Stuff You Should KnowWe aren’t exactly sure who invented trick-or-treating – kids who realized they could extort adults for candy, or adults who bought off kids in exchange for laying off pranks? The bigger question is: Will trick-or-treating survive the 21st century? Learn more in this classic episode.
Hey, everybody. For this week's select, I've chosen our twenty nineteen episode on trick or Treating. It's a really in depth look at trigger treating and it's got a lot of surprising stuff inside, Like it turns out that if you don't set abandoned buildings on fire on Halloween, then you've been trick or treating all wrong all this time. But don't worry. We're releasing this just in time for you to learn the ropes this Halloween. Happy and extremely safe Halloween, everybody.
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles v Chuck, Brian over there, there's Jerry, And this is stuff you should know that right before Halloween. Addition about.
Feel like a little kid every Alloween.
I'm pretty excited about it.
Yeah, do you get trick or treaters? No?
Not really, no kind of life hashtag, et cetera.
Yeah, And I've told my story before, but I'll just briefly summarize again that my house is after a big curve in the road, and people seem to just stop at that curve in the road.
Well, they don't want to come up on old man Bryant's house. No, you know, the old dead oak tree with the big hole in it that yeah Boo Radley hides figures in is kind of off putting. Is right on your property.
And I think in my neighborhood too.
They close they literally close off, the cops close off two blocks.
It's just this big square of streets and.
That's the official sanctioned no stress area where the parents all just walk around and get drunk and all the kids just run around and don't to worry about cars.
Right, So.
Everyone in my neighborhood has congregated there and you're outside of them, outside the zone. Yeah, which I kind of miss, Like I like trick or treaters coming to my house. I guess I could maybe try, and well I could move a few houses in which I'm not going to do.
We could casually move the the roadblocks a little further back to include your house.
Well, they're actual police cars with police officers. I can't move them, give them some but I could put signs that like, you know this way for the best yet and then you like only two more houses.
Right, or like leave a trail of candy because I remember.
When I first moved to Atlanta, we rented a house that got a lot of trick or treaters and I loved it.
Man, I scared the heck out of those kids.
Oh really, yeah, it was a lot of fun, Like I really got that was my first big adult giving out candy night, like the first time I've ever been able to do that, because you didn't have kids yet, so we weren't out of trick or treating. And uh yeah, I made a really a punt to music out, like the Psycho theme and scary John Carpenter stuff.
Sure, I really enjoyed it.
Did you like do anything to overtly scare them?
Oh?
Yes, I wore a I was dressed up as a very scary person.
Huh. And I would jump out and scare them over and over and over.
Did you really jump out? Good for you, Chuck, or.
I would stand in the like Emily would be giving out candy, and I would just be in the darkened house, like eight feet behind her, just standing there motionless.
That's always a nice attack.
Nice, But the point is I sort of feel like we're missing out, Like we certainly enjoy taking our daughter out, but I really wish we had kids that came by.
Yeah, I wish you did too, too bad.
Yeah, a stupid house right there near the main road, so close yet so far away, so far away, and that's your forever house too. Huh Yeah no, trigger treats ever again for you.
And walked in there.
But what we could do is, you know, we could go to a friend's house and that they jump on their coattails.
You can't sit on their couch. You have to take your shoes off in their house. You can't be comfortable.
We've long talked to me and my friend Eddie and Allison. You know the I'm about. They have a good backyard. It's about doing like a haunted trail one year that like if you come trick or treating, you got to go through.
The trail first.
It sounds like a lot of work.
It is, and it would be fun, no, I mean for.
The kids who have to go through the trail kind of earn right, you got to earn that free candy.
Earn that Reesa's pieces.
So we just hit upon like fifteen different themes in this episode. If you'll if you'll agree, I agree, yes, So we're talking about trick or treating here, and if you look at the thing on its face, just the words trick or treat, there seems to be some sort of option here. You can do one or the other. There used to be give me a treat or you get a trick, basically was the equation.
Yeah, they should just change the name now to just treat night.
Treat night, right exactly. We aren't one hundred you sent sure on where trigger treating came from, but what we do know is that it was originated in America in the twentieth century, and that there was this really like brief Golden age where it lived up to its name trick or treat. There was a there was an offer to not get pranked or tricked, and if you didn't take the people up on the offer, the kids up on the offer by giving them candy, you got pranked. That was the equation. It was in the name. Everybody knew the score. And then it slowly kind of moved over to what we understand today, where the police set up roadblocks and everything is.
Safe these kids these days, and it's just.
Kinda just like you said, just the treat side of the equation.
Yeah, I was, of course kidding but we'll get to it. There are people that really do decry this new generation of children who just expect handouts and that it leads to the idea of the welfare state, right, and all this other garbage that I have no patience for sure, because it's just a fun thing for kids. Yeah, do you think they should be earning the stuff?
No?
No, No, I don't feel that way.
I do feel well, I think it'll come through loud and clear as we do the episode.
Right, Well, we should jump back a little bit to the origins of Halloween. We've gone over this before an episode's past, but we all know it originally started as a pagan harvest or not just one, but pagan harvest festivals in general among the Celts over in the UK. Yes, and that evolved into Halloween, but it had nothing to do with trick or treating at the time.
