tech. ‘As a result, these activities are far more popular than bungee-jumping, sky diving or extreme sports, all of which carry real risks of harm.’33 Many haunted house entrepreneurs credit not just horror movies or Halloween with the rise in popularity of haunted houses, but also videogames. ‘It’s like a horror movie, but it’s more like a video game. You’re moving along in an environment’, notes Ben Armstrong, co-owner of Netherworld, a haunted house in Atlanta, Georgia, that plays host to 10,000 guests a night and was voted the nation’s top attraction in 2010 by Haunt-world Magazine.³⁴ Netherworld is acclaimed for its use of live actors and makeup effects; other venues, like Philadelphia’s Bates Motel (rated #2 by Hauntworld) are renowned for their outdoor pyro technics, while some attractions – like The Darkness in St Louis, or 13th Gate in Baton Rouge – are ranked highly for their ‘Hollywood quality special effects’.³⁵ All these attractions provide year-round employment for their owners, and all are housed in permanent locations, usually abandoned factories or warehouses that can be bought or leased cheaply.

Haunted attractions can bring new life to existing neighbour-hoods, but they come with their own specific sets of problems. When the ‘Fear City’ haunted attraction wanted to set up in Morton Grove, a suburb of northern Chicago, the village board was pleased with the addition of 40 seasonal jobs and the spillover revenue to the local restaurants and gas station, but noise, parking and traffic – considering that an estimated 22,000 people would visit the attraction in less than a month – concerned local residents. The attraction answered many concerns by vowing to hire off-duty police personnel during the month of October, and Fear City was allowed to take up occupancy in Morton Grove.³⁶ Apparently Halloween and haunted houses are good for communities feeling the pinch of an economic downturn.

The Piper from the Hallowed Haunting Ground in Studio City, California, 2005.

Another factor contributing to the rise of this relatively new industry was the slow death of physical and makeup effects in Hollywood films as they are replaced with digital effects; the legion of un(der)employed film artists found profitable work in haunted attractions. Dozens if not hundreds of companies work year-round producing full animatronic figures (you can, for example, purchase a chatty Hannibal Lecter robot from Spirit’s website for a mere $279.99), body parts, set dressing like cobwebs and headstones, masks and costumes, sound effects, fog effects and set pieces such as inflatable maze walls. These companies display their wares every year at Transworld, the industry’s trade show; there are also websites, print magazines, how-to videos and books on this burgeoning and lucrative new staple of Halloween.

The haunted attractions industry, however, doesn’t cater only to the professional; it also sells to home haunters who might stage a small maze in their front yard, or simply decorate the yard in an extravagant fashion (known in the industry lingo as a ‘soft yard haunt’). Some of the earliest home haunts to achieve fame beyond their neighbourhood were set in Los Angeles, where access to Hollywood special effects experts or original props and set pieces could be had more easily. One of the best known of the early haunters was Bob Burns, a memorabilia collector who every Halloween turned his San Fernando Valley home into a recreation of a different classic horror or science fiction film; his haunts were so effective that Burns received both local and national news coverage. In 1976, when Burns re-created the 1960 film The Time Machine in his yard, he used the original machine and was even visited by the film’s producer George Pal. His recreation of Alien in 1979 (the same year the film was released) featured Star Trek actor Walter Koenig as the doomed starship captain. Burns’s last show, in 2002, was a detailed rendition of Howard Hawks’s The Thing From Another World (1951).

The influence of Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion was to be found in another famous Southern California home haunt, the Hallowed Haunting Grounds in Studio City. The haunt, which ran until 2005 and has been featured in haunted attraction magazines, websites and videos, literally recreated some of the Mansion’s effects in a typical suburban front yard, offering views of floating lanterns, a bodiless talking medium and translucent ghosts. The Hallowed Haunting Grounds drew approximately 3,000 visitors a year.

By the time some of the home haunt pioneers were retiring, commercially produced effects were becoming cheaper and more readily available to casual Halloween decorators. It didn’t matter any longer if you weren’t in the Hollywood area with access to special effects knowhow; by the 2000s, $1,699 would buy a marble grave sculpture that would abruptly transform into a jabbering ghoul, all set in motion by sensors. Some home haunters, like Eric Lowther of Exeter, New Hampshire, started staging displays so popular that the street had to be blocked off to cope with the thousands of visitors. Lowther eventually moved his display to a farm, and now uses his haunt to raise money for charity.

One of the oddest off-shoots of both the haunted attractions industry and Christianity’s love/hate relationship with Halloween is the ‘Hell House’. This kind of Christian-themed haunted event presents a series of moralistic tableaux under the guise of a traditional Halloween walk-through attraction; however, guests don’t truly interact with the scenes, as they do in a typical haunted house, but are rather passive audience members for a series of short plays that each present the commission of a sin (in a gruesome fashion). The last room in a Hell House usually involves a prayer meeting with the pastor or minister in which he attempts to convert the paying guests to his church. Hell houses may have first appeared in the 1970s, but they didn’t attract major attention until a Colorado pastor named Keenan Roberts began selling a ‘Hell House Outreach’ kit. Priced at $299, the kit includes instructions on how to run a Hell House; for additional fees, Hell House presenters can also purchase optional extra scenes that include ‘Gay Wedding’, ‘Post-birth Abortion’ and ‘Cyber-chick Multimedia’ (the last offers ‘contemporary TNT to caution of the dangerous cesspool the Internet can become’37). There are now hundreds of Hell Houses offered in the United States every year, and they claim a 35 per cent conversion rate.

