The decorations have been taken down, the costumes put away, and all store displays are now about Christmas.  Halloween is well and truly over. But we here at My Dark Path can’t stop thinking about it. So we decided to keep the haunted holiday going for one more episode, even now in November (or December), as Hallow’s Eve has a very dark path indeed, and not the one you think. Let’s talk about Halloween and candy.

When you stop to consider, Halloween is a fascinating holiday, at least partly because it is one of the most if not the most s community oriented.  Christmas and Thanksgiving are spent with the family. Most other holidays are also spent with one’s family or simply enjoying a day off from work.  Only the Fourth of July comes as close to bringing a community together to celebrate a holiday, but Halloween goes one step further.  On Halloween, we invite complete strangers (and well-known neighbors) to come to our door in disguise and in response to what is essentially a threat – trick or treat – give these people free candy.  Well, free to them. The National Retail Foundation reported that in 2019, the last Halloween before the pandemic, Americans spent $2.6 billion on candy totaling 300,000 tons of sweets. That’s an incredible amount, especially considering how much of it is then given to strangers who come to your door.  And yet, this time-honored ritual is often the most contact many people will have with their the children on their street year-round. On Halloween, we give food to our neighbors and strangers alike as part of this nation-wide celebration. Halloween is a community holiday, and a fun, joyful one, but also one with a dark side – a scary side.  And not the fun-scary side of dressing up, going to haunted attractions or watching scary movies.  Genuinely scary.  And it all centers around the candy.

One of the ironclad rules I got from my father growing up was to eat nothing until you got home and we could check your candy.  Indeed, if horror movies have taught us anything, it is to check your candy when you go trick or treating.  Beginning in the seventies, hospitals and medical centers offered to x-ray Halloween candy for free, in order to ensure no razor blades or needles had been inserted. And back then everybody knew somebody who knew somebody who had a cousin that had bitten into a candy bar and gotten cut up by a razor. Maybe there was something to the stories, urban legends that everyone knows is true, even if the story is third hand.

The reality is trickier than the urban legends. Candy tampering even has an official name: Halloween Sadism, coined by Dr. Joel Best, a sociologist who has extensively studied the phenomenon. Today we will walk a dark path looking at Halloween Sadism and Strangers with Candy.

Before we get going, I do want to sound a note of caution. Halloween is fun, and many of us have nothing but happy memories of it and enjoy it still.  Today’s episode features discussion of harm being done to minors. We neither celebrate nor enjoy this element, but it is nevertheless part of the dark history of Halloween, and we here at My Dark Path often acknowledge the terrible things that have happened without being exploitive in the stories we tell.  If hearing about children being hurt would bother you, allow me to sincerely encourage you to check out one of our other spooky episodes – perhaps one of our episodes like Haunted Dolls, Witch Trials before Salem, or our three part series on The Amityville Horror, all of which make for excellent listening (although, perhaps ironically, they also all contain threats to children).  

Hi, I’m MF Thomas and this is the My Dark Path podcast.  In every episode, we explore the fringes of history, science and the paranormal.  So, if you geek out over these subjects, you’re among friends here at My Dark Path.  Since friends stay in touch, please reach out to me on Instagram, sign up for our newsletter at mydarkpath.com, or just send an email to explore@mydarkpath.com. I’d love to hear from you.

Finally, Thank you for listening and choosing to walk the Dark Paths of the world with me. Let’s get started with this special Halloween-after-Halloween episode of My Dark Path.  So get your costume back on, grab your pillow case or plastic pumpkin, and let’s Trick or Treat our way through dangerous strangers with candy.