No, it wasn't wrong. Again, trick or treating is a one hundred percent American invention, that's right. And so with Halloween in particular, you've got all these different components for the modern Halloween or for trick or treating. Yes, you have going from house to house, you have getting two said house and asking for a treat, basically sanctioned begging, got your costume, costume, dressing up, being outside, kind of parading around. All of these things find their origin in the Celtic and I think specifically Gaelic harvest festivals that introduced the dark half of the year. That's right, And in particular there was Sowyn, which forever I've always said sam Hayne, because that's how it's spelled.
Now, you said Salen right when we did our have a wee an episode, didn't you? Probably? Yeah?
By the way, speaking of sown or sam Hayne, you realized that I went to New York and saw the Misfits on Saturday.
Oh yeah, how was that?
I mean it, it was great, colossally amazing. This is the original Misfits, right, the original Misfits. Glenn Danzig, Jerry Only Sure, Doyle, Wolfgang von Frankenstein. Yeah, who actually specifically invited us to this listener right, yes, to this this show.
And it was that's amazing.
Knock your socks off?
Didn't the Damned play as well?
The Damned opened, and then Rancid and then the Misfits just tore the roof off the sucker.
I saw when I saw you were going.
I looked up some YouTube clips of this tour and it looked pretty amazing.
It was amazing and I think Glenn Danzig said that was their last one ever. Oh really, and so we got to see it. Wow, yeah, you me and I had a great time.
Amazing.
So big, big thanks to Doyle Wolfgang von Frankenstein for the invite.
The stage set up looked great, it was.
It was just a really cool show and they played almost everything.
Yeah.
Yeah, it was just a really good show.
That's fantastic. So anyway back to Sowyn, Yeah, so I mean that's a perfect time to mention that show. Though it all worked out, it did.
Hallow's Eve was the night considered when the veil between the living and the dead was the shortest, and so that's when this that's when Halloween formed.
Right right, So people would dress up in like modern day Ireland, Scotland, I believe, Wales. Yeah, man, they would dress up like demons or fairies or supernatural characters who were because this veil was so thin between the living and the dead or the supernatural, right, they could cross over.
These preachers could cross over and communicate.
So if you dressed up them. Maybe they would be confused and think you're one of them and leave you alone.
That's right.
So this now we've got the costume thing going right.
That's right.
And part of that was the community getting together, getting drunk on you know, probably high octanea meat and stuff like that, and they would pray through the town. They still have Halloween parades all over the place. Right here in Atlanta we have one of the best and little Five Points Halloween parade.
Fantastic, Like when you think about the Halloween preyed at your town, like that is centuries millennia old. Yeah, that tradition is.
Yeah.
So we have those two things going on, and then the one missing piece is knock knock, Hey give me candy. Right, But this we have the origins of which came and it's still not Halloween. It took American kids to put all this stuff together. But the European tradition of souling, which was when kids on Hallow z would go from house to house and pray for the souls the departed, and in exchange you would get a soul cake.
Yeah, which I looked up. They look pretty good.
What is it? Just a little bit good?
It looks like a muffin top like top of the muffin. To you, it looks really good.
Soul cakes or mumming, which is and this sounds fantastic. I wish kids still had to do this stuff. You would have to perform a short musical number or some kind of performance to get a treat of some kind, right, maybe a little spare change.
Right, So in that sense you have going to house to house and getting something from the owners of the house, like a treat or something like that.
That's right, But there was a reason.
For that, praying for the soul of their departed loved one, doing a little dance number something like that. The prank part, the prank part of the equation that also existed before trick or treating too, and in fact that was kind of the origin the biggest tradition of Halloween itself was pranking.
Yeah, and that came from Ireland, is that right?
Yeah, in the eighteen eighties, they would prank. They would just run around doing pranks and then they would blame those fairies or demons, right, han sown for the mischief that it wasn't nuts, it was the fairies.
On sam Hin, right, I mean it sounds.
That's how it's spelled.
Yeah, it's really that's a confounding pronunciation, it is.
But there you have it.
That's right.
And then pranks back then, and of course we're pretty low key dingdung ditch stuff like that, moving the neighbor's furniture to the roof.
I saw that. Yeah, flower pot on the chimney. Sure, but it would also get way way worse than that.
Yeah, I looked up mischief night. We never did that. In Georgia, no or Devil's Night.
It was also called.
Yeah, which is the night before Halloween when all these pranks would happen region to region is called different apparently. In New Jersey it's mischief Night, Cabbage Nights. Well, in Camden, New Jersey's Mischief Night. Other parts of New Jersey call it cabbage Night. Since NATA calls it Damage Night.
That's pretty overt. That's a punk band name, right there.
Damage Night, Yeah, totally that you insurance deductible night. Other part.
I don't know why Ohio is so highly represented here. Beggar's Knight is something else. They called it in Ohio.
Chok, because there's nothing else to do in Ohio but sit around and wait for that night.
For Hellow's Eve.
Other names Doorbell Knight, Trick Night, Corn Night, Tic Tac Night, Goosey Night, and then in Canada Gate Night or Matt Knight if you're in Quebec, because mat.
