Haunted Refrigerator Night – October 30, 2024

History of Haunted Refrigerator Night

The tradition of storing food in cold places has been around for a long time, since the ancient Persians. Historians believe they were the first to use cold storage for food, although the ice was harvested for various purposes since 1000 B.C. Societies like the Greeks, Romans, and Hebrews, also stored snow in insulated materials to keep their food cool, according to various sources. Back then, ice harvesting was the only way to ‘refrigerate’ food. People would preserve ice collected during the winter season in cold stores to use in the summer. By the 19th century, this method was replaced by the use of iceboxes that were usually made of wood and had a large block of ice inside to keep things chilly. The icebox is commonly called the early precursor to the refrigerator.

Then came Frederic Tudor. This American businessman and founder of the Tudor Ice Company realized that he could easily ship ice from the ponds of Massachusetts to the Caribbean. Years later, he was shipping ice practically everywhere, from the Caribbean to Europe, to India, and even Hong Kong. His contributions to the ice trade earned him the moniker of ‘Ice King’ in Boston. He showed the hotter tropical countries just how much they needed ice, and by the 1930s, ice was a mass-market commodity all over the world. However, because it was difficult to harvest ice— and dangerous too, as people had to extract it from frozen ponds — multiple people tried to invent artificial means of refrigeration. The first person with relative success at this endeavor was Scottish professor William Cullen, who designed a small refrigerating machine in 1755. But, the amount of ice generated from this machine was too little for the invention to be considered practical. Over the next decade, multiple inventors would similarly try their hand at inventing refrigerating devices, and many of these earlier inventions made it to the consumer market as well. Over time, the design became more streamlined, the engines more eco-friendly, and the storage spaces larger. So much so that we can now store food for a long time until they barely resemble what they once were.

The 21st century has left us spoilt for choice in terms of food storage options. We have various designs, models, sizes, and functionalities. This may be the reason why we sometimes cannot find leftovers in the vast depths of our chilly caverns. This also may be why American actor Thomas Roy and his wife decided to create Haunted Refrigerator Night as a special holiday. And what better time to tackle the scary mess that is your refrigerator than the night before Halloween? According to these perennial holiday creators — they have created more than 75 holidays in all(!) — they had a tradition of cleaning out the horrors in their fridge right before Halloween each year, and the idea sprung from this. Whatever their reason, we are glad to get a little push to clean out our refrigerators.