Epps says he recalls pulling pranks on neighborhood pets.

"I remember tying cans to the tail of the neighbor's cat," he says. "It was extremely unsociable...and imperious."

Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory Seamus Heaney, who grew up in rural Ireland, says kids from his generation did not play pranks.

But the Nobel laureate says he fondly remembers "a sense of misrule" among members of the generation before him.

"[They told of] throwing bags over chimneys to keep in the smoke, yoking a horse and cart inside the house, of people finding a horse and cart in the kitchen," he says.

But Heaney and his friends were not so devious.

"Our [pranks were] confined to knocking on doors and running away," he says.

Turnip-Lanterns and S&M

On Saturday night, students at the College will celebrate their own version of Halloween in the famed Adams House masquerade, which has a history of attracting an eccentric crowd.

Last year, for example, Adams House students paid tribute to randomization by holding an S&M ceremony.

And surely this year, many students will come dressed as transvestites or appareled with goods from Hubba Hubba.

Arnold St. Pierre, owner of the Broadway Costume Company in Boston, says this year's hottest costumes include the lead charters from the "I Dream of Jeannie" television show, Scarlet O'Hara and Braveheart costumes.

Adams House committee co-chair Nicholas Stavropoulos 97 refused to release the theme of this year's masquerade but promised that it will feature motifs ranging from "punishment" to "remorse."

Halloween has a very different meaning for Heaney.

"My sense of Halloween was that sense of darkness of the year and spirits about," Heaney says. "This season is the old Celtic season of the winter, of the dark."

"[We] lived in a world where talk of ghosts was more common than today, in a ghost ridden culture," he says.