Schiff’s bases and their metal complexes find wide applications in biological systems, as well as non-linear optical materials, in electrochemical cells, as corrosion inhibitors, thermo-/photochromic materials and as thermally/chemically resistant flame retardants (Jia & Li, 2015 ▸; Singh et al., 2014 ▸). In the present investigation, we synthesized dichloro (compound A), dibromo (compound B) and diiodo (compound C) derivatives of N-salicylideneaniline (Schiff’s bases) (Scheme 1). The chemical structures (Fig. S1 of the supporting information) and procedures followed for the synthesis of compounds are given in §2. The presence of a strong hydrogen bonding functional group (e.g. the amide group) makes Compound A a Class III category, and the surprising effects of jumping, breaking and sudden blasting upon heating its polymorphic crystals are presented in this paper. To our knowledge, such a phenomenon is unusual and not reported in polymorphs of the same compound (Steiner et al., 1993 ▸; Crawford et al., 2007 ▸; Sahoo et al., 2013 ▸).