Halloween Haunts: A Pre-Halloween Tradition Thankfully Extinct: Moving Night
By Ray Van Horn, Jr.
Commonly, it was known as Mischief Night. Detroit hellraisers called it Devil’s Night. In Michigan, New York and the Dakotas, it was referred to as Gate’s Night. All around the American northeast, you heard it riotously called “Goosey Night” or “Cabbage Night.
In my native area of Baltimore, Maryland, two words during the Halloween season struck palpable fear amongst adults and teenagers who’d sacrificed their summers working long hours to buy their first wheels.
Moving Night.
Pranks, sabotage and vandalism abound the night before Halloween. The miscreant side to the trick or treat accord. Moving Night was reserved for hooligans instead of haunts, where on-edge citizens were all but guaranteed a soaped car window or their porch chairs relocated. The latter often being deposited on the deck of the next-door neighbor, if said scalawag was cavalier. Into the bushes three blocks away or busted up outright from the more savage reprobates.
Doorbell dashes and toilet papering through tree branches, porch rails and car antennae were the least harmful stunts on Moving Night. What had people nervously chittering the most throughout Maryland was the pitiless egging of houses, smashing of flowerpots and pumpkins, slashing of car tires and actual arson.
Baltimore’s Moving Night roots can be traced back to the late 1800s in Appalachian Pennsylvania and reports of a rascally “corn night” staged before Halloween. Commencements thereof entailing of doorbell ringing and a subsequent pelting of dried and shelled corn pellets into the faces of victimized responders.
The bizarre ritual morphed into Baltimore-based capers of personal property being shuffled off for kicks. If you can get your head around it, such outrageous shenanigans from yesteryear included hoisting buggies onto barn roofs. Hence, the eventual imprint “Moving Night.” 
It was the ten-to nineteen-year-old bracket who were the main perpetrators on Moving Night. I vividly recall my parents having had their car windows soaped and their mailbox crushed with a bat on two different Moving Nights. By local teens, who were eventually caught and whose parents were forced into off-the-books restitution.
I also reminisce over the one Moving Night I participated in, though my story comes with a twist. The girls of our neighborhood begged me as the unspoken teen chief to do something about a group of dastardly punks less than a mile away who’d threatened to come onto our turf in a 1968 Nova loaded with raw eggs for Moving Night. Bragging they’d splatter everyone’s houses and issuing unsavory terrorizations involving the molestation of our young ladies.
I rallied my male buddies. We raided our parents’ refrigerators of all the eggs we could muster. This was when John Rambo was king, so I stationed us strategically across two wooded patches flanking the main road into our neighborhood. Upon hearing the rumble of .289 horsepower approaching, my verbal call to action was some silly wolf yelp, but it was effective. We sprang from our cover and pelted the crap out of the Nova with our eggs until those jerks smoked their tires in reverse and sped off.
I don’t think anyone ever moved so fast on Moving Night.
Ray Van Horn, Jr. is the author of Bringing in the Creeps, Behind the Shadows, Coming of Rage and Revolution Calling. Ray is a contributing writer for The Metal Hall of Fame and he has covered music and film for outlets such as Blabbermouth, AMP, Pit, Dee Snider’s House of Hair, Music Dish, DVD Review, Horror News.net, Fangoria Musick, Hails & Horns, Metal Maniacs, Noisecreep and many others. Ray was an NHL game analyst for The Hockey Nut. Ray was a runner-up finalist in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine’s “Mysterious Photograph” contest. His work has appeared in Rue Morgue, Eternal Haunted Summer, Punk Noir, Atomic Flyswatter, Horror Tree, Cyber Age Adventures, Flash in a Flash, The Rubbertop Review, Story Bytes, Quantum Muse and New Noise, plus the anthologies Dread Mondays, Horror A-Z: X, Axes of Evil and Axes of Evil II.
Bringing in the Creeps link:
Amazon.com: Bringing in the Creeps: 9798992652949: Horn, Ray Van: Books
Behind the Shadows link:
Amazon.com: Behind the Shadows: 9781960991423: Van Horn Jr., Ray: Books