Devils night book4/6/2023 ![]() ![]() While some fire-related pranks in the city date back to the 1910s, when Detroit college students started bonfires and then handed cigars to arriving firefighters, pranks increased during the Great Depression. ![]() Roc Canals/Moment via Getty Imagesįor Detroit, Devil’s Night may have come in response to tough economic times. (The most infamous October 30 prank? Likely the Orson Welles 1938 broadcast of War of the Worlds that had some listeners believing an alien invasion was really happening.)įires were a pre-Halloween tradition. In most cases, these activities are done out of amusement or to go against societal taboos, albeit briefly. Depending on the region, it’s taken on various names, from Mischief Night to Cabbage Night-the latter for a child’s habit of plucking cabbage to hurl at houses in rural areas. FirestartersĬelebrating the night preceding Halloween dates back decades. It was neither trick nor treat, but a fiery demonstration the night before Halloween that anxious locals came to refer to as Devil’s Night. Every October 30, hundreds of fires were started in Detroit, a tradition wholly unique to the city. What drew attention from as far away as Japan was something that had become a macabre ritual. Children in the city used binoculars to scan for signs of new infernos firefighters peddled t-shirts with captions like The Heat Is On and Just for the Hell of It even national CBS newscaster Dan Rather mentioned it during the CBS Evening News, noting that “two hundred young people” had already been arrested for fire-related incidents. “People don’t believe there are these fires,” he said. Shigemoto was a producer for Japanese television channel Asahi TV, and it was the second year in a row he had traveled to Detroit. It was almost too much to take in: All around the city, abandoned buildings, cars, and dumpsters were ablaze. It was 1986, and Shigemoto had flown from Japan to Detroit, Michigan, instructing his camera crew to point their lenses toward the flames. Nobi Shigemoto couldn’t quite believe it, and neither could his viewers. ![]()
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