Tainted Halloween candy

Tainted Halloween candy are cases in which someone has added poison or sharp objects such as razor blades, needles, or broken glass to candy and then distributed it at Halloween to harm random trick-or-treating children. In many areas, rumors of poisoned candy are mostly urban legends about malevolent strangers who want to harm children, and serve as modern cautionary tales to both children and parents.

A few cases of strangers harming children in this way have been reported in the news media, though far fewer than the number of unconfirmed accounts. Commonly, the story appears in the media when a young child dies suddenly after Halloween. Medical investigations into the actual cause of death often show that these children did not die from eating candy given to them by strangers. In other, rare cases, adult family members have spread this story in an effort to cover up murder or accidental deaths. In other incidents, a child who has been told about poisoned candy places a dangerous object or substance in a pile of candy and pretends that it was the work of a stranger. This behavior is called the copycat effect.

History

Claims that candy was poisoned or adulterated gained general credence during the Industrial Revolution, when food production moved out of the home or local area, where it was made in familiar ways by known and trusted people, to strangers using unknown ingredients and unfamiliar machines and processes. Some doctors publicly claimed that they were treating children poisoned by candy every day. If a child became ill, and had eaten candy, the candy was widely assumed to be the cause. However, no cases of illness or death were ever substantiated.

In the 1890s and 1900s, tests by the US Bureau of Chemistry and other state agencies on hundreds of kinds of candy found no evidence of poisons or adulteration. These tests revealed that inexpensive glucose (from corn syrup) was in common use for cheap candies, that some candies contained trace amounts of copper from uncoated copper cooking pans, and that coal tar dyes were being used for coloring, but there was no evidence of the many types of poison, industrial waste, garbage, or other adulterants alleged to be present. Eventually, the claims that children were being sickened by candy were put down to indigestion due to overeating, or to other causes, including food poisoning due to improper cooking, hygiene, or storage of meat and other foods.

Several events during the 20th century fostered the candy tampering myth.

In 1959, a California dentist, William Shyne, gave candy-coated laxative pills to trick or treaters. He was charged with outrage of public decency and unlawful dispensing of drugs.

In 1964, an annoyed Long Island, New York woman gave out packages of inedible objects to children whom she believed were too old to be trick-or-treating. The packages contained items such as steel wool, dog biscuits, and ant buttons (which were clearly labeled with the word "poison"). Though nobody was injured, she was prosecuted and pleaded guilty to endangering children. The same year saw media reports of lye-filled bubble gum being handed out in Detroit and rat poison being given in Philadelphia, although it is important to note that these were media reports and were never substantiated to be actual events.

Another notable milestone in the spread of the candy tampering myths was an article published in The New York Times in 1970. This article claimed that "Those Halloween goodies that children collect this weekend on their rounds of ‘trick or treating’ may bring them more horror than happiness", and provided specific examples of potential tamperings.

Reports and copycat incidents peaked shortly after the Chicago Tylenol murders, which were first reported one month before Halloween in 1982. This incident involved a murderer who added poison to a few bottles of over-the-counter medication after the medication had been delivered to stores.

Debunking the myths

A primary scholar in this area, Joel Best of the University of Delaware, has drawn together 90 cases of alleged poisoning attempts from 1958 onward. In none of the cases does he attribute the events to "random attempts to harm children" at the Halloween holiday, noting instead that most cases are attempts by adults to gain compensation or by children to seek attention.

Over the years various experts have tried to debunk the various candy tampering stories. Among this group is Joel Best, a sociologist at the University of Delaware, who specializes in candy tampering legends. In his research, he researched newspapers from 1958 to 1983 in search of candy tampering. Of these stories, fewer than 90 instances might have qualified as actual candy tampering. Best has found five child deaths that were initially thought by local authorities to be caused by homicidal strangers, but none of those were sustained by investigation. Far more prevalent during the same period were reports of vandalism, racist incidents, and children being injured in pedestrian–vehicle collisions on Halloween.

