Wait, Is Mischief Night Only A Thing In New Jersey?

As much as social media has connected us with people far outside our communities and expanded the average person’s worldview, some things just don’t seem to make it across state lines. For example, when my friend from Chicago casually said we could go to Jewel for groceries, I, raised in New York and New Jersey, looked at her like she had three heads — which is also how she looked at me when I said that one of my friends worked at Modell’s (RIP) in high school.

Recently, I learned that something much larger than a chain store — something that I thought was a childhood rite of passage — is actually a hyperlocal phenomenon: Mischief Night.

No idea what I’m talking about? Apparently, you aren’t from certain parts of New Jersey and the surrounding tri-state area. I spent most of my childhood in central Jersey, where Mischief Night was what you called the night before Halloween, when brave tweens and teens would go out under the cover of night to egg cars, TP houses, and generally cause, well, mischief. Some towns even set legal curfews for people under 18 to combat the chaos. (I, personally, never partook as my mom kept me inside once the sun went down and treated the night like it was a Purge scenario.)

I always thought this annual tradition for the cool kids was a universal experience, and then the New York Times completely rattled me. In 2013, they created a fascinating American dialect quiz from over 350,000 survey responses. The questions ask how you pronounce certain words and what you call different items or situations. After you’ve answered, you can see who else in the country answered the same way, by location.

When I came across the quiz years later, I was surprised to see that people have other terms for light vandalism on Halloween Eve. For the question, “What do you call the night before Halloween,” the multiple choice options included Trick Night, Cabbage Night (?!?!?), and a slew of other names. Then, I saw the map of where else my answer — the correct one, Mischief Night — was selected:

See that teeny, tiny area of red in central and southern New Jersey? You might have to zoom in. Yes, that is where people also answered Mischief Night. The lighter red and orange show where a few people answered the same thing, only in the immediately surrounding areas of Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut, and Delaware. Indeed, Modell’s (may they rest) had a larger national presence than Mischief Night.

After that shocking discovery, I’d occasionally ask people who didn’t grow up in this area if they’d ever heard of Mischief Night. A few had, but many hadn’t. When I asked the same Chicago-based friend what she calls the night before Halloween, she just said, “October 30th?” So this year, with that sacred, property-damaging night approaching, I decided to poll people one last time, via BDG’s Slack.

The results were very much in line with the New York Times’ map. A few people immediately knew all about it — they were from Connecticut, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. As a kid, one had even enthusiastically participated in Mischief Nights on Long Island (which, spiritually, is New Jersey). Someone else reminded me that the Parks and Recreation episode “Greg Pikitis” is based on the premise, though that takes place on Halloween proper.

Then, of course, some had never heard of such a thing — those from California and Massachusetts. Others still came from places with the same tradition, but had their own names for it: Devil’s Night in Detroit and Connecticut, and Goosey Night right next door in northern Jersey.

Ultimately, I shouldn’t have been surprised that the Garden State is the true home of Mischief Night. It’s a night when young people go out and do obnoxious things for no real reason. What’s more New Jersey than that?