They would take.
They would steal the gate off your fence or the mat from your doorstep and.
Oh really remove it.
Yeah, okay, so they're pretty on the nose, especially Damage Night.
But Devil's Night in Detroit it became legendary over about a twenty year period in the seventies and through the mid nineties. I saw before they finally got a little bit of a could put a dent in it by forming Angels Night.
Yeah, they kind of rebranded it.
Well, not rebranded.
The angels were volunteers who would walk around to keep kids from setting everything on fire.
Oh okay, because that's what they did on Devil's Night.
It was a night of arsen It was a night of arson.
I thought that it ran its course because they burned all the buildings down in Detroit. There was nothing else left.
It was a real problem.
Though I looked into it and like hundreds of kids, Like in nineteen ninety four, I think there were like three hundred and fifteen kids arrested from the Devils Night fires and other stuff.
In nineteen eighty four, the peak of Devil's Night in Detroit, there were eight hundred and ten cases of arson in one night. Amazing in Detroit. Yeah, they would just set the city on fire.
And I'm sure some of these were bags of poop on a doorstep, which I think we can all agree is harmless fun.
It is, unless you're the steppy cever.
Did any of the stuff? I never rolled a house.
Oh you didn't, Now that was fun.
I'm so mad. I was so busy being good.
Never too late, buddy.
I know I should roll a house or fork a yard.
I don't know if that is the plastic forks.
Just basically get like two thousand plastic forks and stick them in the yard.
Oh yeah, I've never heard of that one. You never did that. Really chew up a lawnmower.
I never egged a house because I always heard that, Yeah, really damage his paint.
Yeah. We did have the Junior senior egg fight every year. That was kind of fun.
Well, there you go, you got something.
We get together in a field and throw eggs at each other.
Aside from wasting a lot of press resource with well eggs, yes, but also toilet paper. You really should roll somebody's house at least once in your life. It's great, is it?
Yeah? All right, Yeah, I'm gonna roll your condo.
I remember when I was a kid. Actually, my friend and I rolled the neighbor's house, but we had to be in or at least, so we were doing it basically in broad daylight. It was dusk at best, and the cop drove by, which never happened in our neighborhood ever.
Never.
The cops just weren't needed, right, It was just I think we talked about in the free Range episode in parents episode, you could just do whatever. And we had to knock out of the house of the neighbor whose house we just rolled to let us in to hide from the cop. She went out and told the cop like, it's it's fine, don't worry about it. We rolled her house and had to get safe harbor from her.
Yeah, And you can't really clean up a roll house, can you.
You can? And if they come tell your parents what you did. The rain makes it way worse.
Yeah, but I mean you can't you up there can right?
Some of it's inevitably stuck up there. But you can pull it down as gingerly as you can to get as much as you can. But no, some's going to be left over.
All right, I'm going to roll a house.
Okay, just know whose house you're rolling, like, you don't want to get shot at or anything.
I don't see that anymore either, I feel like it. I mean, I don't live in the suburbs. Maybe it's a little more prone to happen there. Yeah, but it seems like a lost art it very well.
Maybe I don't know anybody who rolls. I just assumed it was because we'd outgrown it, you know.
Emily called it teeping house.
Yeah that's Ohio.
Yeah yeah, all right, let's take a break.
We barely talked about this. I think we're one page in good that's great, all.
Right, stop, should stop, should know?
All right.
So to recap, Chuck, we have the costumes in play now. We have being out on Halloween nights sometimes parading drunkenly community, we have going from house to house, and we have the prank factor.
That's right.
All of these things are out there, floating around, have been out there for centuries millennia. By the time America is born and makes it to the twentieth century, and at some point some kids said, we think, hey, you know what, we could pull all this together and turn it into something really amazing and peculiar and unique called trick or treating.
That's right.
You found a great piece from a sociologist named Samira Kawash, great name called Gangsters, Pranksters, and trick or Treating nineteen thirty to nineteen sixty.
Yeah, and is this.
That pure period, Yeah, that you were talking about where she thinks that American kids just created this thing.
Yeah, there's two historical views, because we don't know where it came from.
Huh.
One historical view, and I think this is what Kawash believes too, is that it was actually kids who figured this out, which is great, who said we can extort adults to not prank them if they give us treats, right, And that it was a genuinely a kid in mention of kids, they made it up, right, And there's some evidence for that kind of thing. A lot of like the early newspaper accounts of it kind of call the kids gangsters and say they're extorting people. It's also possible that was like written super tongue in cheek and that dry. It was kind of dry and lost to the ages.
Yeah.
The other historical view is that the kids were out pranking and doing the pranks, and it was the adults that introduced treats into the equation to buy them off, okay to yeah, to keep them from pranking.
Right, Los Angeles possibly as the point of origin, and this one wealthy kids. I guess that makes sense that this would be the idea of like kids a privilege. Sure, you know, like come around, give me stuff. But apparently in Los Angeles, kids in the wealthy parts of town would dress up and their parents would take them around from house to house and this is this is that pre nineteen thirty period though.
