In my area, it seems like trick or treating is in free fall, possibly due to the poisoned candy myth, with parents likely moving heavily to trunk or treating.
I hate trunk or treat.
Stop making the neighborhood you live in “scary.” Go door to door, meet the neighbors, be friendly.
Kids can’t walk house to house anymore, we have to put everyone as close together as possible in a parking lot.
My parents completely believed this, said they even heard of people putting razor blades into candy.
Warned me to never accept candy or treats that was custom made or had an opened package.
…No… one… ever gave out any candy that was not just from a bag of mixed halloween candy bought at a super market.
But it did contribute to my crippling anxiety and paranoia.
At one point (this is waaay before webcams or cheap and small cameras were a thing, mid 90s), they told me they had put cameras all over the house, ‘so we’ll know if you misbehave while we’re out and you don’t have a babysitter!’
… I spent the entire time they were gone looking for cameras. When they got back, I told them that unless they were using literal spy cameras, they had lied to me.
They just smiled.
Said nothing.
Just smiled.
…
They managed to not tell me what their actual anniversary date was for 30 years.
Because it was 3 or 4 months before I was born.
And they had told me my whole life that they’d been a proper Christian couple, who didn’t have sex until after marriage.
Yeah turns out they were both drug addicts, alcoholics, going to parties all the time, my mom may have even been bisexual… but they decided to become strict fundamentalist Christians and raise me as if they always had been too.
…
I don’t talk to my parents anymore.
I’m sorry. That’s hateful. I don’t understand why people take so much enjoyment in manipulating and lying to children.
From what I recall, without looking at this article, the only case of poisoned candy in the US came from a man that poisoned his own son’s candy in effort to pass it off as someone else doing it.
Correct! The poison pixy stix guy. All the other ones are mythological.
1/2 a billion people ( including all that lived), over half a century, have not reported one case of poison during an annual trek by millions of vulnerable people ?
During a night where there are thousands of crimes of all sorts .
I prefer to think of it as a lack of published information
Be the change you want to see in the - wait no
This guy has done years of research, going through decades of local news, to find mention of Halloween candy incidents. While there is always room for error, suspicious deaths are generally reported at the local level, and the available data support the findings that nobody is out there poisoning children on Halloween.
They die by violence, by accident, by misadventure. Not by eating a piece of candy with a slightly defective wrapper.
I read that too a while back, and i believed it for years. Now, I’m just not sure.
I’m not saying it happens a lot… but
Outside the fact it’s just hard to tamper most commercially packaged candy. There seems to a taboo about poison in this county. People will be glad to shoot me but god forbid they touch mah diabetes causing candy.
But social taboo works both ways, and it alters the self reporting. I remember a few times I have seen local authorities not wanting to call adult poisoning that. Then later it was
And, despite the movies, poison food usually does not kill. Often altered food merely gives discomfort that hard to tell from food borne illness.
So, although trick or treating is probably one of the safest activities one can do here, and doubtless many want to think it completely safe. It’s probably safer than riding on the freeway
I wish you weren’t getting downvoted because you don’t seem to be making some wild claim — it’s not like you’re saying everyone’s out there poisoning the kids.
I think there’s merit to your argument, and even if not it makes for interesting discussion.
Thanks, it honestly took a bit of courage to reply in those comments. I have been severely bashed by others about this very topic since the 1990s, so eventually I just went with the flow. There seems to be a large group of people, now and then, who were improperly scared and restricted by overprotective parents who made similar arguments to justify their bad parenting decisions. Or seen their friends restricted.
It actually touches on why there are not so many kids playing today outside, unsupervised. All these baseless fears
So, for many, anything that reminds them of that, is going to get a good downvote or so, at the very least, if not a snarky comment. But, while I have supervised or been on several Halloweens, now that my kids are grown and the grandkids are starting new traditions, I would like to be done with these fears while not embracing the idea that everyone is kind, nice or safe. Street smarts… etc
Its a very contentious subject, and I would not be surprised this comment will rub people the wrong way. If you want to see interesting American social dynamics, this is a prime example. Its not entirely out of the realm I would be called a bad parent or bad grandparent simply by saying what I said
It’s probably hard for random people to make an actually lethal piece of candy. But I’m also absolutely sure many have tried. They never make news for one reason or another. And they’re too rare to make statistics either.
102 people died daily in 2016 in motor vehicle accidents.
Local authorities waiting for a full tox panel before announcing cause of death, or reversing, or dithering, is no cause for alarm
Consumer protection laws are No Joke.
We’re pretty safe on Halloween, all things considered.
