Halloween History with Chelsey Weber-Smith

Summary

Podcast Summary: "You're Wrong About"

Episode: Halloween History with Chelsey Weber-Smith
Host: Sarah Marshall
Guest: Chelsey Weber-Smith, author of American Hysteria
Release Date: October 24, 2024

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Introduction

In this Halloween-themed episode of You're Wrong About, host Sarah Marshall welcomes Chelsey Weber-Smith, the mayor of Halloween Town and author of American Hysteria. The duo embarks on an in-depth exploration of Halloween's history, unraveling its transformation from ancient pagan rituals to the modern-day festivities laden with urban legends and societal fears.

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Pre-Christian Origins of Halloween

Chelsey begins by tracing Halloween back to its pagan roots, specifically the Celtic festival of Samhain celebrated approximately 2,000 years ago in what is now Ireland. "Samhain was like a big party in honor of death," Chelsea explains at [07:35]. This festival marked the end of the harvest season and the beginning of winter, a time believed to be when the veil between the living and the dead was thinnest.

Key elements included bonfires, feasts, and disguises to ward off spirits. "They never knew. We're talking bonfires, giant meals, bunch of alcohol," Chelsea remarks at [08:22], highlighting the festive yet eerie atmosphere that parallels today's Halloween celebrations.

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Christianization and the Veiling of Pagan Traditions

With the advent of Christianity, the festival underwent significant transformation. Chelsea discusses how the Christian Church aimed to supplant Samhain with All Saints Day (All Hallows), a move intended to honor saints and martyrs instead of the "fun dead people." "The Puritans banned Christmas, so they certainly would have no Halloween," Sarah notes at [14:20], emphasizing the strictness of early American colonial settlers.

Chelsea adds, "They wanted to erase the pagan holidays," at [10:32], explaining the cultural shift that led to the dilution of Halloween’s original themes. This period also saw the demonization of mystical creatures, portraying witches and other supernatural entities as uniformly evil, a stark contrast to their more nuanced representations in earlier traditions.

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Irish Immigration and the Rise of Mischief

The mid-1800s brought a significant influx of Irish and Scottish immigrants to America, carrying with them the evolving traditions of Halloween. Chelsea describes how these communities introduced various pranks and mischievous activities that became integral to the holiday. "Gate Night," she explains at [21:39], emerged during this era, characterized by pranks ranging from stealing gates to throwing rocks and painting slurs on houses.

“It was a way for Irish immigrant boys to let off steam," Chelsea states, highlighting the social dynamics and tensions within these communities. The pranks, while often harmless, sometimes escalated into destructive acts, reflecting broader societal issues such as immigration stress and cultural assimilation challenges.

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Transition to Modern Halloween: Haunted Houses and Community Control

As Halloween traditions evolved, so did the nature of its celebrations. By the 1970s, the concept of haunted houses gained prominence, initially spearheaded by charitable organizations like the United States Junior Chamber (JCS). Chelsea notes at [48:57], "They would take over a location, often a park field, sometimes even an abandoned building," transforming these spaces into elaborate haunted attractions for charity.

However, the rise of more transgressive haunted houses, exemplified by Blood Manor in the 1970s, introduced a darker and more intense element to Halloween. "They did a whole scene of the South American rugby players of Flight 571 eating each other," Chelsea recalls at [55:30], illustrating the boundary-pushing nature of these early modern haunted houses.

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Urban Legends and Moral Panic: The Poisoned Candy Scare

One pivotal moment in Halloween's history discussed in the episode is the 1974 incident involving Timothy O'Brien, an eight-year-old who died from cyanide poisoning after consuming a poisoned pixie stick. Chelsea recounts at [60:20], "On Halloween night in 1974, Timothy O'Brien died after eating a poisoned pixie stick," sparking widespread fear and leading to enduring myths about tampered Halloween candy.

This tragic event fueled moral panic and urban legends, with "nobody knew what was going on," Chelsea explains at [62:18]. Despite the rarity of such incidents, the fear persists, manifesting in contemporary practices like candy inspection and the prevalence of stories about dangerous treats.

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Societal Shifts and the Commercialization of Halloween

Throughout the decades, Halloween's character has continually shifted, influenced by societal changes and commercialization. The tragic 1980s haunted house fire at Six Flags' Haunted Castle, which resulted in eight teenage deaths, led to stringent safety regulations and hindered the proliferation of indie haunted attractions. Chelsea remarks at [55:54], "They became pretty sure that he was guilty when not only did they figure out that this man... had been at work with 200 people vouching for him being there," drawing parallels to high-profile legal cases like Casey Anthony’s.

The commercialization further altered Halloween, making it a major economic event with trunk or treat events and elaborate community-sanctioned activities that prioritize safety and supervision over the earlier traditions of mischief and mayhem.

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Modern-Day Celebrations and Cultural Reflections

In the digital age, Halloween continues to evolve, incorporating elements like trunk or treat and daytime festivities to accommodate contemporary concerns about safety and community. Chelsea reflects at [75:55], "So today the story of Halloween is a story of a battle between kids and adults," encapsulating the ongoing tension between preserving the holiday's playful transgression and ensuring it remains a safe, family-friendly event.

The episode concludes with a discussion on how Halloween serves as a cultural outlet for expressing fears and managing societal anxieties, allowing individuals, especially children, to engage with themes of fear and safety in a controlled environment.

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Notable Quotes

• Chelsey Weber-Smith [07:35]: "Samhain was like a big party in honor of death."
• Sarah Marshall [14:20]: "The Puritans banned Christmas, so they certainly would have no Halloween."
• Chelsey Weber-Smith [21:39]: "Gate Night," characterizing the prank-filled festivities of the late 1800s."
• Sarah Marshall [48:57]: "They would take over a location, often a park field, sometimes even an abandoned building," transforming spaces into haunted houses.
• Chelsey Weber-Smith [60:20]: "On Halloween night in 1974, Timothy O'Brien died after eating a poisoned pixie stick," sparking urban legends.
• Chelsey Weber-Smith [75:55]: "So today the story of Halloween is a story of a battle between kids and adults," reflecting ongoing cultural dynamics.

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Conclusion

Halloween History with Chelsey Weber-Smith offers a comprehensive examination of Halloween's evolution, highlighting the interplay between cultural traditions, societal fears, and commercialization. Through engaging dialogue and insightful analysis, Sarah Marshall and Chelsey Weber-Smith illuminate the ways in which Halloween mirrors and responds to the changing contours of society, ensuring its enduring relevance and fascination.

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Additional Resources:

• Chelsey Weber-Smith's Podcast: American Hysteria – Explore more on moral panics, urban legends, and haunted attractions.
• Upcoming Episodes: "Buried Alive" on American Hysteria, releasing October 28th.

Credits:

• Edited by: Miranda Zickler
• Produced by: Carolyn Kendrick

Happy Halloween!

Transcript

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah, I do want kids to be out in the dark doing things that will inconvenience me. Welcome to your wrong about I am your ghostly hostly Sarah Marshall. And today we are having a very bootacular Halloween conversation with our friend, American Hysteria's Chelsea Weber Smith. This episode is on the history of Halloween, the spirit of Halloween, from its pre Christian origins to our more contemporary fears and our worries about what might be in our children's candy and all the fears in between. We're talking about haunted houses, we're talking about pranks and mischief and how adults try to change the way that their children celebrate holidays and how effective that is or isn't at times. And just, yeah, what this holiday is to us, what it allows us to do and what we love about it. So thank you so much for joining us today. If you also want more Halloween stuff, if you want to hear me and Chelsea talk about another topic over on American Hysteria, there is an episode out now called I Was a Teenage Poltergeist where I got to come on and tell Chelsea about the Enfield Poltergeist, which was in North London in the late 1970s, as well as a little bit of Victorian ghost hunting lore as well. And we had a lovely time. And next week, Monday, October 28th, they will be putting out on the American Hysteria feed an episode called Buried Alive. And if you're in the area and if you would like to see even more ghost conversation between me and Chelsea, we would love you to come see us at some of the live shows that we're doing in December and January. There is an announcement on this very show feed with details about it. There's an announcement over on American Hysteria. But just to tell you again, we're doing shows in December and January, December 3rd and 4th in Portland at the Aladdin Theatre, December 11th in Seattle at the Moore Theater, January 11th in San Francisco at the palace of Fine Arts Theater, and January 24th in Los Angeles at the Regent Theater. We're really, really, really excited to get to come bring in the new year with you, let go of the old one and to, you know, do something that you're very used to at least hearing us do, talking about history and ghosts and the search to connect with the other side, spiritualism, geeking out about history. And added to that, we're going to have parlor tricks and the music of American Hysteria, producer Miranda Ziegler's Fleetwood Mac tribute band the Little Lies, and perhaps some ghosts. It's hard to say, but we just want to bring you kind of A fun, ghosty variety show. And if you're able to come, then we'll be so happy to see you. And if you're not, then we will be astrally projecting it to you the whole time. And we're just so happy that you're here thinking about Halloween, hopefully eating some candy. If you want some bonus episodes, we, as always, have some on Patreon and Apple, plus subscriptions. We have last month's episode on Somerton man with Candice Opper. It's our most recent. And we have another bonus coming out later this month on the various adaptations. Well, two of them. There's actually more than you would think of the Stepford Wives with Sarah Archer, who is very qualified in the Stepford Wives arena, I would say. And I had a lovely conversation over there. I can't wait to share it with you. And that's it. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for listening to this episode. Thank you for celebrating Halloween with us in whatever way you observe it or don't. We're just happy you're here. Here's your episode. Welcome to youo Wrong about the House on the Block that still gives out popcorn Balls. And then has the police called on them? And with me today is Chelsea Weber Smith, the mayor of Halloween Town.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Ugh, I wish.

