Halloween

The Halloween in these photographs is not a children’s holiday for most of the period. It is a night of property damage that communities spent thirty years trying to civilize.

The holiday arrived with Irish and Scottish immigration in the 1840s, carrying two older customs. Souling was the practice of going door to door for cakes in exchange for prayers. Guising was going door to door in disguise and performing for food or coin. Neither is quite trick-or-treating, but both are clearly its parents.

What developed in America through the late nineteenth century was closer to sanctioned rioting. Gates were lifted off hinges and hung in trees. Outhouses were tipped, wagons were hauled onto barn roofs, windows were soaped, and streetcars were derailed by greased tracks. Newspapers reported the damage every November 1 the way they reported weather. In cities the destruction got expensive enough that by the 1910s and 1920s civic groups began organizing parties, parades and house-to-house rounds specifically as a bribe — give the children somewhere to go and something to collect, and they will leave the gates alone.

That is where the modern holiday comes from. The phrase trick-or-treat appears in print in western Canada in 1927 and spreads through the United States in the late 1930s. Sugar rationing shut it down during the war, and it came back after 1947 and became universal within a few years.

The costumes in the early photographs unsettle people, and there is a reason for it. They were made at home from what was in the house — flour sacks, cheesecloth, old sheets, papier-mâché formed over a clay mold and painted. The faces are asymmetrical and the expressions are wrong because a person with no training was sculpting a face by hand at a kitchen table. Nobody was trying to be frightening in the modern sense. The results simply are.

The commercial holiday starts with the Dennison Manufacturing Company of Framingham, Massachusetts. From 1909 they published the Bogie Book, an annual party-planning guide showing how to decorate a room with their crepe paper, and it standardized the imagery — the black cats, the orange and black, the witches on brooms, the grinning moons. Much of what reads as traditional Halloween iconography is Dennison’s catalog.

The pumpkin is an American substitution. In Ireland and Scotland the carved lantern was a turnip or a large beet, unpleasant to hollow out and genuinely grim to look at. The pumpkin was native, larger, softer and everywhere in the fall, and it took the job over completely.

Apple bobbing, nut roasting and mirror divination fill the period party photographs, and all three are fortune-telling games rather than party filler. The night was traditionally when the future could be read, particularly about marriage, and a young woman peering into a mirror by candlelight in a 1910s photograph is performing a specific rite rather than fixing her hair.

For anyone working with these images, the useful thing is that the archive holds far more Halloween-adjacent material than anything tagged Halloween. Harvest scenes, pumpkin fields, cider pressing, corn shocks, masquerade parties held at other times of year, and October street photographs all belong to the same visual world and were catalogued under other headings entirely.

A Magazine Editor Spent Thirty-Six Years Asking