There really was a teenager hospitalized on Halloween after eating a cupcake, but he later admitted to overdosing on prescription medication.
There really was a 55-year-old man injured by a sewing needle in his stomach lining after eating caramel apples, but given his age and that he first became ill a few days before Halloween, it is unlikely he got the apple trick-or-treating. In any case, the incident was first reported in 2003, and Best dates the rise of sharp-objects-in-apples paranoia to the 1960s.
At least two reported deaths of children during or shortly after trick-or-treating were later found to have resulted from natural causes. One child who allegedly died from heroin-laced candy was later determined to have found a relative’s stash of the drug; police concluded later that family members laced the child’s Halloween candy after the fact to throw suspicion off themselves. An almost identical case happened in 2018, but that time the drug was meth.
And in perhaps the most appalling case, a boy who died after eating Halloween candy laced with cyanide was later found to have been intentionally murdered by his own father for insurance money. The father had also given poisoned candy to his daughter and three neighbor kids, though thankfully none of them consumed it. He was executed by the state of Texas in 1984.
Some rumors of Halloween sadism are merely reflections of the times and “the ways we express our anxiety,” Best said. In 1982, after seven people in the Chicago area died from poisoned Tylenol, more than 40 communities banned trick-or-treating that year, and reports of suspected poisonings spiked, Time Magazine reported. During the Halloween seasons in the years following the 9/11 attacks, rumors spread of terrorist attacks at shopping malls holding “safe Halloween” events. By contrast, in 2017, when an ISIS-inspired terrorist killed eight people in New York on Halloween, concerns about additional attacks didn’t even last through the evening.
Today, amid the nation’s real anxiety over its fentanyl crisis, the Halloween sadism myth has morphed again.
In August 2022, the Drug Enforcement Administration released a warning about a surge in brightly colored fentanyl pills that looked like candy or sidewalk chalk. The colors were part of a “a deliberate effort by drug traffickers to drive addiction amongst kids and young adults,” the head of the DEA, Anne Milgram, said at the time. The post noted that the media, not the DEA, had dubbed these pills “rainbow fentanyl.” It did not mention Halloween, trick-or-treating or the surreptitious transfer of the pills to unsuspecting kids.
Over the next two months, news outlets such as Fox News highlighted drug busts in which traffickers used large containers for candy like Whoppers and Skittles and toys like Legos to attempt to conceal their illicit cargo, citing the DEA’s rainbow fentanyl warning and tying it to Halloween in a way the DEA had not. During a Fox News interview with Milgram — in which she said, “We have not seen any connection to Halloween. I want to be very clear about that.” — on-screen text read, “‘Rainbow fentanyl’ warnings ahead of Halloween.”
From there, local law enforcement officials began releasing warnings citing these reports, and then Fox News interviewed those officials about their concerns, the source and substance of the warnings growing ever more blurred. Even Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) filmed a public service announcement about the supposed threat, citing the DEA and spreading misinformation that merely touching fentanyl can kill. At a news conference, Florida attorney general Ashley Moody said 2022 “could be the scariest Halloween in my lifetime.”
Tragically, at least one child died of a fentanyl overdose on Halloween last year — a 20-month-old baby in Baton Rouge. A month later, the Advocate reported police had a warrant for the father’s arrest for negligent homicide. Child deaths by fentanyl belonging to adult caregivers are increasingly common amid the fentanyl crisis and not limited to any specific day of the year.
There is one thing that kills more children on Halloween than any other day, according to an analysis of four decades of data: vehicles. The risk of pedestrian fatalities in vehicle collisions increases by 43 percent on Halloween, and child pedestrians aged 4 to 8 are 10 times more likely to be killed by vehicles than on other days. The number of pedestrians killed by vehicles on Halloween has remained roughly consistent since 1975.