[Sarah Marshall]

What a great job, right?

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Definitely.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah. But you were one of the friends of the show. I think your first ever episode with us was on Killer Clowns.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

That's right.

[Sarah Marshall]

And you have stayed on that beat ever since. And we were talking about having you on for what I think of as at this point, our traditional Halloween episode. And you were like, well, we could. Why don't we just do an episode on what Halloween is?

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah.

[Sarah Marshall]

And I love that.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

No frills, no gimmicks.

[Sarah Marshall]

What, do you have a podcast, Chelsea?

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Allegedly, yes. It's called American Hysteria. And we cover moral panics, urban legends, conspiracy theories, hoaxes, crazes, many of the same things that you hear about on your beautiful show you're wrong about. And we kind of just analyze them through a sociological, historical lens and try to understand where our fantastical thinking comes from and where it's taking us.

[Sarah Marshall]

I love that. Where is it taking us?

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

I don't know.

[Sarah Marshall]

Okay.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

That's part of the show. I don't know.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah. A part of the show is trying to figure it out together, you know, Because I think. Yeah. What's nice about exploring these questions is that we also get to acknowledge all the stuff that we're so confused about, which Just feels like a good way to talk to the world.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yes, yep. And to assert that neither of us know what's going on despite the even handed way in which we tell you about world events.

[Sarah Marshall]

Right. I know the balance is really interesting. And you're researching because you find a lot of very specific topics that let you dig these very narrow and deep rabbit holes through history. And the one you're researching now that I think will be out by the time this one is on.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Say it, Sarah.

[Sarah Marshall]

Burial artists.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Oh, I thought you were going to say. I thought you were going to say Skibidi toilet.

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh, Skibidi toilet. Yes. Well, is that one? Yeah, that one's very important.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

That will be out by the time this is out. Yes.

[Sarah Marshall]

That just shows the breadth of your interest that I had already moved on from Skibidi toilet.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

From Skibidi toilet to being buried alive at American Hysteria. We bring you the topics that you're looking to learn more about.

[Sarah Marshall]

There you go. The freshest. The freshest topics in the garden. And yeah, you showed me Skibidi toilet at my house and you really won me over personally to the idea that something very interesting and complex is happening. And then I did have that song in my head for many, many, many days.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

You and me both, babe. It's been probably two months of this.

[Sarah Marshall]

It's been quite a year.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Skibidi research. Yeah, it has been quite a year as well.

[Sarah Marshall]

So. Okay, so let's talk about Skibidi Halloween.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Okay, let's do it.

[Sarah Marshall]

What is Halloween? We know this is Halloween. What is this?

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Well, this is a celebration that started as a pagan slam bash every year that kind of celebrated the coming darkness. Right. A typical festival of the dying, of the light. And people are gathering what they need. And you know, this is happening like 2,000 years ago. And specifically it was a feast of the dead, which, you know, you see in many cultures all over the world. But this is 2,000 years ago, kind of in modern day Ireland. So this is the Celts that are rocking out to this death party.

[Sarah Marshall]

The Boston Celtics.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Exactly, exactly. A long and storied history.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah, they've been around longer than people realize. Yeah, the Celtics.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

I know. So Samhain was like just a big party in honor of death. You know, it's typical when the veil between those living and those in the other world is lifted and you might be able to like commune with dead friends and relatives and you'll like, see magical creatures like demons, ghosts, and your favorite fairies. I'm not talking about me. And they, you know, you never know. You never know. We're talking bonfires, giant meals, bunch of alcohol. It's kind of like a little bit like what we think of as Halloween now. They would, like, go door to door dressed in disguises later on in the years. And it was just a chance to get drunk and kind of honor death. Right.

[Sarah Marshall]

Which is interesting because now we have for like, you know, sort of secular American adults. What that makes me think of as sort of, you know, occasions when we get to do that is weddings and tailgating or, you know, football generally, I guess.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yes.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

It's our celebration of death. You're right. Tailgating.

[Sarah Marshall]

Well, we don't. It's. Interestingly, it feels like the death part is at least below the surface.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yes. Yeah.

[Sarah Marshall]

It's always humming, although maybe not as far below the surface as we think.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Right below the skin. Yeah. And so, you know, it was like the Romans came in, they conquered the Celtic lands in the first century, blah, blah, blah. Then the Christians came. They wanted to erase the pagan holidays.

[Sarah Marshall]

Chelsea has college lecture, yada, yada, century.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

A.D. they're like, I just want to get to America. Let's just get to America. And so, right then we get this thing. We've all heard of All Saints Day, All Hallows. And instead of honoring kind of like the fun dead people, we're honoring the boring dead people, saints and martyrs. Although, to be fair, I don't find saints boring. Don't worry.

[Sarah Marshall]

I will say, and I bet what you're about to say is that saints really aren't boring. It's because the sort of things we try and get kids to do to honor them are, I would say, yeah.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Saints often live very rock and roll lifestyles. It's true. Basically, the reason that they created this day where they were honoring saints and martyrs was because they kind of knew that there needed to be one of these, like, cultural valves that you could pull to, like, take off pressure and to allow people. Because they still could have bonfires, they could dress up, they could play games. I assume they could get drunk. You know, whether or not that was overt or not.

[Sarah Marshall]

But they associate it with the conquering religion now.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Right, Right, exactly.

[Sarah Marshall]

Or I guess, is this like, yeah, we're doing craz Christianity. If these are saints, then yeah, this.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Is definitely like the Christianization. And so they took these elements and then they also added in the fact that, like, now witches and little devils and, you know, all these fun, more like nymph like, creatures are all just like blanketly evil because of the way that Christianity views the mystical realm, or whatever you want to say. So.

[Sarah Marshall]

Right. Which we talked about in our Cottingley Fairies episode too, how, like, it was really. It was about kind of this broad genre of the wee folk and how you couldn't turn your back on them because they were very tricky and sort of amoral, it seems, to some extent. And then the Victorian fairy is like this very ahistorical kind of like, reinvention of the fairy type figure that this sort of spirit of subversiveness still somehow finds a way to live inside of. Is my read.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yes, no, absolutely. And it's. It's similar to kind of Satan as well, because, I mean, it's more complicated than I'm making it. But many times in the Bible, when Satan is mentioned, it is not Satan, like, big capital S. It's like, you are a Satan. And that translation, you know, can roughly come out to someone who throws something across one's path. So it's more like this. This thing you have to get over to find your faith and continue to be close to God. It's less of like this evil, demonic, insane, like, snake, lizard, possessor.

[Sarah Marshall]

Right. Oh, is this why it's get thee behind me, Satan? Because I've always been confused about that, because it seems like, come on, Satan, get thee behind me. Like my idea.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

You know, That's a great question. I don't know, but that would make sense to me.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah, but it makes more sense if it's like, yeah, the thing in the road that you have to get past. And in that case, it's like, you know, you're driving home and there's traffic and you're like, get behind me. Satan is like a more accurate representation of that idea, it would seem.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Theologians weigh in below.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Shall we enter the great country of America now where Halloween really becomes what we know it as today?

[Sarah Marshall]

Yes. The only country.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

The only country that really matters.

[Sarah Marshall]

Satire.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

We obviously are kidding everyone.

