So I’ve been writing about Detroit for an RPG project recently, and I’m reading all this stuff about Devil’s Night, the night before Halloween, when apparently the less-clueful portion of the citizenry goes out and tries to burn the city down. I understand efforts to wipe out this ridiculous holiday have gone pretty well, recently, but I can’t find any information on how it started. Where did this tradition come from? Can any of the Teeming help? Many thanks!
I’m not sure how it started, but for your research, the two main cities were this occured were detroit, MI and newark, NJ. that might help in locating the source.
I heard that succubi are very nice.
According to the movie The Crow, it was started by the evil crime lord Top Dollar in Detroit, who was later killed by an undead rock star named Eric Draven. ::grins::
Yep, Devil’s Night seems to have largely died out in recent years, at least in Detroit. You don’t hear about significant numbers of fires around Haloween anymore.
When I moved to the Detroit area in 1970 Devil’s Night was in full swing every October 30, so it goes back at least that far.
I moved away in 1983, so not sure how it’s been since then
Devil’s night, in Detroit, dates back to at least the 1950s when I knew about it. At that time, however, it was simply a night of pranks. I really don’t know the origin of the practice of moving the pranks back one day from Hallowe’en and giving it a new name.
The Devils Night = Arson phenomenon started much later–either the late 1970s or early 1980s. My totally unsubstantiated WAG is that it was an accident that fed on itself. Some of the pranks associated with Devil’s Night would always have included minor arson: the flaming dog turd in a paper bag stunt; lighting trash barrels (in the days when trash barrels were metal and not plastic); and, rarely, actual arson of an abandoned garage or house. I would guess that as the number of abandoned houses in Detroit grew, they became more frequent targets. At some point, either the news media or the fire department publicly recognized that the number of arsons were up on Devil’s Night and that publicity turned the scattered events into a “tradition” that a number of idiots decided to “carry on.”
In New Jersey we called it Goosey Night. There are more antiquated labels, “Mischief Night” and “Cabbage Night,” but I don’t know anyone who really called it that.
Detroit was relatively fire-free this Devil’s night. That’s down from approx 300 fires in 1985.
In the mid 80’s, there was fairly high unemployment in this area and a lot of abandoned buildings. I’m not sure what causes this arson behavior, but I think it has something to do with mixing Vernors and Strohs.
We also called it Devil’s Night when I lived in Jersey, but I don’t recall many things burning there.
LMAO
(BTW, I was born and raised in Detroit)
Root around the Web and you’ll find lots of sites linking ‘Devil’s Night’ to the English tradition of ‘Mischief Night’, which involves general unruly behaviour on 4 November, the day before Guy Fawkes Night. The assumption seems to be that ‘Devil’s Night’ is an American adaptation of an olde-worlde English folk custom. The problem with this is that the English ‘Mischief Night’ is known to have been a wholly twentieth-century development. It is also highly localized and the vast majority of English people won’t have heard of it. In other words, this is another example of how the mere existance of a tradition is not evidence of its antiquity.
We had it growing up in Pittsburgh, though it was fairly innocent. I lived out in the country, where we could get field corn pretty easily. We’d fill a few paper bags full and throw handfuls of the corn against windows and roofs. My mom used to jump sky high when it happened to us.
It was called tick-tacking, and for some reason it was hilarious to a nine-year-old.
We had eggs, TP and soap, too, but tick-tacking was king.