Halloween Hijinks

Have you ever wondered what mischief your rural relatives got up to on Halloween, way back when?

"Outhouse tipping," that's what. After all, if it's good enough for Loretta Lynn...

First of all, for those of you who've never seen an outhouse (a small structure used as an outdoor toilet) here's what they look like...

This appears to be one of the more modern outhouses of yesteryear as the owner has thoughtfully provided a roll of toilet tissue rather than scraps of newspaper or pages torn from the Eaton's catalogue.

Standard Halloween practice was to tip over outhouses onto their sides. Bonus points if someone was inside!

"Outhouse dumping" was common too. This involved moving someone's outhouse to another location. Sometimes the outhouses ended up in a park or on the front steps of a church. In the early 1960s, I recall Lucan Ontario's Main Street lined with outhouses the morning after Halloween night. The practice soon died out once everyone had indoor plumbing. One of the last outhouses that remained during the latter part of that decade was an outhouse that stood at St. James Cemetery, where many of our relatives are buried.

Dumping outhouses could make front page news...

Source: The Blyth Standard, 1 November 1955, page1

Removing gates from their hinges ranked high among Halloween pranks. Needless to say, the next morning, the farmers were led on a merry chase to round up their runaway livestock.

Anything that was detachable or movable was an easy target for mischief makers. Hay wagons and horse-drawn buggies were favourites. If you could hoist the vehicle onto a rooftop, all the better...

Halloween pranksters hoisted an Amish buggy atop a Ford sales office in Hartville, Ohio, on Oct. 31, 1950. Photo found here.

The more, the merrier!...

Halloween prank with rooftop buggies in Airdrie, Alberta, 1930s.

Source: Nebraska State Historical Society.

If hoisting a buggy (or seven) onto a roof was too much effort, you could simply place one man's buggy in front of the home of another man. Result!

Hiding things scored big points with rural youth...

Source: The Wingham Advanced Times, 5 November 1925, page 5.

Way back when, hiding a farmer's plow in a tree was considered the height of hilarity...

Unsuspecting plow before it was pilfered.

Removing street signs and putting them in the wrong places was always good for a laugh. Turning things upside down was another source of mirth.

But sometimes, Halloween hoodlums carried things too far. Oh, the depredation...

Source: The Clinton News Record, 27 October 1932, page 7.

And in this case in Seaforth Ontario, a Mrs. Paul Shaver had a very close shave...

Source: The Huron Expositor, 3 November 1876, page 8.

Yes, those ancestral pranksters who preceded us got up to plenty of Halloween mischief back in the day. It was all fun and games until somebody lost an eye. Or had a close shave.

But it could have been worse. On Halloween, our ancestors back in Ireland used to batter down doors with stolen cabbages, stuff cabbages down chimneys, and whack each other with bags of flour!