In North America, by the beginning of the 20th century, Halloween had mostly become a celebration of mischief in all its forms, but it retained its early, otherworldly tones. According to most sources, the holiday emerged out of the Celtic feast of Samhain, a pagan Day of the Dead -- the day of the year when the boundary between the spirit world and the world of the living is most flexible. In the U.S., it developed into a pidgin holiday. (As the landscape historian John Stilgoe has written, jack-o-lanterns, for instance, first came to this country as part of an English rural ritual called "perambulation," the yearly policing of land boundaries.) Many adults tolerated pranks because they represented the spiritual origins of the holiday -- they were supposed to be perpetrated by mischievous sprites or goblins, who played tricks and then disappeared.

In one case of vandalism reported in 1948, three boys broke into a vacant summer home on Long Island. Once inside, they managed to do $10,000 worth of damage -- nearly $100,000 in today's dollars. "The furnishings" damaged in their assault on the home, according to the Times, "included imported rugs, oil paintings, statuary, medieval spears and swords and a collection of autographed photographs of prominent persons of the operatic stage."

The house's apparently kindhearted owner -- a well-regarded ear, nose, and throat doctor (hence the autographed photos of opera stars) -- asked that they be fined only $500 ($5,000 today) in damages. The settlement specified that the boys work until they had made enough money to pay off the debt themselves.

In some towns, Halloween extended into a week's worth or more of misrung doorbells, spooky, far-off lights, and vanished kitchen implements. Reported the Times:

There is, for instance, the night called "moving night," in which household objects, partitions, gates, shutters and sundry other items are transferred from their original places to foreign parts. Elders keep a sharp vigilance over their property; yet the next morning finds the need of a clearing house for the return of "mislaid" objects. Then there is the night called "door-bell night" when boys go about sticking pins in door-bells, thus locking the bells and causing prolonged ringing.

The merely spooky, however, could quickly turn sinister. In some places, children rioted on Halloween. In 1945, near Kew Beach in Toronto, for reasons unknown, a group of high schoolers started bonfires on a main thoroughfare, fueling them with gasoline and bits of fencing. Mounted police arrived; instead of turning and running, the students threw rocks at them, and set up barricades to prevent firetrucks from entering the street and putting out the bonfires. When police finally arrested and booked 13 of the rioters, a mob of 7,000 young people -- boys and girls -- gathered and marched down to central booking to free them. It took tear gas and water canons to disperse the crowd, and bail for the ringleaders of the Kew Beach incident was set at $1,000 (about $10,000 today). Most of them spent several weeks in jail.