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There was a time when Halloween in Kelowna was filled with so many tricks that a call went out to ban it, along with all the treats that went along with it.

The young people of the city were creating havoc in the streets in the late 50s and one newspaper editor had enough.

“The time has come, we think, to outlaw Hallowe’en,” R.P McClean, the editor of the Kelowna Courier, wrote in a Nov. 5, 1958 editorial. “The time has come to bury deep the ghosts and the goblins and place a couple of tons of cement over the graves.

“This night, conceived as a time for harmless fun, has become a night of terror, of vandalism, of endless destruction and of bodily injuries. Acid thrown into cars, broken car windows, broken house windows, street barriers erected on dark streets, firecrackers thrown at people, fences pulled down, paint thrown on houses – these things are not pranks.”

The trouble started that Halloween after a Kelowna Packers hockey game, leading McLean to conclude it was rowdy teenagers causing all the trouble.

“The police cannot be blamed; they are too few trying to cope with too many over too large an area,” he wrote. “But parents certainly can be blamed. Those parents who allow their teenagers to run wild on this night. They must share the responsibility for the damage. And they must share too the responsibility for the complete outlawing of Hallowe’en, which must come.

“The suggestion, we fully appreciate, will bring howls that the outlawing of Hallowe’en would mean the end of the little tots’ fun, the youngsters who visit from house to house. This may well be, but, regrettable as it would be, it would be much better to deprive the little tots of this little spot of fun than to allow the near young men and women to carry on as they have been.”

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From that, it appears that there had been a history of such vandalism in the city leading up to this tirade in 1958.

City council did not follow McClean’s advice to ban the wearing of costumes on city streets for 12 hours on Oct. 31 and to impose stiff penalties.

Instead, for Halloween 1959, special patrols were brought in to help police, leading to what was reported as one of the quietest Halloweens in Kelowna’s history.

Some postal boxes and two sets of school soccer posts were vandalized and four young men were arrested early the following morning for damaging four paper disposal boxes.

That was followed by an even quieter Halloween 1960.

“Both RCMP and city officials are happy with the peace of the night – usually one of the most hectic on the city’s calendar,” the Courier reported. “As far as the police and the 40 volunteer ‘vigilantes’ who kept up a night-long radio patrol of the area, Hallowe’en 1960 will be remembered as more treat than trick.”

Patrols included the BC Dragoons guarding Glenmore and assisting “in keeping the banshees exorcised as in previous years.”

The following year there were extra patrols of 30 police volunteers as well as members of the Civil Defence, BC Dragoons Militia, city work crews, fire department and Forest Service on car and foot patrols.

“However, despite the vigilance, many of the store windows received a soaping they didn’t ask for and newspaper boxes were uplifted but undamaged,” the Courier reported.

That doesn’t mean that Halloween in Kelowna, Kamloops or the rest of the country has become so tame that precautions are no longer necessary.

Fireworks, for example, are not legal for sale or use in BC except between Oct. 24 and Nov. 1 and can only be set off with permits from local governments, some of which have very strict controls.

They were banned altogether, for example, in Kamloops last year because of drought conditions. Kelowna requires anyone giving fireworks displays to have Fireworks Supervisors and/or Pyrotechnics Certification cards and must be finished by 11 p.m.

And be prepared for stepped-up RCMP patrols this Halloween, even though it is 65 years since McClean called for it to be banned.

“The Kelowna RCMP are always concerned that we will have an increase of activities that negatively affect our community during Halloween so we will ensure there is full deployment of RCMP officers along with a number of supporting cast members to supplement the night,” Const. Mike Della-Paolera, Kelowna RCMP media relations officer, said in an email. “Some of the concerns are fireworks/crackers – the forest are still dry – impairments and mischief.”

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The annual Halloween celebration has come a long way from its origins but treats and costumes continue to this day.

The celebration can be traced back to an ancient Celtic festival from 2,000 years ago called Samhain.

At that time, Nov. 1 marked the first day of winter and a transition from light to dark, according to a Sundance College article called 'The History of Halloween in Canada.'

“According to Celtic tradition, spirits and otherworldly beings were likely to visit on the evening of October 31,” the article says. “To appease these visitors, the living would prepare food offerings and dress up in disguise.”

The tradition included a large communal fire where the bones of sacrificed animals were burned.

The word Halloween is a contraction of “All Hallows Eve,” or the day before All Saint’s Day.

The connection of All Saint’s Day to Halloween is rather complicated and ranges over a couple of centuries.

In 609, Pope Boniface IV established an all martyrs day on May 13, when he dedicated the Pantheon in Rome as a church, according to Britannica.

Pope Gregory III, who reigned from 731 to 741, broadened that to an all martyrs and saints day then moved it to Nov. 1 when he dedicated a chapel in Rome’s St. Peter’s Basilica.

That day was confined to Rome until 837 when Pope Gregory IV extended the celebration to the entire region served by the church.

In England, it became known as All Hallows.

The origin of the term “trick or treat” is unclear, the Sundance College article says. In medieval England and Ireland, people would dress in costumes and collect soul cakes.

According to the National Trust for Scotland, the origins of the activity, if not the name, is a traditional Scottish custom called “guising.”

“Scottish children traditionally donned costumes and pretended to be malicious spirits as they went ‘guising’ around the local streets,” it says. “It was believed that, by disguising themselves, they would blend in with any wandering spirits and remain safe from harm. After performing tricks or songs, guisers were given gifts to help ward off evil – a far cry from some of today’s trick-or-treaters, who get ‘treats’ for simply showing up in costume.’

The Scots also claim title to the tradition of carving pumpkins or, in its case, neeps.

“In true Scottish tradition, scary faces were carved into neeps (turnips) to create lanterns that would scare off ghouls wandering in the witching hours,” the National Trust article says.

That tradition was brought to Canada in the 19th century where the first printed use of “trick or treat” was in an Alberta newspaper in 1927, the Sundance College article says.

“In the early 20th century, Irish and Scottish communities revived the Old World traditions of souling and guising in the United States,” says History.com. “By the 1920s, however, pranks had become the Halloween activity of choice for rowdy young people.

“The Great Depression exacerbated the problem, with Halloween mischief often devolving into vandalism, physical assaults and sporadic acts of violence.”

With sugar rationing during World War II, trick or treating was curtailed but it revived during the post-war boom. That was the time when candy manufactures ramped up production, and advertising, to promote the event.

And, if Kelowna was any example, it was also the time when pranks, vandalism and violence made a big comeback.

The only Canadian city that seems to have actually banned Halloween was Bathurst, NS in 2017.

That was a partial ban, simply preventing anyone older than 16 from trick-or-treating and it imposed an 8 p.m. curfew.

"I wanted to demolish it altogether but I got outvoted," Kim Chamberlain, the deputy mayor of Bathurst at the time, told the CBC. “At least we were able to make some modifications."

An email to the City of Bathurst from iNFOnews.ca, to see if the ban still existed or was enforced, went unanswered.

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