If you trick-or-treated as a kid, you might be familiar with warnings like these:
“Don’t eat any candy until your mom and I can check it!”
“Someone could have put drugs in there.”
“No you can’t eat that caramel apple!
She could’ve put a razor blade in there!”
Many parents who are otherwise intelligent, rational people get swept up in this annual
Halloween hysteria - even to this day, which makes for some pretty fun memes.
But do any of us actually know of anyone who fell victim to shifty ne’er-do-well neighbors
on Halloween?
Probably not, because this urban legend is based on very little...or nothing at all.
We called two experts from our friends at The Conversation to ‘lift the mask’ off
this terrifying tale.
Kalpana is a longtime investigative journalist and scholar of ethics & religion.
Scott is a historian and author who is living his childhood dream of researching myths and
monsters of all varieties.
Let’s start with an obvious question: how did a country as obsessed with stranger danger
as the US wind up sending their kids out once a year, en masse, in the dark to collect candy
from strangers?
The history of Halloween is hazy at best, but it’s basically a Frankensteinian monster
composed of bits and pieces from many cultures.
The core is Celtic.
The Celts had a feast called Samhain, which marked the end of summer.
It was a celebration of harvest, but it was also a time to remember the dead and contemplate
death.
Other cultures contributed various limbs - Romans, Catholics, English Christians, and more.
The rough predecessor of the Halloween we know today came alive by the 19th century.
Waves of Irish and Scottish immigrants brought this cultural hodgepodge to the US in
the 19th century.
At first, the focus was on the “trick” part.
Adolescents pulled truly classic pranks like...
Setting random fires, slashing car tires, tipping over outhouses, and somehow getting
livestock on top of barns.
In Kentucky in 1879, 200 boys tied a stuffed “human” to some train tracks - then howled
with laughter when the panicked conductor stopped the locomotive just in time.
The large number of young men who often come from immigrant backgrounds...really did find
in Halloween a way to express what I think we have to call class conflict.
[00:18:52] We have to remember that this is an era in American history that, and I’m
talking about 1880 to about 1920 with some reverberations after, that some historians
have called the second civil war because of the level of violence and labor organizing
and strikes.
Some anxious members of the middle class tried to replace pranking with more wholesome Halloween
activities, but they weren’t very successful.
Reprieve came with WWII, when the whole country scaled back festivities in favor of rationing
to support the troops.
But after that, Halloween came roaring back.
And this time, the “treat” part took center stage.
Wartime sugar rationing ended, and candy companies teamed up with the new ad men of Madison Avenue
to flood the streets with sweet treats.
The rising middle-class, now nestled in brand-new suburbs, unleashed hordes of their young kids
- the Baby Boomers - to demand treats from their neighbors.
By the 1950s, particularly in the white middle class culture, there was a feeling that Halloween
had become a normalized American holiday.
That “trick-or-treat” was not a threat anymore
Unfortunately, this light-hearted fun didn’t last very long.
By the time the oldest Baby Boomers reached their teens and 20s, Halloween had earned
a far more sinister reputation.
If we did want to pick a patient zero moment for this particular panic, it would be the
October 28, 1970 op-ed about Halloween in the New York Times….It’s not referring
to any particular incidents.
The op-ed simply states that, for example, could horror rather than happiness be waiting
for your child in their bag of Halloween candy?
Could what you think is sugar sprinkled on the cookies actually be a poisonous lye? ...could
that apple contain a straight razor?
That singular line seems to be where that particular visceral powerful image comes from.
Two incidents relatively close together seemed to confirm the op-ed’s worst fears.
First, barely a week after the story’s publication, a 5-year old Kevin Toston of Detroit died
of a heroin overdose.
Analysis of his Halloween candy revealed a dusting of the drug.
...it’s reported in the Times, it’s reported in the national news, it’s an above-the-fold
story.
...the actual story is that he had been staying with his uncle on Halloween night, had essentially
gotten into his uncle's heroin stash, ingested it, died.
Some of the family members, in order to kind of protect the uncle, had actually then sprinkled
the Halloween candy with heroin, to suggest that in fact, this had been a random attack.
Just 4 years later, a father in Houston named Ronald Clark O’Bryan took out a $20,000
life-insurance policy on each of his two kids: 8-year old Timothy and 5-year old Elizabeth.
Then, O’Bryan bought five 21-inch Pixie Stix and laced them with cyanide.
