Tricks at Halloween
When I was in my very early teens Halloween was a diversion for a little devilment, a time to be a little rowdy. It isn’t like now when kids run amuck. It was for a bit of excitement. It was more than dressing in outfits like hobos, sheets as ghosts, or wrapped like mummies for school or trick or treating , it was playing pranks like soaping windows and throwing shelled corn at passing cars.
My friends and I would explore the streets of Indian Head, Pennsylvania under the cover of darkness to visit many of the houses with stubs of soap to smear the windows of unsuspecting home owners. We weren’t wasteful using full bars of soap, but we would save carefully hoarded scraps of soap bars when the bar was nearly used up..
Attacks on two homes in particular I remember. The first encounter occurred just as it was getting dark. I was walking with my friends. We spied a stone house with a hedge of shrubs near the front of the house nestled under a large front window. We could see the flickering of a television inside. He program was in black and white at that time. No one had color televisions. We dared the youngest kid in our group to soap the window with the old chant, “You don’t have a hair…” His stealthy approach behind the bushes was perfect. Not a leaf stirred on the bushes. Slowly a hand arose out of the jungle of leaves and began to trace figure eights on the glass surface. The most unusual about the raid was that the homeowner came to the window and was apparently hypnotized by the audacity. She stood there, her head following the soap’s tracings until the hand disappeared back into anonymity.
The second occurred at a home where we were tossing grains of shelled field corn onto her porch. It was rumored that the woman slept with a large pistol under her pillow. When the porch light snapped on at the sounds of corn hitting her door, we ran. It was fully dark by that time and in my blind dash to escape, my legs tripped a turkey wire fence that was about thigh high in height. I did a complete somersault, landing on my butt. The next day, I could see that the wire fence was dented and fence posts on both sides of my assault were leaning toward the spot that tripped me.