PART ONE

Halloween Sadism began in 1959, right at the end of the fifties in Eisenhower’s strong, patriotic America. On October second of that year, CBS television premiered a new show, The Twilight Zone, offering viewers a weekly program that showed strange and different situations, often with a moral or political lesson.  The country was beginning to change in the wake of the postwar boom, and the sixties, with a radical change to the nation and the community on the way, were just around the corner.  That Halloween, a Fremont, California dentist named William Shyne distributed 450 laxative-laced candies to children — 30 of whom fell ill. We still don’t know why he did it.  He never offered an explanation. He was later charged with "outrage of public decency" and "unlawful dispensing of drugs." He was fined, given a four month suspended jail sentence, and two years of probation, which doesn’t sound like much for someone who poisoned thirty children.  He kept his license to practice dentistry, although I’m not certain I would want him as my dentist.  He was the first of what would become a long line of alleged candy-tamperers, some of which were real, many of which were not.

Another high profile case made headlines in 1964, when a 47-year-old mother from Greenlawn, N.Y., named Helen Pfeil handed out bags of treats containing arsenic-laced ant traps, metal mesh scrubbing pads and dog biscuits to teenagers she thought were too old to be trick or treating. She was arrested, charged with endangering children, found guilty, and given a suspended sentence. Pfeil told police she "didn't mean it maliciously" but was "annoyed by the Halloween custom," the Milwaukee Journal reported. She also allegedly told the teens that she was giving them poison and made no attempt to disguise it as candy. She was later committed to a state hospital for mental observation.

In 1970, article entitled “Those Treats May Be Tricks” appeared in The New York Times.  Published on October 28 cautions, “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.” No evidence, just a lot of “may be” something dangerous. This is a pattern we will see from the seventies through the present day: the news media presenting sensationalized stories about what “may” happen with no actual evidence that it has happened. Paradoxically, just because the media sensationalizes something does not mean there is not an underlying danger.  However, far more often than not, the danger to children at Halloween is not from strangers with candy but family with candy. 

The same year the New York Times warned of “stranger danger” at Halloween, the first death from Halloween candy occurred when a five-year-old Detroit, Michigan boy, Kevin Toston, fell into a coma, was brought to the hospital, and died four days later without ever regaining consciousness.  An autopsy revealed he had ingested heroin.  Tests on his Halloween candy found trace heroin dust, causing police to investigate those who gave out candy on Halloween night.  However, police eventually discovered that the boy had actually found his uncle’s heroin stash and mistakenly eaten it. The family then put a small amount of heroin on the candy to throw off investigators.  Clearly, the tactic only delayed justice, and those responsible found themselves arrested and on trial.

In 1974 in Pasadena, Texas Ronald Clark O’Bryan attempted to poison five children, including his TK year old daughter Elizabeth and his eight year old son Timothy.  Although five kids were given pixie sticks laced with potassium cyanide, only young Timothy consumed his, resulting in his tragic death.  Although the community initially mourned for the O’Bryan family, things became suspicious when it was revealed that Ronald, an optician by trade and a deacon in his local church, was deeply in debt to the tune of a hundred thousand dollars and had taken out life insurance policies on both of his children.  He had distributed poison candy to other children to make it seem like a Halloween sadist had done it. His actions earned him the nicknames “The Candy Man” and “The Man Who Killed Halloween.”  Ronald Clark O’Bryan was convicted of capital murder in June of 1975 and executed by lethal injection in March of 1984 at the Texas State Penitentiary at Huntsville. His crimes against his own children were heinous, and furthermore, they promoted panic and fear across America.  Not only did he poison his son and attempt to poison his daughter, but to cover up the crime he attempted to poison three other children in his neighborhood, giving further fuel to the moral panic over Halloween sadism and not-so-Strangers with candy come trick or treat time.  

The moral panic also got a boost from the 1982 Chicago Tylenol Murders – someone put cyanide in Tylenol bottles in the Chicago area, which tangentially is why virtually everything has tamper-proof packaging nowadays.  A few copycats tried to kill family members with allegedly tampered Tylenol but what was determined to be an in-house murder attempt.  Although this event did not take place at Halloween, it reinforced the popular idea that strangers tampered with products to hurt or kill innocent people just taking a painkiller or eat a candy bar.

