In an interview with Michigan Radio in 2013, local historian Bill Loomis said that there was a boom in popularity with people wanting to communicate with the dead from post-Civil War Era to the 1920s. “The Civil War saw a huge rise in the interest in that – in séances, in ouija boards and telepathy, and all kinds of things like that. Even hypnotism came around, spirit photography was real popular. They were all, aside from a few things, they were all considered frauds eventually. But people had strong interest,” said Loomis.

Although there aren’t any stories that are unique to Detroiters, Elliott Bragg said that a few of the stories were very funny. There were a few ways with which you would celebrate Halloween: if you were a high society type, it was a great excuse to have a huge party. Upscale hotels would have Halloween parties – the Griswold, the Detroit Athletic Club, the Boat Club – and they would decorate in a harvest themed motif. People would congregate at Grand Circus Park and Campus Martius for an unofficial parade of costumes and Halloween revelry.

I sat down with Detroit historian and Crain’s Detroit Business Special Projects Editor Amy Elliott Bragg to hear about some of the origins of Halloween in Michigan and its popularity in the early 20th Century. Halloween wasn’t really celebrated in Detroit until late in the 19th century. An influx of Scottish and Irish immigrants in the 1840s brought the “witchier” tradition to the region, but the holiday wasn’t mentioned on paper until the 1860s.

I’ve always loved spooky things. I didn’t grow up celebrating Halloween, so I take the holiday seriously as an adult: on my personal calendar, Halloween starts on October 1 and lasts the rest of the month. I plan my costumes (yes, multiple) months in advance – it’s an entire ordeal. So when I had the opportunity to learn about the Halloween trickery of Detroit’s past, I was ecstatic.

“It makes me think about how our notion of safety has changed so much where today we’re like ‘Make sure the candy isn’t poisoned,” she said. “And yet, like, 100 years ago it was like “Go run around in the street and destroy things!”

High society women’s newsletters in the 1920s also advertised psychic and fortune-telling traditions for women who wanted to discover who they would marry, but in a spooky way. “The paper would be like, ‘Well you should peel an apple, and try to keep the skin all in one piece. And then you throw the apple skin over your shoulder,’” said Elliott Bragg. “There’s all sorts of little twists on this story: you have to be looking in a mirror while you throw the apple over your shoulder, or sometimes you have to spin three times and then throw it over your shoulder.”

Another – considerably less safe – tradition was to bake random inedible objects into your food and serve it to unsuspecting people. “You would take a penny, a button, a key, and the fourth object varied. Sometimes it was a shell, sometimes it was a little heart charm, and you would bake it into a cake or put them in a bowl of mashed potatoes, and then you would serve the cake or potatoes,” Elliott Bragg said. “Whoever got the penny, it was said that that person would receive a fortune. Whoever got the key got the key to success. The heart charm would, of course, be true love.”

Considering that biting into your food and finding inedible objects is already bad, Elliott Bragg says that the button was the worst object to find in your food. “I think the button was like, ‘You’re out of luck.’”

Yet another way to celebrate was for adults to allow “roving gangs of children” to run amok in the streets. These gangs often consisted of boys who would destroy property by uprooting people’s cabbage plants, breaking off the stalks, and throwing them at houses. They would also break off people’s yard gates and set large fires in the middle of the street. “People kind of wrote off this boy gang terrorism as, like, ‘Well you have to let the animal spirits get out once in awhile,” said Elliott Bragg.

“And sometimes, these roving gangs of children would interrupt high society parties. So, every once in awhile you would see a report where it said ‘a gang of boys busted into the Roosevelt Hotel and ran through the lobby!’ They would, like, knock over chairs, and pull off table cloths and one year they broke into a restaurant and stole a bunch of toothpicks,” Elliott Bragg said. “People were really afraid of these roving gangs of children.”

Gender-bending costumes played an integral part of terrorizing the neighborhood. “Little girls would dress up as little boys,” said Elliott Bragg. “They would parade in the streets with the freedom that they could experience as a little girl only when they were dressed up as a boy. And the boys would sometimes put on girls clothes while they were running around and breaking things.”

Even though Halloween was overwhelmingly a playful holiday, some children in these roving gangs did end up being seriously hurt or killed from being too rambunctious. As Detroit transitioned from the 1930s to the 1940s, Elliott Bragg said the mischief trickled to a stop with changing societal norms. The trick-or-treating that we know today started around the 1950s.

It’s clear that times have changed since the Scottish and Irish immigrants introduced Halloween to our region, and Elliott Bragg agrees. “It makes me think about how our notion of safety has changed so much where today we’re like ‘Make sure the candy isn’t poisoned,” she said. “And yet, like, 100 years ago it was like “Go run around in the street and destroy things!”

Photo credit: Flickr/Matthew DeWitt