The Scariest Halloween Tradition

And how nobody reads anymore

Slate invited me to revise and extend last year’s newsletter on the history of trunk-or-treating, and you can read the resulting article here. Do you want to learn more about how to track down unwritten histories? Do you want to learn that parents post-9/11 were worried that Halloween would (uh, somehow?) be affected by terrorism? Do you want to know that the origin story for (most of) the stories about how candy was being poisoned by strangers was … a father covering up his poisoning his own son? Read on!

Okay. That’s the promo stuff. You can log off now! What follows is a brief annoyed grunt.

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Let’s take a moment to indulge…me.

People on the Internet are terrible readers. The Internet is good for delivering text and bad for fostering reading — if you read on a computer or phone, you’re literally reading on a distraction engine! That doesn’t help anyone! (I have a Dua Lipa YouTube concert video on in the background while I’m writing this.)

People who comment on the Internet are worse than this. You might think that someone commenting on an article or a post about an article would be more likely than a random user to have read it, but that’s almost certainly untrue. As I write, here are some of the leading comments on the Slate Facebook post about this article:

• Emily H. “Trunk or treats are fun. I'm sorry but it's a lot more safe because there's no risk of cars hitting your kids. Let them have the freedom of the lot, run from place to place, and have a great time.”

• Jo H.T. “This came about because it was considered unsafe to let children trick or treat house-to-house any longer. This is considered a safer alternative.”

• F.J. H. “Love Trunk or Treat activities. It is a fun holiday. Peeps will get upset over anything.”

As you’ll learn when you read the article, the bulk of it is spent establishing that trunk-or-treating emerged in an era when fears over safety emerged—but that those fears were either misguided (stranger danger!) or a moral/orthodox panic (satanists will get your kids, to oversimplify). Instead, I argue—with a lot of a citations—that the real safety issue with Halloween is … traffic. And that trunk-or-treating is enjoyable and safer, at least as long as people build cities (and neighborhoods) for cars, not people.

So, thank you, commenters, for boldly misunderstanding literally everything.

I want to emphasize, as someone who is less Online than Chappell Roan (go offline for your own safety, Chappell!) but more Online than most of you, that this is basically what creating things on the Internet is like now. Comments ruin the experience of everything, not because they’re harsh or unfair (sometimes, but often not), but mostly because you realize that the vast bulk of people able to afford a computer and an Internet connection are seemingly incapable of reading something more complex than a McDonald’s menu. It’s pretty demoralizing to be regularly reminded that we live in a post-text society.