Every October, the streets of Sudbury fill with the same flicker of orange light that’s been glowing for generations. Children still march door to door in costume, pumpkins still sit on steps, and the sharp northern air still smells faintly of wet leaves.
Through more than a century of local stories, the night life of Oct. 31 in the Sudbury area reveals both sides of Halloween’s character: one celebrates creativity, generosity, and community: the parties, parades, candy, and laughter; the other, its restlessness: the pranks, the vandalism, the crimes, and tampered candy.
Together, these elements form a living history of the tricks and the treats across the Nickel Belt.
As we approach All Hallows’ Eve, let’s look back and see how the night has evolved over the last century — spotting the differences, the similarities, and perhaps a few surprises along the way.
The Treats
The earliest newspaper mentions of Halloween in the Sudbury area reach back to the early 20th century, when residents of growing mining towns of Copper Cliff, Coniston, and Sudbury began adopting the holiday in earnest.
In the 1910s and 1920s, the night was less about candy than about community. Social clubs and church groups hosted masquerade dances for adults, while schools held “fancy dress” competitions.
Across the region, costume contests rewarded creativity over store-bought expense: coal dust made an easy face paint, and old work clothes became scarecrow rags.
In Coniston, Miss Ethel Robertson entertained a few friends at a Halloween party. The evening was spent playing games with “dainty refreshments served in the dining room which was gaily decorated in black and yellow.” And, unlike the costume parties that would dominate the latter half of the century, “all came in fancy dress.”
Looking back exactly 100 years to 1925, Halloween in Sudbury was a night where “piles of fun” were in the cards, with both young and old taking part in the revelry. Observers noted,
“Tonight the streets will be filled with masquerading revelers, witches, and goblins, clowns and fairies … Door bells will be rung and horns tooted under unsuspecting windows of those who have forgotten their youth, and strange weird tappings will be heard everywhere. Jack-o-Lanterns with big round eyes and sharp teeth will scare the passerby, or grin with malicious intent.”
For Halloween 1927, bright coloured lights, lively music and fanciful costumes inspired by another age were the cheerful features of a “Confederation Carnival” (celebrating Canada’s 60th Anniversary year). The Copper Cliff Club was draped in traditional orange and black, becoming a living tableau of Canada’s past. Women from the area costumed themselves as Victorian ladies, and mischievous pirates, with Mrs. W. J. Bell capturing first prize as a “Confederation coquette.” Couples who stepped onto the dance floor to test their skill competed for prizes in “old-fashioned barn dance” and “modern dancing.”
By the 1930s, as the Depression tested families across the district, Halloween served as an affordable escape. The town’s first organized parades appeared, often sponsored by merchants who saw an opportunity to brighten spirits and draw crowds downtown. The local newspaper described elaborate displays in shop windows — paper witches, orange streamers, hand-painted signs offering “Hallowe’en Specials.”
Even during hard times, the community gathered in costume, celebrating imagination as a form of resilience against the challenges of the era.
During the war years of the 1940s, Halloween parties carried patriotic overtones. Rationing limited sweets, but children still dressed up, many as soldiers and nurses. Organizations like the Mine Mill union and women’s auxiliaries held annual masquerade costume dances into the late 1940s.
One 1944 account noted that children marched through the downtown in a Halloween parade that ended at the armoury. The night symbolized a brief return to normal life, and even offered the first recorded example of complaints about candy when one child reportedly got three small chocolates while their friend received four.
The post-war boom of the 1950s brought a wave of change to Sudbury’s Halloween. Suburban neighbourhoods sprouted in places like New Sudbury and Minnow Lake, and with them came the modern ritual of door-to-door candy collecting. Candy manufacturers and grocers advertised plentiful varieties of “safe, wrapped treats,” reflecting new expectations of abundance and hygiene.
Local newspapers increasingly ran photos of costumed children proudly displaying pillowcases filled with taffy, apples and chocolate bars. Families decorated porches with store-bought plastic pumpkins and paper skeletons, while the local radio station held contests for “best scream” and “most original costume.”
It was an optimistic era where the “treats” of Halloween mirrored the prosperity of the times. Though some children, it was noted, attempted to return a chocolate bar if they had already received the same one from another house. (Thus began the candy economy of trading and bartering amongst the children.)
By the 1960s, Halloween had become the area’s most eagerly anticipated community event (after Chirtsmas, of course). Schools organized costume parades through gymnasiums and down local streets, and community centres in Garson, Copper Cliff, and Lively hosted family nights featuring games, dancing and prizes donated by local businesses.