Sadly, as with Ronald Clark O’Bryan and the Chicago Tylenol Murders, such is also the case with most Halloween Sadism events – it is an inside job.  In 1985, Professors Joel Best and Gerald T. Horiuchi authored a paper entitled “The Razor Blade in the Apple: The Social Construction of Urban Legends” a study of the urban legend of neighborhood monsters poisoning trick or treaters.  Best and Horiuchi, sociologists at the University of Delaware and California State University, Fresno, respectively, found that even though there were plenty of newspaper articles warning parents about this urban legend, there were less than 90 instances of what actually can be considered as candy tampering between 1958 and 1983. 

As with poor Kevin Tosten, a three-year-old in New Britain, Conn., was diagnosed with cocaine poisoning after Halloween1994. Police suspected his Halloween candy, but no drugs were found on the leftover piece of candy, and suspicion, as usual, then turned to relatives and friends.

In the twenty-first century, there are still isolated incidents of Halloween sadism, none of which were fatal. In 2000 James Joseph Smith of Minneapolis allegedly put needles in Snickers bars and gave them out to kids on Halloween. A 14-year-old boy was pricked when he bit into the candy, but no one needed medical care.  Smith was charged with one count of adulterating a substance with intent to cause death, harm or illness.

In 2000 some kids in Hercules, Calif., came home from trick-o-treating with packets of marijuana done up to look like mini Snickers bars. The police traced the fake candy to a single house. They found the homeowner didn’t know the Snickers were actually mini marijuana packs. He was a postal worker who took the candy home when it ended up in the dead letter office and was mortified to learn what he had done.  Again, no harm was done in the end, no one consumed the drugs that looked like candy, but again, it feeds the narrative that people are putting drugs in Halloween candy on purpose.

In 2019, in Colerain Township, Ohio, police urged parents to carefully examine any candy received while trick or treating after two people said they found razor blades hidden inside candy wrappers. One of the people claimed to have found a blade and cut a finger while sorting through their candy on Halloween night.  While that man went to the hospital for stiches, no one else was injured. The two families who found the blades had trick-or-treated together in the same neighborhood in the Cincinnati suburb, but no one was ever caught. That same night in Waterbury, Connecticut, police arrested a 37-year-old man after razor blades were found in the bottom of two trick-or-treaters’ candy bags.  The blades were not in candy, just loose in the bags.  The man was charged with risk of injury to a minor, reckless endangerment and interfering with a police officer. The suspect later claimed that it was an unknowing accident that he put the razors in the bags, but according to the local paper, “did not provide an explanation as to how the razor blades were handed out to children along with candy.”

Every year the media is full of these stories. The fact remains - no one has ever been seriously injured or died from Halloween candy they received from a stranger.  That is true.  Halloween sadism is real. That is also true. 

PART TWO

One of the great ironies of Halloween is that the way it is currently celebrated developed out of an attempt to control unruly children on this dark night. As Lisa Morton reports in Trick or Treat: A History of Halloween, we link Halloween and its customs to the ancient Celts and the feast of Samhain [Matt – pronounced Sow-when], and the specials you watch on the history and documentary channels will go into detail on how the celebration is centuries old. But the American way of celebrating it is actually a comparatively new phenomenon.

Trick or treating did not actually spread throughout the USA until after the second world war, when rationing meant candy and sugar were strictly limited.  It was not until the early fifties that it became popular.  Nevertheless, the community celebration of Halloween began much earlier, but done in a very different way for a very different reason.

