Listening Post: haunting memories
I live on a back road outside Potsdam and my few neighbors are all of a “certain age.” So Halloween has been off the radar for many years. I don’t think I’ve seen a goblin at my door in this millennium. It’s astonishing how a red-letter date on the calendar of young kids, and the parents of young kids, can become just another day.
Old school Halloween. Can you spot Martha Foley?
I grew up in the village though, part of a fractious tribe of kids that knew every backyard shortcut in town, and had an alarming tendency to sneak out of the house at night. My parents would hand out candy to about 400 kids every Halloween. I would bring home, it seemed, my weight in goodies each year–only to plow through the trove day after day until by Thanksgiving I was down to the dreaded licorice and gumballs. I was also, I must confess, a bit of a JD and abused toilet tissue, eggs, firecrackers, and the patience of my neighbors.
It’s my impression that kids are on a tighter leash nowadays, with more planned and chaperoned events, and more store-bought costumes taking the place of the traditional free-for-all. According to my father’s tales, it was even wilder when he was a kid. For example, by the morning of All Souls Day, most of the outhouses in his neighborhood would be tipped on their sides. He said my grandfather tried to circumvent this practice one year with anchor bolts set in concrete, but this only brought out the hacksaws.
What are you up to this Halloween? What are your favorite treats–and tricks? Don’t be scared to tell your story in a comment below.
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My father was a legendary Coach in the north country. He was one of the founders of the Northern Hockey League, coached baseball and basketball as well, but at Halloween, his main concern was his perpetual championship bound football team. A small school. Not much depth. He couldn’t lose any of them to disciplinary suspension, so for me, the end of my trick or treating candy haul, was the biggest treat of all; the HS football players were ALL at my house, having dinner and sumptuous desserts with my parents, and they stayed all sprawled out on the living room floor, playing board games, and sorting my candy with me, the 5-10 year old. At a prearranged time, my parents took each and everyone of them home to the safety of their own parents’ supervision. Most of my candy went with them, but none of my friends got to spend Halloween with all those football heroes, so they were welcome to it!
I am of that “certain age” and live quite a ways out in the sticks so not any trick or treaters at my place either, but Dale’s reference to things being even wilder in his dad’s time reminded me of my dad’s story of one Halloween. He was probably in his early teens in the late 1930s or thereabouts. He lived in a residential part of Rochester NY. He and a buddy of his made a dummy they laid out along the side of the street with a rope tied to one of the arms going up and over something that allowed them to pull the rope as a car approached and let it drop, giving the impression that a body was reaching out for help. As cars slowed or stopped and saw what it was, they drove on…except one car – when the driver recognized the trick, he drove over the dummy, but it somehow got hooked on the underside of the car. My dad and his friend chased the car for blocks – they had put a lot of work in the dummy and they wanted it back but it finally got away from them. The next morning my dad saw, on the front page of the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle, his dummy on a stretcher being held by two police officers. Apparently it had dropped off somewhere downtown. I still have that clipping from the paper – the caption reads, “Typical of groups roaming downtown streets last night for annual Halloween celebration was this one of a dummy that brought out police cars and ambulances.”
One of the Halloween tricks I recall that tickles me still is the one students played on their dean at a college in Illinois in the 1950s. My husband taught at the college and we lived on a block with some other faculty and the dean who was a near neighbor. In the wee hours of the morning students had acquired a cow and forced it up on the dean’s front porch right to his door. They rang his doorbell and made sure he was aroused before they disappeared. I was raised on a dairy farm so I can appreciate the effort it took to get the cow up the porch steps and to stand at the door …all this without waking the dean’s household.
My dad liked to tell the story of his hooligan friends in Kittanning, PA, who would go around on Halloween and tip over all the outhouses. After one such event, the local hotel owner proclaimed that he’d had enough, and that he would take precautions to assure that his guests would never be inconvenienced again. The following day he hired a mason to build a row of solid brick outhouses…and the bet was on.
When the next Halloween rolled around, “someone” stole a long and heavy chain, wrapped it around each of the outhouses, and attached the free end to the nearby train, which departed right on schedule, and hardly noticed the extra tug.
Out of work teenagers were hired to pick up the bricks……