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 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,
poison or drugs inserted into or concealed in apples and candy.
What they continue to find, if history continues to run true to
course, is nothing. While caution about the hazards of the
Halloween custom is wise, statistics suggest that the kind of
nasty-neighbour 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 - New York Times, the
Los Angles 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
misbehaviour. 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
rumour that spread in the 1940-s 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
reports, 31 were published between 1969 and 1971, with a second peak
of twelve 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% 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 rumours and stories combine two familiar themes of urban
legends: danger 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 rumours 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
rumours. 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 the 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 rumour 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 the viewers'
minds when they set out trick-or-treating.
Mostly, however, the Halloween-sadist rumours 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, 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
boys father, Ronald Clark O'Bryan, who inserted the tainted candy into
Timmy's bag after he had returned from trick-or-treating.
Sylvia Grinder, 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 sadists rumour shows that just as
we've got to be careful about what we eat, so, too, must we be careful
about what we believe.
