In coal country, Halloween has a deep dark past

Oct. 29—If master horror writer Stephen King chose the coal region of the late 19th century as the setting for his novel about demonic juvenile delinquents, he might have called it "Children of the Cabbage."

Today, Halloween is an all-ages affair expected to generate $12.2 billion in consumer spending this spooky season. In the pitch-black past, the greenbacks most associated with the holiday were stalks of cabbage wielded like weapons by young thugs bent on menacing their neighbors in the name of puckish fun.

Halloween was a night of terror that kept the cops busy, the taverns packed and the streets empty except for sooty young faces smeared with coal dust and twisted with wicked grins amused by vandalism considered traditional at the time. The Children of the Cabbage also flung fistfuls of dried corn at windows, tipped over outhouses and cows, and swiped the gates from picket fences.

As the Celtic-rooted celebration approached, newspapers published warnings to farmers to harvest their cabbage patches lest they be reaped by hooligans who pelted household doors with the stripped stalks of the leafy staple.

The Oct. 31, 1891, morning edition of The Scranton Republican laid out the long night ahead:

"If on a Halloween a farmer or crofter's kailyard still contains ungathered cabbages, the boys and girls of the neighborhood descend upon it en masse and the entire crop is harvested in five minutes' time and thumped against their owners' doors, which rattle as though pounded by a thunderous tempest."

Sometimes, the "tempest" did real damage. A police blotter brief published in The Scranton Times on Nov. 5, 1898, documented a case that went to court:

"Five young boys were arraigned before Alderman Lentes last night on the charge of malicious mischief. Mrs. Johanna Phillips, of Pittston Avenue, appeared as prosecutrix in the case. She alleged that they, while out celebrating Hallowe'en, threw a cabbage stump at her door, breaking a glass panel. None of the boys would confess to throwing the missile which broke the glass. The boys' parents agreed to pay for the panel and the case was settled."

Jake Wynn grew up in Williamstown, a tiny Dauphin County borough about 25 miles west of Pottsville. Now a tourism communications manager in Frederick, Maryland, the 30-year-old coal country native's "Wynning History" blog keeps him connected to his Anthracite Region roots.

"I think I caught the tail end of the really crazy escapades," he said. "Williamstown didn't do Halloween on Halloween night and that was in part because there were such high jinks going on — teenagers pulling pranks, so they moved trick-or-treating to another night."

The "high jinks" Wynn recalls are familiar standards — eggs thrown at houses and cars, toilet paper draped on trees and windows streaked with soap. In a 2019 blog post, he quoted a Pottsville Republican editorial published on Oct. 25, 1893:

"Where are the Policemen? The local press should be a unit in denouncing the barbarous practices known as Halloween in which the doors, doorbells and windows are battered in the name of amusement. There is no reason why these vandals should not be as amenable to the law as the burglar or the mischievous marauder defacing and destroying property ... "

While the vandalism seems extreme by today's standards, Wynn points out that children in the coal region of the late 19th and early 20th centuries had to grow up fast. There were no child labor laws. Boys as young as 6 worked 10-hour shifts in coal breakers. Girls as young as 8 labored in silk mills.

"They became men and women at such young ages because of the work that was expected of them to sustain their families," Wynn said. "They were pretty rough around the edges by modern comparisons. ... Their lives were very much a life and death struggle in all regards, so when they were 'letting off some steam,' they had a lot of steam built up."

Tradition made life more bearable, said Maureen McGuigan, director of arts and culture for Lackawanna County. Scottish and Irish immigrants brought Halloween to America as the festival of Samhain, pronounced "Saa-wn."

"It marked the Celtic New Year, so it was a time of harvest as the Celts prepared to go into the winter," McGuigan said. "They would gather their food and celebrate going into the darkness so they would have these big bonfires. ...

"And there was very much an idea that this was a time of year that was a 'thin place' (between life and death) so that the spirits could pass through the veil between worlds. (Costumes) became part of it through people dressing up so the spirits wouldn't recognize them."

Immigrants also observed rituals aimed at divining the future, McGuigan said. Young women burned nuts in hearths and bobbed for apples in hope of identifying their future husbands. Some of these traditions live on. The jack-o'-lantern — the universal symbol of Halloween — is rooted in ancient Celtic lore, too.

"The legend of 'Stingy Jack,' " McGuigan said, referring to the fabled loser who cheated the devil and was doomed to wander the Earth in darkness carrying a carved turnip lit with a candle.

"It's interesting that they used turnips (for jack-o'-lanterns) in Ireland, but when the immigrants came over, pumpkins were more available and cheaper," she said.

McGuigan, 49, experienced Halloween as a traditional night of donning a plastic mask and trick-or-treating for candy. She said her 82-year-old father, retired English teacher and Scranton poet Jack McGuigan, told her about Halloween treats kids could take to the candy store.