[Sarah Marshall]

So if we don't pretend America is the only country, then the terrorists really do win.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

It's true. So, okay, basically, in the beginning of American colonialism, 1600s, 1700s, anything even close to Halloween would have been obviously absolutely banned. I mean, the Puritans banned Christmas, so they certainly would have no Halloween.

[Sarah Marshall]

Which makes sense because Christmas, like, sort of roughly medieval Christmas, as far as I know, involves wassailing, which is effectively what adults should be doing on Halloween now. Right. Because so many adults are bummed that kids don't trick or treat on the day or, like, you know, at night in the neighborhood anymore. And rather than trying to stop time, adults, kids start going to each other's houses with a big bowl of wine.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah.

[Sarah Marshall]

And drinking from it and singing, you know, so I feel like Christmas, you know, from a Puritan perspective, like, not to. Not to take their side, but, like, I get how it doesn't support their values.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

No, it doesn't. And, you know, it was, like, very ghost related to. Because, you know, it's a dark. A dark middle of the winter festival. And. Yeah, it just. I mean, basically, the Puritans didn't like anything fun, as we, of course, know. But then that's also not true, because they could have sex, and they did have sex. Very out in the open. And that is a conversation for another time.

[Sarah Marshall]

There you go.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Let's.

[Sarah Marshall]

Let's put it. Let's put a pin in our inevitable Puritans episode. I'm excited for that.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah. Or Puritan sex, I think we should do.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah, that's good. We don't want to try and do all the Puritan stuff all at once.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

We don't want to bite off more than we can chew.

[Sarah Marshall]

All right. Puritan sex coming Easter 2025.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Okay. So in the middle of the 1800s, we have this, like, big wave of immigration, especially from Ireland as well as Scotland, where Samhain was also practiced. So they brought over the version of Halloween that had kind of been evolving over the years in Ireland. And that form of Halloween was centered mainly around. Do you know, Sarah?

[Sarah Marshall]

Turnips close pranks. Ah, that's not close. Thank you, though.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Well, it may be closer than you realize.

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh, okay. Pranks.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

The reason is that in Ireland, boys would carve creepy, spooky faces in turnips to scare away travelers or people that they didn't want hanging around. And then they would also tie strings to cabbages and pull them through fields to kind of scare people in a very, like, Children of the Corn like manner. So once the Irish lads came over, they started teaching these pranks to other local boys. And another one of these pranks was to pull up a turnip stock, light it on fire until it was smoking, and then jam it in the keyhole of a house to make the house just smell terrible. Which is pretty funny, I guess. Yeah, a little scary. It wasn't on fire.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah, fair enough.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Is that better? I don't know. So it continued to kind of ramp up, and suddenly there were kind of like, these packs of delinquents that were doing things like stringing ropes across sidewalks to trip people who were walking to trip pedestrians. Oh, yeah, not good. They would coat seats in the chapel with molasses. Funnier. They would tie doorknobs of opposing houses together, which. It's pretty funny to me, you know, because you're like, can't get it open.

[Sarah Marshall]

This is all, like, infuriate. The most infuriating stuff that they could think up, which I appreciate.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. They would also knock over everything they could find, especially outhouses that were occupied in a very Jackassian type of apparently classic comedy, because it's been around a long time.

[Sarah Marshall]

I mean, you know, it's this. Something we all dread. And therefore, it's an ideal prank.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

They would also lead livestock onto barn roofs. Roofs? Roofs.

[Sarah Marshall]

How do you do that?

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

I don't know. I'm not a farm kid. I wish I was. But there must be some way to get them up there. There must be, like, a little trap door. You can push them up or something.

[Sarah Marshall]

But it makes sense to me if there's, like, a hill behind it, Right? Like, depending on how level the ground is or like. I don't know. But it's a great question. They managed. They figured it out.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah, they figured it out. And I feel like it's very fratty, Right? It's like those. It's like an 80s frat movie where they are pranking the rival school and taking their mascot and putting it on the roof.

[Sarah Marshall]

And if you do it with a goat, then the goat's like, okay, cool. So, you know, that's ideal.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah. Little goat. Not a giant cow. Little goat.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah, just a little goat.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Just a little goat. Then they would also just do, like, stupid, really irritating things, like you said, like just tearing up people's crops. Not nice. Seems like that would affect the whole town. If you're just tearing up the crops of people who are growing food, they would smear paint all over houses. They would explode pipe bombs.

[Sarah Marshall]

Hmm.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

And another very jackass thing they would do is leave dummies on the train tracks to scare conductors, which is a.

[Sarah Marshall]

Plot point in the Good Sun. So, you know, it didn't work out well in that movie, but, yeah, it's like, I don't know. These are all pranks where there's, like. You can see how there's different things for different kids with different personalities, and some of them sort of lean more into, like, harmless mayhem, and some of them lean more toward violence, which is certainly intriguing when you're a child. But it also occurs to me that sort of the presence of pranks does sort of suggest, like, A level of, if not prosperity than, like, some degree of stability. Right. Like, you're not going to destroy people's crops if everybody is starving. I don't think as a prank, you would do it as a crime, but.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Not as a prank, you know, I mean, I don't know. I'm not sure.

[Sarah Marshall]

No, good question.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Because these were all, you know, mostly Irish immigrant communities. I mean, it was spreading, and we'll get a little bit more into the spread of this prank culture in a minute. But, you know, it was at this point mainly, you know, Irish kids who definitely were being, you know, not treated well by the United States, as we know. So I don't know, it might just really be, like, purge, like, boy behavior. There's a spirit of boyhood, I guess, amongst all of these holidays.

[Sarah Marshall]

So we have this culture of mischief that can get into pipe bomb territory, but can also just be in cabbage territory in communities of boys who are Irish immigrants to the United States. Right. Is that a good summary?

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

That's a great summary.

[Sarah Marshall]

Love it.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

It is, you know, spreading to other boys in America, as you might imagine, white boys in America and who are.

[Sarah Marshall]

Allowed to behave threateningly.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Right, right.

[Sarah Marshall]

To this day.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yes, exactly. I mean, it's a very particular brand of, again, like, Jackassian behavior that continues into this very day. And so eventually, October 31st was nicknamed Gate Night. And that came from the sheer number of gates that were stolen off their hinges, because that was, like, one of the most popular pranks was just steal people's gates.

[Sarah Marshall]

Hmm.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah. Not the best. Not the one you want your holiday named after.

[Sarah Marshall]

And then make a giant cooling rack.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah, that's what you would do with all your gates.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah. And then make the biggest loaf of bread in the world. Where and when was this approximately?

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

So this is. I think Gate Night is, like, late 1800s. And it's also in Canada. These things are also happening in Canada.

[Sarah Marshall]

Is this kind of like in the Northeast or sort of more like urban centers?

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah, I think the Northeast is probably. If we think about kind of the patterns of Irish and Scottish immigration, I would say that that makes the most sense.

[Sarah Marshall]

Right, cool.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

So, as you mentioned, a little bit, like, the community accepted Gate Night like, it was nobody's favorite thing, but it was like, okay, again, it's like the Purge, where they're like, you get this one night, get it all out of your system. It's kind of in this controlled manner, and at least we know, like, when it's gonna happen and at least kind of what's going to happen. So, like, get it all out tonight so that the rest of the year you can act.

[Sarah Marshall]

Right, yeah. Which is familiar, you know, that feels contemporary and it also. Yeah, this, I don't know, this conversation is making me think about how, because I think you and I have maybe talked about this before, but how sort of part of true crime as an interest is that, like, to be reading and enjoying true crime for many people, to some extent, you know, to be watching it or listening to it is to be telling yourself on some level that you're not in a true crime story, you know, and that what you're encountering has entertainment value because it's not too close to an joy.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Right.

[Sarah Marshall]

And you can kind of remind yourself that way that things are not that bad. You know, not everybody, not all the time, but I think that's part of it. And I think, you know, and then in the past, it's also been a marker of identity because in sort of, you know, because in 19th century Britain, you know, there is this anxiety, sort of, again, a Victorian anxiety, that the working classes would be corrupted by true crime and would become criminals. And the idea that if you're, you know, of the working class, then you're right on the bubble and you could go either way. But if you're in, you know, if you're a member of the upper class to some extent or the aristocracy, then you are incorruptible, you know, which didn't really play out, but it's a nice idea. It was. And. And this thing of, you know, true crime is a thing that sort of shows what category of identity you're in. If you're middle class or, you know, higher than that, because you're showing that you're allowed to enjoy something that can't corrupt you because you're sort of demographically safe from its corruptibility. And I feel like the idea of mischief is also, you know, like, clearly a marker of race and class in America, because to do mischief is to be on the right side of the law every other day of the year.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Oh, absolutely.

