The Myth of Poisoned Halloween Candy And Hidden Needles

     I am, just barely, old enough to remember going out on Halloween (and it was Halloween back then, not some pagan sounding "Harvest Festival" where you half expect people to be burned alive in wicker cages to propitiate the gods) and being able to collect homemade cookies, candy, candied apples, and other treats. But that quickly changed in the late 1970s when stories of applies with needles or razor blades starting making their appearance in the media, followed by reports of poisoned candy. Soon, homemade cookies and doughnuts were replaced with coupons for a doughnut or large cookie at the local grocery store; and it quickly became the norm to only hand out commercially produced and packaged candies. Eventually, police agencies were offering to search through candy for suspicious items; and hospitals were offering to x-ray bags of candy. For awhile it was popular to take kids around to stores or to shopping malls to trick-or-treat, but that also faded away. Now it seems that we are stuck where kids go trunk-or-treating at events sponsored by churches or other groups, or are dutifully driven around by parents to relatives. It's safer that way.

    But what if this was mere paranoia, looming larger in the public psyche than the odds of it happening in real life?

    I recently happened across an article from the History Channel website entitled "How Americans Became Convinced Their Halloween Candy was Poisoned." It begins:

    Rumors of tainted, poisoned or otherwise murderous Halloween candy handed out to unsuspecting youngsters are as much a part of the Halloween tradition as costumes and sing-song pleas for sweets. The myth goes like this—no kid is safe on October 31 because psychotic murderers may hand out tainted treats to trick-or-treating children.

    But is poisoned Halloween candy a terrifying threat or an urban legend?

    “Many, if not most, reports of Halloween sadism are of questionable authenticity,” write sociologists and criminal justice experts Joel Best and Gerald T. Horiuchi. 

In fact, stories of poisoned candy seem entirely to be urban legend. There are only two cases involving Halloween candy described in the article:

    In 1964, for example, a New York woman named Helen Pfeil was arrested for handing out things like ant poison and dog biscuits to kids. When questioned, the housewife said that she was joking and that she gave the items to kids she felt were too old to be trick-or-treating. Though no children were poisoned during the incident, law enforcement didn’t find her actions funny.

    The most infamous Halloween poisoning took place on October 31, 1974. That’s when a Texas man named Ronald O’Bryan gave cyanide-laced pixie sticks to five children, including his son. The other children never ate the candy, but his eight-year-old son, Timothy, did—and died soon after.

    Though nobody saw O’Bryan put the cyanide in the candy, investigators learned that O’Bryan had recently taken life insurance policies out on his children. He was convicted of murder and executed via lethal injection in 1984. Though it’s been decades since the crime, the “Candyman” murder still looms large in the memories of many parents on Halloween.

And, in the latter case, the murderer wasn't even targeting trick-or-treaters generally, but his son and his son's friends. He mistakenly thought that poisoned Halloween candy was so common that it was the perfect way to cover up his crime.

    The article "Trick or truth? The real story behind Halloween candy tampering" from CBC News, indicates that there were "4 cases of tampering reported between 2008 and 2019, but none resulted in injury or death" although I can't determine from the story whether these were only in Canada or included all of North America. But the reporter also reached out to Joel Best:

    "I couldn't find a single report of a child killed or seriously injured from a contaminated treat received during trick-or-treating," he said. "This is a contemporary legend, and that's all it is."

    Best identified about 200 confirmed cases of candy tampering in the U.S. and Canada since 1958.

    "The attempts to systematically follow up on all reports concluded that the vast majority were hoaxes," Best said.

    "Is it possible that someone maliciously passes out treats with the intent of harming children at random? Of course. But this raises the question why there usually aren't multiple reports from the same area." 

    Best said in some instances, kids tampered with their own candy to get attention, or a friend or family member played a prank that went awry or a foreign object ended up in candy during the manufacturing process. 

It goes on to describe the two incidents mentioned above as well as a few others: a dentist in California who distributed laxative laced candies to children; an incident from Toronto, Canada, in 1968 where a mentally ill man actually had booby trapped apples with razors and needles, and poisoned some candy; and a 2000 case out of Minneapolis where four teenagers received chocolate bars with needles. But, as the article concludes, the real danger on Halloween is trick-or-treaters being struck by cars.

    As for Joel Best, who literally wrote the book on these types of incidents: "Best never inspected his children's Halloween candy and doesn't think it's necessary for parents to do so."

“All I can say is I don’t know of a single case of a child killed by a Halloween poisoner,” says Best. “I’ve seen five news stories that attributed deaths to Halloween poisoning. In one case, it was the child’s own father, and the other four were all retracted.”

Additional sources:

• "Why the urban legend of contaminated Halloween candy won't disappear"--NPR.
• "Why Halloween’s ‘Poison Candy’ Myth Endures"--Atlas Obscura.