Apples and homemade treats were common gifts to trick-or-treating children in the earlier parts of 20th century. Over time, parents preferred individually wrapped, store-bought candy. No cases of homemade candy apples killing or permanently injuring children this way have been proven. Commonly, the story appears in the media when a young child dies suddenly after Halloween.
Medical investigations into the actual cause of death have always shown that these children did not die from eating candy given to them by strangers. Worries that candy from strangers might be poisoned has led to the rise of alternative events to trick-or-treating, such as events held at Christian churches, police and fire stations, community centers, and retail stores. Claims that candy was poisoned or adulterated gained general credence during the Industrial Revolution, when food production moved out of the home or local area, where it was made in familiar ways by known and trusted people, to strangers using unknown ingredients and unfamiliar machines and processes. In the 1890s and 1900s, the US Bureau of Chemistry, in conjunction with state agencies, tested hundreds of kinds of candy and found no evidence of poisons or adulteration. The prevalence and persistence of these myths during the 1960s, a time of social upheaval, greater racial integration, and improved status for women, reflected societal questions about who was trustworthy. An automobile trunk at a trunk-or-treat event at St.
Due to their fears, parents and communities restricted trick-or-treating and developed alternative “safe” events, such as trunk-or-treat events held at Christian churches. This collective fear also served as the impetus for the “safe” trick-or-treating offered by many local malls. This story also promoted the sale of individually wrapped, brand-name candies and discouraged people from giving homemade treats to children. Several events in the late 20th century fostered the modern-day candy tampering myth.
In 1959, a California dentist, William Shyne, gave candy-coated laxative pills to trick-or-treaters. He was charged with outrage of public decency and unlawful dispensing of drugs. In 1964, a disgruntled Long Island, New York woman gave out packages of inedible objects to children who she believed were too old to be trick-or-treating. Another notable milestone in the spread of the candy tampering myths was an article published in The New York Times in 1970. This article claimed that “Those Halloween goodies that children collect this weekend on their rounds of ‘trick or treating’ may bring them more horror than happiness”, and provided specific examples of potential tamperings. Reports and copycat incidents peaked shortly after the Chicago Tylenol murders, which were first reported one month before Halloween in 1982, further contributing to the myth of candy tampering.
Joel Best, a sociologist at the University of Delaware, specializes in the scholarly study of candy-tampering legends. He collected newspaper reports from 1958 to 1983 in search of evidence of candy tampering. Fabrications by children are particularly common. Children sometimes copy or act out the stories about tampered candy that they overhear, by adding pins to or pouring household cleaners on their own candy and then reporting the now-unsafe candy to their parents. The deaths of five children were initially blamed on stranger poisoning.
However, all of these claims were proven false upon investigation. In 1970, Kevin Toston, a 5-year-old boy from the Detroit area, died after finding and eating his uncle’s heroin. The family attempted to protect the uncle by claiming the drug had been sprinkled in the child’s Halloween candy. In 1978, Patrick Wiederhold, a two-year-old boy from Flint, Michigan died after eating Halloween candy. However, toxicology tests found no evidence of poison, and his death was determined to be due to natural causes.
In 1990, Ariel Katz, a seven-year-old girl in Santa Monica, California, died while trick-or-treating. Early press reports blamed poisoned candy, despite her parents telling the police that she had previously been diagnosed with a serious medical condition, an enlarged heart, which was the actual cause of death. In 2001, a four-year-old girl in Vancouver, British Columbia died after eating some Halloween candy. However, there was no evidence of poisoned candy, and she actually died of a streptococcus infection. In a 1974 case, 8-year-old Timothy O’Bryan from Deer Park, Texas, died after eating a cyanide-laced package of Pixy Stix. Despite these claims of poisoned candy being eventually proved false, the news media promoted the story continuously throughout the 1980s, with local news stations featuring frequent coverage.