(Idiotic Halloween Belief #1 is in the post immediately above this one. Both #1 and #2 are sticky and will remain at the top of this blog until November 1st)
Remember when we were young? The thrill of driving around in the cold from house to house because they were all 6 miles apart from each other er, walking from house to house trick-or-treating? (I guess the rural experience doesn't translate well)
Anyways, you know what the drill was: you walked around with a bag, dressed in a costume, and collected candy. It was a pretty simple gig. If you were lucky, you got full sized commercial chocolate bars (Aero, Smarties, Jersey Milk, etc.) Less lucky, and you got the Halloween sampler-sized commercial chocolate bars. After that the wish list got a little fuzzy. Twizzlers were always acceptable, but knock-off twizzlers were a huge disappointment. My favourite candy, Rosebuds, never really caught on. The homes that gave you themed candy from other holidays was sometimes a little weird (were those new candy canes or really old ones? How long do chocolate Easter eggs keep anyways?), and of course the second biggest letdown was the "homemade treats" people. Who the hell wanted caramel popcorn balls, or nanaimo squares, or pastries? Well, anybody who realized that there was still a bigger letdown: the health obsessed idiots. Plain applies, toothbrushes, sugarless gum, noisemakers, and carrots. Regardless, you brought them all† home (the sack your brought was never full enough, and your Machiavelli-inspired largest bag hunt ended up being in vain), and then you ate as many of them as you could on the first night (lest siblings find your stash).
†Well, except for the healthy crap, you usually threw that out thinking you needed to "make room in the bag"
So whatever happened to that? Well, the answer is that the world became a dark and dangerous and ugly place. Every home is now full of sadists who inject cynanide into KitKats, sprinkle heroin on the popcorn balls, and slip razor blades into candy apples. Er, hasn't it? Maybe when Osama bin Laden sets up a bungalow in Mill Woods and decorates it with lots of cotton strewn out to look like spiderwebs we have something to worry about. But for now, this is all much ado about nothing. It turns out that nobody has ever tainted Halloween candy!
Snopes.com is great for debunking Urban Legends, and they do a pretty good number on the poisoned Halloween treats rumour. The only cases ever occuring have been cases of adults who knew the children trying to kill them in a way that would look like a random attack on kids"
By far the most famous case of Halloween candy poisoning was the murder of eight-year-old Timothy Mark O'Bryan at the hands of his father, Ronald Clark O'Bryan, in Houston, Texas. The child died at 10 p.m. on 31 Trick or Treat! October 1974, as a result of eating cyanide-laced Pixie Stix acquired while trick-or-treating.In other words, all of this "parental inspection of candy" is a giant pointless fear tactic, quoted often in the news media and passed along as some sort of urgent warning to kids. However, massive checks of newspaper records dating back to 1958 have determined that no Halloween candy has ever been poisoned except for poisoning done by persons close to the family. Ironically, this whole thing puts parents on guard for the strangers who's doors they knocked on, and never get them worrying about the tainted O'Henry bars that their secretly homosexual uncle has been handing out.
To make his act appear more like the work of a random madman, O'Bryan also gave poisoned Pixie Stix to his daughter and three other children. By a kind stroke of fate, none of the other children ate the candy.
Now what about foreign objects, such as needles and razor blades? Well, Snopes reports that such occurances are actually true...sorta. In fact, there has been... drum roll please...
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hey, did I say you could stop the drum roll yet?
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...one case.
That's right. One lousy case: In Minnesota in 2000, a creepy 49 year old was discovered to have put needles in Snickers bars and handed them out to children. We've been talking about foreign objects in Halloween candy for close to half a century, and in all that time in all of North America one guy did it one year.
Can we cut back on the annual paranoia please? As a whole, the experience of walking around from house to house trick-or-treating has fallen massively out of favour with parents, mostly because of concerns over bad candy (and slightly less so out of concerns over random child abductions). But with an older child and travelling of groups of at least three children, this should never be a concern. But the numbers of door knockers is reduced year after year, all because of some stupid persistant fears that have no basis in reality.
As thefolklorist.com says:
The truth about the dangers might not have been discovered, were it not for California researchers Joel Best and Gerald Horiuchi, who studied national crime data going back to 1958. In their 1985 published study, they found only 76 reports of any kind of tampering. Most of them turned out to be mistaken or fraudulent. Out of these 76 reports, only three incidents of children dying were reported to be tainted candy cases. In one case, the father of a Houston boy gave him arsenic laced candy to collect on a large insurance claim. In the second case, a boy stumbled across his uncle’s stash of heroin, ingested some of the drug and died. This boy’s family tried to hide the facts by sprinkling heroin over some of his other candy, but the family soon confessed to their cover-up. And in the third case, a Los Angeles girl had a fatal seizure that was first blamed on tainted candy, but later discovered to be the result of a congenital heart condition.
Parents! Stop leaving your children at these silly cookie cutter mall events! Let them go forth and experience the joys of trick-or-treating! The worst that is likely to happen is that your child might go to the home of some anti-fun freak who has no candy to give them. If you're so protective that you're bothered by this, than you might as well visit this link.
Other links on this topic:
- "The Candy Man", 30 years later
- How often does Halloween candy tampering really happen?
- Halloween candy-tampering mostly just myth
- Tainted Candy or Paranoia? U Students Consider What's Really Scary This Halloween
- History proves candy tampering scare unfounded
- Why bother to save Halloween?