Even hospitalized young children received Halloween treats. In 1961, the Brownies from Lively brought toffee apples to the Sudbury-Algoma Sanatorium, while parties were also held in children’s wards at St. Joseph’s, Memorial, and General hospitals.
The 1970s and early 1980s expanded the sense of spectacle. The City Centre and the New Sudbury Shopping Centre held indoor costume contests, providing warm alternatives to October’s chill. Youth groups staged haunted houses in basements and community halls while volunteer firefighters organized safe-walk programs for trick-or-treaters. Churches and schools hosted “Hallowe’en Fun Nights,” complete with apple-on-a-string games and pumpkin-carving contests.
Although the night has, for the most part, been one for children, as the 20th century marched toward its conclusion, adults gradually reclaimed the playfulness of Halloween that existed for them at the beginning of the century. Bars and nightclubs embraced costume parties, hosting themed dances all across the Nickel Belt offering prizes for “most frightening,” “funniest,” and “most creative” outfits.
Couples dressed as movie characters or political figures; miners appeared as ghosts of their own trade, faces powdered with chalk dust. In a 1986 interview, Susan Nunamaker stated that gorilla suits brought the kid out in adults. “It’s the same thing that’s popular every year,” she said, “people line up for our gorillas (and) of course we have none left.”
In 1983, the Bentham family in New Sudbury transformed their driveway into a graveyard complete with crosses, a mummy that could rise from its coffin, and a hangman, while eerie music played throughout the night. Close to 400 children visited, and the family handed out treats and balloons until they ran out at 8 p.m.
By 1986, seniors at Gatchell Pool donned costumes for and bobbed for apples during an aqua-cise class. Civic employees entered pumpkin design contests, with the engineering department crafting a construction worker out of multiple pumpkins, complete with fur hair and drafting tools for facial features, while the city administration department created a “punk” witch in a leather jacket.
Employees at the Toronto-Dominion Bank on Durham Street spent the entire day in costume, including a baby, a devil, a martian, and a little girl. There were reports of some employees being “too convincing,” causing minor office panic when a particularly realistic witch tripped over a copier cord.
Every Halloween, certain neighbourhoods in Sudbury seem to draw the crowds, and in 1994, an estimated 400 children (witches, ghosts, and Power Rangers) descended on Ravina Gardens in Garson, causing “Out of Candy” signs to appear on doors as early as 7:15 p.m. Minnow Lake saw its share of goblins too, as roughly 250 children made their way along Cherrywood Crescent, filling their treat bags to the brim. According to an informal survey the next morning, those two areas had the highest turnout in the city.
Even during cold, windy nights (like the -6°C Halloween of 1996) many Sudbury families still made the effort to go out, though some stayed home due to safety concerns, including a rare report of tampered treats.
Despite these precautions, the tradition of door-to-door fun and community parties continued to thrive in Sudbury neighbourhoods, with many children competing to see who could collect the heaviest pillowcase of candy.
The Tricks
Yet behind every cheerful photograph of costumed children lies another story — the restless, sometimes dangerous energy that Halloween has always invited.
The earliest “tricks” recorded in local papers date to the 1910s, when mischievous youth in Copper Cliff and Sudbury upended outhouses, unhitched horses and moved woodpiles onto roadways.
In 1916, a particularly memorable incident involved four local boys who carried their pranks so far on Halloween night “as to do damage to the entrance to the Public School by removing some brick and stone.” Unfortunately, they found themselves in police court the following morning admitting their guilt and being “allowed to go on suspended sentence upon paying for the damage.”
In 1922, a heavy safe from some adjoining building was dragged outside and left in the middle of Borgia Street by persons unknown. Police called it “rowdyism,” and as the decade progressed, they began deploying extra patrols (as well their “Black Maria” paddy wagon) each Oct. 31 to keep pranks from escalating. Smashed lanterns and soaped windows were considered seasonal nuisances, but the boundary between “harmless fun” and “funless harm” was very thin for the long arm of the law.
From the 1920s into the 1930s, reports mentioning severed clotheslines, the removal of sidewalks planks and gates and the soaping of windows, cited these acts less as vandalism and more as “tradition.”
As written in the newspaper in 1924: “Last night was dark and spooky. The little boys of the town must have been praying for just such a night, for they seemed to expect it and excelled themselves in carrying out the traditional pranks of the evening.”
