If someone published a book explaining that Hallowe’en was a tradition invented by Milton Hersey and the Cadbury people, I’d have been ready to believe. Hey, they started it in time for child me to benefit, so I’m grateful -- whatever the story is.
But this tradition has roots. On Saturday, October 31 back in 1885, the Toronto Globe published a special Hallowe’en story and reported on pranks often committed by rowdy medical students, who went around in a gang, turning off the new gas street lights.
On Hallowe’en 1885, Toronto and the Globe got more than they bargained for. The Monday edition reported breathlessly that police constable Jenkinson, making his rounds at Parliament and Gerrard late that night, had discovered a nude female body hanging from a meat hook outside a butcher shop. “Great ghosts!” the Globe reports him as saying.
The Globe writers, on behalf of Victorian decency, seems to have been genuinely horrified. “Suppose a delicate lady had to pass an exhibition of this kind. The result would have been terrible.” A good deal of disgust was directed toward the Trinity medical students. They denied all culpability, though the body -- and two others found outside the school building -- had indeed been stolen from its morgue.
An assistant at the butcher shop staff and some of his cronies were arrested at the scene. But on November 19, city police magistrate Denison freed them, saying, “I’m afraid we haven’t got the right persons. I wish we had.”
Who perpetrated the Hallowe’en Outrage? asked the Globe.
Just the candy this year, please, just the candy.
