If you grew up in certain parts of New England, the words Cabbage Night may need no explanation at all.
October 30 meant trouble.
Windows might get soaped. Trees might wake up wearing toilet paper. Pumpkins were sometimes smashed, eggs flew, gates wandered away from where their owners had left them, and teenagers suddenly had very important reasons to be out after dark.
But if you grew up somewhere else, the obvious question is probably:
Why on earth was it called Cabbage Night?
The answer turns out to be wonderfully literal.
Cabbage Night was a regional name for a night of pranks and mischief around Halloween. Today it is most often associated with October 30, the night before Halloween, although historically the name was sometimes used for Halloween night itself.
And yes, actual cabbages were involved.
What Is Cabbage Night?
Cabbage Night is one of several regional American names for the traditional night of pre-Halloween mischief.
Depending on where someone grew up, October 30 might instead have been called Mischief Night, Devil’s Night, Gate Night, Goosey Night, Beggar’s Night, Corn Night or simply nothing at all.
Cabbage Night became especially familiar in parts of the Northeast, including New England, New York and New Jersey. The Dictionary of American Regional English records variations including Cabbage Stalk Night and Cabbage Stump Night as well.
The basic idea was much the same regardless of the local name: young people had a semi-traditional night when they were expected to get into a certain amount of mischief.
Exactly how much mischief depended on the place, the decade and apparently how ambitious the local teenagers were.
Later memories include soaped windows, toilet paper, shaving cream, eggs and smashed pumpkins. Older accounts can be considerably more agricultural.
That is where the cabbage comes in.
Why Was It Called Cabbage Night?
Because people really did throw cabbages.
This isn’t one of those holiday explanations where someone centuries later decided the name probably had something to do with a crop.
Newspaper evidence actually puts cabbages in the hands of the pranksters.
The Dictionary of American Regional English has found a remarkably early example from November 1, 1861, in a Trenton, New Jersey newspaper. The paper reported that the previous evening—Halloween—was popularly known locally as Cabbage Night and noted boys going around armed with cabbages.
Other nineteenth-century accounts describe cabbage heads, stalks and stumps being taken from gardens and hurled at houses or doors along with the usual assortment of Halloween troublemaking.
In western Massachusetts, the Berkshire County Eagle complained in 1873 about young men raiding gardens for cabbages, removing gates and generally creating havoc. Later reports from the Berkshires described cabbage debris scattered across sidewalks and yards.
So the name wasn’t merely decorative.
A cabbage could be prank equipment.
And compared with today’s neat little supermarket cabbage, it is worth picturing what might have been lying around a nineteenth-century garden after harvest: tough stalks, damaged heads, leftover leaves and vegetables nobody intended to bring into the kitchen.
Perfect ammunition if you happened to be a bored teenager in late October.
Cabbages Already Had a Strange Connection to Halloween
The pranksters weren’t the only people giving cabbages a rough night.
Cabbages also appeared in older Halloween fortune-telling traditions.
Nineteenth-century American newspapers repeated customs in which young women pulled cabbages or other plants from the ground and examined their roots for clues about a future husband. The National Endowment for the Humanities found newspaper accounts joking about just how often cabbages turned up in Halloween customs.
There were also reports of people pounding on doors with cabbage stalks as part of Halloween mischief.
Does that mean we can trace Cabbage Night neatly back to one ancient cabbage ritual?
No.
And that is where some modern explanations get a little too tidy.
Halloween had a whole collection of old customs involving food, fortune telling, noise, pranks and agricultural leftovers. Cabbages clearly participated in more than one of them. What we can document confidently is that by the nineteenth century American boys really were using cabbages for Halloween mischief—and newspapers were already calling the occasion Cabbage Night.
That is enough without inventing a prettier origin story.
Was Cabbage Night a Vermont Tradition?
Absolutely.
But it wasn’t only a Vermont tradition.
Vermont is one of the places where the name lasted long enough to become part of local memory. People from several parts of the state still recall growing up with Cabbage Night, and Vermont newspapers recorded Halloween mischief going back well into the nineteenth century. A Montpelier account from 1879 described cabbage heads and stumps among the night’s projectiles.
Modern Vermont memories are full of the later version: toilet paper, eggs, soaped windows, smashed pumpkins and teenagers roaming around together on October 30.