Due to these incidents, the local newspaper urged parents to “keep youngsters entertained at home” with parties and games instead of letting them “wander the streets.”
By the late 1940s, Halloween mischief had taken on new forms. Eggs became the weapon of choice, and police logged dozens of complaints about broken windows and soiled laundry lines.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the growing popularity of trick-or-treating brought a national concern over safety that reached Sudbury’s streets. Parents were warned about “foreign objects” in candy and about homemade treats from strangers. Though actual incidents were rare, fear spread quickly.
Police inspected apples and caramels, and community centres began offering supervised events as “safe Halloweens.” Local authorities encouraged parents to inspect every item prior to being consumed by their eagerness to offspring.
In 1981, police investigated a disturbing Halloween incident in which three children walking along Highway 69 were accosted by two men in their early twenties. The suspects pulled up in a half-ton truck, accused the children of knocking over mailboxes and ordered them to pick them up. When they obeyed, the men grabbed them — one had his arm twisted while another was punched in the head. The unknown attackers then stole the children’s candy bags and fled the scene.
Sudbury Regional Police, in 1985, were kept busy chasing down an inordinately large amount of mischievous pranks that went a little too far.
One 18-year-old Chelmsford man learned “it’s not easy to take candy from a baby” after he allegedly robbed a seven-year-old girl of her treat bag. The determined youngster refused to let go, was dragged a short distance, and screamed for her mother.
“Before you know it, every parent on the street was chasing him,” said Inspector Bob Cowley. A quick-footed father eventually caught the teen and held him until police arrived. “He admitted it was a stupid thing to do and said his friends had goaded him into it,” Cowley added.
Police also reported another candy-snatching incident in Sudbury, when a 13-year-old girl required two stitches after a boy tried to slice open her bag. Other calls that night included a woman in combat fatigues pointing a plastic machine gun through a restaurant window in the Donovan, though Cowley joked, “We’re not planning to charge Rambo for anything.”
As well, several cases of vandalism involving cars and homes sprayed with gray paint occurred at multiple points across the city. The most serious of which occurred at the National Hotel, where a man who had been at the bar exited to find that his car had been completely painted grey (windows and all).
The following year, a relatively quiet and event-free Halloween was marred when a pin was discovered in trick-or-treater's apple in the New Sudbury area. Sudbury Regional Police Sgt. Cal Smith said at the time that “Woodbine-area parents are being urged to check their children's treats.”
A decade later, on Halloween night in 1996, a family in New Sudbury discovered a two-inch sewing needle hidden inside a box of raisins. “The child was at home, digging out all his candies and opened a box of raisins and found a needle in it,” said Staff Sgt. Rick Bulman of Sudbury Regional Police, at the time, noting that the child was not injured. Aside from this unsettling incident, police reported no other Halloween-related problems.
Even with all of these situations occurring, the only time that Halloween night vandalism sparked debate was in 1984, when, at the Onaping Falls town council, Councillor Germaine Gorham suggested the community may need to “think about banning Halloween” or at least meet with parents “to discuss if they want Halloween.”
In her argument, Gorham described recent incidents of vandalism at the Dowling seniors’ home, saying, “The ladies there worked very hard preparing candy and handed out 160 packages. When we got outside we found obscene things written all over our cars … . Halloween is just not fun anymore.”
But, despite annual worries over the “tricks of Halloween night,” many Sudbury residents looked back on their own youthful mischief with fondness, seeing it as part of the fun. Letters to the editor often expressed nostalgia for “simpler times,” when a soaped window was the worst offence. The balance between fun and fear, between treat and trick, persisted within Sudbury’s Halloween DNA.
Well dear readers, there’s a knock at the door and the witches and goblins are here, not for delicious candy, but for a taste of our history. More than a hundred years after the first pumpkins appeared on porches across the Nickel Belt, Halloween in the Sudbury area still carries the same fun-filled feelings that have encompassed it since the beginning.
The costumes may have changed, the candy multiplied, and the rules of safety have tightened, but the essential spirit — the laughter, the creativity, and even the small rebellions that mark the transition from autumn to winter — endures.
Sudbury’s Halloween, in all its tricks and treats, remains what it has always been: a night where history walks beside us, asking for one more piece of candy before the lights go out.
Happy Halloween….Boo!
Please share your memories and/or photos of Halloween’s Past by emailing them to Jason Marcon at [email protected] or the editor at [email protected].