The Hanging Man

I think my earliest Halloween memory was seeing a crude dummy in a flannel shirt hanging from someone's porch with a bloody knife sticking out of its eye. I was trick-or-treating and I must have been about 6. It's a mystery why this image would have stayed with me for so long but that seems the earliest one I can bring into sharp focus. I don't remember whether I was frightened or whether I found it hokey or anything about what could possibly have burned it eternally into my memory. Maybe it was the idea of someone hanging a real murder victim out in front of their door on Halloween as if to say "If you play a trick on me you just might get stabbed in the eye and hung from my porch with bulging eyes and blackened tongue as a warning the other children!" What else could it mean?