Whereas in Europe the harvest festival was a time for game playing, celebrating, and attempting to learn the name or appearance of the person one might marry, in the early twentieth century the holiday was dedicated to pranks and unruliness by children and teens.  In rural areas particularly, Halloween was an event almost exclusively celebrated by mischievous and naughty boys. Throughout America boys would knock on doors or ring doorbells and run away, which was the least damaging thing they could do. They would steal gates, allowing livestock to wander free; throw rotting cabbages at houses; scare pedestrians and neighbors; and even place wagons or buggies or cows on barn roofs. The pranks grew wilder, more damaging.  In some towns the people would wake up on November first to find all gates missing and piled up in a massive mound in the center of main street.  By the 1920s, the vandalism and destruction had spread to most cities. Windows would be broken, fires set, fire hydrants opened, telegraph and telephone poles sawn down, and automobiles flipped over where they were parked. Pedestrians would find a sock full of flour flung in their faces, covering their entire body with the powder – remember this is a time when most people don’t have washing machines and laundromats did not exist. By 1933 Halloween was called “Black Halloween” in many cities, and the people carrying it out were “hoodlums” who needed to be stopped. This is a far cry from dressing up as your favorite Avenger or Disney princess and asking the neighbors for candy.

In order to stop the vandalism and threats to the neighborhood, civic organizations and the community began to work together to create activities to prevent “hoodlums,” now transforming back into neighborhood children, from getting into trouble.  Schools began to organize activities both during the school day and for Halloween evening.  Books began to be published about activities families and communities could organize. Both the books and community leaders encouraged that the Halloween activities actually begin a week or two before the actual holiday, thus not even giving unruly children the time to plan pranks.  Hard to contemplate how to flip a car over when you are busy learning lines for your school’s Halloween play or making a costume for the school’s Halloween pageant, which would feature prizes from local business which would rather give a few items to be given to the contest winners than clean up the inevitable vandalism that would follow otherwise.

Contests were especially big in the child-distracting Halloween world.  Window decorating contests, poetry contests, baking contests, and costume contests were encouraged.  In one of the more clever ideas, schools would host a party then put all the student’s names in a hat and the winner would be announced on the radio that evening. The catch was, you had to be home in order to win the prize.  So children would leave the party at school and race home in order to be eligible to win the prize – no time for vandalism. Because of the great depression, neighborhood parties also became a way of organizing activities to limit impish kids. Families would pool money and resources and have a “house-to-house party” in which groups of costumed children would be led from house to house in a neighborhood with each house having a different activity or treat.  It is the house-to-house party that eventually led to the most cherished of all American Halloween traditions, and it developed to stop damaging and malicious children.

The first recorded use of “trick or treat” is from a 1927 newspaper, describing pranksters going from house to house using the phrase to blackmail homeowners into giving them something to eat or other treat in exchange for not being pranked.  By 1939 communities were seeing more groups of children in costume going house to house using the phrase.  By the fifties, trick or treating was a national tradition, with children in costumes continuing to use the phrase, to the present day we might note, even though pranking had almost entirely vanished from the holiday.  In some parts of the country, the pranking was moved back a night to October 30th, which came to be known as Mischief Night or Doorbell Night, the latter based on the practice of ringing a doorbell and running.  In parts of the country it was also known as Cabbage Night (for the cabbages thrown at houses and people), gate night (for the continued removing of gates) and even mat night, in communities in which children would swap welcome mats between houses.  The tradition took a dark turn in Detroit in the seventies and eighties when it became known as Bonfire Night, with tens of thousands of fires being lit in the city each October 30th.  This tradition has fortunately ended, but it is a reminder that Halloween was often a time of danger.  The first time that candy presented danger to children, however, had nothing to do with Halloween sadism and actually occurred in the summer. 

PART THREE

In 1874 the United States experienced its first missing child case to make national headlines.  For the last five days of June of that year, two men would drive their horse and buggy down East Washington Avenue in the Germantown area of Philadelphia, an affluent neighborhood, and offer candy to the children who played in the yards and the streets there, chatting with the kids as they ate the candy.  Earning the children’s trust through this act, the men then set their plan in motion.  On July 1, 1874, Charley and Walter Ross, ages four and six, were playing in front of their family’s mansion

The boys' father, Christian K. Ross, was a wealthy Philadelphia businessman well known in the community. However, the family’s fortunes had been greatly diminished by the stock market crash of 1873, and Ross had been keeping up appearances of wealth, despite the family now being much less well off than their lifestyle presented.