Yeah, they think sometime in the twenties, and if you think about it, that really resembles what we do today. Yeah, But in between that origin and where we've arrived today, there was this pure period nineteen thirty to nineteen sixties. Some people might even take it a little further beyond that, where the kids seem to have run the show, and there really was both sides of the equation.
A trick or a treat, right, But that term actually was in nineteen twenty seven in an article. Right, it's at the first time they found the two words in print.
Together, I guess three words.
That was in an article about a town called Blackie in Alberta, Canada. Yeah, and it seems like all of it was sort of on the West coast early on.
Yeah, and again they think possibly it did originate in Los Angeles, or it may have originated in multiple towns on the West coast roughly at the same time.
But we're thinking twenties because in nineteen nineteen there was a book by Ruth Edna called Ruth ruth Na Kelly called The Book of Halloween, and it didn't mention any kind of trick or treating in there.
No, and it's like an exhaustive, comprehensive homemaker.
Oh review would have been in there, right for sure, and you.
Got to think, like poor Ruth ed Ni Kelly's like, gosh, if I just waited like two years to put this book out, they're going to come up with something brand new with Halloween two years after I come.
Up with this book, I wrote the book on it. Right, not quite now it's out of date.
But they did find mentions of it in newspapers out West Portland, Washington, Reno, Nevada, Nevada, Helena, Montana.
Yeah, and you can kind of track its progress from the dates and mentions in West East paper articles. Right. Yeah. So there's those two sides. One say that it was kids who came up with it on their own. Perhaps they were introduced with the idea of going from house to house to get treats in Los Angeles, but then they said, well, we're also doing these prankings. Maybe we can say, hey, we won't prank you if you give us a treat. There's that view. The other view, again is that it was adults who said, whoa kids, You know, we don't want you setting fires any longer, derailing street cars because every once in a while, somebody would die, people would get shot at by angry neighbors. Sometimes somebody would be in one of those buildings that they set on fire and they die. People would die in a building that kids set on fire as a Halloween prank. So for the most part though, it was just kind of tolerated as one night a year when the kids basically had power and we're allowed to run the show. So this idea, this other historical view that adults finally said, hey, you know, we're not going to just say you can't do pranking. That'll probably be a bad thing. But why don't we just start having parties on Halloween night while we're out pranking, and they'll be cider and doughnuts, and you can come inside and bob for apples and maybe do that instead of running around pranking the neighborhood. And once you did do that, you went from and this is samir k Wash putting it, like you under the rules of society. You went from this powerful kid who could levy a prank on you if he or she wanted to, to a house guest of the adult who now had you in and had given you donuts and cider. You're really going to set their house on fire as a prank after that? Of course not, you're not going to. So in this sense, trick or treating was something the adults introduced to keep kids from carrying out these pranks.
Yeah, and it was by the time World War two came around. It was a big thing in the nineteen forties. But of course, with the sugar rationing and just the fact that there was World War two going on, it put a dent in it for a little while, but it came back bigger than it ever had been after the war, And.
I mean seriously, it came very close to dying out going from World War Two. It was pretty new. It hadn't gained that much traction. There were a lot of cranks and grumps who were not happy about this kind of thing.
I'm curious what else had died in the war and never came back. There's got to be lots of little things.
That's a great question to look it up.
But there were a couple of big pop culture sort of tent poles that helped Halloween along Charles Schultz's pe Nuts. Of course, it wasn't the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown yet.
That was the sixties, I think, yeah.
But in nineteen fifty one he had a four day comic strip run around Halloween where the Peanuts gang got already and got their costumes going, and that really brought it to the forefront.
And then Donald Duck. It was a cartoon Donald Duck Trick.
Or Treat a year after that that had Donald working with his nephews, or trying to prank his nephews while they were trick or treating and working with a witch, and then the candy companies get involved.
There was also a very famous costume company called Ben Cooper Costumes.
Yeah, they're the ones that did like the cheap.
Yes, plastic mask like a Vinyl smod that's right. But they had this really great talent of identifying what was going to be like a hop culture phenomenon.
Before it ever blew up. Yeah, it'd get the right.
They're cheap, yeah, but they were also making these things like ten months before, so they really had to have foresight and they were really good at it. But the fact that you could get cheap, amazing costumes that the little kids all wanted of their favorite characters, yeah, that definitely helped things along too.
Yeah, it was It's hard to overstate like how big of a deal it was to a kid to be that the certain whatever they wanted to be. I think it's still that way, I'm sure it is, but now it's a lot easier, I think to buy costumes, right. I think when you and I were kids, there's a lot of fashioning costumes.
Uh huh.
When you didn't have the ability to be like the alien from Alien or you know, it was a lot harder to put together these elaborate costumes, but once you get your heart set on it, you like you had.
To sure, you know.
So I'm going to tell you my best costume, and you tell me yours. Okay, okay, my mom made one from scratch. Yeah, clown is a clown costume. But the big kicker was that it was an upside down clown walking on his hands, So my feet were the clown's hands. Yes, his head is like dangling between my legs. I've got his legs sticking up off of my shoulders and I don't remember my head must have been covered up like I was in his butt or something like that, right, but I was upside down walking clown. Greatest costume ever?
