When Halloween became America’s most dangerous holiday

The unquiet spirits, vampires and the omnipresent zombies that take over American streets every October 31 may think Halloween is all about spooky fun. An op-ed on Oct. 28, 1970, in The New York Times suggested the possibility of strangers using Halloween’s “trick-or treat” tradition to poison children. Though it had no evidence, Newsweek magazine asserted in a 1975 article that “over the past several years, several children have died and hundreds have narrowly escaped injury from razor blades, sewing needles and shards of glass put into their goodies by adults.” By the 1980s, some communities banned “trick-or-treating” while hospitals in some metropolitan areas offered to X-ray Halloween candy. In a popular nationally syndicated newspaper advice column called “Ask Ann Landers,” Landers warned in 1983 of “twisted strangers” who had been “putting razor blades and poison in taffy apples and other Halloween candy.” Social tensions and fear However, a comprehensive 1985 study of the of 30 years of alleged poisoning did not find even a single confirmed incident of a child’s death, or even serious injury. Sociologist Joel Best at the University of Delaware, who led the study, called it an “urban legend.” Most reports of poisoned Halloween candy that appeared in print were editorials written by authoritative voices in politics and media rather than actual events.