Pagan Rites at Girls' School Adjourned by 11

 A local newspaper published this account of an 1897 Halloween party at the Woman’s College of Frederick:

Hallowe’en was celebrated in fine style by a phantom party in the college Hall. About eight o’clock a ghostly procession could be seen wending its wayl through the corridors to the Hall where lanterns of pumpkins, ears of corn, autumn leaves, and the skeleton of Mr. Smith, made the scene one to be remembered.

After a march in which sixty girls joined[,] each carrying long tin horns filling the air with soft sweet strains, dancing was indulged in until the lights were suddenly turned on and you were requested to unmask, then began the fun. Fortunes were told and bright futures prophesied for all, corn and flour were freely used, which cou’d be easily told from the looks of the chapel the next morning.

Refreshments were served later in the evening, and at eleven o’clock the crowd dispersed after having spent a most delightful evening.

Thanks are due to the kind friends who remembered them so kindly with a large bag of pop-corn balls.

Today, we’d call “lanterns of pumpkins” jack-o’-lanterns, of course. A nice pagan touch is added by the “freely used” corn and flour – harvest symbols, certainly, and the scatter patterns may have been used in the fortune-telling.

My guess is that “the skeleton of Mr. Smith” normally hung in the school’s laboratory and/or biology classroom, and was used as an anatomical teaching tool on all the days that weren’t Halloween. Today most such displays are plastic replicas, but human skeletons were classroom fixtures everywhere for centuries, and often were affectionately nicknamed.

Interesting that this women’s college wasn’t equipped with a Miss Smith.

A century ago, the Woman’s College of Frederick changed its name to Hood College and moved to its present-day campus nearby, but the 1897 revels would have been in the school’s original building, the antebellum, slave-built Winchester Hall at 12 E. Church St., which houses Frederick County offices today.

One wonders whether county employees still “freely use” corn and flour every Halloween. One also wonders whatever became of Mr. Smith.

Sources:

Winchester Hall: Building for the Future. John Mongan, writer-producer. Frederick County Government, 2005. 22 min. Accessed 31 Oct. 2021 at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAekEDueVpM.

“Woman’s College Notes.” The News (Frederick, Md.), 1 Nov. 1897, Page 2. Accessed 30 Oct. 2021 via Newspapers.com.