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📜 Halloween week in our TWIH puzzles, short for This Week in History: a series of crosswords, one for each of the 52 weeks of the year, each built from real events that happened that week. This one covers October 25–31: sixteen moments from a muddy French field in 1415 to the night a radio play landed Martians in New Jersey, with an escape artist’s last Halloween, a stock market crash and the very first message sent over the network that became the internet. Every clue starts with its date, a few carry a bonus hint in grey italics, and a word bank sits under the clues if you get stuck. Print it, or play online right in your browser. The answer key sits at the bottom — fold it backward along the dotted line before you start. Next week is November 1–7, or see every week in the series.

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This Week in History: October 25–31

Crossword · Puzzle No. 127ThePuzzleSolver.net

Medium

Every clue is something that happened in the last week of October, and each one starts with its date. The number after a clue is the answer’s length; one answer is two words, shown as (5,7). Use the word bank if you get stuck.

Across

1 Oct. 31, 1941: Work ends on the four presidents’ faces carved into South Dakota’s Mount ___ (8)Sculptor Gutzon Borglum died months earlier; his son Lincoln finished the job.

7 Oct. 27, 1918: Over France, Manitoba-born pilot William “Billy” ___ fights off about 15 German planes and earns the Victoria Cross (6)He’s still the most decorated serviceman in Canadian history.

9 Oct. 25, 1415: Henry V’s small, worn-out English army and its longbowmen beat the French at ___ (9)Shakespeare made it famous in Henry V.

10 Oct. 26, 1917: The Canadian Corps joins this muddy First World War battle in Belgium (13)Canadian troops took the ridge on November 6.

14 Oct. 28, 1886: President Grover Cleveland dedicates the Statue of ___, a gift from France (7)

15 Oct. 28, 1790: Spain and Britain sign the first ___ Convention, over a sound on Vancouver Island’s west coast (6)

1	2	3		4	5		6

	7							8


		9

	10			11

12
						13
			14

15

Down

2 Oct. 27, 1904: New York’s first ___ line opens, and about 150,000 people ride it for a nickel (6)

3 Oct. 30, 1938: Orson Welles’s radio version of The War of the Worlds has these invaders landing in New Jersey (8)Some listeners took it for real news.

4 Oct. 26, 1881: Wyatt ___ and his brothers face the Clantons and McLaurys near the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona (4)The whole gunfight lasted about 30 seconds.

5 Oct. 30, 1888: John J. Loud patents a ___ pen, meant for marking rough surfaces like leather (9)

6 Oct. 29, 1929: More than 16 million shares change hands as Wall Street crashes on ___ (5,7)

8 Oct. 29, 1969: A UCLA student sends the first message over this network, the internet’s ancestor; it crashes after just “LO” (7)

10 Oct. 25, 1881: Pablo ___, who went on to co-found Cubism, is born in Málaga, Spain (7)

11 Oct. 31, 1926: Escape artist Harry ___ dies in Detroit, on Halloween (7)Nine days earlier, a student had punched him in the stomach in his Montreal dressing room.

12 Oct. 27, 1938: DuPont introduces stockings made from this new synthetic fibre to a crowd of 4,000 women in New York (5)They didn’t go on sale across the U.S. until May 1940.

13 Oct. 26, 1825: The ___ Canal opens, linking Buffalo with Albany and the Hudson River (4)Governor DeWitt Clinton carried lake water to New York and poured it into the Atlantic.

Word Bank

AGINCOURT, ARPANET, BALLPOINT, BARKER, BLACK TUESDAY, EARP, ERIE, HOUDINI, LIBERTY, MARTIANS, NOOTKA, NYLON, PASSCHENDAELE, PICASSO, RUSHMORE, SUBWAY

✂ fold backward along this line to hide the solution ✂

Solution hidden on screen — it prints automatically.

Solution

1A RUSHMORE7A BARKER9A AGINCOURT10A PASSCHENDAELE14A LIBERTY15A NOOTKA2D SUBWAY3D MARTIANS4D EARP5D BALLPOINT6D BLACK TUESDAY8D ARPANET10D PICASSO11D HOUDINI12D NYLON13D ERIE

How to Solve a History Crossword

You don’t need to be a history buff to finish this one. Every clue hands you a date and a short story, and the word bank lists all sixteen answers, so the real puzzle is matching each story to its word and fitting it into the grid. Here’s a good way in:

Start with the blanks. Clues with a ___ in them are the quickest wins. If you recognise the name or the phrase, the answer is staring right at you.
Use the word bank as a checklist. Cross off each answer as it goes into the grid. With sixteen answers and only a handful left, the last few clues often solve themselves.
Count the squares. The number in brackets is the answer’s length. Several answers in the bank share a length, so counting squares is the fastest way to narrow a clue down to two or three choices.
One answer is two words. It’s marked (5,7) and goes into the grid with no space, the same way every crossword handles phrases.
Read the grey lines. A few clues carry a second line in grey italics. It’s a bonus hint or a surprising detail, for the clues that are hardest to pin down from the date alone.
Let the long answers do the heavy lifting. The thirteen-letter answer at 10 Across runs almost the full width of the grid, and 6 Down is twelve letters long. Get those two in and you’ll have letters for half the puzzle.

New to crosswords? Our complete guide to solving crosswords covers clue types and fill strategy from the ground up.

About This Puzzle

The TWIH series splits the calendar into 52 weeks that land on the same dates every year, so this puzzle is worth pulling out every Halloween. The This Week in History page shows the whole calendar and every week that’s ready so far.

Halloween closes out the week, and two of the clues suit the season: an escape artist who died on October 31, and a radio play that sent Martians into New Jersey the night before. Four stories have a Canadian connection: the Canadian Corps at Passchendaele, a Manitoba-born pilot who is still the most decorated serviceman in Canadian history, a 1790 deal between Spain and Britain over a sound on Vancouver Island’s west coast, and a punch in a Montreal dressing room. The internet’s very first message is here too. It was only two letters long, because the system crashed before the third.

Every date and detail in the clues was checked against museum, archive and encyclopedia sources before it went into the grid. A couple needed care. The War of the Worlds is famous for a nationwide panic, but many historians now think the newspapers of the day blew it far out of proportion, so the clue sticks to what’s certain: some listeners took it for real news. And whether that Montreal punch really caused Houdini’s death is still argued, so the clue tells you both facts and lets you draw your own conclusion.

Next week, This Week in History: November 1–7 runs from Michelangelo’s ceiling to the last spike of the CPR. Looking for more Halloween? The Halloween puzzle pack has six spooky puzzles, from an easy word search to a haunted-house maze.

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Puzzle Pack: Word Play & Trivia · Series: This Week in History