On that Wednesday morning the men pulled up in front of the house as usual but told the boys they did not have time to get any candy that day, and invited the boys to come with them to buy candy and fireworks for the upcoming fourth of July celebrations.  The boys, having become used to getting candy from these men, no longer strangers in their minds, climbed onto the wagon.  The men pulled up in front of the local store, handed Walter twenty-five cents and told him to go in the store and buy candy and fireworks.  When Walter came out a few minutes later, the wagon, the men and his little brother were gone.

The boys’ mother was recovering from an illness in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Mr. Ross, however, who was home at the time, thought the boys were playing in a neighbor's yard. But soon a neighbor told him that she saw the boys traveling in a buggy. The father began the search for his son that he would continue until his death in 1897. He didn't tell his wife about their missing son, not wanting to worry her or hamper her recovery, and she found out about the kidnapping when he began advertising in the newspapers for his son’s return.

A stranger had found Walter and returned him to his father, but no sign of Charley.  Walter told his family everything, including what he could remember of the two men and everything that happened up to Charley’s disappearance. Two days after that, the father received a crude note, which read: [FYI, Matt - this is the actual note with spelling and grammar as is]

Mr. Ross- be not uneasy you son charly bruster. he all right. we as got him and no powers on earth can deliver out of our hand. You wil have to pay us befor you git him from us. an pay us a big cent too. if you put the cops hunting for him yu is only defeeting yu own end. we is got him fitt so no living power can gits him from us a live. if any aproch is maid to his hidin place that is the signil for his instant anihilation. if yu regard his lif puts no one to search for him you money can fech him out alive an no other existin powers don't deceve yuself and think the detectives can git him from us for that is one imposebel

yu here from us in few day

The spelling and grammar are atrocious, but the message was obvious. Mr. Ross would have to pay a large ransom and if he sought help from the police Charley would be killed.  So he waited.  On July 7 another note arrived, demanding twenty thousand dollars, about half a million dollars today, and giving Christian Ross instructions on how to get the money to the kidnappers.  The father tried to follow the instructions, but they were unclear, and he did not know how to contact the kidnappers.  Lost, afraid, and angry, he went to the police who began looking for Charley and his kidnappers.  Sadly, all leads ran cold quickly and communication from the kidnappers ceased entirely.

It was not until December 13, five and a half months after Charley went missing, that there was a break in the case because of two other crimes.  The police were investigating the kidnapping of a Vanderbilt child and found a ransom note in that case that matched closely the one for Charley Ross. They identified the handwriting as belonging to fugitive convict William Mosher.  Mosher was a career criminal well known to the police who often worked with fellow career criminal Joseph Douglas.  On December 13, 1874, Mosher and Douglas attempted to burgle the home of Judge Charles Van Brunt in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. Sadly for them, Judge Van Brunt’s brother Henry lived right next door and saw the men through the window.  Gathering a number of armed neighbors with him, Henry Van Brunt entered his brother’s home and confronted the robbers.  A gun fight broke out as Mosher and Douglas attempted to escape and both men were shot.  Mosher died instantly, but Douglas, though mortally wounded, lingered for awhile. Accounts conflict at this point, but according to some in the house, as he lay dying, Douglas confessed to the kidnapping of Charley Ross, but said only Mosher knew where the boy was being kept.  Some thought he also said that Charley would be found within a few days, but that did not seem to be the case.

Upon report of Douglas’s confession, Mr. Ross brought Walter to New York to see the bodies.  Six year old Walter identified the men as the two who gave him candy and money for firecrackers and who took Charley. Mosher was easy to recognize, even in death, as his nose was badly malformed from untreated syphilis.  The men were clearly identified as the kidnappers, but Charley was not found.