Children sometimes copy or act out the stories about tampered candy that they overhear, by adding pins to or pouring household cleaners on their own candy and then reporting the now-unsafe candy to their parents. In these incidents, the children have not been harmed; they know that the dangerous item is present and that it would be unsafe to eat the candy.

Misattributed poisoning deaths

The deaths of five American children were initially blamed on stranger poisoning. However, none of these claims were sustained upon investigation.

• In 1970, Kevin Toston, a 5-year-old boy from the Detroit area, found and ate heroin his uncle had stashed. The boy died following a four-day coma. The family attempted to protect the uncle by claiming the drug had been sprinkled in the child's Halloween candy.
• In a 1974 case, Timothy O'Bryan, an 8-year-old boy from Deer Park, Texas, died after eating a cyanide-laced package of Pixy Stix. A subsequent police investigation eventually determined that the poisoned candy had been planted in his trick-or-treat pile by the boy's father, Ronald Clark O'Bryan, who also gave out poisoned candy to other children in an attempt to cover up the murder. The murderer, who had wanted to claim life insurance money, was executed in 1984.
• In 1978, Patrick Wiederhold, a two-year-old boy from Flint, Michigan died after eating Halloween candy. However, toxicology tests found no evidence of poison and the death was determined to be due to natural causes.
• In 1990, Ariel Katz, a seven-year-old girl in Santa Monica, California, died while trick-or-treating. Early press reports blamed poisoned candy, despite her parents telling the police that she had previously been diagnosed with a serious medical condition, an enlarged heart, which was the actual cause of death.
• In 2001, a four-year-old girl in Vancouver, British Columbia died after eating some Halloween candy. However, there was no evidence of poisoned candy, and she actually died of a streptococcus infection.

Media and the myth

Despite these claims of poisoned candy being eventually proved false, the news media promoted the story continuously throughout the 1980s, with local news stations featuring frequent coverage. During this time cases of poisoning were repeatedly reported based on unsubstantiated claims or before a full investigation could be completed and often never followed up on. This one-sided coverage contributed to the overall panic and caused rival media outlets to issue reports of candy tampering as well.

By 1985, the media had driven the hysteria about candy poisonings to such a point that an ABC News/Washington Post poll that found 60% of parents feared that their children would be injured or killed because of Halloween candy sabotage.

Advice columnists entered the fray during the 1980s and 1990s with both Ask Ann Landers and Dear Abby warning parents of the horrors of candy tampering:

"In recent years, there have been reports of people with twisted minds putting razor blades and poison in taffy apples and Halloween candy. It is no longer safe to let your child eat treats that come from strangers." –Ann Landers in 1995

"Somebody's child will become violently ill or die after eating poisoned candy or an apple containing a razor blade." –Dear Abby in 1983

This collective fear also served as the impetus for the "safe" trick-or-treating offered by many local malls.

Social causes

The prevalence and persistence of these myths during the 1960s and 1970s, a time of social upheaval, greater racial integration, and improved status for women, reflected societal questions about who was trustworthy.

2015 Columbus case

In 2015, a teenager reported to police that she had found a razor blade in a Snickers bar that she received while trick-or-treating in Reynoldsburg, Ohio, near the capital of Columbus. She reported that she did not find it until the day after she received the candy bar, and could not remember the house from which she received it. Police stated that it seemed to be an "isolated incident".

Further reading

• Lewis, Dan (October 6, 2013). "Where Did the Fear of Poisoned Halloween Candy Come From?" Smithsonian

External links

• Halloween Sadism: the evidence by Joel Best
• Mikkelson, Barbara & David P. "Halloween Poisonings" at Snopes.com: Urban Legends Reference Pages.
• Mikkelson, Barbara & David P. "Pins and Needles" at Snopes.com: Urban Legends Reference Pages.
• "Fighting fear with fear" at Salon.com