Growing alongside the haunted attractions industry is the Halloween attractions industry, which focuses not on adult hauntings but on family-friendly and agriculturally themed seasonal festivities, including corn mazes and pumpkin patches. Since haunted houses – with their high levels of gore effects and intense shocks – are unsuitable for small children, the Halloween attraction business is filling that gap for the young ones. Sometimes referred to as ‘agritourism’ or ‘agri-tainment’, corn mazes and pumpkin patches not only provide families with a kid-friendly, old-fashioned autumn/ Halloween experience, but have proven an economic boon for farmers. Corn mazes, which can occupy anywhere from two acres to more than 40, can produce as much as 200 times the profit that the same land would generate by simply being used for growing and harvesting corn. Corn mazes probably grew out of the long tradition of hedge mazes in Europe, but recent advances in GPS technology have given rise to dozens of professional maze planning and designing companies. A corn maze is always cut in a complicated design, which could be anything from the farm’s logo to a state flag, and is created from special hybrid corn; visitors pay a fee to enter and are provided with maps. Corn mazes and pumpkin patches usually form the heart of a Halloween experience that might also include face-painting, crafts and foods displays, contests, playgrounds and hayrides. Sometimes corn mazes are transformed in the evening into haunted attractions, with monsters stationed throughout the maze.

Pumpkin patches and pumpkin growing have also benefited from recent new advances. Farmers in the eastern part of the U.S. grow special hybrid pumpkins in hopes of winning the prize for the largest pumpkin of the year; so far, achieving a one-ton pumpkin has remained an elusive goal, although recent prize-winners have come within nearly 200 pounds. Specially grown oversized pumpkins have also been turned into boats for events such as Nova Scotia’s Windsor Pumpkin Regatta, in which immense, hollowed-out pumpkins are rowed or motored for specified distances.

Technology continues to move forward, and the haunt industry moves with it. Aside from increasingly amazing and affordable robotics, there are now 3D technologies that equip maze customers with glasses and offer them a walk-through 3D experience, usually assisted by the liberal use of fluorescent paints and black lights; motion sensors and infrared cameras that detect the presence of guests and activate a scare; plasma television screens that play back an excessively horrifying scene with more realism than can be achieved with a robot; zip-lines that can allow actors to pass overhead; and ‘slider gloves’ that, when raked along an asphalt surface, produce showers of phosphorescent sparks.

Pumpkin patch at Forneris Farms in Mission Hills, California.

Twenty-first Century Halloween Tricks

Advanced technologies, however, have also produced a few less pleasant Halloween scares in the new millennium. Urban legends – once limited to what could be reported in papers or passed via word of mouth – are now spread on 4G networks almost at the speed of thought. The 9/11 terrorist attack on the United States in 2001 didn’t dampen the spirits of trick or treaters the way many experts had predicted it would (although policeman and firefighter costumes were more popular that year), but it did spawn several new urban legends, including one involving anthrax-laced candy and one in which ‘my friend’s friend was dating a guy from Afghanistan’ who warned her not to board any planes on either 9/11 or Halloween.38 A legend that’s been passed around since the mid1980s is that of the haunted house that’s either impossible to survive or will offer money back to patrons who make it all the way through. In 2008, a man named Andrew T. Lazaro was actually arrested for spreading malicious Halloween rumours on the Internet, all of which centred on a supposed gang initiation in which new members would shoot schoolgirls and women on Halloween night. The search to find Lazaro – who made the postings on 30 October, but wasn’t arrested until 1 December – intensified after schools brought in extra security and cancelled certain events.

Costuming has also ventured down some questionable new avenues in recent years. Dressing pets in costumes was one thing – the American Pet Products Association reported that Halloween costumes were one of the top trends in pet retailing for 2011³⁹ – but putting Fido or Kitty in a pirate outfit for Halloween was nothing in comparison to what was happening in human costuming. The second half of the 2000s saw an explosion in the sales of sexually provocative Halloween costumes, especially those aimed at women; everything from traditional hoboes and clowns to Disney heroines to the Tim Burton character ‘Edward Scissorhands’ could now be had in a ‘sexy’ version for women. Sociologists, psychologists and femin ists debated the positives and negatives of this trend, some de-crying the ‘hypersexualization’ while others applauded the costumes as ‘empowering’. Dr Deborah Tolman, director of the Center for Research on Gender and Sexuality at San Francisco State University, suggested that these costumes might be a way for women to mock the overly sexualized images of women presented in advertising and media: ‘Hey, if we can claim Halloween as a safe space to question these images being sold to us, I think that’s a great idea.’40 However, child psychologists worried about the effect on girls, since sexy costumes (like ‘French Maid’) were now marketed to children as young as eight years old. ‘Studies show that the oversexualization of girls correlates with depression and eating disorders’, noted psychiatrist Dr Gail Saltz in a discussion of Halloween costumes for teens and younger children.⁴¹ Schools began to ban Hal loween costumes and parties because girls were dressing too provocatively and boys were using too many violence-themed accessories such as fake weapons.

