From gender-bending costumes to gastrointestinal surprises, the history of Detroit offers some unusual practices revolving around Halloween.
Halloween wasn’t really celebrated in Detroit until late in the 19th century. An influx of Scottish and Irish immigrants in the 1840s brought the “witchier” tradition to the region, but the holiday wasn’t mentioned on paper until the 1860s.
Although there aren’t any stories that are unique to Detroiters, Amy Elliott Bragg said that a few of the stories were very funny. There were a few ways with which you would celebrate Halloween: if you were a high society type, it was a great excuse to have a huge party. Upscale hotels would have Halloween parties – the Griswold, the Detroit Athletic Club, the Boat Club – and they would decorate in a harvest themed motif. People would congregate at Grand Circus Park and Campus Martius for an unofficial parade of costumes and Halloween revelry.
In an interview with Michigan Radio in 2013, local historian Bill Loomis said that there was a boom in popularity with people wanting to communicate with the dead from post-Civil War Era to the 1920s. “The Civil War saw a huge rise in the interest in that – in séances, in ouija boards and telepathy, and all kinds of things like that. Even hypnotism came around, spirit photography was real popular.
Another – considerably less safe – tradition was to bake random inedible objects into your food and serve it to unsuspecting people. “You would take a penny, a button, a key, and the fourth object varied. Sometimes it was a shell, sometimes it was a little heart charm, and you would bake it into a cake or put them in a bowl of mashed potatoes, and then you would serve the cake or potatoes,” Bragg said. “Whoever got the penny, it was said that that person would receive a fortune. Whoever got the key got the key to success. The heart charm would, of course, be true love.” Considering that biting into your food and finding inedible objects is already bad, Elliott Bragg says that the button was the worst object to find in your food. “I think the button was like, ‘You’re out of luck.’”
Yet another way to celebrate was for adults to allow “roving gangs of children” to run amok in the streets. These gangs often consisted of boys who would destroy property by uprooting people’s cabbage plants, breaking off the stalks, and throwing them at houses. They would also break off people’s yard gates and set large fires in the middle of the street. “People kind of wrote off this boy gang terrorism as, like, ‘Well you have to let the animal spirits get out once in awhile,” said Elliott Bragg.
“And sometimes, these roving gangs of children would interrupt high society parties. So, every once in awhile you would see a report where it said ‘a gang of boys busted into the Roosevelt Hotel and ran through the lobby!’ They would, like, knock over chairs, and pull off table cloths and one year they broke into a restaurant and stole a bunch of toothpicks,” Elliott Bragg said. “People were really afraid of these roving gangs of children.”
Gender-bending costumes played an integral part of terrorizing the neighborhood. “Little girls would dress up as little boys,” said Elliott Bragg. “They would parade in the streets with the freedom that they could experience as a little girl only when they were dressed up as a boy. And the boys would sometimes put on girls clothes while they were running around and breaking things.”
Even though Halloween was overwhelmingly a playful holiday, some children in these roving gangs did end up being seriously hurt or killed from being too rambunctious. As Detroit transitioned from the 1930s to the 1940s, Elliott Bragg said the mischief trickled to a stop with changing societal norms. The trick-or-treating that we know today started around the 1950s.
And more recently, we have parents checking their children’s candy to make sure it hasn’t been tampered with or poisoned.
Source : Kinsey Clarke, “All tricks, no treat: Here’s how Detroiters used to celebrate Halloween“, Neighborhoods Blog.
More About the History of Halloween in General
Straddling the line between fall and winter, plenty and paucity, life and death, Halloween is a time of celebration and superstition. It is thought to have originated with the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain, when people would light bonfires and wear costumes to ward off roaming ghosts. In the eighth century, Pope Gregory III designated November 1 as a time to honor all saints and martyrs; the holiday, All Saints’ Day, incorporated some of the traditions of Samhain. The evening before was known as All Hallows’ Eve and later Halloween. Over time, Halloween evolved into a secular, community-based event characterized by child-friendly activities such as trick-or-treating. In a number of countries around the world, as the days grow shorter and the nights get colder, people continue to usher in the winter season with gatherings, costumes and sweet treats.
For more information and a collection of video clips explaining Halloween, visit the History Channel website.