Mischief Night

Image via NJ.com

Do you have a special name for the night preceding Halloween?  Is it just October 30th to you?  Diabetes Eve?  Perhaps, if you're a teacher, it's the night you drink yourself into oblivion if the next two days happen to be school days?  There are no worse days to be an educator than the day of and the day following sugar-centric celebrations.

If you answered with any of the above, clearly, you are not from New Jersey.  Along with Wawa, good pizza, hoagies, and the Jersey devil, I grew up assuming everyone knew about Mischief Night.  How little I appreciated my good fortune, taking for granted so many regionally specific South Jersey/Philadelphia-area treasures.

According to a linguistic study, most of the country has no particular name for the night before Halloween.  A miniscule (and wrong) minority of people in Michigan and parts of New England refer to the night as Devil's Night or Cabbage Night, respectively.  The rest of the country outside of the New Jersey/Philadelphia area remains pitifully ignorant of this bit of folklore cum rite of passage.

So what is it, exactly?  It is exactly as advertised - a night for those of us perhaps too old to trick-or-treat but too immature to appreciate the sting of vandalism or other forms of petty property crime to unleash our Ids and act like complete assholes.  Described thusly, it is actually not the least bit surprising that this is a New Jersey based tradition.  The other 364 days of the year, we keep our assholery to a low simmer on the back burner.  One night of the year, we move that pot of rage to the front of the stove and crank it up to medium high and let that sucker boil over.  

Where did this tradition come from, and why New Jersey?  It may have roots in the Pagan celebration of Samhain, a time when spirits would come and play tricks on the living.  Some say the origins extend back a mere hundreds of years, as the first known documented incident took place in Oxford in 1790.  Others link the practice to the remembrance of Guy Fawkes, and the burning of bonfires on November 4th.  Still others tie the October 30th date to the pandemonium following the Black Tuesday stock market crash of October 29, 1929.  

Classic Mischief Night pranks include the irritating but not outrageously destructive toilet-papering of a neighbor's trees, egging cars or houses, or spraying silly string on every imaginable outdoor surface.  The pranks often escalate quickly, as things tend to do in New Jersey.  More serious vandalism, like spray painting property, throwing bricks through windows, or setting fires, has been a problem in the past.  In 1991, Camden had an especially extra Mischief Night when several shootings and 133 fires were reported.

I don't recall specific incidents in my town, beyond casual reports of toilet paper in trees and maybe some cars getting egged.  Mischief Night was just in the ether; it was a foregone conclusion.  Local news channels cautioned us to beware.  Better park your cars in your garages tonight.  Better hope it doesn't rain before home owners have a chance to clean the TP out of their trees.  

I recall feeling each October 30th the acute disappointment of living in a rural area with no easy access to prankable neighbors.  It sounded like the thrill of a lifetime to run down the street smashing jack-o-lanterns, throwing eggs, ringing doorbells and running away.  I'm sure that given the opportunity, I would have wussed out.  I'm a slow runner, so of course out of all my co-conspirators (whoever they may have been...none of my friends were out doing these things without me) I would be the one to get caught and punished.  

One year, I had a real YOLO moment and decided I didn't want my years of peak adolescent assholery to pass by unappreciated.  I must have been maybe 15 or 16 - too old to trick-or-treat but too young to fully anticipate the consequences of my actions.  I found a small paper bag and surreptitiously harvested a healthy selection of dog crap ranging in texture from petrified fossil to fresh and malleable, which I secreted beside the garage.  I slipped a pack of matches from the kitchen drawer where my grandmother kept her cigarettes.  I waited until nightfall.

When it was time for me to let the dog out after dinner, I was ready.  I clipped the dog's leash to his run, grabbed the crapsack, and mustered up all my courage.  I remember it was a windy but cloudless night with a nearly full moon, which was the only source of light as I picked my way through the dark forest of pine trees between my grandmother's front yard and the closest neighbor's driveway.  The whole way there, I tried to suppress irrational thoughts of The Wolf Girl with the anticipation of hiding in the trees and watching this neighbor stomp on a flaming bag of dog crap.  I patted myself on the back for being so visionary as to select both desiccated feces that would ignite, as well as fresh turds that would defile ones shoes when stomping out the flames.

Once I found myself standing in my neighbor's driveway, I felt overly exposed to the sporadic traffic passing by on the main road.  I crouched down on the far side of the car that this poor bastard had left exposed to the egg-throwing hoi polloi, and whipped out my pack of matches.  I struck one and held it against the paper bag, which had grown somewhat damp from sitting outside as the seasonably warm day turned to a chillier dusk.  The match quickly shortened as I fumbled with the bag, and I shook it out just before it burned my fingers.  

No matter.  I lit another match and a gust of wind blew it out immediately.  I tried lighting three matches and sheltering the bag and matches from the wind between my body and the car.  No luck.  This pitiful attempt at juvenile arson continued unsuccessfully until I ran out of matches and settled for depositing the not even remotely flaming bag of poo next to the driver's side door of the car and crept home, defeated.

I've since engaged in many asinine actions and pranks, but none specifically tied to the calendar as on that ill-fated night.  Looking back, I'm relieved to have failed.  As windy as it was that night, if I had succeeded in lighting the bag on fire, I would have either ended up in the burn unit or torched the neighbor's house to the ground by accident, or both.  Probably both.  Mercifully for everyone involved, my Mischief Night candle burned out long before the legend ever will.