But historical evidence also puts Cabbage Night in western Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey and other pockets of the Northeast and Great Lakes region.
That patchy geography explains something that still happens today.
Two people can grow up only a state or two apart and discover as adults that one considers Cabbage Night a perfectly ordinary phrase while the other has absolutely no idea what they are talking about.
Regional language can be funny that way.
Was Cabbage Night Always the Night Before Halloween?
No—and this is another detail that gets flattened in modern summaries.
Today, Cabbage Night usually means October 30.
Historically, however, it could mean Halloween itself.
That 1861 newspaper example described October 31 as Cabbage Night. Other nineteenth-century accounts did the same. DARE consequently defines it as originally the night of Halloween and later a night near Halloween, often the night before.
Regional newspaper research from the Berkshires shows the same transition. Earlier mischief happened on Halloween night; as the custom moved into the twentieth century, the prank night increasingly separated from Halloween and settled on October 30.
That separation actually makes a certain amount of sense.
Halloween gradually became the night for costumes, parties and trick-or-treating.
The tricks got their own night.
What Did People Actually Do on Cabbage Night?
There was never one official list of approved Cabbage Night activities—which is probably for the best.
Accounts vary wildly.
Some of the common ones included:
- soaping or waxing windows
- ringing doorbells and running
- moving gates or lawn decorations
- toilet-papering trees and houses
- throwing eggs
- smashing or moving pumpkins
- throwing vegetables, especially cabbages
- making noise around houses and streets
Some communities regarded it as annoying but fairly predictable kid behavior.
Other years were considerably less charming.
Historical reports include broken windows, property destruction and occasional fires. Police warnings and attempts to redirect teenagers into organized Halloween activities show that adults were complaining about Cabbage Night almost as long as young people were celebrating it.
So describing all of it as “harmless fun” would be rewriting the record a bit.
Sometimes it was harmless.
Sometimes somebody had to explain why a cabbage had gone through a window.
Cabbage Night, Mischief Night and Devil’s Night
These names describe closely related traditions, but they aren’t simply interchangeable everywhere.
Mischief Night became especially familiar in parts of the Mid-Atlantic.
Devil’s Night is strongly associated with Detroit and parts of the Great Lakes.
Cabbage Night appears in pockets of New England, New York, New Jersey and elsewhere.
Gate Night developed in some places where removing gates was apparently popular enough to deserve top billing.
There are even places where neighboring towns preferred different names.
That makes Cabbage Night less like a national holiday and more like a bit of regional folklore that traveled, changed and picked up local names along the way.
There was no Cabbage Night headquarters issuing rules.
Thankfully.
Is Cabbage Night Still a Thing?
The name has faded in many places, but it hasn’t completely disappeared.
People still use it, particularly when remembering childhood traditions, and some communities continue to recognize October 30 as Cabbage Night or Mischief Night. Municipal records from New Jersey were still using Cabbage Night as an official name for October 30 when establishing Halloween curfews in 2025.
In Vermont, the phrase continues to turn up in local conversation and memories as well.
The actual pranks have changed more than the idea behind them. Rotten cabbages are considerably less convenient when most teenagers no longer live within easy raiding distance of somebody’s cabbage patch.
Toilet paper travels better.
So Why Cabbage Night?
Because once upon a time, late October left gardens full of extremely throwable things.
Young people needed very little encouragement.
A cabbage hit a door with a satisfying thump. A stalk could be dragged, swung or tossed. Leftover vegetables were plentiful, and Halloween already had a long tradition of allowing ordinary rules to loosen for a night.
Somewhere in that combination, the cabbage earned naming rights.
And for generations of people in scattered corners of New England and the Northeast, October 30 didn’t need to be called the night before Halloween.
It already had a perfectly good name.
Cabbage Night.
Want To Learn More??
Dictionary of American Regional English (University of Wisconsin–Madison) — “Cabbage Night” — DARE — Cabbage Night
National Endowment for the Humanities — Halloween History in Chronicling America —National Endowment for the Humanities — Halloween History in Chronicling America
Vermont When — Haunts of History: How Halloween and Mischief Came to Vermont — Vermont When — Haunts of History: How Halloween and Mischief Came to Vermont
Hillsdale, New Jersey — Cabbage Night/Mischief Night resolution Hillsdale, New Jersey — Cabbage Night/Mischief Night Resolution
Discover more from A Little Off the Ordinary
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.