Christian Ross spent $60,000 – almost a million and a half in today’s money – the bulk of his remaining family fortune - in his futile search for his missing son, and much of the nation joined in the manhunt for the boy. At various points, police detectives from Philadelphia and New York, detectives from the Pinkerton Agency and even the United States Secret Service were enlisted to bring the boy back to his family.  Charley was the first victim of crime to become famous across the nation.  He became a cultural icon in a manner never seen before, but that became more prominent in the twentieth century with the kidnapping of individuals like the Lindberg baby, Elizabeth Smart, Patty Hearst and Jaycee Lee Dugard. Charley was the first kidnapping in the nation that got national attention. Posters with his description were circulated all over the United States. Christian Ross even received a telegram from entertainment impresario P.T. Barnum (of Barnum & Bailey Circus fame) that said, “If you will meet me at my home here before Monday I will pay your expenses both ways. I will pay a large reward and I think I can get Charley, if alive.”  Ross met with Barnum, who offered to pay a ten thousand dollar reward for Charley’s safe return.  This being P.T. Barnum, however, there was a condition.  If Charley were returned safe, he would have to go on tour with the circus and be put on display as part of Barnum’s travelling exhibit.  Ross counter-offered that if Charley returned safe, he would reimburse Barnum, rather than have the boy as part of what, at the time, would have been referred to as a Freak Show.  Needless to say, nothing came of the bargain

Police arrested a third member of the gang after the deaths of Mosher and Douglas. William Westervelt was a disgraced Philadelphia policeman and brother-in-law of Mosher, and what police today would call a known associate of Mosher and Douglas. Police were convinced he was an accomplice to the kidnapping of Charley Ross, arrested him, and put him on trial in August of 1875. While he was awaiting trial, Westervelt was visited in prison by Christian Ross. Westervelt told Ross that he was not involved in the kidnapping, but knew for a fact that Charley was still alive when Mosher was shot dead in Brooklyn. He did not know where Charley was being held, however.  The jury found him not guilty of kidnapping, but he was convicted of conspiracy and sentenced to six years in prison.

After Westervelt’s trial. Charley’s father wrote a book, The Father’s Story of Charley Ross, the Kidnapped Child, published in 1876 and arguably the first True Crime best seller.  All profits from the book went into looking for Charley, and copies of the book were sent to police all across the nation to aid in the nation-wide search for the boy.

Christian Ross died in 1897, never finding his son, nor learning what happened to him.  Charley’s mother died in 1912. The Ross mansion was torn down in 1926. The Cliveden Presbyterian Church now stands on the site of the kidnapping.  Walter Ross lived until 1943, and had to endure not only being the survivor of the kidnapping that took his younger brother, but a swarm of imposters claiming to be the missing Charlie in his later years.  Beginning in the twentieth century, many adult men came forward claiming to be Charley Ross. Each was disproved.  Gustave Blair of Phoenix, Arizona, for example, petitioned a court to officially identified him as Charley Ross.  He claimed he had been raised in a cave and then adopted by a man who told him his real name was Charley Ross.  An Maricopa Country, Arizona court declared Blair was the real Charlie Ross in 1939, but Walter and the rest of the Ross family refused to accept Blair’s claim. Walter referred to Blair as “a crank” and told reporters, “The idea that my brother is still alive is not only absurd, but the man's story seems unconvincing. We've long ago given up hope that Charles ever would be found alive.”  After the ruling, Blair legally changed his name to Charley Ross, but the family declined to even meet with him. Subsequent DNA testing on Gustave Blair’s descendants and members of the Ross family has confirmed with 99.99 percent certainty that he is not Charley Ross.

While being the first major kidnapping in America, it certainly was not the last. Although at the time it was one of the greatest crimes of the gilded age, the story of Charley Ross has faded from popular memory, leaving his kidnapping a footnote in American history, unknown by most, except by the listeners of this podcast.  Although - one thing from the kidnapping entered the communal consciousness.  It is the origin of the phrase, repeated often in the months after Charley’s kidnapping and indeed by parents ever since, “Never take candy from strangers.”

