By Ed Okonowicz
Rising Sun Outhouse, an article by Ed Okonowicz — At a lot of places on Mischief Night, teenagers playfully soap car windows and toss corn at neighbors’ homes. But years ago, according to one long-time resident, during Halloween week in peaceful Rising Sun, “All hell would break loose.”
To hear Cecil County old-timers tell it, the shenanigans started around the turn of the last century in the early 1900s. Townsfolk used to head out into the countryside and pickup farm machinery, porch furniture, rocking chairs, corn husks and loads of manure. Then they’d dump it all right smack dab beneath the town’s lone traffic light in front of the National Bank of Rising Sun.
As years passed the practice changed a bit. Town residents would wait by their front windows for the late Mischief Night or early Halloween morning arrival of one or more outhouses. That’s right, private-outdoor toilets. For decades, unidentified pranksters delivered these stolen structures with a dependability that would put most Federal Express couriers to shame.
Some say the tradition, from assorted purloined goods to old-fashioned Johnnys On the Spot, began in the 1920s. In olden days when there were lots of outhouses available, teenage boys would haul them into Center Square up to five nights in a row. In later years, the mysterious events occurred on October 30 or the 31st or both.
Ask area elders if they were involved in this rite of passage and you’ll get a wink, a sly grin or a boastful and heavily embellished tall tale. But hazy historical records cannot negate the fact that outhouses appeared each autumn with regularity and the stories associated with this wacky custom could fill a fair sized ledger.
One year the town drunk used one of the outhouses as a bathroom, while it was sitting under the traffic light. One fella had one fall on him as he was trying to move it, and another unlucky soul slipped and fell headfirst into the sewage pit while trying to shake an outhouse loose of its foundation. A cagey farmed locked himself inside his privy and allowed the boys to carry it all the way into town. When they deposited the structure its owner stepped out, displayed his shotgun, and said, “All rights boys, let’s take it back.”
The autumnal adventure got so far under the skin of one mayor that he hired an off-duty Wilmington (Some say Baltimore) detective to end the matter. The challenge inflamed the local boys who flattened the strangers’ car tires and ran the hired gun out of town.
During some years, police gave the phantom perpetrators and their pilfered privy a light-flashing escorted, as residents and out-of-towners lined the streets holding cameras to capture the scene. More recently, however, town officials and law enforcement personnel decided things were getting a bit out of hand, and they established curfews to discourage the practice. According to former Mayor Judy Cox, as the area became more congested and traffic increased, the event became a safety concern. The arrival of modern plumbing also reduced the availability of outdoor toilets, as the lack of interest contributed to the demise of the distinctive small-town custom.
Today an outhouse appears intermittently in late October, placed by an individual or small group to commemorate the quirky custom. But those in the know say it’s a pale reminder of the practice’s heyday, when farm implements, porch furniture, and yes, a purloined privy or two, would be piled “sky high in Rising Sun’s town square.
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Source: By Ed Okonowicz and republished with permission; published in Haunted Maryland: Ghosts and Strange Phenomena of the Old Line State
My name is Earl S. McMullen. I’m 80 years old.
My ‘family’ owned property on Ridge Road from the 1890’s. The Halloween stories were commonplace when the Family gathered for various reasons and Sunday Dinners.
My Grandfather used to cut Ice at Keppel’s Mill in the winter , and sell it throughout the ‘Sun’. During the warmer weather..
An interesting anecdote was that My Father (Howard R. McMullen) drove a trash wagon occasionally, and one time his Mule would not budge at the Intersection by the bank.
Fed up , Dad took some paper from the trash, scratched a match alive, and lit a fire under the mule’s belly..
The Mule pulled the wagon ahead about 6 feet, then watched in glee as Dad made a hurried effort to extinguish the fire, now centered under the (again immobile) wagon.
Fact or fiction, it made up the stories we shared at Granma’s house. 🙂
Earl, thanks for visiting the share and passing along your family story.