Fires. Tipped over outhouses. Roaming cows. This town battled pranks and changed Halloween.

• Anoka, Minnesota, began its Halloween celebrations in 1920 to curb destructive pranks by local youths.
• The town's civic festivities, including a parade, became a model for other cities to deter vandalism.
• Anoka dubs itself as the Halloween Capital of the World, hosting a monthlong celebration that draws thousands.
• The town's history illustrates Halloween's evolution in the U.S. from a night of mischief to a community-focused holiday.

ANOKA, MN – Anoka’s Halloween tradition began less as a celebration than an intervention.

It was 1919, and the one-time logging town set along the Rum River about 20 miles north of Minneapolis was having a problem. All Hallow’s Eve was more trick than treat. 

For a while, Anokians would wake up the next day to find windows covered in soap. Outhouses set on fire or tipped over. A carriage taken apart and reassembled on a rooftop. But this time, cows were found roaming downtown. Other farm animals were inside a school, eating the math books.

At the time, pranks characterized America’s Halloween celebrations. But they were becoming increasingly destructive. Other towns had even considered banning the holiday altogether.

In Anoka, city leaders decided something had to be done. 

But instead of forbidding it, they took a different tack. In 1920, they organized a night parade as part of civic Halloween celebrations to keep the young troublemakers busy. 

More than a century later, the Minnesota town of 18,000 – which went on to dub itself the “Halloween Capital of the World” – draws tens of thousands of Halloween die-hards and spirited locals alike to a monthlong celebration.

There’s a formal orange-tie ball, a giant pumpkin expo, ghost tours, zombie bar crawls, elaborate decoration contests and parades including Big Parade of Little People in Anoka’s quaint red-brick downtown. 

While its Halloween capital designation may be a matter of dispute when stacked up against heavy hitters with spookier backstories, Anoka’s roots and history help illustrate the unusual path the holiday has taken in the United States as it moved away from pranks and vandalism to become what it is today.

“People live for October in this town,” Rebecca Ebnet-Desens, head of the Anoka County Historical Society, told USA TODAY. "It’s mayhem around here.”

But 105 years ago, the town’s mayhem was more feared than celebrated.

Halloween’s history, from tricks to treats

Halloween is rooted in the ancient Celtic ritual of Samhain, marking the harvest and coming winter – and few know the shortcomings of the cold more than Minnesotans. It was a time when the barriers between the worlds of the living and dead were thought to be at their thinnest.

Along with honoring dead relatives, people told scary stories of malevolent spirits crossing over to kidnap people or set fires to homes, said Lisa Morton, the author of “Trick or Treat: A History of Halloween.” 

Eventually, Celtic traditions melded with All Saints' Day (Alholowmesse in Middle English), and All Hallows' Eve, the night before, became known as Halloween.

Halloween grew in popularity in America during the 1840s with the mass migration of Scottish and Irish immigrants fleeing the potato famine, Morton said. And with them came their love of prank playing, which had once included scaring people by tying a string to a cabbage and pulling it through a field at night, or carving a gourd with a glowing face.

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, the Halloween pranks morphed into tipping over outhouses, leaving manure on doorsteps or using a spool-and-stick “Tick Tack” to make frightening noises on unassuming neighbors' windows. 

In some places, people awoke to find streets blocked with bathtubs and buggies, vegetable gardens uprooted or livestock set free, fueling the nickname “Gate Night.” In one case, teenage boys put a "stuffed body" on railroad tracks, forcing the conductor to stop the train in horror. 

As America grew more urbanized, the options for mayhem at times became more dangerous, such as setting fires or pedestrian tripwires.

In 1918, nine boys were detained in Kansas City, Kansas, for waxing streetcar tracks that caused a crash and injury, The Topeka Capital-Journal reported.

“The pranks started to become really destructive,” Morton said. “Many cities were considering banning the holiday altogether.”

After the cow invasion, Anoka's town leaders had enough, said John Jost, 47, a longtime resident and Halloween enthusiast who helped memorialize the city’s history of the holiday.

“They were taking farmers' cows and putting them inside buildings. And not just tipping over outhouses, but setting stuff on fire. Every year it was progressively getting worse,” he said. “In 1919, they said, ‘This has to stop.’ "

Local businessman George Green is credited with suggesting the idea of a giant celebration of treats and entertainment to curb vandalism in 1920.

“'Why don't we keep them busy with a great big parade?'” he asked, according to Jost. “That's how it started.”

Anoka secures a spot on the U.S. Halloween map

When Halloween rolled around in Anoka in 1920, businesses decorated stores. A parade with bands, confetti and 500 costumed marchers was scheduled for the evening, with participants getting popcorn, candy and peanuts. Later, a big bonfire was set. 

Other events included releasing chickens into a crowd that scrambled to catch them, with winners taking them home, according to one report about the town’s history.

“We don’t know if the chickens enjoyed the sport, but the crowd did,” a 1920 Anoka County Union article declared. 

When the next day dawned, the newspaper reported there had been “nowhere near the usual amount of Hallowe’en depredations.” 

Although Halloween parades had been held elsewhere, such as Scranton, Pennsylvania, and large holiday celebrations were held in places like Newark, New Jersey, Morton said Anoka gets credit for being among the early adopters of big celebrations enacted specifically to foil destructive pranks. 

