The archive / Morals and safety
1970–1990 · USA
Strangers are poisoning children’s Halloween candy!
Poisoned Halloween candy
Panic meter
The verdict
Every autumn the media warned of strangers poisoning sweets. Research has not found a single such case.
Reality meter
What was said?
From the 1970s onwards, every October newspapers and police warned that strangers were putting poison or razor blades into the sweets children were given as they went door to door. Hospitals offered to X-ray bags of sweets, and many parents threw away anything that wasn't factory-wrapped.
The verdict: what happened next?
The sociologist Joel Best has gone through reports of poisoned Halloween sweets dating back to the 1950s and has not found a single confirmed case of a stranger killing a child this way. The best-known death, in 1974, was a child poisoned by his own father in order to collect on a life insurance policy.
The razor-blade stories almost always turned out to be hoaxes or pranks.
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