One group has even called for an end to costumes that promote stereotypes of mental illness: in 2002, the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) protested against the selling of costumes like ‘the Straight Jacket’ and the use in haunted attractions of scenes involving electroshock therapy or insane asylums. NAMI’s executive director Rick Birkel noted:

Halloween costumes portraying hospital patients in straitjackets, or haunted houses presented as insane asylums, are no different than the blackface minstrel shows in an earlier era, when African Americans were cruelly caricatured, segregated and marginalized in our society.⁴²

The group was successful in getting the Pepsi company, which was sponsoring the Atlanta haunted attraction Netherworld and its ‘Inner Sanctum’ theme, to remove its logo from Netherworld’s website; however, Spencer Gifts, parent company to the Spirit Halloween stores, stated that they would continue to ‘poke fun at life situations whenever and wherever we find them’.⁴³

Fundamentalist Christians groups continue to call for the abolishment of anything they deem pagan or Satanic, and have published literally hundreds of cautionary books and web pages which often begin by quoting Vallancey and then descend to even more fantastic depths. Writing about how Samhain was practiced by the ancient Celts, one book notes, ‘As part of the celebration, people donned grotesque masks and danced around the great bonfires often pretending they were being pursued by evil spirits’, while the jack-o’-lantern ‘may have originated with the witches’ use of a skull with a candle in it to light the way to coven meetings.’44 In 2009, even the Vatican weighed in, running an article in its newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, entitled ‘Halloween’s Dangerous Messages’. The author of the article, Joan Maria Canals, stated: ‘Halloween has an undercurrent of occultism and is absolutely anti-Christian.’ He suggested that parents should ‘try to direct the meaning of the feast towards wholesomeness and beauty rather than terror, fear and death’.⁴⁵ (After this story received considerable negative reactions, many clerics pointed out that the Vatican had issued no official statement on Halloween, and that its newspaper was run by an independent editorial board.⁴⁶) Some reverends, among others, have countered by suggesting that if Christians are to ban celebrations on the basis of their pagan origins, they might want to start with Christmas and Easter.

Religious concerns over Halloween have also spread to schools. In Northern California, high schools banned Halloween celebrations because of fears that they violated the constitutional right to freedom of religion. ‘Teaching about Halloween will fall under the guidelines of teaching about religious beliefs and customs’, Los Altos school board president Phil Faillace said. ‘And school time may not be used to celebrate Halloween, just as it may not be used to celebrate Easter, Yom Kippur or Ramadan.’⁴⁷

Schools and churches weren’t the only ones who were mistrustful of Halloween by the 1990s. Around 1992, lists of common phobias began to include ‘samhainophobia’, a fear of Halloween. Dozens of websites now exist purporting to be skilled in treating this condition – which may be accompanied by or related to other phobias, including placophobia, a fear of tombstones or burial, or ailurophobia, fear of cats – even though there are virtually no documented cases of it.

Employers and parents have had their own reasons to dread Halloween. By 2010, one in three Americans planned to either hold or attend a Halloween party, with many parents preferring to stage parties for their teenagers and friends rather than risk letting the adolescents engage in unsafe behaviour on the night. Most parents spend considerable time and money decorating or preparing costumes for their children, and companies worry about employee costuming – inappropriate costumes, including those that are overtly sexual or portray offensive stereotypes, can be disruptive. American employers ‘are likely to see an uptick in absences’ around Halloween, according to one workforce-management company.48 Employees are taking more time off for Halloween, and yet 25 per cent of American households each year are still expected to run out of candy for trick or treaters.

New studies on Halloween – and surely the fact that Halloween is now the subject of studies proves how thoroughly accepted into mass culture it has become – have indicated other reasons for stress as well. A Yale University study found that birth rates actually decreased on Halloween (as compared to Valentine’s Day, when they rose), while an article in Psychology Today called Halloween ‘the new New Year’s’ in terms of the social pressures experienced by young adults anxious to connect and network.⁴⁹ To modern urbanites, Halloween’s fears are more about social pressures than malevolent sprites and the coming winter.

In the twenty-first century, Halloween has survived terrorist attacks, economic downturns, malicious urban legends and increasingly terrifying haunted attractions only to become bigger than ever. Contrary to dour predictions, costumed American tots are still demanding candy on the evening of 31 October, but adults now have the option of participating in trick or treat or heading out to enjoy an evening of carefully staged (and sexy) scares. Folklorist and Halloween expert Jack Santino has summed it up this way:

Halloween in the U.S., then, has been changing and adapting for over a century. Before World War II it was celebrated with parties in the home; it then became a masked solicitation ritual, and is now an inversive, large-scale public festival.50

Now, as the twenty-first century enters its second decade, Halloween is becoming something else: the latest mega-successful American export to tantalize happy consumers around the globe.