[Sarah Marshall]

And to sort of be announcing to yourself and your family what category of being you're in. So they're, you know, like whiteness and Halloween live together.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah, well said. Well said. And, you know, as the turn of the century is happening, we're starting to see, like, more costumes. And these are handmade costumes made out of sheets and things. You make masks out of, you know, makeup. But the whole point was to be completely unrecognizable. And I'm Sure. You've seen like some photos of early Halloween costumes, right?

[Sarah Marshall]

Yes, but I can't really picture any, so I think we should probably look at some pictures to jog our memories.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Google along with us, folks. Early Halloween costumes. What are you seeing, Sarah?

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh, yeah, you know, kids in big sort of like the kind of expressionless humanoid masks that would end up in horror movies.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yes, absolutely. You know what it really looks like to me is like the puppets from Mr. Rogers neighborhood.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yes.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Like Lady Elaine's face on a human body.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yes.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

So that's what. Yeah, that's what we're looking at now.

[Sarah Marshall]

Right. They're like raggedy shaggy, very homemade, like a lot of yarn. I'm looking at a photo of just like a life size Raggedy Ann type person, you know, with like. And like a lot of the things that have been, I think that are. Cause this is, you know, in the sort of golden age of listicles on the Internet like 10 years ago. I feel like it was a very classic Halloween content thing to be like these 27 photos of people in old time Halloween costumes will make you wish you had never been born or whatever.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah, that's, you know, God, hire her. Buzzfeed. Are you listening?

[Sarah Marshall]

I don't know if they can hear anymore.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

I. I think it just has a lot to do with the uncanny valley when I'm looking at this stuff, because it's like, you know, a lot of the faces of these masks which I imagine were made out of like paper mache or maybe like even like animal skin. I don't know.

[Sarah Marshall]

I mean. And some of them I think are mass manufactured. But like, you know, if you're looking at stuff from the early 20th century, kind of before World War II and the advent of all these plastics that we have and everything now, it's like a lot of old clothes and like rags and potato sacks getting cut up, as far as I can tell.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah, yeah, definitely. But they're much creepier than pretty much any costume that I ever see now. So yeah, hats off to them for that. So yeah, now we've got kind of costumes in the mix as well. And at this point, these rural areas, because that is one thing I'll say about where these things are happening. It was mainly in rural communities that these big pranks were happening, which is kind of obvious based on all of the different pranks that I've told you about. But as the century turned and cities were growing larger and larger, these pranks kind of skipped over into the big city and then like cranked the fuck up. So if you think it's been bad so far, it's only gonna get worse. All right?

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh, no.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Don't worry, Sarah. It's all over now. I mean, for the most part, Halloween's dead, baby.

[Sarah Marshall]

Buried the lead. Wow.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

So, you know, these kids and teenagers would go into buildings and pull fire alarms. They would throw bricks through store windows. They would paint, like, swear words, and I'm imagining slurs on people's houses. They'd light small fires that sometimes turned into big fires. And if you were out on Halloween night, which, like, adults were kind of like, again, I just cannot push the point enough that it was like the purge. It was like, if you were an adult and you were out on Halloween, you were fair game, and you could get jumped and they'd be like, give us treats. Give us, you know, I don't know. What kind of treats did they have back then, Sarah?

[Sarah Marshall]

Necco wafers.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

There you go. Give me all your Necco.

[Sarah Marshall]

Necco wafers.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

You know, as we're getting now, we're, like, into the 20s. Okay. So here are three incidents that were recorded to have happened.

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh, boy.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

In the 20s and 30s in prank land. So in 1929, a, like, wild pack of boys planted and then detonated dynamite on their high school campus and caused a huge amount of damage to the building.

[Sarah Marshall]

Is that a prank or.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

I don't know. I feel like we're moving out of prank territory, aren't we? In 1932, a man almost lost his eyes when a teenager just blasted him in the face with a rock. So people are just getting rocks just. And I mean, like, thrown as hard as you can at, like, you see an adult help them with rocks is the norm for those participating, which, of course, was not every child and teenager out there, but, you know, enough that this was an ongoing, like, big time problem. Okay.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah. And I know we're talking about this so far as, like, part of the culture of boyhood, but it also occurs to me that, like, part of the appeal of wearing a Halloween costume is that for potentially the only night of the year, your gender is up for grabs.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Mm. Mm. But this was such a boy thing. One of the things that happened was in 1939, a little girl almost had to have her entire arm amputated because a boy kept hitting her with rocks. Yeah. And it's like, just gate night shenanigans, right? Yeah.

[Sarah Marshall]

Wow. I feel like. I don't know, there's, like, a bunch. I feel like there's various things laid over top of Each other. Right. Because on the one hand, I believe in, like, young people's right to sort of, like, do potentially destructive but not harmful things or annoying things. But on the other hand, this is also, like. It feels like we have in here, too, this thread of just, like, let adolescent boys wound people, and if you give them a purge night, then, yeah, the social contract is upheld.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah.

[Sarah Marshall]

Shouldn't have been out and about, little girl.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

I mean. Yes. And you would be in agreement. Not exactly, as we'll see, but with the adults of the time. Because now we're getting into, like, the 30s and 40s, and the tolerance for this type of thing is starting to definitely go down. But instead of a, you know, a constructive means, adults were arming themselves with rifles and going out into the night. And if they saw teenagers doing anything, they would threatened to kill them or they would fire their guns in the general direction of the teenagers to scare them, hopefully. But I don't have the details of those shootings, so I'm not quite sure.

[Sarah Marshall]

The history of Halloween is more about, like, a war between children and adults than I realize. Oh.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

And it's gonna continue to be this very thing. So. Yeah.

[Sarah Marshall]

Also, not to be too simplistic, but I feel like there has to be an element of we are having a Great Depression and our tempers are short.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yep, you are right on the money, babe. So they were like, yo, we have been tolerating this boys will be boys night for decades now, and it's only gotten worse. It's only ramped up to a point that is totally unacceptable and intolerable during a Great Depression, first of all. And then eventually during World War II, which we know this type of behavior was, like, certainly not going to fly during a major world war that we were, you know, saving scrap metal for. So it's like, we didn't have the resources to deal with this type of just malarkey, property damage and death and destruction. You know, I mean, people did die from these pranks, like, on roadways, like, again, like, with the dummy stuff.

[Sarah Marshall]

You blow up a building. I mean. Right. I mean, my God, it makes sense that socially this would feel a lot less permissible during a time of war when people are feeling under threat and, like, existentially afraid, you know, for the future of their lives and their country and their family than, you know, during a time of relative peace and prosperity, you know?

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Exactly. And, yeah, by this time, it's like millions of dollars of damages were being accrued each date night, Halloween night, whatever you want to call It. And so this is the moment where kind of the war on Halloween officially begins. Oh, we're in, you know, the wartime years. And the first people to take action to try to quell Halloween was the Chicago City Council, and they wanted to ban it completely and replace it with Conservation Day.

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh, come on.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

I mean, come on.

[Sarah Marshall]

What does that involve? You're supposed to be saving a wounded loon.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

I cannot for the life of me figure out what Conservation Day meant to them. I have tried really hard.

[Sarah Marshall]

It's doing whatever the opposite of setting a building on fire is. It's a conserving a building, helping it be less on fire.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah. And I'm guessing since this was like the 40s, that they didn't mean environmental conservation and they met more like conserving resources or conserving. I don't know. I really don't know. But whatever it is, it sounds like it sucks.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yes. That's not a good substitute holiday. Like, they need to replace it with something that is not committing crimes but is almost as fun for teenagers. Like, you know, Making Out Day.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah.

[Sarah Marshall]

Although I can see why some people might not like that.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

And, I mean, we can think of kind of what it was when the Catholic Church or the, you know, the Christians of the land took Samhain and turned it into All Saints Day.

[Sarah Marshall]

Right.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

So it was like this way of, like, you still get to have your little party, but we're going to kind of reorganize it, tamper it down so that it's acceptable to our cultural moment. Right.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah. Huh.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Luckily, the mayor did not enact the policy, so Halloween continued to live at.

[Sarah Marshall]

That point in Chicago. Yes, Chicago, the city that tried to cancel Halloween.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Then in 1950, President Truman got involved on this Halloween war, and he tried to officially turn Halloween into the only thing worse than Conservation Day. Youth Honor Day.

[Sarah Marshall]

What? What's that?

