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Mischief Night

Spudrick68

Spudrick68

Justified & Ancient
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Jun 8, 2008
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I've just had a conversation with my wife and we disagreed with when Mischief Night was, so I looked it up on the internet. According to Wickipedia it is the night before Halloween in the U.S. but the night before Bonfire Night in the U.K. I was brought up in Preston and my wife in Manchester and I just wonder why to me it was always the night before Halloween but to her it was before Bonfire night?
 
Is it just me or is this just a northern thing? Certainly was not on any calendar down my neck of the woods [south east].

I'd never heard of this until a few years back when I believe it was the subject of a low level British film.

Seemed to me just to be an excuse for anti-social behaviour.
 
I prefer to think of it as a less capitalist trick or treat ;)

It was definitely the night before bonfire night in Huddersfield in the late seventies / early eighties, before it was destroyed by the huge orange steamroller of US popular culture Halloween, poisoned 'candy' (they were 'spice' previously!) and all.

Are there no halloween greeting cards yet? Hallmark must be kicking themselves.
 
I've never heard of it either, I grew up in Warwickshire and slowly made me way down south til I ended-up in Sussex and it's a new one on me.
 
I heard of it in Lancashire in the 60s - it was the night before Bonfire night - although round our neck of the mischief was mainly put fireworks through letterboxes, and setting alight the bonfires people had set up for November 5th. It wasn't really a general thing.
 
It was the night before 'bommy night' in Leeds, cira 1970s too. For all the claims of stuff people had got upto, i think the worst i ever saw in the flesh was a milk bottle on the foor handle.

Everyone claimed to have done something that we'd probably consider antisocial behaviour now, but i think they were full of it.
 
To be honest for us it was mainly knocking on peoples doors and running away. My parents wouldn't let us knock on peoples door on halloween as they considered it to be begging.
 
There's plenty of Halloween greeting cards for sale in US stores, Lizard.
 
East / West Split

I was talking about this with a bloke in work yesterday - it was always the night before Halloween, out here on the western edge of Lancashire. He was brought up in York, and always knew it to be the night before Bonfire night.
 
Paraphrasing the entry in the Oxford Dictionary of English Folklore (2003, p242):
Mischief Night was the evening on which children across the northern counties thought they had the right to cause havoc with tricks and other misbehaviour. ... In the 1950s, the Opies reported 4 November as the key night across the counties of Lancashire, Cheshire, Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, and north Lincolnshire, but according to 19th Century accounts in the same area, it was 30 April. ...

Halloween too was sometimes Mischief Night, and this is the regular time in parts of Scotland and Ireland.
Click to expand...
 
Tonight, I am mostly watching my old video of 'Wishmaster'.

Miles better than 'Night at the Museum (I & II)', to which it is distantly related.

:twisted:
 
When I was little and getting ready for Halloween, Mom would trot out her complaints that Halloween used to be (this would be in the thirties and forties in rural Iowa) about doing fun, creative things and now it's all little kids' gimme-gimme-gimme. The fun she remembered ranged from creative costuming, to Halloween party games, to practical jokes, some of which involved moving outhouses but all of which were regarded as harmless. Older books reference practical jokes intended to give people harmless scares, such as rigging a piece of wood to create a spooky window-tapping effect, and fads such as running up behind people, marking their backs with chalk, and running away. This was all supposed to happen on Halloween, and after an invigorating night of pranking in masks with your friends, you'd come back home - or to your primary victims, who might invite you in to buy you off with treats, hence trick-or-treat - to hot chocolate and ghost stories. Nasty hoodlums would use the license to do things like leaving bags of flaming dog poop on people's front porches, ring the bell, and run off, but people who did that risked a bottom full of shotgun-propelled rock salt.

I think whether this sort of thing remains a fun bonding experience or turns into vandalism depends on the size and cohesiveness of the community. You could do things to your neighbors in Panora, IA that were all in good fun that would get you in trouble in New York City.
 
Mischief night never made it to Kent & Surrey in my lifetime. In fact, I'd never heard of it before reading about it (in previous years) on this board.

On a tangent perhaps consonant with Peni's, I used to adore Hallowe'en & Bonfire Night with the cubs and scouts: this time of the year with a chill in the air and an early sunset has always been my favourite, i liked ghost-stories and the thrill of being afraid, and the prospect of two 'celebrations' in such proximity had me excited a long while in advance of the actual days.

In hindsight, though, my typical Hallowe'en sounds - as I've reflected before - rather old-fashioned: apple-bobbing, fancy-dress, ghost-stories, games that involved (for want of a better word) groping in the dark, getting covered in flour, and eating odd-coloured dyed-food; as well as plenty of outside-events conducted by firelight. I did go trick-or-treating one year, but I seem to remember being somewhat older - and then we only visited homes of people we knew and my parents were hanging around at the end of the road, I think. In fact, dredging me memory, I don't really recall any trick-or-treaters calling on us either (in the mid-80s). That must have come in the early 90s.
 
Never heard of Mischief Night in Glasgow growing up. It must be a north of England thing.

And I've never "Tricked or Treated". I did go out for Halloween as a child, right up to the age of thirteen when my mate George dressed as Hitler. (No seriously he did - a comical Hitler - and no one was offended. I went as Quasimodo)

Halloween involved visiting neighbours in fancy dress and performing a song, poem or joke to be rewarded with treats. I thought "tricking" was inherited from the U.S. but maybe Mischief Night is to blame.

And I'd also like to take this opportunity to state that I never joined the cubs and the scouts a month before Halloween just so I could attend all the winter parties up to the New Year. Never did. You can't prove it.
 
Out here in rural Aberdeenshire, Hallowe'en for most kids is still about dressing up and going around houses doing a "party piece", like telling a story or a poem, in exchange for sweets. Also, bobbing for apples and other traditional fare.

Fortunately (?) this year no kids came round here so I was filling my face with Cadbury's Buttons this morning.

They're not Cadbury's, they're mine.
 
We had a grand total of zero visitors on Saturday night, so I'm working my way through a family sized tin of Heroes.

There were loads of kids going up and down the street in fancy dress, but they seemed to be avoiding our gaff for some reason!
 
We didn't get as many as usual either. Normally there's a big rush between 6ish and about 8.30 - there's a lot of young kids in our neck of the woods - but we had a few little 'uns with parents around 5, then another mini-rush of slightly older kids between 7 and 8, and then that was it. No idea why: weather was OK, etc. Apparently the local plod reported fewer trick-or-treat related calls this year too, despite it being a Saturday night to boot.

So anyway, yeah, lots of choccy left here too :).
 
Must be a universal washout then. Last year, here in DC, I was out with the dog for a couple of hours handing out sweets to all the costumed kids. Last year Odin was a little devil, before I realised that might not be the best costume for a Doberman.

This year, we had about 6 people come by! My half of the street was completely dark - it was almost as if a powercut had affected that end. Bloody miserable bastards, I had half a mind to go and TP their houses myself.

So I waited out anyway with the dog in his fireman's outfit (I even got him a flashing red collar) for a couple of hours drinking beer by flaming torchlight. I had a good time anyway.
 
In Barrow in Furness is was definitely 30th Oct. I was the victim of a drive by egging.
 
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