And in 2000, James Joseph Smith handed out Snickers bars full of needles, although no one was seriously injured. If you live in Houston, you probably know about Ronald Clark O’Bryan, nicknamed the Candy Man, who poisoned his children’s candy to collect their life insurance money. It doesn’t help that every now and then, somebody is inspired by the rumors to actually do this. And this year’s dumb panic is over marijuana-laced candy, something that will probably give ’70s kids deja vu. Growing up in the ’80s, I was always warned somebody might put PCP on my candy. These rumors change with the times, reflecting larger social anxieties. In 1957, Ed Gein was arrested to media sensationalism, and it’s telling that around this time, the rumors began to go around: Some monster was poisoning Halloween candy. Sure, it seemed safe, but then, as the ’50s progressed, it began to become clear that maybe America wasn’t as safe as we thought. It was really only after it got firmly established that people realized sending their children out in the dark to hit up total strangers for sugary snacks was maybe not the best idea in the world. It served a needed cultural purpose, whether people admitted it or not. It was something new, yet familiar enough to be comfortable. It helped that trick-or-treating reflected a lot of holiday traditions from around the world. After World War II, many Americans moved to suburbs far away from their families, and needed icebreakers to meet the neighbors. In truth, it was probably because Americans were dealing with the present. In fact, if you dig deep enough, you’ll find a lot of people actually furious that kids were showing up at their houses demanding candy, calling it extortion.
Generally it’s held that adults came up with it to contain obnoxious childish pranks, but there’s little record of that. Why? Good question: Historians are still working on it. While there have been customs and ideas that resemble it since the Middle Ages, ranging from souling in England to belsnicking in Germany, the American idea of sending children out in costumes to hit up the neighbors for candy actually began in the late 1940s, starting out West and spreading across the country. Really, it starts with the history of trick-or-treating, which is a lot more recent than you might think. So why do we cling to this particular Halloween horror story? You’d think it happens every year, but in reality, it’s almost always a hoax. If there’s one Halloween horror story that’s a durable urban legend, one that’s taken root so deep in our psyche we think it’s real, it’s the one about the creepy neighbor doing… something to the candy.
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