All this week: Halloween urban legends – horrific truths, bald-faced lies, wild embellishments and insane speculations

In a nation where fear is an effective substitute for money in greasing the oxidized gears of education and legislature, it’s not surprising that, year after year, one of the most pervasive Halloween horror stories centers around the cranky Scroogish sociopath hell bent on exterminating younglings by way of cyanide toffee and razorblade apples. While the general panic over randomized candy sabotage is an annual national reality, the specific nature of said sadistic treachery varies regionally based on local culture and current events – in the ‘70s, some square suburbanites were terrified that their respective hippy union locals were going to perpetrate MK Ultra Jr. with hallucinogenic fun-size bars, while hand-wringing city folk obsessed over garden variety maniacs loading goodies up with straight pins. Other alleged October antagonists have included Satanists, commies and old people. 1982’s still-unsolved cyanide-laced Tylenol poisonings, which killed seven people, gave whole new life to weaponized foodstuff fears, as the events validated the assertion that a person could commit a random mass poisoning with no apparent motive or calculated scope (most large-scale poisonings are later proven attempts to cover up a specific individual attack).

While untraceable and insidiously inured into the American psyche to the point of timelessness, the fear surely stems from the same social paranoia that confabulates severed fingers in fast food and scopolamine-drenched business cards. Dependable sulky party-pooping by a religious right that views Halloween as paganistic bacchanalia certainly doesn’t help diffuse the rumors, nor do the repeated incidences of reported candy tampering that turn out to be middle-school pranks perpetrated by kids inspired by the fallacious candy-tampering legends. In these cases, the media is often just as guilty, using the same legends that inspired the prank to construct a sensationalized, but wholly imagined, precedent for a poorly judged joke that is in no way tantamount to the stories that inspired it.

A study conducted by sociologist Joel Best, who reviewed thousands of newspaper articles dating back as far as 1958, concluded that there has never been an actual circumstance in which multiple random victims were harmed by the purposeful concealment of foreign agents in Halloween candy. But, hey, if it gives you an excuse to discard a pack of Good & Plenty, don’t stop believin’.