Really? Yeah? Got any pictures somewhere? Okay?
Yeah.
I did a lot of funny ones, like my brother and I were Han Solo and Luke Skywalker when I was really little nice. But then I got into like I was always wanted to do like funny characters. I like like I like Ed Grimley one year, the Saturday Night Live character I did Ed Grimley one year, and I was I don't know, I felt like I was always trying to make people laugh. I never did scary.
Stuff until little kids started coming around and trick or treating me at your house.
Yes, and then you started just scaring like movie characters.
Like even into my adult years, you know, I would try and find some cool movie character, like Hi from Raising your Zona.
I did one year.
It's almost a grimly same here.
Uh No, not all actually uh.
And then one year I did a great I actually won a contest in New Jersey one year when I was a hardy kushna and I like shaved my head. I did the whole thing. Wow, I had literature. I passed out. Wow, made the whole the whole deal.
You just ended up joining a local chapter for a little while. It was fine, really got into the role.
But I haven't. It's been a few years since I've dressed up.
Yeah, same here, because I just, oh, that's not true.
I haven't been.
I haven't been to a Halloween party in probably five years. Right, what were you last year?
I was Patrick Bateman from American Psycho.
So you were you, but with a tie, right and like.
A giant inflatable brick cell phone.
Uh huh?
And you was a specific Michael Jackson A moment of Michael Jackson's history where he's holding blanket over the balcony. Oh sure, and Momo wast it's you can see it on Instagram.
That's great. Yeah, I have to check that out, all right.
So the candy company started getting involved, That's where I left off.
Yeah, because the costume company.
They knew it was gold for them.
Mars Incorporated in the early nineteen fifties were doing ad campaigns on TV and in newspapers and on the radio and stuff about trick or treat. It became a thing with UNISEF. They had a Trick or Treat for UNISEF campaign back then.
I think they still might, you know. You know, I'm talking about the little boxes. I think so holds change.
Yeah, and they.
Would just give them to little kids, and while they were out trick or treating, they'd also ask for change for UNISEF right to help needy kids overseas. Yeah, and that actually went a really long way to legitimizing trick or treating.
Yeah.
They're doing a lot in these days too for kids special needs kids like it. It's taken this long to finally get the word out, Like the blue pumpkins.
Have you heard of those?
If you trick or treat with a blue pumpkin, that means that you have some special need where you may not be able to walk to a front door and say trick or treat. I'm dressed as you know, Michigan j bullfrog what.
That'd be a great costume? It would be.
But did you pull that off of I just yeah, wow, nice.
He's been on my mind lately. I guess so.
But so people know, like, oh, you've got a blue pumpkin, so I shouldn't say, like, you know, come on, kid, why don't you tell me what your costume is?
And?
Uh?
It's good though, like that it's taken.
It's ironic that it's taken this long to get parents on board to the fact that some kids need, you know, different kinds of treatment.
I don't know if ironic is the best word, as much as disappointing is. Yeah, you know, you're probably right. Should we take another break? Oh my god, we're gonna have to take three more?
No?
Not, okay, yes, we will then.
Stop? You should know stop? You should I should know?
All right, So I think basically what we were saying when we left off, it's sorry about the nostalgia here everybody. But I mean, come on, you.
Get us in a room. Yeah, around Halloween, it's going to happen.
So by the early fifties, trigger treating was huge and established and had so if the nineteen thirty to nineteen sixty was the Heyday, the golden age of trigger treating, nineteen fifty to nineteen fifty nine was the salad days of the Heyday?
Right?
And when did people start complaining about it? The seventies and eighties, nineties.
Far back as the twenties. Oh really, yeah, because those newspaper articles that you can track the progress of Halloween, more often than not they were like old cranks complaining about how they didn't want to have to give tricks or treats or whatever little kids.
Don't you blackmail me?
They don't, Yeah, exactly, you know, what are we teaching our kids? And there's actually, if you kind of scratch beneath the surface of trick or treating, at first, it appears to be kind of a weird power struggle between kids and adults, and it definitely is that, But there's also another power struggle going on between adults of two different minds, ones who are like you are overparenting by being upset about this or like this is just one night a year, it's good for kids, and other people are saying like this is terrible for kids. Well, allowing them to go from house to house to beg is just a bad idea. It's unsafe a is another way to put it to. So there's like a struggle weirdly over trick or treating, and it has to do with underparenting and overparenting and that conversation about the whole thing.
I have seen parents ruin kids' experiences, whether it's like a Easter egg hunt or trick or treating.
I've seen this in action.
Because they're too involved. Yeah, yeah, I mean that's what it comes down to, is just how involved are you in your kids trick or treating. For a very brief period, there was very little involvement in kids trick or treating. Yeah, and a lot of people say that's actually really good for kids. In this other way that we've kind of started to evolve toward is not.
Yeah, I don't remember my parents taking me around trick or treating. I'm sure that happened maybe when I was really little, and we certainly would have had to go somewhere else, because you know, I've lived on the dirt road, the dirt road with no neighbors or very few of them. But I just all my memories stem from being like probably ten to fifteen and being completely on my own with my friends.
Ten to fifteen, ten years old.
