7 Forgotten Mischief Night Pranks You Used to See Every Year

On the night before Halloween in 1938, Orson Welles signed off his War of the Worlds broadcast by explaining that the Mercury Theatre couldn’t “soap all your windows and steal all your garden gates by tomorrow night,” so it destroyed the world instead. October 30 goes by a lot of regional names, and Detroit’s version has a history all its own, but the pranks themselves are getting harder to find. “Over the years, it’s declined steadily,” Elmwood Park, New Jersey, police chief Michael Foligno told NorthJersey.com in 2022. “In the last 5 to 10 years, kids hardly come out anymore.” Here are seven pranks that used to be a sure thing every Mischief Night, and what put each of them out of business.EggingToilet-PaperingShaving CreamSoaping WindowsDing-Dong DitchTipping OuthousesTick-TacksEggingEggs | paci77/GettyImagesIn 2015, one grocery chain decided the easiest way to stop egging was to stop selling eggs to kids: Redner’s Markets, based in Reading, Pennsylvania, renewed what 6abc called a longstanding policy of refusing to sell eggs to anyone under 18 until the day after Halloween. The manager of its Bensalem store told CBS Philly that the rule had been in place since the store opened about five years earlier: “We do not sell eggs to minors because they’re going to go around and vandalize with the eggs,” he said. At least one teenager the station talked to wasn’t worried: “I’ll get them from my friend’s house.”Toilet-PaperingHome is pranked with toilet papering | HeatherPhotographer/GettyImagesEven the most harmless-looking prank landed on a police contraband list. In 2018, the Township of Washington police department in Bergen County, New Jersey, announced that on Halloween and Mischief Night it would confiscate all items, “including toilet paper and shaving cream,” from juveniles found wandering around unsupervised, record their names, and enforce a 9 p.m. curfew on October 30 and 31. Not every homeowner minds the mess, though: one resident of Little Silver, New Jersey, featured by NorthJersey.com in 2022, gets all the kids on her block to toilet paper and shaving cream her house every year.Shaving CreamShaving foam on the hand | kyoshino/GettyImagesShaving cream ended up on the same do-not-sell list as eggs: by 2010, Jersey City stores had been asked to avoid selling eggs, flour, and shaving cream to teenagers before Mischief Night, while police enforced an 11 p.m. curfew, according to 1010 WINS. Newark went further and ordered anyone under 18 to stay close to home after 10 p.m. unless a parent or guardian came along. Foligno, the Elmwood Park chief, knows the drill from the other side: as a teenager, he went out on Goosey Night, as many in North Jersey call October 30, with members of his wrestling team. “We would walk through the streets and throw eggs and use shaving cream, and soap the windows,” he recalled.Soaping WindowsSoap on a window | baona/GettyImagesA bar of soap dragged across glass was the cheapest trick a kid could pull, and some towns tried to make the windows less tempting by handing them over. In October 1951, Beacon, New York, art teacher Frances Schipbanker ran the town’s first Halloween window-painting contest, with the Lions Club recruiting the merchants and buying the supplies, and some of the adults behind it hoped it would cut down on the usual Halloween vandalism, according to the Beacon Historical Society. Plenty of towns still run one: in Rye, New York, kids painted more than 400 windows in October 2025, the 72nd year of that town’s contest.Ding-Dong DitchDoorbell ring | slobo/GettyImagesRinging a doorbell and running away was popular enough that at least one corner of the country gave it its own night. Halloween historian Lesley Bannatyne told NorthJersey.com that where she grew up in southern Connecticut, the night before Halloween was called Doorbell Night. Welles worked it into that same 1938 sign-off, telling listeners that “if your doorbell rings and nobody’s there, that was no Martian … it’s Halloween!” These days the doorbell has a camera: 20 percent of U.S. internet households had a video doorbell by 2023, according to Parks Associates. “I’d say it’s because everyone’s got cameras now,” Jim McDowell, police chief in Goshen, New York, told MEL Magazine in 2019, explaining why egging and toilet-papering had dropped off.Tipping OuthousesOuthouse | grandriver/GettyImagesIn small towns, the classic Halloween target sat out back. After the Halloween weekend of 1909, the Princeton Union in Minnesota reported that a gang had gone into one woman’s yard and overturned her outhouses, and that the schoolhouse yard had filled up with buggies, wagons, and road scrapers taken from around town. Plumbing ended the prank: in 1940, nearly half of American homes lacked complete plumbing, which the Census Bureau defines as hot and cold piped water, a bathtub or shower, and a flush toilet, and by 1990 only 1 percent did. There’s not much sport in tipping over a bathroom.Tick-TacksAlmost nobody remembers the tick-tack, a homemade noisemaker made from a wooden spool with notches carved into its edges, wound with string and set against a window, so that a yank on the string rattled the glass, according to the local history site Greetings From Sioux Falls. In 1902, a newspaper in Douglas, Wyoming, joked about the boys who frightened women “with rag-time tick-tacks on window panes.” The cheap version needed only a tack, a thread, and a nail: Maine columnist John Gould recalled in 1999 pushing a tack into a neighbor’s window casing, looping his mother’s thread on it, and letting a shingle nail fall against the glass while the man kept on reading.