I can remember a comedy routine on a Paul Lynne record where he heated up pennies to toss at trick-or-treaters. Apparently, though there hasn't been any real cases of strangers poisoning kids. Maybe a razor blade or two, though.
For a detailed description of Best's findings, see reports compiled by Snopes, The Incidental Economist or Dr. Best's updated research page. But the Cliff's Notes version is this: the vast majority of the reports turned out to be pranks. A couple days later a kid would confess to sprinkling poison (or baking powder, etc) on his own candy in hopes of freaking everybody out. There were also a couple of cases in which a child died while trick-or-treating (or right after) from causes that were unknown for a day or two. For instance, in 1990 a girl died of congenital heart failure, and in 2001 a girl died from a bacterial infection, that had nothing to do with Halloween candy. But in each case, for that moment in time before the coroner’s reports came back, police departments and media outlets went berserk, warning parents to throw away all their children’s candy in the face of a potential poisoning.
There was a sad case in 1970 in which a little boy somehow got into his uncle’s heroin stash and overdosed. It happened in early November, and the family, in an attempt to protect the uncle, sprinkled heroin on the boy’s Halloween candy to make it look like a stranger had done it. The investigation discovered the family's actions, and determined the death wasn't caused by the heroin on the candy -- but again, for a moment in time it looked like a legitimate poisoning. Those couple of days seem to be able to breed a kind of fear that is far more potent than any of the reassurance produced by the reports that a stranger wasn't to blame.
Dr. Best did find one case in which a child died from poisoned Halloween candy -- in 1974, a father killed his own son that way. The father, who was trying to collect on his child's life insurance policy, was discovered, locked up, and sentenced to death. As grim as this is, it’s still a far cry from the evil stranger out to get the innocents at random.
So why? Why do we still think there's a stranger out there? Or that there could be? Or that there once was?
Perhaps it’s simply because the image plays on something so primal -- the worry of a stranger hurting our children -- that all it needs is the occasional suggestion to stay alive. Or perhaps it’s because of Helen Pfeil. A 1960s Long Island housewife who's the closest thing to an origin story that Dr. Best could find.
In 1964, crazy ol’ Helen (ok, she was only 47, but I like to picture her as an old bat) got a funny idea. She thought she’d hassle the kids she deemed too old to be trick-or-treating. Got a little too much hair on your chin? Instead of handing you candy, Helen would hand you a steel-wool sponge thingee. Or a doggie biscuit. Or (judgment fail) a little tablet of ant poison labeled “ANT POISON.” Helen had kids of her own. Her husband thought the idea was a riot. So with a smile and a scold, Helen told each teen who came to her door about the joke. I imagine her shaking her finger, her Halloween take on the old coal-in-the-stocking routine, “too old to be trick or treating missy… here’s what you get!” A doggie biscuit! A clump of steel wool! But still, for the handful of teenagers who came home with ant poison in their sacks, the damage was done. Their parents launched a hunt to find this sicko. Helen Pfeil was arrested. She plead guilty, with her husband cringing in the background, to the sound of the harshest crickets in the land. The gavel.
Could misguided Helen be the source of all our fear?
I titled this post the way I did because I have the scratchy feeling that on one hand even though that fear is useful (erring on the side of caution makes absolute sense when it comes to your child), on the other hand it can grow so large -- this specter, this cloud of collective worry -- that it can do real harm, on a massive scale.
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