But to fifteen, that's pretty late.
What to trick or treat?
Oh yeah, oh, now we trick or treated up until probably the like the ninth orteenth grade.
Well we'll get to it, but in some places you get to get arrested for that.
When did you stop? You'd still trick or treat if they would let you.
I think I stopped around thirteen.
Well, maybe fifteen was too late. Maybe thirteen or fourteen.
You're fine, nough fifteenth great, go with God.
No, but you're you're probably right now that I'll look back at. Maybe I went to Halloween parties, but maybe.
There's a kind of an unofficial slash official again in some places cut off after twelve, really done? Yeah, because thirteen you're a teenager now, and that's not kids stuff as we'll see it. Allegedly, trick or treating is a transition from kidhood to adulthood, and by the time you're thirteen, you've made that transition that's in your past. It's sad, but it's I don't know why, I'm like Christopher walk and all of a sudden, but I am. Yeah.
Maybe I wasn't going that late, but I definitely remember going by myself at a certain point. But now with my neighborhood, it's just that I see mostly parents.
Not involved at all.
They're there kind of like if your child is two or three, helping them walk to the door and stuff. Sure, but otherwise we're just drinking and the kids are doing their things.
So let's talk about this. Then let's skip toward the end and we'll jump back. Okay, all right, there is this debate over, you know, whether it's better to just kind of cross your fingers and hope for the best and let your kids go out and trick or treat on their own, whether that's good or whether we need to the world's just too unsafe for that, and we need to much more manage kids trick or treating than just letting them go out on their own.
Well, it depends on where you are. That's the big divide.
Yeah, And one of my personal heroes, the world's worst mom Lenori's Kanazi, who came up with the Free Range Kid's blog and the whole movement. Frankly, she makes this really great point that when we let kids trick or treat, we let them confront danger like on their own, and it's real, it's just a thin, the narrowest margin of danger. I mean, people always talk about like the you know, like the worst things that could happen on on Halloween when a kids out trigger treating, getting hit by a car, getting kidnapped by a stranger, getting like, yes, just stuff that happens, and it can't happen. It's true, but it happens so infrequently that the chances are it's not going to happen, and you're actually better off just letting the kid roll the dice, because, as Lenorise Kanazi puts it, when when you go trigger treating, you're transitioning from being a kid to a grown up, and you're doing this quite literally. You go with your parents first, and they kind of teach you the rules of the road, like just take one piece of candy, or that house over there has their lights off, so leave them alone. They don't want to have anything to do with this and then after that you let them go on their own, right, and they kind of take the ball and roll with it. And she says that that when they're out trick or treating kids dressed like grown ups, they take to the streets, they encounter the scariest possible locals, which is in goblins, and then yes, they're doing the scariest possible time night and the whole thing is dressed rehearsal for adulthood, and that like, that's the benefit of trick or treating.
I don't quite get that that is the same as adulthood. Like you and I all the time walking around night fighting goblins and water.
Right, exactly where would we have been without trick or treating to prepare us for fighting goblins?
All right?
But just confronting fears are on their own, without their parents managing their world for them so that they can handle themselves, have the confidence to know they can handle themselves. And I guess feel good about having confronted their fears and gotten candy in return. Let's not forget about that. Yeah, Now, on the other hand, it's just just take the candy. It's fine, right, Mommy and Daddy made it perfect for you. All you have to do is go get the candy. You're in a perfect bubble and everything's fine. Yeah, So I kind of tend to fall on Lenor's Knazzi's side on that.
Well, should we talk a little bit about the.
You know, whether or not there have been all these real horror stories over the years, and whether or not any of those are true. As far as the razor blade and the apple and stuff like that, hypodermic needles and candy, this stuff doesn't happen, No.
And the thing to point out, and I know we've talked about it before, is that it was an urban legend that came true.
Right There was one case, and this is actually kind of funny if you asked me. In nineteen fifty nine, there was a dentist in California named William Shine who I took alo laxative pills and disguise them as candy and give out four hundred and fifty of them jerk to kids, and they were all pooping.
I guess, so I think a few did poop. Nobody got injured, though.
Right now, you're not gonna get injured from a laxative.
You could poop over, poop over poop.
Yeah, but this is when I think this real story got out. And then all of a sudden he gets morphed into needles and razor blades or poison or candy laced with heroin and.
Stuff like that. Well that did happen.
Well yeah, but that's the thing, Like the examples that are listed are reverse engineered almost right.
Right, So, there was a little boy in Texas who died from eating a cyanide laced pixie stick right in Texas, in I can't remember what year.
Of seventy four, and.
It turned out that it was his dad. That his dad was the scum of the earth who had taken out insurance policies on his own children, good Lord, and then gave them spiked Halloween candy to make it look like some mad poisoner he killed his kids so he could collect insurance. One of his kids did die, but it wasn't just some random Halloween poisoner. That guy didn't really exist at the time.
Yeah, nineteen seventy in Detroit was the heroin incident. This kid overdose, These kids ate their uncle stash is what really happened. And then the uncle's like, oh crap, let me sprinkle the heroin on the candy and cook up the story and maybe cook up some heroin right since I'm cooking, Yeah, and to try and get out of this.
