corn v
[. . .]
4 To pelt (usu a house or car) with corn (usu shelled) as a prank; hence vbl n corning. chiefly N Midl Cf corn night n
1976 Brazil Times (IN) 29 Oct 1/2, Well we go trick-or-treating. And we sometimes go corning. And . . once Darrin’s sister had my sister over for halloween and . . they corned our house. 1993 Bedford Gaz. (PA) 27 Oct 3/3, Once upon a time, there were three boys. . . They all wanted to go corning on Halloween night. 1997 DARE File—Internet cePA [Coal Speak], Cornin(g): Throwing corn at houses, people, and/or cars; takes place as part of mischiefing. “Dem kids corned my car!” 2001 in 2017 Ibid cwIN, Corning basically involved hiding at the side of a road with bagfuls of hard, dried corn kernels and throwing the corn at passing cars (or just throwing corn at the windows of people’s houses). 2009 Ibid IA, It was a week or so before Halloween and we went around and corned houses (threw corn at the windows—I’m from Iowa) or we soaped the windows but we never did any real damage or destroyed anything. 2011 Ibid wPA,“Corn-ing,” a longstanding Halloween tradition in the suburbs of western Pennsylvania, is a popular prank in which kids sneak up to houses after dark and throw pre-hardened corn kernels at their windows, producing a truly startling sound effect. 2017 Ibid wIL (as of 1970s), Here on the night before Halloween, I was thinking about the joys of my youth (in the mid-70’s), one of which was corning. Big handfuls of dried corn kernels from nearby corn fields, aimed at the picture windows or the screen doors of the neighborhood houses. . . I grew up in semi-rural western Illinois, 15 miles, more or less from St. Louis. Ibid eKY (as of 1970s), I am from eastern ky and as a teenager in the 70’s, i went corning. Today the tradition is still practiced in the area. Children climb up to the top of a small hill and throw corn on cars passing by. Everyone has become accustomed to having their cars hit with corn around Halloween. 2017 DARE File cwIN(as of c2005), I was told about corning, pronounced “cornin’” by Brazil, IN natives. Also some Terre Haute folks were familiar with it. This was 2004–2006 but they had done it in previous years, in high school. And they would hide in a corn field along a country road, typically at night, and wait for a car to come by then throw a whole ear.