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

It was just about spending the day instilling moral virtue in teenagers.

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh, no. Oh, Truman.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Which is not a good replacement for Halloween.

[Sarah Marshall]

No, these are very bad. That's. So this was, like, a pressing enough concern that it's. At some point in his tenure, President Truman was like, what will we do about Halloween?

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yes. Yes.

[Sarah Marshall]

See, I didn't see that one coming.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

It was a huge deal.

[Sarah Marshall]

Understandably. I would also be afraid. I mean, I don't leave the house on Halloween anyway. But that's because I'm watching movies the whole time.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yes. That's nice. I try to leave on Halloween, but maybe I shouldn't.

[Sarah Marshall]

Not in the 1940s. No.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

But like, right around the time this was happening, the Korean War kind of eclipsed the controversy, and the House of Representatives moved on to more important issues and just tossed his motion aside. Okay, so Halloween continued to live.

[Sarah Marshall]

Whose motion was it?

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Was it the Truman's?

[Sarah Marshall]

Okay, wow.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

All the way to the top.

[Sarah Marshall]

They're like, the war on Halloween has to wait. There's a bigger war afoot.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yes, exactly. So with the government failing them, as usual, it was up to suburban parents to take matters into their own hands. The most terrifying thing of all, a suburban mob. So they kind of took Youth Honor Day. They tried to implement that in these smaller communities. For example, Ocala, I think it's pronounced sorry if it's something else. In Florida, their chapter of the Moose Lodge, through a big youth honor party, which was complete with a king and queen of youth honor and a little parade in honor of their honor.

[Sarah Marshall]

I appreciate what they're doing because youth honor is the worst, just the dorkiest thing to call something they have to know they can't. Come on.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

It just seems like you're asking for the teenagers with less than adequate supervision to burn down your Moose Lodge.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yes.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

And, yeah, I mean, there were dorks out there that were like, I like Youth Honor Day. But for the most part, you know, teenagers were not about to trade Halloween for Youth Honor Day.

[Sarah Marshall]

You know, fair enough.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Fair enough.

[Sarah Marshall]

Teenagers are hard to trick.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

They are. But the suburban parents were like, time to use reverse psychology to trick these kids.

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

So they were like, look, we know youth on her day is not working, so we're going to need to create a milder Halloween. We're going to have to, like, beat them at their own game. Right. So each house started decorating their basement in different spooky themes. So every, like, participating house on the block would have a basement for these teens to kind of hop to one by one and get, like, a spooky, creepy experience, which I think sounds so awesome. Can you imagine if we did that? They'd never let us now, but so.

[Sarah Marshall]

It'S kind of like everybody lends one room of their house to be a haunted house. And you, like. It's. It's communist, Chelsea. We could never do it today.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

And yet it was kind of a conservative movement, you know, I mean, I can't say conservative. I don't say conservative. Like, conservative versus liberal. But, like, it was, you know, it was like a way to try to control an unruly counterculture.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah, totally. And, you know, better than Youth Honor Day because it's like, yeah, it Feels like they're like, okay, we get what you want. You want to be scared, and we want you to be scared. We just don't want to also be scared for our lives.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yes, yes, exactly, exactly.

[Sarah Marshall]

But it's. It's like recognizing the holidays about fear and, like, finding a way to make it a soft play area, it seems like.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Precisely. So here's like, an example, which I love, of a few sentences from an instructional party pamphlet that was passed around between parents as a way to create kind of like a frightening experience on a budget. So, quote, hang old furs, strips of raw liver on walls.

[Sarah Marshall]

Regular old household furs, I guess.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

So where one feels his way to dark steps. Weird moans and howls come from dark corners. Damp sponges and hairnets hang from the ceiling to touch his face. A guard dressed as a dog suddenly jumps out at him, barking and growling.

[Sarah Marshall]

First of all, huge waste of liver. My God.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

My God. I know liver's hard to come by.

[Sarah Marshall]

Well, I guess liver is relatively cheap, but if you maybe. I don't know. But, like, it's. I do love that they were like, we gotta tone it down. We gotta start nailing meat to our walls.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

God, I have, like, this just like, very vivid and lovely comforting memory of being a kid and going to this haunted house that, you know, had the classic, like, put your hand in here and it's spaghetti, but it's intestines. And, like, put your hand in here and it's grapes, but it's really eyeballs. And like, it's just, you know, there's something about that that although I don't, you know, support the liver industry, I think it is, like, cool that there was this, like, DIY haunted house industry that was happening that would then kind of transform into what we know today.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah, I think it's nice whenever people cooperate to do something together, you know, it's. It's great. Like, we always need more of it. I think.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

I agree. And, you know, I don't know exactly what it was, if it was just these, like, little parties or what, but the pranks got, you know, the pranks got much, much tamer, and Halloween became more of this, like, parent sanctioned evening.

[Sarah Marshall]

Do you think adults ruined Halloween by, like, taking over it? I mean, I mean, not ruined it, but, like, ruined it for scary teenagers.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

I mean, yeah, I think they ruined it for teenagers that wanted to, like, throw a dummy on a car. But I think naturally this type of behavior started to wane in, like, the 50s and 60s because we had a much more like, G golly scenario happening. And, you know, I mean, it's not like the pranks died out, because it's like. I remember TPing, I was trying to teepee the house of, like, this really mean girl, and we couldn't get to her house because she was, like, mega rich and had this giant fence around her house. So we just TP this tree outside of the fence. I don't even know if it would have, like, registered as her tree, you know, but it's like we were still doing pranks, like, in the 90s. I mean, I guess this was even the early 2000s, and they're still happening now. Yeah, they kind of happen at least a little bit. So, like, this spirit. I mean, I can't say now because everything is so weird now, but, you know, through the 90s and 2000s, we still had. There were eggings. There was the, like, trick if you don't give the treat. Although I always feel like that. Didn't I never remember someone being like, oh, you didn't. You don't have candy. Well, I'm gonna egg your house. It felt more targeted than that about who was getting egged.

[Sarah Marshall]

But, you know, what occurs to me, too, is that there is, like, such a thing, you know, for Americans of, like, when are kids too old to trick or treat? Right?

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah, that's a great point. And I will say, like, two Halloweens ago, we were living in a house where we would get, like, five trick or treaters a night, you know, like, very few. And the last two of the night knocked on our door. It's like 9:30, which is like a jarring time to have someone trick or treat at your house when it's all children. And I opened the door, and it was like these two people who, I swear to you, I think were 19, and they just looked at me and opened their backpacks. Did not. Did not say trick or treat. And I just was like, here you go.

[Sarah Marshall]

I have never gotten trick or treaters. I don't think I've ever lived in a place as an adult where I've gotten trick or treaters. You know, these, I don't know, holidays sort of, like, shift around and sort of, I guess, find the thing that they need to be for the community or the culture that's having them based on what else is going on. But it feels like this is, you know, the holiday season, right? Because summer ends and it's back to school, and then we have, like, you know, it's like this luge that goes from Halloween to Thanksgiving to Christmas to New Year's, and then we just kind of. And then the holidays abandon us, and we have three more months of winter to get through somehow. Because I think we should space everything out more is what I think. But what purpose do you think, you know, the way we do. I'll throw Thanksgiving in there, too. You can take it or leave it. But the sort of. The Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas thing in modern America, what's it about?

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

I mean, I would think that it's just ancient parties about the harvest and the darkness and rituals to, like, pray to the Sun God to return. Right. Or, like, pray that the crops take us through the winter. Or, like. I think it all has to do with, like, the dying of the light again. Like the, like, rage.

[Sarah Marshall]

Rage against the dying of the light.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah. And that's Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, I guess. I mean, you know, that's what just comes to mind. And you just don't need parties as much in the summer, or let's say an excuse to, like, community party.

[Sarah Marshall]

People don't need to be forced to have parties. Yes, People just have parties all on their own.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

That's what. Yeah, so I think that's. I think it's like, all harvest, all the time is what our holidays kind of all go back to.

[Sarah Marshall]

That's interesting. Yeah. And then, of course, we have. Well, we have Black Friday, and that's one of our harvest.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah, absolutely. Yes.

[Sarah Marshall]

And then we see who will have to keep his appointment with the Wicker Man.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

There probably is some, like, crazy pagan equivalent to Black Friday that I'll stumble upon one day and be telling you on this very podcast.

[Sarah Marshall]

Right.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

So now we're in 1969. Are you ready to come back along with me?

[Sarah Marshall]

I'm ready.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Walt Disney opens the Haunted Mansion in Disneyland, which was modeled after the dark rides of carnivals that had been around since the 1800s.