“And that was a model that did indeed catch on and spread, and it was successful,” Morton said. 

Another early adopter was Independence, Kansas, which set up a celebration in 1919 to battle mischief and called it "Neewollah," Halloween spelled backward.

As Anoka’s celebration continued and grew into the next decade, there were weddings, wrestling and boxing competitions, and an organized pillow fight.

During the Great Depression, people in some U.S. cities pooled their resources and staged house-to-house parties with various treats or homemade attractions such as giving kids a sheet for a costume, setting up haunted basements or handing out a treat or a game.

In conjunction with civic celebrations, it all helped fuel the tradition of kids getting dressed up and going house to house trick-or-treating, Morton said. After World War II, companies began making packaged Halloween candy and costumes, further fueling the participatory tradition we know today.

Nuptials and scrimmages soon turned into telling tales of haunted houses down Anoka's famed Third Avenue; house decorating; football games played in the high school's stadium, affectionately known as "the Pumpkin Bowl"; and having minor celebrities, such as the winner of "The Dating Game" TV show in 1970, ride in parades.

While part of Anoka’s lore around its nickname as the Halloween Capital of the World dates back to the 1930s, it wasn’t until 2003 that a Minnesota congressman declared it so that Anoka was the pinnacle of the coveted, spooky destination.

Anoka draws Halloween fans, families from all over

It was still August this year when Jost put out his neon jack-o-lanterns, plaster gargoyles, spooky flamingos and Halloween banners in his Anoka yard. 

Jost is a banker who – like most residents – grew up marching with his classmates in the Big Parade of Little People and trick-or-treating and then began creating haunted yards when they outgrew the other activities. 

In 2020, he served as chair of the celebration’s 100th anniversary and helped write a book about the history. 

“It's just kind of ingrained into who you are as you grow up in Anoka,” he said. 

"It's like, in your blood," Jost later said as he walked toward the city's iconic pumpkin sculpture resembling the fixture in the 1998 Disney Channel original movie, "Halloweentown."

Except here, its name is "Iron Jack," and it was a gift from city workers who constructed it from recycled iron parts to commemorate the Halloween festivities' 100th anniversary.

"I almost consider Halloween separate from the other holidays as an Anokian," Jost said. "Halloween just is."

Today, the celebration lasts a month. It draws 60,000 people to the main parade alone, he said, and gets people not just from Minneapolis but from other states and countries, including Germany and Brazil.

“We have some hardcore folks who do the circuit,” Ebnet-Desens said, noting a tour of well-known Halloween or haunted destination towns such as Salem, Massachusetts; Savannah, Georgia; and Hell, Michigan.

In Anoka, visitors may stay in a Victorianbed and breakfast, eat at Serum's Good Time Emporium and have drinks at Billy's Bar & Grill, which is located in an 1800s-era building known for its mob connections and rumored ghost visits.

They also come for ghost tours, including a former doctor’s residence-turned-antique store with rocking chairs that rock with no one in them, or a Masonic Hall where the lights turn off and on by themselves. Paranormal fans are also drawn by the history of a former mental institution that once performed lobotomies. It has since been repurposed into housing for veterans experiencing homelessness.

Perhaps, Ebnet-Desens said, Anoka’s embrace of Halloween has helped make ghosts feel welcome here.

'It's always about giving back'

Today the Halloween Capital of the World is known for good ol' family fun. In true "Minnesota nice" fashion, locals won't tell you they are better than other spooky cities, but they will tell you their pride is built on good citizenry.

Lifelong Anokian and Halloween committee member Linda Evavold said the dozens of events they coordinate and plan year-round are meant to bring together and support the community rather than commercialize the holiday.

For Evavold, Halloween in Anoka is "not necessarily just, you know, spooky, which is ghosts and skeletons. It was just more about a celebration in our town and being proud of Anoka."

In the digital, doomscrolling age, when Americans are facing a loneliness epidemic and increased societal division, Evavold said Halloween in Anoka is the time to show up for one another.

Whether that be at bingo nights, around a bonfire or watching little ones march down the street in their costumes. Now more than ever, Evavold said Halloween is about bringing families and youngsters together rather than dispelling trouble that might be brewing.

"It makes us happy that we slow life down for people," she said.

Most of the events are free for attendees – locals or not – and proceeds of Anoka Halloween merchandise go to scholarships across the community. Here, Halloween spirit isn't about wicked tricks, "it's always about giving back," Evavold said.

Pranking has faded in much of the United States

In Anoka and across the United States, serious pranking has faded, Morton said – but it took time in some places. 

“In some areas, the kids did not want to give up their prank playing, so they moved it to the night before. They moved it to Oct. 30, and that became known as Devil's Night,” she said.

In Detroit, people set fires in trash cans or abandoned buildings, leading the city to enact a curfew and fueling neighborhood patrols that in the 1990s helped quelled the problem.

And what about Anoka? Ebnet-Desens said she’s sure some minor pranks still occur. 

But at least for now, the city’s math books remain safe.

Sam Woodward's role is supported by a partnership with Pivotal and Journalism Funding Partners. Funders do not provide editorial input.