On Halloween night, Ronald gave one each to Timothy and Elizabeth and the other three
to neighborhood kids.
Fortunately, four of the five kids didn’t eat the poisoned candy.
Unfortunately, 8-year old Timothy did.
Less than an hour later, he died.
Ronald, who quickly earned the nickname “Candyman Killer,” was convicted in 1975 and executed
in 1984.
As tragic as those deaths were...they were pretty much the only real stories that fed
the Halloween sadism urban legend.
A 1985 review by criminologist Joel Best found no verified instances perpetrated by strangers.
But the (black) cat was out of the bag.
Newspapers published annual warnings about tainted candy; certain towns and neighborhoods
sought to limit festivities, or scrap them altogether; local news stations broadcast
unverified tales of tampered treats; and some hospitals even offered to X-ray candy for
free.
In short: an urban legend was born.
Of course, these events didn’t occur in a vacuum.
Academics of various stripes have devoted a lot of attention to this and other urban
legends.
They found that certain contexts can make societies vulnerable to these panic responses.
Scott: [00:03:04] .instead of focusing on big complex issues - if you can find a small
issue that seems to represent a larger moral problem, then there’s a likelihood...of
society latching onto that.
Scott [00:10:42] Every single historical context,
Colonial Americans feared witches in the untamed wilderness around them.
Dr. Frankenstein’s monster embodied fears of unrestrained scientific advancement in
the early 1800s.
In the 1910s and 20s, the blossoming economic and sexual freedom of women spurred rumors
of ‘white slavery rings’ and fantastical tales of predatory vampires.
Scott wrote about these and more in his book Monsters in America.
His favorite?
...in the 19th century, everyone...is completely obsessed with sea serpents...sea monsters...Part
of the reason for that was this was also the era of maritime commerce.
It was an era of the rationalization of the scientific community.
There was a lot of interest and the possibility of this undiscovered life that was out there
on what was one of the new American frontiers.
So if all these monsters are just different iterations of societal fears, what made the
1970s so ripe for Halloween-focused stranger danger?
The ‘70s were just such a time of social change and politically there was so much happening…there
was fear.
Here are just a few minor incidents from around that time...
The constant threat of nuclear war; the JFK assassination; the Malcolm X, Martin Luther
King Jr. and Robert Kennedy assassinations; global protests in 1968; the Manson Family
murders; an oil crisis; the Kent State massacre; the war in Vietnam; revelation of war crimes;
more protests; the Pentagon Papers; the Jonestown cult; defeat in Vietnam; Watergate; and, of
course, all these serial killers whose very real crimes form the backbone of today’s
true crime industry.
All these serial killers.
All your favorite serial killers.
All your favorite true crime stars.
I mean, serial killers.
Scott: [00:07:20] There’s no one single cause, but all of these things form the atmosphere
in which these fears are being worked out through essentially a false but very easy-to-understand
story.
Fueling this particular story was a growing awareness of childhood physical and sexual
abuse.
In almost all of the moral panics that we could talk about over the last 50 years, danger
to children is frequently at the center of it.
Scott [00:27:38] We know that overwhelmingly, children who suffer physical and sexual abuse,
it’s within the family or a family friend.
Yet the overwhelming emphasis tends to be on...stranger danger.
The literal strangers with candy.
One survey found that the number of Americans who agree with the statement “you can’t
be too careful in dealing with people” rose from 45.6% in 1966 to 54.3% in 1973.
From a 2021 perspective, all of this may seem like a normal amount of bad news.
But it turns out that we still fall for this old Halloween fiction.
And it may be blinding us to the actual danger of Halloween:
Cars.
A recent study found that the relative risk of death by car was 43% higher on Halloween
than other nights.
And kids ages 4-8 years had the highest relative risk - a whopping 10-fold increase.
Compounding this problem is the increasing frequency of binge-drinking by older revelers,
as well as the liquor companies who push themed spirits.
Sure, traffic accidents aren’t nearly as spooky as the Candyman Killer.
But maybe they should be, because they’re far more threatening to kids than poison-wielding
strangers ever have been.
We want to hear from you.
Did your parents inspect your Halloween candy?
Did they ever find anything?
Tell us in the comments!
Also, check out The Conversation at theconversation.com!
It’s a nonprofit site that gets academic experts like Scott to explain their research.
Remember to hit subscribe and we’ll see you next time.