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh, yeah, right. And for people who don't know, a dark ride is just like, A, it's literally dark, but, B, it's like the ride can control the lighting. So what you see is controlled because it's a totally artificial environment.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

And also, it is generally like you are in some sort of cart or boat. You know, you're not walking through it as much.

[Sarah Marshall]

Right.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

In some kind of a seat.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

So that kind of, like, spiritual sparked this haunted house revolution in America. So we had kind of the combination of these cute neighborhood haunts and the idea that they could be bigger and that they could be independent of this neighborhood structure. So the first haunted houses as we know them today were created for charity by the United States Junior Chamber, also known as the jcs, which I believe are still around today.

[Sarah Marshall]

I don't know. I have some of their old cookbooks, so. Thank you.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

You would. So they were like a nonprofit personal development business leadership club. And they also did community service and let me give you a list. This is a total aside of former members of the jcs. Are you ready?

[Sarah Marshall]

I'm ready. Tipper Gore.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Close. Al Gore is on the list. Bill Clinton, Elvis Presley, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Howard Hughes, Charles Lindbergh. Al Gore, Bill Gates, Larry Bird, and of course, Sarah. Serial killers John Wayne Gacy and Edmund Kemper.

[Sarah Marshall]

Edmund Kemper, Yeah. You just don't think of him as being one of the more civically oriented serial killers, you know?

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

No, I wouldn't have accepted, expected him. John Wayne Gacy. I feel like that's on brand.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah, yeah. Very into charity work, as we know.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

So they would just take over a location, often a park field, sometimes even an abandoned building. And they would transform them and create their own original sets and their own practical effects. And they'd use makeup and costuming to transform their volunteers into monsters, ghouls, devils, witches, all the scary stuff. But they removed the element of the vehicle that you have in dark rides. So patrons just started walking through these buildings that were turned into haunted houses.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah. Wow.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah. And so these were like all over the country. It was very popular. It was like the JCS did this every year and it was kind of like part of the Halloween culture. Like, you'd be like, we're going to the JC haunt this year and you can still see that. I mean, my favorite haunted house in all of Washington state, and believe me, I've been to most of them, is run by the Shriners at a golf course outside of shoreline Washington called the Nile. And I highly recommend going there. It's like a series of buildings so you like also walk through the woods. And each building has its own, like, creepy theme. It's great. So the charity haunts kind of. By the 70s, famously a more transgressive decade started to lose their edge.

[Sarah Marshall]

Okay.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

And this 24 year old school teacher and former theater kid and absolute icon from Maryland named Itzy Atkins was like, I can do better than this. And he was like, I can go harder than this.

[Sarah Marshall]

I love it.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

He was like, let's go. I need a location. We're going to do this. I need something sick and cheap. So he found an abandoned nunnery in the small rural town of Ridge, Maryland.

[Sarah Marshall]

Nice.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

It was crumbling it was, like, molding and, like, dank and dark and obviously, like, dangerous, most likely. But it was the 70s, so you could just kind of do whatever you wanted.

[Sarah Marshall]

Nothing like an abandoned nunnery.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Then he teamed up with this other haunted house aficionado named Skip Smith. So now we have Itsy and Skip.

[Sarah Marshall]

Itsy. Skipsy. Yeah.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

So they got their funding from the county after they agreed for their first year to have all the proceeds go to the parks department. And that's when they named their haunted house. The best name for a haunted house I've ever heard. Ooh, Blood Manor.

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh, yeah. What? As an aficionado.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yes.

[Sarah Marshall]

How do I make a good, scary haunted house? The way Chelsea Weber Smith, who has been to dozens, if not hundreds of haunted houses, would recommend. What's a good haunted house involve detail.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

It's all about the detail, because it's real easy to throw up some, like, black fabric on some plywood walls and, like, put a teenager in a mask around every corner. But, like, you have to get the ambiance. You have to go into a room. You have to. You have to build your set. You know, you have to, like, spend the time, and it makes a huge difference. And you just have to get the detail, and you have to just really try. And if you try, I think that you'll get there. A lot of people don't want to try in this world.

[Sarah Marshall]

I know there's no substitute for trying. Yeah.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

No one wants to work anymore.

[Sarah Marshall]

And there is, like, I think that the screaming is really important, you know, Like, I think we all need to scream in October.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

I can't help it. Another good valve. Pressure valve is the scream.

[Sarah Marshall]

Right. If you're screaming on purpose, which I sometimes do, if I want to make people feel good and not make them think they didn't. Didn't scare me, then I'll do a courtesy scream. But, like. Yeah, like a real scream. I don't want to hurt their feelings. No, But a real scream that just, like, rips out of you is, like. It feels like it's scooping up, like, tension that you've been storing up for, like, weeks to months and just, like, I don't know, lifting it out of you somehow.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yes, definitely.

[Sarah Marshall]

So the modern haunted house is underway.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah, it's, like, fully underway. And, you know, this is, like, the first time where it was, like, a test of endurance to get through it. Right. Where it's like, you know, it was like a test of courage.

[Sarah Marshall]

We've come back around to where we started. Right. It's like it became this tame thing for the kids and now it's like, can you handle Halloween?

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yes, exactly. And you know, they would like have all of this theatrical gore because of course these were like theater kids. So they were, you know, they knew how to, how to set a scene.

[Sarah Marshall]

Ipsy and Flipsy. Yeah.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Really, they invented like the classics, like the operating table room where the like blood covered surgeon is working on a dummy, you know, and.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah, that is a classic.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

And they also are the ones that invented the chainsaw in the haunted house. So that's been since the very beginning. And he just took the chain off and still used the gas powered chainsaw, which they don't do anymore, which is a huge mistake because you don't smell the gas fumes. That's like electric. You need to smell the gas fumes. And they would even put fake blood into the oil tank that would like spray everywhere while they were running with the chainsaw.

[Sarah Marshall]

That's great.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yep. And it would eventually be dubbed by a British tabloid the sickest show in America.

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh, come on. It was.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Which it was.

[Sarah Marshall]

I don't know. Well, you're using sick in a complimentary way.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

But I will say that they did a couple things that were maybe a bit. Bit problematic in that they had a Son of Sam storyline.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Coming out Sarah. Before he was even caught. So it's like if you remember the Son of Sam murders, it was like, you know, it was like a panic.

[Sarah Marshall]

Like 13 months I think. Yeah. Of people not knowing. Yeah. Or knowing that there was. That there was a. Yeah. A killer at large but not knowing who it was.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

But then they also. Which I feel is a little more sensitive to your show, they did a whole scene of the South American rugby players of Flight 571 eating each other.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah. And also it's like, look, I wouldn't do that. You wouldn't do that. If we walked into a haunted house where they were doing that, we'd be like, ooh. But like, I also, I don't want to be like a total marm and act like that isn't the kind of thing a 24 year old, kind of subversive like horror industry type theater kid would do. You know, where it's like, it's like, oh, it's callous. But like that's also. I don't want to like too roundly condemn the way that people, you know, sometimes process scary stuff callously, especially when it's still going on. Yeah. It would really put a dent in my haunted house enjoyment. But I also. I'm not under the illusion that everyone throughout history has always been particularly mature.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

No, I mean, Halloween is probably our most transgressive holiday. You know, I once dressed up as gay L. Ron Hubbard. That could arguably be construed as offensive, perhaps in poor taste, but I think I looked pretty good.

[Sarah Marshall]

But. Right. So it's. It's kind of. We're coming back around to, like, anything goes. It seems like.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yes. Because it's the 70s, and anything kind of did go. So Blood Manor was doing great, but then, you know, places like Knott's Berry Farm started doing Knott's Scary Farm, and the indie haunts started to kind of face trouble, especially when. And I don't know if you've ever talked about this on the show or know about it, but at a New Jersey Six Flags haunted house called the haunted castle, 29 people got trapped inside a haunt, this haunt that caught on fire, and eight teenagers died in the fire. And so that made, like, lawmakers all over the country create these, like, very intense safety laws, building codes, all of that type of stuff for commercial and charity haunts, which just meant that it was much more expensive and much harder to have that kind of haunted house. And business kind of started to win out.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah. Which is good for the health of the teenagers, but sure.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah. Good to have codes, bad to ruin charity haunts.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

So now we're moving into, like, a very important time in Halloween history and kind of what we could say killed Halloween as we know it, though of course, it continued on, but never with the same vibe that it had in the 1970s. And that was the poison Halloween candy incident from 1974. Have you talked about this on the show? What do you know about this, Sarah?

