Just as surely as we can expect American children to trick-or-treat every Halloween, so we can expect well-meaning adults to raise the specter of what I and other folklorists call “Halloween sadists”—stories about people who prey upon costumed kids by giving them tainted treats.
School and police authorities issue their annual warnings against tampered foods; and hospitals, hoping to placate anxious parents, will X-ray their children’s bags of sugar-coated Halloween loot.
What they look for each Halloween is danger—razor blades, needles, poisons, or drugs inserted into or concealed in apples and candy.
What they find, if history continues to run true to course, is nothing. While caution about the hazards of our Halloween customs is wise, statistics suggest that the kind of nasty-neighbor story that incites such fear at Halloween time is just another urban legend.
The existence of large-scale threats to children from Halloween sadists is taken for granted by most parents. But this belief, and the fear that results, is based largely on hearsay and exaggerated reporting, not on documented attacks on children.
As Joel Best, a sociologist at California State University, Fresno, has written in 1985 in Psychology Today
magazine: “Everyone knows that Halloween sadists have been responsible for countless deaths and serious injuries. Fortunately, everyone is wrong.”
In order to assess the threat of Halloween sadists, Best and his colleague Gerald T. Horiuchi reviewed all the Halloween-related stories reported by four newspapers
—the New York Times
, the Los Angeles Times
, the Chicago Tribune
, and the Sacramento Bee
—between 1958 and 1984. They reported their findings in the sociology journal Social Problems
in June 1985.
Best and Horiuchi found only 76 reported incidents in the twenty-seven-year period. Many of the incidents turned out to be unverifiable or to be hoaxes perpetrated by children in the spirit of Halloween misbehavior. And no report described an incident in which death or serious injury was caused by adulterated goodies.
There is a prototype for later Halloween sadist stories. A rumor that spread in the 1940s described a prankster who heated pennies on a skillet, then offered them to unwitting trick-or-treaters.
But Best and Horiuchi’s survey suggests that a fear of more lethal Halloween sadists developed in the early 1970s. Of the 76 news reports, 31 were published between 1969 and 1971, with a second peak of 12 reports coming in 1982.
The pair contend that the first peak might be attributed to “heightened social strains of that period.” The 1982 cases, however, were directly related to reports of the seven deaths caused by cyanide-laced Extra-Strength Tylenol sold in the Chicago area, and of several similar incidents that followed.
That year, the Food and Drug Administration studied 270 potential candy-adulteration cases and found that only 5 percent indicated any actual tampering. An FDA official described the fear of Halloween sadists as a case of “psychosomatic mass hysteria.”
Even though crime reports and reliable news stories do not support the fear of Halloween sadists, oral tradition keeps the concern alive.
These rumors and stories combine two familiar themes of urban legends: dangers to children and the contamination of foods. And just as urban legends like
“The Microwaved Baby” or “The Batter-fried Rat” seem almost plausible, the Halloween-sadist rumors appear to make sense when compared to crimes described daily in the news.
Unlike most urban legends, there is no well-defined “text” of these rumors. They may take the form of warnings to parents to check their children’s treats before allowing the children to eat them. Or it may be one child’s warning to another: “You shouldn’t go to that house because of what happened to a kid there once.”
The razor blade and the apple, however, appear regularly in accounts of the legend. The apple may recur because of its Biblical status as a forbidden fruit or, more likely, because apples are in season at the time of Halloween. The razor blade may recur because its size would make it easy to conceal within a snack or because its blade—sharper than a needle or pin—makes it especially menacing.
The media play a large part in keeping the idea of a wave of annual treat tampering alive. A typical article in a parents’ magazine in 1974 called Halloween the “Holiday for sadists.” Newsweek
, in a 1975 article, went so far as to claim that “several children have died and hundreds have narrowly escaped injury from razor blades, sewing needles and shards of glass purposefully put into their goodies by adults.”
Another influence on the rumor is “slasher” films, such as Halloween
(1979) and Halloween II
(1981), in which random attacks by maniacs are directed against helpless young people. One such film, Halloween III: Season of the Witch
(1983), depicts a maniac’s plot to murder millions of children. These films are usually shown on or near Halloween, often at midnight, making the fear of Halloween sadists all too fresh in viewers’ minds when they set out trick-or-treating.
Mostly, however, the Halloween-sadist rumors seem
to combine the fears that we naturally associate with the holiday: a fear of strangers, a fear of the night, and fear for our children’s welfare that is wholly justified, considering the myriad types of mischief that are given license on Halloween.
There is one case in which a child was killed by a contaminated Halloween treat. On Halloween, in 1974, eight-year-old Timothy O’Bryan of Houston, Texas, died from cyanide poisoning after eating a package of Pixie Stix candy that had been adulterated with the poison. But the person convicted for the murder was not a random sadist, but the boy’s father, Ronald Clark O’Bryan, who inserted the tainted candy into Timmy’s bag after he had returned from trick-or-treating.
Sylvia Grider, a folklorist at Texas A&M University, studied this case and concluded that Mr. O’Bryan was “the only person ever convicted of acting out an urban legend and carrying it to the ultimate conclusion—murder.”
It is usually a version of the “Candyman murder” incident, as the press dubbed the O’Bryan case, that people retell when they pass on a Halloween-sadist story.
Of course, the evidence against the threat of Halloween sadists does not mean that parents should not warn children about the hazards of taking candy from strangers or eating it without inspection. After all, urban legends often give good advice in a fictional framework. But the Halloween-sadist rumor shows that just as we’ve got to be careful about what we eat, so, too, must we be careful about what we believe.