Halloween Mischief

The tradition that used to exist in America, especially in small towns across the heartland, of young people playing pranks on Halloween night pretty well expired a number of years ago, and nowadays, with the increase in youth church parties and so forth, even the tradition of going door to door trick or treating has almost gone by the wayside in a lot of places. I understand the parental concern about kids going door to door, especially if you don't know who lives in all the houses. And as far as the mischief-making that teenagers used to engage in, I suppose there was never really any justification for it, although I tend to look back on my own Halloween capers with nostalgia. Most of it was relatively harmless stuff, like soaping windows, but even in that case, the kids were still making work for someone else to have to do. And sometimes, as my post from last week illustrated, the pranks turned out to have serious consequences. Even when no one got hurt, they often resulted in the destruction of property.
On Halloween night in 1920, two boys at Sarcoxie, Missouri, entered a shed where a man stored his automobile so they could prank the car (perhaps soap the windows). When they departed, they left a door to the shed open, and two of the man's horses came into the shed and ate a bunch of wheat he had stored in the building, causing them to founder.
In 1930, two boys lit a fuse to set off a charge of dynamite close to a house near Nixa with the idea of scaring a group of their peers who were having a party at the residence. The two boys started to run, but when they saw that the fuse had ignited a grass fire, they turned back to try to put out the fire and the dynamite exploded when they were still near it. Both boys lost the sight of one eye.
In 1931, in an incident similar to the one I described last week, a thirteen-year-old boy was shot by a law officer at Butterfield as he was playing a prank. He was rushed to a Monett hospital and was expected to recover.
In 1936 at Neosho, a group of boys turned over a man's chicken house. Soon afterward, a different group of boys happened by, and the man came out of his house with a shotgun, thinking it was the same bunch of boys. He ordered them to halt, but one of them started running. The man shot the boy full of buckshot. The boy apparently was not seriously hurt, and charges were not brought against the man.
Those are just a few of the Halloween pranks gone bad that occurred in the Ozarks during the first half of the 20th century. Usually the pranks were confined mostly to soaping windows, toilet-papering trees, throwing trash into the streets, and overturning outhouses, with an occasional broken window. Still, even if nobody got hurt, these types of things still meant that someone other than the pranksters usually had to clean up the mess. So, I guess it's not a bad thing that we don't see a lot of mischief-making on Halloween nowadays.