All this week: Halloween urban legends – horrific truths, bald-faced lies, wild embellishments and insane speculations. On Monday, Matt explored the panic over tainted candy. On Wednesday he took on the insane culture of ultimate haunted houses.

Today: Mock Gallows, Inadvertent Nooses and Accidental Hangings

As front-lawn Halloween displays have evolved beyond dollar-store cobwebbing and leering jack-o-lanterns to include severed limbs, colored lights and sound effect CDs that play out like bondage den wiretap recordings, Halloween urban legends have followed suit. An unfortunate teenaged actor is found dangling lifelessly from a hangman’s noose after a haunted hayride skit goes horribly awry. The bloating corpse of a rope-hanged suicide is admired by passersby who appraise it as a smashingly successful Halloween decoration.

Before inadvertent hangings (and grossly misinterpreted purposeful ones) became the stuff of Halloween legend, the most popular noose-hanged prop story came out of a real incident in which a camera crew shooting an episode of “The Six Million Dollar Man” broke the forearm off a funhouse dummy, revealing bones and mummified muscle tissue. A coroner’s exam revealed that the corpse belonged to infamous cowboy outlaw Elmer McCurdy, whose body had been autopsied, preserved and toted around as a sideshow spectacle before eventually getting lost to the fevered competition of 20th century amusement park entrepreneurship.

Not to harsh your collective mellow, but, like the McCurdy story, the tales of Halloween hangings are totally true. As urban legends go, it really just chalks up to the fact that a harness-rigged noose malfunction is more likely than a Pop Rocks-catalyzed belly explosion. Beginning in the early ‘90s, newspaper stories chronicling the untimely deaths of dedicated haunted house employees and ambitious partygoers to staged-hanging oopsy-daisies started appearing nationwide. More recently, as lynched newspaper-stuffed overalls have become a fixture of autumnal suburban landscaping, openly displayed suicide victims have been shrugged-off as clichéd décor. Just this October, the body of a California man who shot himself through the eye was left to decay in a porch chair for days while smiling neighbors stared at the corpse and admired what they perceived as holiday spirit.

Along with these inarguably unfortunate tales comes the requisite humbugging of so-called “gruesome” trends in decorating, and pleas for a return to straw bundles and carved pumpkins – you know, the simpler Pagan-inspired effigies of yore. Really, though, it’s a lot easier than that: If you’re going to build a supportive harness to stage a hanging, learn how to do it and don’t be a big stupid idiot. If you’re going to kill yourself, have the common decency to do it in your house or your sex dungeon or anywhere where no one has to look at your revolting, smelly body. Happy Halloween.