No matter how fun it can be, Halloween is a time of year that puts people on edge.
The longer nights can make us more willing to believe spooky stories that prey on our
biggest fears.
But the thing is, almost all Halloween urban legends are pure hokum, which should hopefully
help everyone sleep a little better at night.
Here are a few of the most notorious Halloween hoaxes you don't have to be scared of.
Ghostwatch
A pseudo-documentary about a haunted house, Ghostwatch aired in the United Kingdom on
Halloween night in 1992.
The program did everything it could to make the piece seem like a real-life broadcast,
hiring well-known BBC personalities to give the show extra credibility.
But the program caused some serious problems.
"Because the audience weren’t actually sure, or I wasn’t actually sure, if it was fact
or fiction.
If it was live, or if it was, in fact, a drama."
While it started with a playful tone, the program got darker and more supernatural as
the investigation went on.
It began to appear that the ghost supposedly haunting the place was real, and drawing malevolent
energy from the presenters' attention.
As the ghost got stronger, members of the crew were injured, killed, and possessed,
with the specter ultimately appearing to step into the real world at the end of the show.
“And she’s going to take be taking you through the spine-tingling story."
The program's almost-realistic nature and unscripted feel deceived and even traumatized
many, even though it featured credited actors and writers.
Though it was all in good fun, the program sparked years' worth of rumors and controversy,
becoming an indelible part of modern-day English folklore.
Strangers with candy
Every kid knows the Halloween routine: once you get home, you surrender your loot to the
nearest adult, who scours the bag for needles, drugs, and some candy off the top for themselves.
It's annoying, but necessary, right?
It sure beats swallowing a razor blade.
But here's the thing: the whole "tainted Halloween candy" thing has rarely been anything but
fear mongering.
When sociologists began studying the issue, they discovered that there were practically
no stories of candy ever being tampered with by strangers.
The vast majority of reported stories have wound up being hoaxes that can't be substantiated,
or have been relatively harmless pranks between children.
In the few cases where a child's Halloween candy was confirmed to have been tampered
with, the culprit was almost always someone the kids knew.
One of the only confirmed cases of a stranger tampering with Halloween candy took place
in 2000, when a man was caught sticking needles in Snickers bars, inflicting only one minor
injury.
Black cat sacrifice
Some people still believe that Halloween is a time for satanic sacrifice.
Warnings pop up yearly about keeping your pets indoors so that evil cultists don't offer
them up as part of twisted rituals, especially, for some reason, black cats.
It's not just pet owners that get taken in by this one: some animal shelters halt adoptions
of black cats around Halloween to stop them from ending up on some sacrificial altar.
According to experts on cults, these stories are untrue as well.
While there is the occasional instance of a cat being hurt on Halloween, it's never
the work of violent satanic cults, which have also never really existed.
On a related note, black cats also aren't unlucky, and they certainly aren't evil.
Well, at least not any more evil than cats already are.
Blue star tattoos
Warnings about so-called "blue star tattoos" usually surface around Halloween, and during
the first weeks of a new school year.
Parents are warned to stay away from suspicious people handing out temporary tattoos laced
with LSD.
But here's the thing — the story, like so many others, is always bunk.
Don't feel bad if you've fallen for this one — people have been duped by a version of
it for almost two centuries.
According to folklorists, similar rumors were circulating in England in 1840, long before
LSD was even invented.
The legend then focused on lick-and-stick postage stamps, with the story going that
the glue was poisonous, and caused cholera [CALL-er-uh].
It just goes to show that tall tales can easily be adjusted to new times and places.
Even as decades go by, human nature remains pretty much the same — which is to say,
kind of gullible.
The cannibal's haunted house
This story is a relatively new one, first going viral in 2015.
Supposedly, a group of friends went into a haunted house in Austin, Texas, when they
came across what looked like a terribly gruesome display of a man eating someone alive in a
bathtub.
The screams they heard, the story goes, turned out to be real — the group had come across
a real-life cannibal, who was supposedly fought off by the house's pistol-packing owner.
In Texas, a story like this is almost believable.
But — it wasn't true.
The story was a classic viral hoax, and nothing about the nightmarish episode was based in
fact.
Did we just believe it because of Texas?
Probably.