So again, it really happened, but not in the way that you think.
No. The thing that got everybody so that William Shine guy, who I just think is a scale for that, because he scared the pants off of America's parentsh He basically said, hey, hey, you know how you're letting your kids run free? Something really bad could happened to him, and I just showed you how. And from that that next year on, the parents were anxiously involved in Halloween like they never had been before. Sure because of William Shine. But the thing that really killed Halloween, or at least cemented I think the anxieties in the heads of parents in America is that tail and All poisoner. Oh, sure canceled Halloween nineteen eighty two. Did it really almost drove Ben Cooper Costumes out of business? Candy sales went down fifty percent.
Trick or treated in nineteen eighty two, Well.
Your parents didn't love you. I think I did too. I don't remember not I would remember not trick or treating one year.
Yeah, because that would have been eleven. That's prime time, right, Apparently those are the retirement years.
But all of this stuff added a veneer of fear and anxiety on trick or treating for parents, not for kids necessarily, but for parents, and it drew them into what was possibly just a kid run activity because of fear, probably irrational. Yeah, and now you have to this day, the FDA sending out guidelines around Halloween saying don't let your kids eat any candy until they bring it home, which is just torture. Yeah, and you have to inspect it and if you've see any pinholes or tears or anything that looks weird, just throw it away. Some hospitals say bring your kids candy and well X ray ye to see if there's any razor blades or needles in it or something like that. This is the kind of terror that ironically is overlaid on Halloween. It's like fun terror has actual real terror on top of it, which makes it less fun.
We don't inspect candy. Oh you don't you roll the dice? Huh?
Yeah, that's great.
I don't know anyone who does.
Really.
Oh, man, I was raised like that. You inspect it candy.
Oh yeah, my parents were serious about it.
We never did. I don't know, I just I don't know. That's great.
Maybe it's that thing of like if you're the because it doesn't happen.
Right, No, I'm hardened to hear that. Yeah, because when we did our Free Range Kids episode, I remember thinking, like, what what's going on now? Like like kids are treated like this yor not.
Being poisoned by Halloween candy. It's just not happening, right, you know.
Yeah, Plus in our neighborhood, with the sanctioned closure, all the candy is, people aren't buying their own candy. It's like the neighborhood buys all the candy and they congregated in these couple of blocks.
Oh that's cool.
Yeah, okay, I mean there could be a madman living among us. It happens, but that's like being scared to walk out your front door for fear of being murdered.
Right right, Chuck, You know you just can't live that way.
You can't live that way. You know.
You told me a story about a village, Like villages in Japan have like a festival or two every year. Now, like the whole community comes out it's like a big deal. And there was one village, a little tiny town where this one woman, just I guess, went mad and poisoned the curry that she brought to the village. Thing, kill the bunch of townspeople. It happens, It does happen. But you're right, you can't not eat the curry just because of the small, small chance that some mad person has poisoned it.
Yeah.
The way I look at it is, if that's what happens, then that's you know, your numbers up, your numbers up in your story in the newspaper, right to scare other people.
Sure, you get to be immortalized on stuff.
You should know it's trick or treat going away, Josh, I don't know, Chuck, I say, no, Okay, that's good.
I'm glad to hear that, because again I'm living hashtag condo life. I'm out of the action.
Yeah, I mean, there's this the last bit of this article you sent talked about it going away potentially, But I just I don't think that's ever ever going to happen.
So what are your arguments for it going away?
That it might My arguments or your are my observation, your observations. One of the big ones is that fear among parents that helicopter parenting has not been good for trick or treating. Ah okay, okay, but think about that's a real struggle going on right now overparenting versus underparenting. Which one's gonna win out right? Okay. Another one is there's a perception that that trick or treating is dying out, which is kind of funny, is there. Yes, because people are moving back into towns and gentrifying those towns, like we talked about in the Historic District episode, and as they're doing that. Trigger treating was never huge in the city, and so people who were raised in the suburbs and or were used to it or moving into the city and there's no trigger treating going on anymore. So I guess trick or treating is dying because that's what I'm seeing.
I beg to differ with that too.
Okay, But I mean, you don't live in the city city, you live in a neighborhood.
Yeah, but that's all Atlanta is a bunch of neighborhoods. Okay, you mean I don't live downtown.
Maybe these people live in Des Moines.
I don't know. No one lives in downtown Atlanta.
No, it's true, although it has gotten cooler than it was like a decade ago.
Sure, but I beg to differ that trick or treating doesn't go on in the cities. I think there are apartment buildings in New York where people trick or treat, like just because it's not the picket fence suburban neighborhood.
Sure, I think trick or treating goes on everywhere.
But this author my house, Julie Beck, who wrote in The Atlantic, she put it really well that basically the suburbs and trick or treating just go hand in hand. Sure, Like the suburbs are set up for trick or treat. Yeah, you've got houses that are close together, super safe, yeap where people who live there are just well enough off to buy enough candy for the whole neighborhood. Yeah, they all have kids, They know each other enough that you're not embarrassed for your kid to go up in trick or treat there, and you know that this candy is not going to be poisoned. In the city, you're much more isolated from one another, even though you're living on top of one another.
