Gate-stealing is a weird, and mostly departed, Halloween tradition

There’s a Concord community that calls Halloween “gate night” for reasons that date back a century – it used to be a common appellation because of the popularity of stealing people’s garden gates as the trick part of trick-or-treat. It has faded, presumably because garden gates are extreme rarities. (Why is that, I wonder?)

I wrote a story a few years back that touched on the name, although the main point was the history of Concord’s two-nights-of-trick-or-treating tradition. If you missed it the first time around – or the second or third – here it is again!