poisoned halloween candy
Dressed as Aunt Jemima and dragging my candy-filled pillowcase through block after block of suburban-Philly row homes, my skittish youthful mind was bedeviled with tales of razor blades in apples and rat hairs in Reese's cups. The kids were swapping stories about fat old dirty crippled pervert psychos who were poisoning our candy, and there was no telling when one of us would turn green from a cyanide-laced Nestle's Crunch or bite into an Almond Joy and be spitting blood from glass chunks.
The idea that children are perennial victims of tainted Halloween candy is part of American folklore. But professors in Illinois and Delaware who've devoted their lives to substantiating such allegations can find no evidence of a child's Halloween candy ever being poisoned by a stranger. There is only one documented case of a Halloween candy-poisoning fatality, in 1974 when a Texas man filled his own SON's Pixy Stix with cyanide, killing him. Ironically, the idea of Halloween candy-tampering had already become such an urban legend, the man thought he could avoid suspicion amid a slew of random poisonings by other perps.
I guess it's a good thing that it's largely a myth. And yet I'm reasonably sure that somewhere out there, there exist other lonely men capable of such ugly acts. And I wonder why they've behaved themselves all these years.
