You may have taken the New York Times American dialect test that periodically makes the rounds on Twitter. It’s paywalled now, but from memory one of the questions was something like:
What do you call the night before Halloween?
Goosey Night
Mischief Night
Devil’s Night
Cabbage Night
I don’t have a name for this.
I ran a Twitter poll asking how many people were familiar with this — the idea that the night before Halloween is a holiday (after a sort) of its own, with its own name — and most were, though many said that they had only heard about it from this specific quiz or from The Crow. I ran another poll asking how many people had actually celebrated, though, and the answer was something like “very few.”
This is not really surprising. I am pretty sure Goosey Night (or whatever you call it) is only really A Thing in Jersey and surrounding states as well as for some reason Chicago and Michigan, where Devil’s Night became a huge problem because people kept setting things on fire. The Brits don’t have it at all, but then they barely have Halloween, so this is to be expected. It is however sad, because Goosey Night rules when you are 15, and I am going to tell you why.
Goosey Night is chiefly about toilet paper. The Wikipedia image for the page wrongfully titled “Mischief Night” illustrates this neatly:
On Goosey Night, your chief objective is to put toilet paper on things. There is a skill to this; you will learn quickly that you must start the paper trailing from the roll before throwing it (but not too much) and how best to lob it over a tree branch or power line so that the trailing end catches and stays. At times you will misjudge and the entire roll will become stuck in the tree. This is to be expected; do not panic. Simple use another roll to dislodge the first.
You will need to plan this in advance, as if you are fortunate enough to live in a region that observes this sacred holiday the stores will probably stop selling toilet paper to anyone under the age of 18 about a week beforehand. They will also not sell you eggs and sometimes shaving cream.
You can, as the above indicates, also throw eggs at things. I would discourage this for reasons both spiritual, which I will detail below, and practical: eggs can damage paint, and the cops may not let you go if they catch you with eggs. At the very least, they will take your eggs. Shaving cream is useful for writing temporary messages on driveways, sidewalks, and stop signs; getting it to stick on a horizontal surface takes some finesse, but I am sure you can pull it off.
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These are your chief weapons, but you must also be constantly on the lookout for new opportunities to cause minor mischief. Are there traffic cones sitting around somewhere? Grab them and put them in the road. Do you see one of those construction site sawhorses? That’s your sawhorse now.
You should also employ some element of strategy in your activities. Hit targets in passing, but pick one or two places to really focus on. A group of 4-5 teenagers working in concert can absolutely saturate a suburban block in toilet paper in about 20 minutes. The resulting effect — a street with hundreds of white streamers dangling from each tree, swaying in the night breeze and lit by the orange glow of the streetlights — is positively magical.
How the police will react to all of this is, from what I understand, heavily area-dependent. Some are proactive in hauling in teens they catch. Others take a laissez-faire approach. These might stop you, but if they find that your bag (which should be black, along with the rest of your clothing; you may also choose to borrow your mom’s mascara and paint black lines under your eyes like a Green Beret or NFL player) contains only toilet paper, they will not take it. They probably will take eggs. Shaving cream operates on a case by case basis. Then they will let you go. Cops in such a town are not to be feared, unless you are in the middle of toilet papering your high school, in which case you must run. Honestly you should run from the cops anyway, just in case and because it’s fun.
I am making a plea: you need to be celebrating Goosey Night.
Well, maybe not you. You are probably in your 20s or above, which is about the age when the cops start frowning more seriously on petty vandalism. But you should, and I am being very serious here, encourage your children to engage in petty vandalism.
Not wanton vandalism, mind. There is a Goosey Night code, or at least there was among my friends and I, because we made it up. Or maybe I did, I don’t remember. It’s this: do nothing that causes actual property damage. This is less a moral principle than a selfish and borderline spiritual one; breaking stuff isn’t fun and violates the Halloween ethos of lighthearted mischief. There is also a social contract at play. Towns with cops who are chill about Goosey Night tend to have generally non-destructive Goosey Nights. Regular incidences of property damage will ensure that the cops stop being chill.
I think the point of Goosey Night is to serve as a safety valve for suburban teens to lightly buck the social order once they become too old to go trick or treating. I went trick or treating until I was 24, though, so I can’t speak to that element.
To close, here are some favorite Goosey Night experiences of mine. I’ve no idea if these will be of interest to anyone, but there’s an odd death of Goosey Night autoethnography online, so I’m making a contribution.
Goosey Night is a PvP enabled zone. On my very first Goosey Night, I was 13 and traveling with a group of friends, one of whom was soaking balls of toilet paper in water from a bottle and whipping them at cars as they drove past. They hit each with a very satisfying sort of flump sound. This happened maybe five or six times until he hit a car full of high school seniors, who slammed on the brakes and chased us down. We fled for a while but then got stuck in some bushes and caught. They did not, fortunately, beat our asses, though they did take all of our toilet paper, forcing us to resupply at another friend’s house.
One wonderful year, Goosey Night coincided with Large Garbage Night. This meant that everyone in town was throwing out furniture. We dragged a couch, a recliner, and an end table into the middle of one road and were in the process of assembling a nice living room setup when a cop car drove down the street, at which point we ran away.
Another year, a friend had somehow gotten a hold of that POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS tape. We tied this across several streets in town before we got caught. The cops fortunately thought this was very funny, though they did take our cool police tape.
A group of seniors once drove around town with a paintball gun and eggs and riddled every group they came across with both, including us, twice. The second time they did it right as the cops came around the corner and we got to witness a very brief police chase.
One night my friend (the water bottle kid) and I found a weird little industrial are behind high fence in a cul-de-sac that we had never seen before and could never find again.
We figured out how to get up on the roof of the high school and mess with all the controls for what I assume was the climate control system and turn on all the roof lights. I then made out with [name redacted] before the cops once again showed up and we had to sort of jump down and run into the woods, where I hid under a log with a kid who later pretended to join the military (like, he bought an army uniform and posted pictures in it on Facebook about it and disappeared for a while to go to “basic training”) for about six months before it came out that he had just made it up.
If you have any Goosey Night stories of you own, please post them in the comments or send them to me on Twitter; I really want to read them.
That’s it. You need to be Gooseymaxxing.
Interesting! We thought everyone celebrated Devil’s Night as we call it in the Midwest. I frankly don’t know anyone who isn’t aware of the night before Halloween and its traditions. Same ones you call out in this piece. Nice post.