Yeah, and I think maybe if we're talking about like areas where there are poor kids and where poverty is run rampant, then maybe there's less traditional trick or treating, but there are programs and parties and things they try to do for those kids too.
Okay, so those very things may end up being what kills trick or treating, I should say, the purest version of trick or treating. You can also just make the case well that's what it's evolving into, and just go with it.
I think it will probably be both.
But you're talking about the big Halloween parties, community parties, trunk or treating, trunk or treating, or what was it called Halloween tailgating, Halloween tailgating, trunk or treating. This is the idea that you and we had this at our school. We had the Halloween festival, but that did not replace trick or treating.
Okay, this replaces trick or treating for a lot of children.
Yeah.
So you go out and you get in a big church parking lot essentially, yep, and you have Bob and Frapples and the dunk tank.
Oh this is different, and huh, this is a little different than that well.
I mean I've seen these in person, and.
Okay, but that's a Halloween festival you're talking about.
No, No, I'm talking about instead of trick or treating. It's a big party where they have candy and they have activities and games and stuff.
So are you going from car to car getting candy like the cars or houses?
No, not necessarily, but they're giving out candy.
I mean, you're not talking about a trunk er treating.
It feels very nitpicky to me. No, but it's not. And here's why I'm not talking about a Halloween festival though.
Okay, that's fine, that's fine, but you're not talking about a trunk er treating either.
You mean you walk five feet to a car and they give you candy, then five feet to another car and they say, don't play any games, don't bob for apples, or don't do anything else.
All you're doing is walking to cars.
I'm not saying that they don't have bobbing for apples, but the purpose of trunk or treating is to basically set up a safe ring of cars where the kids are literally penned in. Yeah, the kids who used to be the ones who were running the show are now penned in by the anxious adults cars handing out candy rather than going to houses, walking around to church parking lot for trunk or treating instead of trick or treating. Yes, these are not the kids who could pull that.
I'm not going to replace trick or treat what the.
Kids in the goonies were able to pull off because they had freedom and spark. That kids who trunk or treat are being denied right as let me go back to my friend Lenor Skanazi. She says, the trunk or treating is just another adult light activity, one that reinforces the community killing idea that kids aren't ever safe outside the home, school or supervised program. And that is most definitely the message that kids get when they're trunk or treating.
Yeah, I think that is not going to kill trick or treating or take over trick or treating.
We'll see, Chuck.
I hope you're right, because one thing I have not seen since I've lived in Atlanta is any big trunk or treating activities.
Well, that's because you live in Atlanta. All you have to do is go out to the suburbs and they're everywhere.
But the suburbs are made for trick or treating. They're out in the neighborhoods.
I got to end on a quote I ran across a website, I guess a church website that's talking about trunk or treating. It's awesome this quote. It says that the scariest part about the night this is a trunk or treating night, isn't the costumes. It's the possibility that you could miss out on the chance to use trunk or treat to build relationships and reach these kids with the gospel. Well, yeah, that's the opposite of what Halloween is all about.
That's right.
Have you got anything else? It's about arson, right, eight and ten cases of it. Sorry, I'm one of those curmudgeons that it turns out one more thing. Yes, if you like Halloween, go on to our old Stuff you should know website and search Halloween and Creepy and you're gonna find some amazing slideshows we put together over the years that I remember that. One of my favorite is cute and creuddy Halloween costumes, vintage Halloween costumes that are really creepy, best Jack lanterns, all sorts of great stuff.
Remember those days where we count page views and get excited about that.
Yeah, this one felt like a bit of a tirade.
Yeah was it? I don't think so.
Okay, Kim, Well, if you want to know more about Halloween, get out of there and trigger treat. And since I said that as time for listener may.
This is follow up on paraphilias that we wanted to read for the last few weeks. Just now get into it. Hey guys, longtime listener, first time writer. I've had this episode pop up a few times. It's just been on my mind. I'm in our N with MSN and background and have background in neurophysiology who enjoys studying abnormal psych I understand you were doing a show on psychological term on a psychological term, but you may have ended up painting wrong ideas onto certain practices, specifically S and M and cross dressing. From when I've come to know, it's extremely rare that people practice these primarily for sexual gratification. Of course, these practices are adult in nature. Most regard it as an emotional practice or exploration of self. For example, shibari or rope bondage takes hundreds of hours of practice to perform and those that partake describe a meditation like state as a result, though most would say it's sn M. Most cross stressors describe the long process of becoming female as cathartic and self affirming, although be it temporary. Simplifying cross stressors to those who walk around on high heels to reach completion, well imagine saying that about a trans woman. Of course, if you were doing these practices for sexual gratification, all the power to you. I suggest you look into kink culture as an episode. It's where a wide range of people congregate and share their interest in a community that is founded off respect and consent their meetups and presentations on practices so that others can learn proper technique. The most that practice would like to keep their privacy, and that is from Anonymous.
Takes a lot, Anonymous. That was a good correction emails right. Yeah. If you want to get in touch with us like Anonymous did to set us straight, we love that kind of thing. You can join us at stuff youshould Know dot com and check out our social links there, and you can send us an email to Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
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