"Give us candy, give us cake, give us something sweet to take. Give us cookies, fruit and gum, hurry up and give us some. You had better do it quick or we'll surely play a trick."

That quote is from Jack Prelutsky's classic 1977 children's book, "It's Halloween." These days, when cute kids dressed up like superheroes or KPop Demon Hunters "trick-or-treat" at your door, you're surely not worried about the threat of a "trick."

But a century ago, the "trick" side of Halloween was a lot more intense, disruptive, and even dangerous than a strung-up roll of toilet paper or a few thrown eggs could ever hope to be. Take it from a collection of incidents referenced in Chicago Tribune articles in the 1920s that Megan Suttner assembled for a 2015 post on her blog "A Smile And A Gun."

On Halloween night in 1921 in Chicago, the Tribune reported "rougher celebrants indulged in promiscuous pistol firing… burning wagons, cutting automobile tires and even stealing cars."

In 1922, as paraphrased by Suttner, the Tribune reported a real estate office, two train cars, numerous wagons and vans, and most dangerously, a 500-gallon tank of gasoline were set on fire as part of Halloween night hooliganism.

In 1923, youthful ruffians ripped porches and fences from homes, smashed windows, and uprooted small trees on Halloween night in north suburban Evanston. Citing the Trib, Suttner wrote that more than 200 boys from Evanston — as well as Wilmette, Winnetka, and other North Shore suburbs — ended up in police custody.

In 1924, a bonfire in the Bridgeport neighborhood spread to a nearby sheds, and a feed conveyor owned by a grain company was also set on fire, Suttner wrote on Halloween night, quoting the Tribune.

There were even deadly incidents. The Trib reported on Halloween night in 1926, some reprobate ragamuffins set a fire at a junk shop on West Hastings Street on the Near West Side, leaving a 60-year-old man dead of asphyxiation and causing $600 in damage.

This was not just in Chicago, and it did not start in the 1920s. In a 2018 article, the Saturday Evening Post's Lesley Bannatyne wrote that youngsters around America were engaging in Halloween delinquency by dousing chapel seats with molasses, smearing black paint on the walls of new houses, and throwing bags of flour at people in their finest attire as long ago as the 1880s and 1890s.

Suttner also pointed to the 1905 volume, "The Boy Craftsman: Practical and Profitable Ideas for a Boy's Leisure Hours," which characterized Halloween as "the only evening on which a boy can feel free to play pranks outdoors without danger of being "pinched," and it is his delight to scare passing pedestrians, ring door-bells, and carry off the neighbors' gates (after seeing that his own is unhinged and safely placed in the barn)."

The 1905 book contains instructions for such devices as the "magazine bean blower" — by which they mean a gun's magazine — and two varieties of a tick-tack, a winding noisemaker that youngsters would place against windows for some annoying, but harmless disruption.

But annoying pranks turned to more severe vandalism as Americans moved to urban centers in the early 20th century, Bannatyne wrote.

In 1926, Chicagoans took action — asking youngsters to vow not to engage in any destructive activities and rewarding them with free movies at a local theater if they followed through. Suttner wrote.

This was not the end of disorder associated with Halloween in Chicago. In 1942, the Tribune reported the Chicago City Council had asked Mayor Edward J. Kelly to proclaim Halloween "Conservation Day" and focus on World War II resource efforts as police were ordered to safeguard property from pranksters and vandals.

Why pranks and vandalism?

So what was behind the hooliganism that once defined Halloween as a holiday many probably dreaded? Ada Palmer, a history professor at the University of Chicago, explained that Halloween was one of several holidays — along with Carnival just before the start of Lent — on which historically, people were permitted to do things that would not be appropriate on an average day. On Carnival, the hooliganism even rose to the level of assaulting people — stealing jewelry right off their bodies.

Specifically for Halloween, Palmer explained, there was both a "cathartic opportunity," and a convenient scapegoat. After all, Halloween was All Hallows' Eve, when people believed the boundary between the living and the dead became hazy and spirits were said to revisit their homes.

Thus, pranks and vandalism on Halloween night could be attributed to mischievous supernatural creatures such as faeries, Palmer said. That's faeries, not fairies — what Palmer called "the scary kind that causes trouble."

The acts of real pranksters — breaking open pens, scaring animals — could be attributed to faeries, or Odin and the Valkyries, or other spirits moving through at Halloween.

Such conduct was normal for supernatural beings, Palmer said, and "therefore, human beings could get away with it."

But there were several reasons Halloween pranks and revelry began crossing lines by the 20th century. Among adults, Palmer also pointed to Prohibition, when people were drinking "extra-unhealthy" bootlegged alcohol they didn't know how to handle.

Among youngsters, Suttner also wrote that pranks that may have been "relatively harmless in a small New England town" became dangerous in major cities where so many more people were living by the 1920s.

"Although the simple pranks of the past — switching shop signs, or flinging a sock filled with flour at a man's black coat — were still practiced, so were far more destructive activities, including breaking windows, tripping pedestrians, and setting fires," wrote Lisa Morton in "Trick or Treat: A History of Halloween," also as cited by Suttner.

By the mid-20th century, a coordinated effort was transforming Halloween into a holiday for family-friendly activities rather than a holiday of mischief and vandalism.

"Part of this was, you know, police trying to crack down on any kind of adult outdoor or older kid unsupervised outdoor Halloween activities, while parents and also schools and PTA associations were trying to cultivate the parent-supervised trick-or-treating practices that we now know," Palmer said.

Candy and costume companies also got involved, seeing an opportunity for profit.

Today, the family-friendly American Halloween traditions of trick-or-treating and costumes have spread beyond our shores, though Palmer notes this is a fairly recent phenomenon.

"Commercial Halloween as we know it now has only been spreading to Europe over the past decade and a half," Palmer said, noting that the spread of the traditions can be credited to companies such as Nestlé and Hershey's.

And parents in Chicago and around the country and the world are likely more than happy that they merely have to remind kids to brush their teeth and refrain from gorging on candy these days.