Mischief Night

What the day is

Mischief Night is observed on October 30, the evening before Halloween. It is strongly regional, and the name changes with the region: Goosey Night in parts of New Jersey, Cabbage Night in parts of New England, Devil's Night in Michigan, and Mischief Night across much of northern England, where it is often kept on November 4 before Bonfire Night instead.

Origin and background

Licensed misrule has a long history in the European calendar, with periods where ordinary hierarchy was suspended and pranking tolerated. The autumn version attached itself to the days around Halloween, which already carried associations with boundaries between order and disorder.

The American form was for a long time genuinely minor: toilet paper in trees, soaped windows, doorbells rung and run from. Adults who grew up with it tend to remember it fondly, and the property damage was usually trivial.

Detroit is where it stopped being minor. From the 1970s, Devil's Night in the city became associated with large-scale arson, with hundreds of fires set on a single night at its peak in the mid-1980s, concentrated in abandoned buildings in neighborhoods already hollowed out by deindustrialization. The response, Angels' Night, mobilized tens of thousands of volunteers to patrol and occupy vacant properties, and the fire count fell substantially over the following decades.

That history is the reason police and fire departments in several cities discourage the tradition outright, and why the night is far quieter now than in living memory.

How to take part

• Keep it to your own household. Pranks on people who did not consent are vandalism regardless of intent.
• Bring bins in and move cars off the street if you live somewhere it is still observed.
• Ask older relatives what they did. The anecdotes are usually better than anything anyone does now.
• Read about Angels' Night as a case of a community organizing against a problem it had.
• If you want the harmless version, do something elaborate and unmistakably friendly for a neighbor who will laugh.