Poison, Razor Blades, Moral Panic, and Halloween

Growing up I was fortunate to have a father that would selflessly inspect and test my spoils from a long night of trick-or-treating. The common wisdom at the time was to be wary of poison and razor blades in the candy. Honestly, I’m pretty convinced my dad didn’t believe in most of those rumors and just wanted to eat some of my candy so we negotiated a symbiotic deal where he would “test” the Good & Plenty boxes as a representative sample of my earnings.

I was listening to Tim Harford (Financial Times columnist and BBC broadcaster) talk about the history of Halloween Poisoning and was appalled at the truth behind the annual panic. Consider this 1970 article from The New York Times :

Take, for example, that plump red apple that Junior gets from a kindly old woman down the block. It may have a razor blade hidden inside. The chocolate “candy” bar may be a laxative, the bubble gum may be sprinkled with lye, the popcorn balls may be coated with camphor, the candy may turn out to be packets containing sleeping pills.

It would seem wise to let our parents put themselves at risk by eating our less enjoyed candy (I did wind up adding Sugar Daddies to the sample list for my father once I discovered my distaste for them). Especially because in 1969 – right in our backyard in upstate New York (Oneida and Ilion) – there were reports of razor blades and sewing needles in apples collected on a trick-or-treating spree. Happily, no candy was hurt during these events and only low-value, undesirable treats were caught in the crossfire.

Or what about in 1964 when a woman in Long Island was caught distributing arsenic on Halloween ? Sure, that headline sounds insidious, but when you peel the wrapper of that sticky Jolly Rancher of a tale, the truth is sweeter than the fiction:

On Halloween of 1964, annoyed at the prevalence of kids too old to beg for candy and too lazy and vain to do much in the way of costuming themselves, she set up “special” gift packages for them: Steel-wool pads, dog-biscuits and ant-poison pellets, wrapped in foil pouches. Her lumps of coal, for the kids who she felt were gaming the system unfairly.

The woman literally told the kiddos that these were gag gifts as she was distributing them. But much like Sugar Daddies and Good & Plenties, gag gifts don’t make headlines. Death, danger, and Butterfingers are the real treat.

In 1982, just a month before Halloween, seven deaths in the Chicago area were attributed to Tylenol that had been tampered with. Despite these cases having nothing to do with trick-or-treating, the fever pitch of candy tampering increased dramatically (in fact Halloween was almost canceled !).

Enter the unsung hero of Halloween, the full-sized candy bar of sociology, Joel Best. He and his team scoured major newspapers in a thirty year window to find cases of candy tampering and Halloween tragedies (and he’s been updating it every year since ). The team uncovered precisely 78 cases. Of those 78 (which included the Oneida, Ilion, and Long Island cases), only two were found to be serious. Seventy six of those cases were mere tricks; pranks by kids to their parents or hoaxes perpetrated by adults being the leading causes.

The two serious cases? One was a case of a father poisoning his child in an insurance scam , and the other was an accidental overdose of heroin that killed a child . The heroin had nothing to do with the Halloween candy; the treats were merely a scapegoat to shift blame from the actual source of the heroin – a family member.

All this to say that society may have over-indexed the threat of danger in Halloween candy (including Dear Abby in 1983 and Ann Landers in 1995 ). The reason I think debunking this myth is so important is because we need to question the common wisdom in our own profession. Media, word of mouth, and a general acceptance of “yeah, this does make sense” can poison our own beliefs about teaching.

If you are addicted to the idea of pervasive myths in education, you may want to indulge in the brain candy of some of our previous posts – The Myth of Learning Styles , Myths of Multitasking , Neuromyths – Part I , and Neuromyths – Part II . You may find them just as scary as razor blades in candy.

For the record, I’m not saying that you shouldn’t check candy from your trick-or-treaters, we live in crazy times. But I might recommend that you skip over the Good & Plenty and go for the Reeses.

Read more about the “Halloween Sadism” myths at the Washington Post and ars technica , and Snopes . And definitely listen to Tim Harford’s Cautionary Tales: The Halloween Poisoner .

Image by Myriams-Fotos via Pixabay