PART FOUR

We do not rejoice or find fun in the suffering or deaths of real children.  Though putting children in danger (and even having them die) is at the center of entertainment from Shakespeare’s Macbeth to Frankenstein to Jawsto Jurassic Park, I share these sad and difficult stories with you today to allow us to think about the darker sides of what scholars call “recreational fear.”

Halloween is a children’s holiday that has become a huge holiday across the board, second only to Christmas in terms of money spent to celebrate the holiday. I began this podcast by reminding you how much Halloween is community-oriented, and I would love for us to remember that. The kidnapping of Charley Ross is truly sad, as are the victims of Halloween sadism, but Halloween itself is often a joyful and fun holiday with children and parents alike enjoying a magical night which brings them to their neighbor’s doors, in search of the elusive full-sized bars, but always reveling in the fact that we are engaging in a century-old celebration of being a community.

Halloween sadism is a horrible thing to think about, but the media sure likes to think about it and encourage us to think about it in far greater proportion to its actual occurrence. Last year, Pennsylvania’s Bensalem Township Police Department announced its concern that people might be putting edibles - THC-infused candy – in trick or treat bags this Halloween.  Local news, of course, ran with it despite no actual evidence anyone planned on doing it. And as we record this episode, right before Halloween 2022, the newest moral panic concerns fears that people may try to give children rainbow fentanyl as Halloween candy.

According to the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), Fentanyl is 50 times more potent than heroin and 100 times more potent than morphine. The DEA warned that they’ve seen a rise in fentanyl in bright colors, with a similar appearance to candy, which they refer to as “rainbow fentanyl.” Drug traffickers are allegedly even referring to rainbow fentanyl as Skittles or Sweet Tarts, the names of real candies. The DEA warned that they believe that traffickers are specifically targeting children with the rainbow fentanyl, and have cautioned parents to be very careful around Halloween.  The threat indeed sounds terrible, and, given the sheer number of horrible stories I’ve shared today about bad things happening to children at Halloween, the warnings seem to have merit.   That is until you begin to examine them.  The DEA’s warnings have no evidence to back them up.  No evidence that drug traffickers are targeting children or planning to give away an expensive drug on Halloween to their neighborhood children. Sad though it is, illegal drugs are a business in the United States, and no one gives away their product to people who would not actually be good customers for it. The likelihood of drug traffickers risking their entire operation just on the off chance some local child would take drugs that look like candy seems nonsensical.  In addition, as we have shared here again and again in this episode, when children are found to have ingested drugs on Halloween, the cause is not a stranger but most often a relative.

That isn’t to say that Halloween sadism has not had a chilling effect on the holiday. Local media will continue to warn about the dangers of trick or treating and reporting rumor and supposition as real danger.  Indeed, there is a danger on Halloween, but tainted candy is not it.  According to the National Safety Council, children are more than twice as likely to be hit or killed by a car on Halloween than any other day of the year.

If nothing else, we can take away from today’s episode the fact that statistically speaking your next Halloween will be safe, fun, and free from real danger or fear, at least from candy and strangers – but make sure you bring a flashlight, look both ways before crossing the street and be careful as you walk around the neighborhood.  We here at My Dark Path want you to have a safe, fun, and candy-filled Halloween.

Thank you for listening to My Dark Path. I’m MF Thomas, creator and host, and I produce the show with [producer]; and our audio engineer is Dom Purdie. This story was prepared for us by Kevin Wetmore. Big thank yous the entire My Dark Path team.

Please take a moment and give My Dark Path a 5-star rating wherever you’re listening. It really helps the show, and we love to hear from you.

Again, thanks for walking the dark paths of history, science and the paranormal with me. Until next time, good night and again, always check your candy.