Leave it to 2020 to have a milestone-marking full moon on Halloween, which hasn’t happened in decades. Specifically, the last time there was a full moon on Halloween in all time zones was 76 years ago on October 31, 1944.
The Farmer’s Almanac reported that in 2001 there was a full moon that rose in the Central and Pacific time zones on Halloween, but 2020’s Halloween full moon is special because it’ll be visible in all time zones and it’s a Blue Moon too. October 2020’s first full moon was on October 1. The second, the Blue Moon, will be 30 days later on October 31.
About Blue Moons
Blue Moons don’t mean the moon will appear blue if you’re lucky enough to have a cloudless night to view it. Although sometimes full moons do appear to look blue. However, what makes a moon “blue” is when there are two full moons in the same month.
According to Space.com, there’s a reason for the saying, “once in a blue moon.” Blue moons aren’t common. They happen on average about every two and a half years because there are “are roughly 29.5 days between full moons, making it unusual for two full moons to fit into a 30- or 31-day-long month. (This means that February will never have a Blue Moon.)”
Interesting.
Even rarer, however, is to have a full moon on Halloween. The next one will happen sooner than this one is, though: in 2039. It will also be a Blue Moon.
Because 2020 has been so cray-cray, I can’t help but wonder what happened the last time there was a Blue Moon on Halloween. What was happening in the world then? Were people loonier than normal? Are there any clues as to what we might expect?
October 31, 1944: Historical Events
I learned from On This Day that October 31, 1944, was a Tuesday. (That’s another thing that’s wild about Halloween 2020. It falls on a Saturday. Normally that’d be great. There certainly would be parties and events galore. There still are some happening, but the coronavirus pandemic is certainly curtailing a great many more.)
From the year, I knew World War II was still raging. There weren’t any significant historical events that happened, though. At least none I could find on sites like History.com, Brittanica, or Day in History.
I don’t know why, but that was actually a bit of a relief.
But then I started wondering, “Did Americans even celebrate Halloween in 1944? Was the war sort of like how coronavirus is and it made it unsafe to celebrate?”
So I put my Newspapers.com account to work and started snooping to see what I could find.
October 31, 1944: News Stories
At first, I looked up “October 31, 1944.” Most headlines involved war news and developments. Three of the big stories were:
- The Nazi position in southwest Holland was starting to crack.
- Three “Jap cruisers” had been blasted in Manila Bay.
- General Stilwell’s recall from China.
Halloween certainly wasn’t front-page news, but I did find some mentions of it in the following clips. The number following the date indicates which page it was on. So for the first one out of Rapid City, it was on page 4 of that newspaper.
These days New Orleans is a Halloween mecca. Was it always? I decided to look and happened to stumble across this cute cartoon out of a Shreveport, Louisiana, paper.
October 31, 1944: Halloween full moon news clippings
What about the rare Halloween blue moon? Did I find any mentions of it?
That search was a bit more fruitful and turned up some interesting finds, like these:
I was surprised how many of the stories I did find were warnings to the youth to behave. From coast-to-coast, that was a common theme.
Maybe for good reason, as a clip in the next section demonstrates. Guess no matter the decade, “kids will be kids,” but I was sort of shocked even kids back in the 40s got out of hand. What about you?
And the one about Herman the Hermit…that’s a mystery to me. Did Pittsburgh have a hermit named Herman mascot, or was it just a journalist having some fun?
The Next Day: November 1, 2020
I also realized that if anything had happened on October 31, 1944, it wouldn’t have hit the papers that same day. So did anything big happen on Halloween night in 1944 that made the news the following Wednesday morning?
That yielded a couple of crazy finds, including one about destruction on “Cabbage Night,” the night before Halloween. I have never heard it called that. Devil’s Night and Mischief Night, yes, but never Cabbage Night. What about you?
There was also one from Seymour, Indiana, which these days has a popular Halloween haunted attraction, Fear Fair. (Well, maybe not “these days” 2020 due to COVID, but normally it’s a popular place to get your scare on.)
However, most of the reports were pretty mundane but cleverly phrased like the one from the Fort Lauderdale News. For the most part, the full moon on Halloween night 1944 didn’t bring out the worst in people, and the majority of accounts qualified it as a quiet night with little disruption. That gives me hope for 2020.
Can You Imagine?
I did find some clips that lent a curious view of life back in 1944 compared to 2020. Even with a war on, people were still trusting.
A lot of the Halloween clips I came across mentioned parties, complete with full street addresses. Like one in the Society News section of the Columbus Herald out of Columbus, Indiana. It was like an Instagram or Facebook post, except with words only.
We might give people a glimpse of where we live via our social media accounts, but we only disclose our address on a need to know basis, not for the whole world to know. These society clips were wild!
Moon Names
Want to know when the next full moon, blue or otherwise, will be? Check out the Full Moon Dates and Names page. I update it at the start of every year with that year’s info.
Check-In
Do you have any full moon traditions you perform each month?
Courtney Mroch is a globe-trotting restless spirit who’s both possessed by wanderlust and the spirit of adventure, and obsessed with true crime, horror, the paranormal, and weird days. Perhaps it has something to do with her genes? She is related to occult royalty, after all. Marie Laveau, the famous Voodoo practitioner of New Orleans, is one of her ancestors. (Yes, really! As explained here.) That could also explain her infatuation with skeletons.
Speaking of mystical, to learn how Courtney channeled her battle with cancer to conjure up this site, check out HJ’s Origin Story.
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The old news stories are fascinating. (And funny a couple of them for their bizarreness.) Good post!
Maybe it is me but I think Halloween has lost a lot of its spookiness. In the day, seems most of the movies were horror or at least a large majority of them. I was expecting more bazar occurrences but I can live with it. Thanks for the article.
I feel ya! I was hoping to uncover something truly wild but… if there was anything like that to be had, I didn’t dig deep enough. (But I was also kind of relieved because 2020 has been so cray cray as is is. lol)