[Sarah Marshall]

So we talked, I think, in our first ever Halloween episode, when Mike and I, the year we started the show in 2018, I think we did, like, an urban legend, the Spectacular, where one of the things we talked about was, I think the myth we were trying to get behind was the razor blade and the apple, which I know is, you know, that's your show iconography or some of it. And one of the things we talked about was basically, yeah, the sort of the fear of tampered with candy taking over and being connected to kind of, I think, like a typical thing that happens when there's a panic where it's connected to some actual incident that isn't the thing people are saying is happening everywhere now, but is sort of close enough that you can see how people got there.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Exactly.

[Sarah Marshall]

And what you're talking about is what I think it is, that it's a case where a child did consume poisoned Halloween candy but didn't get it from a stranger.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

That's right. That's exactly right, yeah.

[Sarah Marshall]

And tell us what happened.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Okay, so on Halloween night in 1974, so happening kind of concurrently with the rise of blood Manor, an eight year old boy named Timothy O'Brien was looking at all of the candy that he had accrued while trick or treating.

[Sarah Marshall]

Very relatable. This is my main Halloween memory. Spreading out the candy and counting the candy and thinking about the candy. Yeah.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Sorting the candy. Yes, yes. But on this day, his father, Ronald O'Brien, let Timothy have one piece of candy. He was like, you're gonna have one piece of candy tonight. And he let him have one of those giant pixie sticks, 21 inches long. You remember those?

[Sarah Marshall]

I think so, yeah.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

His dad helped him get it open. It appeared to have been like stapled shut, which was weird. But it was the 70s, so it was kind of like people were still handing out, as you said, like in the beginning, popcorn balls, apples, you know, caramelized apples, whatever. Like it was very, you know, you could get candy because they'd started obviously manufacturing candy, but it was still totally okay to pass out unwrapped candy to kids or unwrapped treats, toothbrushes, if you're a monster, but. Or a dentist.

[Sarah Marshall]

It still happens. But, yeah, it used to be normal and now it's the kind of thing that, you know, if I were handing out homemade treats to kids in my neighborhood, I would just sit down and wait for the police to show up.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

You know, I was going to say you'd be arrested on site. Yeah.

[Sarah Marshall]

You just look at your watch and you wait for them to come take you away. Yeah.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yep, yep. So Timothy, like, started to eat it and complained that it tasted bitter. And his father got him a glass of Kool Aid and he drank it. He climbed into bed, closed his eyes, and an hour later, Timothy O'Brien died. Very, very sad.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

So they took him to the hospital, you know, and they took him in to see what could have possibly happened. And they realized because they could smell almonds coming from his mouth, that he'd been killed by cyanide.

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh, my God.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yes, Yes.

[Sarah Marshall]

I don't want to harp on this, but that's if you want to. If there are less cruel poisons to use on people.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah.

[Sarah Marshall]

Ideally, don't poison anybody at all. It's never a good idea, but it's. That's really horrifying.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

I know. It's really horrifying. You know, the father, Ronald, told the police, like, hey, the only thing my kid ate was this pixie stick. And sure enough, they tested the pixie stick, and there was cyanide in it. And as soon as the community learned about this and the cops kind of announced what was going on, there was, like, a huge panic, which makes perfect sense because nobody knew what was going on. And parents just started to think, well, if this happened to Timothy, it could definitely happen to my kid. And so, of course, all the candy was taken away, and it just continued on. And the news was reporting on this, and it was a huge story, of course, like, a massive story.

[Sarah Marshall]

Where was this?

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

It was in Deer Park, Texas.

[Sarah Marshall]

Okay.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

At this point, the story was that someone in the community had given him this poisoned Halloween candy. Right. However, from the very beginning, authorities were suspicious of Ronald, first of all, because he was just acting really weird. He was raging at his family members because he was going to perform an original song on TV about Jesus taking his son home. And he. He seemed to care more about that than, you know, the death of his son. And he refused to look at his son during the funeral and just was kind of acting, like, very aloof about the whole thing.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah. And this one is interesting, too, right? Because it's like, people respond weirdly to grief. And, like, often you look at cases of people who were wrongly accused of something, and, you know, it comes up that, like, they didn't grieve. Right. You know, and yet, at the same time, like, sometimes someone is just behaving really weirdly, and you're like, hey, yeah, but that is weird, though.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

It's weird. It's weird.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

So the police, you know, we're still gonna check out his story, which was that he got this pixie stick from a particular house, but that he could not remember which house she. And this is a perfect example for kind of what Ronald O'Brien was doing with the police, because they were driving around in circles. He kept being like, one more block, and I'll remember the house. Right.

[Sarah Marshall]

Never do this if you're caught in an elaborate lie.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

No, never. And in the Casey Anthony case, who Casey Anthony was accused of and likely did kill her own daughter, Kaylee.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah. And she was acquitted. And it was, I think, the most outraged people had felt over an acquittal since O.J. simpson.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Definitely.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Easy, easy. I think. Yeah. But when her lies were kind of unwinding. But at one point, the cops were like, okay, we need to come to your work, and we need to start doing interviews with people that you work with. And so she had told them that she worked at Universal Studios, and so they were like, okay, well, take us to your office. So they went to this office building that was a Universal Studios office. She walked in, and they walked right past the desk, and they were all like, what's going on? You know, there's just this woman leading a bunch of cops, and they go down this long hall of offices, and she keeps just being like, it's right up here. Oh, it's just around this corner. We're almost there. And then at the end, she got to the dead end of the hallway, turned around and looked at the cops and said, I don't really work here.

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh, God.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

I just think about it so much.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

It encapsulates something that people really do, and a thing that just happens a lot where you're like, I'm.

[Sarah Marshall]

I can make it. I can make it.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

I can make it. I can make it.

[Sarah Marshall]

I can't make it.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Wild. Like, what was she thinking? Did she just think, there will be an office? There'll be an office. Like, of course there'll be one.

[Sarah Marshall]

Right. Like, there were just. At a certain point, there would be an office with no name plate on it. Or we could just say kca. And she'd be like, well, there it is. Kca. I know. Which.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah.

[Sarah Marshall]

Pan out. Yeah. I think it's like. I mean, these are. You know, these two cases are like. These involve the horrible death of a child. These are two of the worst things we can imagine. And I think finding, like, the ability to just sort of, like, lightly make fun of somebody at the center of it just feels like a little security blanket against the cold.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah. And make fun of the perpetrator, the alleged perpetrator.

[Sarah Marshall]

Chelsea, we don't want to get sued, but, you know.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah. No, allege.

[Sarah Marshall]

Allegedly.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

So back to the proto Casey Anthony, Ronald O'Brien. He was driving around with these cops, and they just started being like, where's the house? And he. You know, the pressure was kind of on him. So eventually he just, like, saw a house.

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh, my God.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

It was like, you know, a house that conveniently had no porch light. It was just dark. And he was like, there it is, boys.

[Sarah Marshall]

There it is. Yeah, it's Burt Harpinson.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yes, exactly.

[Sarah Marshall]

It's Art Core Valet.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Art Porgensen.

[Sarah Marshall]

Art Corvalet.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah, exactly. Then he told them the story that he had told them a bunch of times. He'd been out Trick or treating with his two kids and his friend and his friend's son. They had knocked on this door. No one answered. And the others continued down the block with Ronald and his son Timothy trailing behind. So conveniently, no witnesses. So then only Ronald noticed, and I just cannot believe this story. He says that he noticed and heard the door creak open, just barely. And then from inside the dark house, a single hairy arm just, like, stuck its way through the door with a fistful of pixie sticks.

[Sarah Marshall]

That is insultingly bad lying and also bad parenting, if that's the story you wanna tell.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah. And so he, like, grabbed the pixie sticks, and then, you know, the man's arm just, like, went back in. The door closed, and he was like, I never saw his face.

[Sarah Marshall]

Got my candy from the scary arm, like we do every year.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Stunningly stupid. And of course, the cops were like, no, that didn't.

[Sarah Marshall]

They were like, well, chief, case closed. Yeah, it looks like it's another case of the scary armed man, you know? Yeah, it happens every year. Yeah. It's nice when there's a case where like, yeah, the police involved are just, like, absolutely not about an obvious lie. It's very. It's fun to observe from time to time.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yes, it is nice when that sometimes happens. But they also became pretty sure that he was guilty when not only did they figure out that this man who lived at this house had been at work with 200 people vouching for him being there, but they. The cops figured out that Ronald had taken out insurance policies on all of his kids, and it totaled around 100 grand. And in the 70s, I don't know what that is, but it's more.

