How Haunted Houses Became a Halloween Tradition
Our American Stories
iHeartPodcasts
4.6 • 817 Ratings
🗓️ 21 October 2025
⏱️ 11 minutes
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Summary
On this episode of Our American Stories, before haunted houses filled October nights, Halloween in America was a mess. In the early twentieth century, it was less about candy and costumes and more about broken fences, stolen gates, and angry neighbors. Communities were desperate for order, and their answer came from an unexpected place. Schools, churches, and civic clubs began creating haunted attractions: small events meant to channel mischief into something creative. Author Lisa Morton, whose Trick or Treat: A History of Halloween remains a definitive account, traces how those first haunted houses grew into the elaborate haunted attractions we know today.
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:04.0 | What I told people, I was making a podcast about Benghazi. |
| 0:08.5 | Nine times out of ten, they called me a masochist, rolled their eyes, or just asked, why? |
| 0:15.1 | Benghazi, the truth became a web of lies. |
| 0:18.5 | From prologue projects and Pushkin Industries, this is Fiasco, Benghazi. |
| 0:23.6 | What difference at this point does it make? |
| 0:26.6 | Listen to Fiasco, Benghazi, on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. |
| 0:33.6 | ...or wherever you get your podcasts. And we continue with our American stories. |
| 0:48.3 | Today, Lisa is going to be unpacking the history of the Halloween haunted house, |
| 0:53.1 | which is directly tied into today's practice of trick-or-treating. |
| 0:58.2 | Lisa is the author of Trick-or-Treat, a History of Halloween. |
| 1:02.2 | By the turn of the 20th century, |
| 1:04.2 | Halloween in America was nothing more than a day of pranking, |
| 1:07.8 | kind of like April Fool's Day. |
| 1:09.7 | Here's Lisa Morton with the story. |
| 1:11.6 | So it was all good fun at first, but then by the 20th century, as America is becoming much more |
| 1:19.4 | urbanized and more populated, these pranks move into the cities. And when they move into the cities, |
| 1:26.3 | they become much less nice. Now they are about |
| 1:29.9 | destroying things, about shattering glass bulbs and windows. They are about setting fires, |
| 1:37.9 | tripping pedestrians. And by the 30s, they are causing millions of dollars of damage. |
| 1:45.3 | And this is also during the Great Depression when a lot of these cities don't even have the money to pay for all of the damage that's resulting from this vandalism. |
| 1:53.7 | And a lot of cities at this point considered dropping Halloween or trying to ban it. |
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