"In the '50s, (treats) were still coins and maybe fruit," she said. "My father remembers going to a barbershop where the guys would put pennies on the stove, and the kids were supposed to grab as many as they could without getting burned."

Until the late 20th century, saying "trick or treat" wasn't enough to earn a reward in coal country. Kids had to perform, usually singing a song or reciting a poem, said Edward Moran, a Wilkes-Barre native, writer and literary critic who lives in New York but owns a home in Jim Thorpe.

"We got a nickel if we recited something," he said. "We got a penny if we didn't."

Moran has written extensively about growing up in coal country and is currently working on a book about the history of Halloween. In a draft chapter he shared with The Sunday Times, Moran wrote:

"Growing up in the anthracite coal regions of eastern Pennsylvania in the 1950s, I perhaps experienced Halloween at its combustive core, right at that critical-mass moment of incandescence, when the ways of the old country were still able to beguile if not scare the bejesus out of you. Coal country Halloweens were at that time pretty much beyond the pale of the larger American culture, uncorrupted by Hallmark store-bought fixins and uppity do-gooders who wanted you to trick-or-treat for UNICEF. A pox on all of them — we did Halloween the way it should be done, presided over by blood-orange jack-o'-lanterns gouged out with penknives and illuminated by real wax candles designed to sputter out at midnight. The menacing architecture of the collieries in our little coal-patch towns only ratcheted up the fright factor, with their hulking breakers and rugged tipples looming like ghastly silhouettes against the sky.

"On Halloween night in the coal regions, the hours between sunset and nine o'clock were reserved for the pipsqueak trick-or-treaters, pre-adolescent boys in homemade skeleton or devil costumes, and girls dressed as ballerinas or pointy-hatted witches. No cross-dressing or gender-bending in those antediluvian days. Promptly at nine o'clock, the colliery whistle sounded its haunting knell, low and sonorous like a dirge from an old hoot owl, signaling that it was time for the real mischief to begin, spirited by duck-tailed teenage boys in pegged pants, or, as they were known at the time, 'juvenile delinquents.'

"Costumes were a cinch; you just went down to the cellar coal bin, smeared some coal dust over your acne-pocked face, and you were good to go. There was a clear line between mischief and mayhem in those innocent times. Soaping windows and egging parked cars was downright tame compared to the whispered rumors of nefarious goings-on in the local graveyards, where still-older adolescents gathered for furtive rituals best left to the imagination ... "

Moran's musings on Halloween reveal a deep connection to the holiday and his coal region roots. At 76, he still revels in the memories he made as a young ghoul in Catholic school.

"We had Halloween parties at school," he said. "Instead of a skeleton or a ghost, we had to come as a saint. I had to dress up as Edward the Confessor with a crown on my head, but I really wanted to do the odd saints, like St. Tarcisius or St. Kunegunda."

Some of the coins Moran and his classmates collected on Halloween contributed to Catholic ministry overseas, he said.

"We donated to the Society for the Holy Childhood," he said. "If we collected 500 pennies, we had the right to name a 'pagan baby' being baptized in some other country. Classes competed to see who would bring in the most $5. Every time we collected $5, we could decide the name for this child. Somewhere in Korea today, there's a (grown) child named Tarcisius ... "

A kid with a fresh schtick could clean up on Halloween night. Moran was a born performer.

"When I was 9 or 10 years old, Topps Chewing Gum had just come to the area," he said. "They had a plant up in Mountain Top and they made baseball cards. They came out with a line of U.S. Presidents cards and I was so excited by them because I always loved the presidents and I wanted to dress up like one.

"I didn't want to be Washington or Lincoln — they were too ordinary. ... So I finally settled on William Howard Taft. He was a big 300-pound man. I put a pillow under my shirt and made a white mustache out of toilet tissue and I went around and recited a poem I wrote about Taft. That kind of gives you a sense of what a little nerd I was. The other kids were running around not reciting anything and I was reciting presidential poetry."

Poetry doesn't break windows with cabbage stalks and corn or tip over outhouses. Those who would curse the Children of the Cabbage should first peer into their own haunted Halloweens past, Jake Wynn warned.

"Today when you see kids pull a prank or do something that shows up in the newspaper or on social media, the comments are just brutal," he said. "Like, 'Where are the parents?' and all that. And it's just like, man if you guys thought back to when you were kids. ...

"We're so disconnected from the way things used to be. There's sort of this golden version of like, everything was perfect, the children were so well-behaved back in the day. No. It wasn't like that at all. You guys are blanking out on all the crazy antics and pranks you got up to. You weren't saints."

Except maybe Edward Moran.

CHRIS KELLY, the Times-Tribune columnist, wishes you and yours a safe, happy Halloween. Read his award-winning blog at timestribuneblogs.com/kelly.

Contact the writer:

kellysworld@scrantontimes.com; @cjkink on Twitter; Chris Kelly, The Times-Tribune on Facebook.