[Sarah Marshall]

What kind of earning potential does a child have that you can take out that size of a policy on them?

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

I know. I was thinking that as well. It's very. It's odd.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Even to just really top off how twisted this guy was, he had also given another poison pixie stick to his friend's son to try to cover his tracks.

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh, is he going to accuse the friend or is he going to say, look, we both got hit by the hairy arm killer?

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

I think he was going to say the second one.

[Sarah Marshall]

Okay.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

But I don't know if we really know that. But yes, it was trying to basically be like both of these kids were poisoned by some random poisoner.

[Sarah Marshall]

And was that afterwards or was it simultaneously?

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

It was simultaneously.

[Sarah Marshall]

It was. Oh, God. I mean, not that one is better than the other, but.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

No, but it's so premeditated. And, I mean, obviously, but it's just so, like, he really thought it through. But luckily the parents heard about what happened and they had not given that piece of candy to the child, so he was okay.

[Sarah Marshall]

Can you imagine? Like, you have, like, the bucket is on top of the fridge or wherever you keep it, and it's like sitting there like a time bomb waiting to be consumed. And it's just like, mere luck that has kept that from happening.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

So lots of evidence obviously had piled up against Ronald O'Brien, who would go on to be known as the Candyman.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah, he's yet another one of our mastermind criminals who only got as far as thinking things through without any consideration for human life or, you know, love or anything, but then was a complete fucking idiot once the chips were down. Which is, yes, really a very common type, as far as I can tell.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah. Much more common than the mastermind serial killer. Yeah.

[Sarah Marshall]

And once again, I would like to put forth that an inability to value human life does not make a person smarter, it makes them stupider. And clearly sometimes very bad at lying.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

He eventually died by electric chair 10 years after the trial.

[Sarah Marshall]

Oh, wow.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

And this was like a massive story, right? It was huge, yes. What happened with this, right, is up to this very day. I mean, just last year we had a massive, like, drugs in candy scare. I think it was Mexican gangs are putting fentanyl in candy. Right. The point of the story, the fact that it was not a random poisoner, it was someone intimately connected to the person who died as well as the person who almost died. That part of the story was, of course, totally forgotten in the sensationalism of everything. And I just think over time, I don't know exactly how it happened, but over time it just became like, this happens. Like this is a common occurrence every year. I mean, you remember this from childhood. It was like your parents had to look at all your candy. They used to take it to get X rayed. That was a whole thing because it was like razor blades and nails and all this stuff was supposed to be in candy. And, you know, I mean, it's by and large an urban legend to this day. Like, it. There are not instances of anyone dying from a random psychopath.

[Sarah Marshall]

And every so often there is, you know, like somebody finds like a pin or something. But it seems often to be like, you know, somebody pretends to have found something because it's like kind of a cultural meme.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Exactly. Yeah.

[Sarah Marshall]

But then also, yeah. The sort of other aspects of ostension where it's like, it's something that is on people's minds so much that any indication of the possibility of candy being tampered with in any way is sort of. People are ready to, you know, if they see anything slightly out of order to assume the worst. Basically.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah. You know, I think that that mixed with this story of the Candyman. Yeah. They, like, melded into this tale, you know, and then you've got the 80s, we've got the satanic panic, we've got all of this dangerous. These dangerous Satanists that are coming after your kid. But where are they? I don't know. I can't find them. But they're out there. It's kind of the same thing. It's like, right, Halloween got into this time of urban legend and moral panic, and it really became. And why wouldn't it? Right. It's like the night of darkness and death and the night when kids dress up like devils and witches and all that kind of stuff. Like, it makes sense that that was the time where the idea of Halloween became even more dangerous. And, you know, that's kind of, I think, where we kind of enter the picture in the 90s as kids. And, you know, we're door to door, we're with our parents, our candy's being checked. Everything is, like, safe when you're, you know, a child. And it just became kind of the Halloween that we know today. But not really, because, of course, talking about what Halloween has become in the digital age as a whole other conversation.

[Sarah Marshall]

Right. And I do not claim to have my finger on what Halloween is now, but it seems to involve a lot of trunk or treat.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yes.

[Sarah Marshall]

And a lot of doing stuff, like, not on the night, but on, like, the observed night of Halloween on, like, a weekend night. And doing stuff in broad daylight.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah.

[Sarah Marshall]

People should feel secure that their kids are safe. And we don't live in a world that makes it easy to feel that way. But, like, yeah, I do want kids to be out in the dark, you know, doing things that will inconvenience me.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

You know, it's their right. And our inheritance.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah. I would like it if they didn't throw rocks at me. But, you know, they could throw a small rock every now and then. I probably deserve it.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yeah. They can hit my house with one egg.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah. One egg.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

That's it.

[Sarah Marshall]

I mean, in this economy, that's all they can afford.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Although, don't waste eggs, people.

[Sarah Marshall]

Okay. What should we throw at people's houses? Kale? No, that's a food, technically. Junk mail. Balls of wadded up junk mail. Yeah.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Okay. All right. Okay. I feel like that's okay.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

So I think today the story of Halloween is a story of a battle between kids and adults between like violence and over the top boring, childlike fun, quote unquote. You know, it's like, it seems like it's always been this attempt to find a balance between transgression and kind of like a regular old boring day. And finding a way to like let kids have these experiences but still do it in a way that is parent sanctioned and safe. And, you know, I don't. I don't have an opinion on how Halloween should or should not be. I just know that I fucking love Halloween and I'm so happy to be here to talk to you about Halloween and to, you know, spread the real history of what a journey Halloween has really gone on.

[Sarah Marshall]

Well, yeah. And also Halloween is like what we make of it. And I love getting to celebrate it with you and to do, you know, a Halloween episode with you and to just, yeah. Think about fear and think about what we need to sort of have a healthy culture and to sort of feel safe. The ways of pretending to be in danger that help us feel safer in my ideal society, and I think in a healthy society, children know they are safe and therefore get to be scared.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Yes, that's the dream.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah. Well, Kelsey, as always, it has been so wonderful to trick or treat around the block with you. And I think and by now we people know we have a holiday show coming up.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Oh, yeah, we do.

[Sarah Marshall]

We have a Christmas and New Year's winter solsticey show. But it's also, it's very Halloweeny. We're, I think, keeping the sort of wassail spirit of Christmas as a very close cousin to Halloween. And I'm so excited to get to do that with you again. This December and January, we're going to be up there in Portland, Seattle, San Francisco and la. And yes, other cities are important, but we will be too tired to go to them.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

And we hope to bring it to your town someday soon.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

And this will be our massive seance experience.

[Sarah Marshall]

Chelsea, just thank you so much for everything and thank you for being my friend and. Oh, it is an honor the honore. We got to share it. I guess we trade it back and forth.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

The youth honor is all mine.

[Sarah Marshall]

Yeah. And you make a show called American Hysteria. It's wonderful. It's amazing. It's. You're the Rod Serling of our times.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Wow.

[Sarah Marshall]

And what should people listen to? Throw us out some topics because I think it's you know, even if people know generally what it's about. What's some stuff that you've done lately?

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Well, skippity toilet, of course.

[Sarah Marshall]

Of course. Yeah.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

Our Halloween special is Buried Alive. That'll come out pretty close to Halloween. But, yeah, we've done killer clowns, as you mentioned. I'm just gonna name some good Halloween topics. Last year, we did an episode called the 12 Foot Skeleton. And we did the history of the 12 Foot Skeleton, but also the history of skeletons as decorations in America, which is very fascinating too. We did an episode called Haunted Attractions, which we've talked quite a bit about today. But we have a whole episode that goes into, like, extreme haunted houses as well. If you are interested in something weird, there is a good chance that in the last, I don't know, 200 and something episodes, we may have talked about it. So I always say, just scroll. Just like, just scroll. See what you like.

[Sarah Marshall]

All right, let's go take this egg somewhere.

[Chelsea Weber Smith]

All right. I'll bring my fistful of junk, Ma.

[Sarah Marshall]

And that was our episode. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much to Chelsea Weber Smith for being our guest. And please check out the American Hysteria catalog if you want to learn about haunted attractions, the 12 Foot Skeleton, Haunted dolls, teenage poltergeists, or next week, being buried alive. I personally am very invested in that one. Thank you to Miranda Zickler for editing. And thank you to Carolyn Kendrick for producing and for writing little puns for me to say in the intro. Happy Halloween.