Halloween Myths

It seems Halloween spooks more adults than kids. Every year, parents around the country check their children’s newly acquired candy stashes for razors embedded in apples, needles in Twizzlers, and cyanide in Hershey’s. Every year, local news outlets will warn parents to check unsealed treats lest their bedsheet-clad child turn into a real ghost.
The surprising truth is no child has ever died from tampered-with Halloween candy; no, not one. Every alleged case of a candy-related poisoning has been proven a hoax; sharp objects found in Halloween treats are a slightly different story. There have been several instances of a relative or friend embedding razors or needles in apples or candy bars as a very ill-thought-out practical joke, resulting …show more content…
The public is too well-informed to believe in literal witches and bogeymen, but Satanists running a preschool or sickos handing out drugs at playgrounds are still considered plausible occurrences. Urban legends serve the same function of old folklore. Hansel and Gretel, for example, is a story often told to children to teach them not to stray from the path, not to trust strangers, and so on. The boy who cried wolf illustrates why you should not ruin your credibility by saying there is danger when there is none.
Hopefully, few parents today are willing to warn their child that, if he wanders off, a cannibalistic witch will attempt to lure him into an oven, or that if they raise a false alarm they will be eaten by a wolf while nobody bats an eye. But we still have a need for stories that confirm our suspicions that the world is Big, Bad, and Out to Get Them, which is where urban legends come in.
That’s not to suggest that urban legends are by definition untrue. Sadly there are dozens of examples of real-life kidnappings, random murders, and other disturbing crimes. But when these events are passed into the public consciousness through evening news, forwarded emails, and after-dinner small talk, they become legendary and serve the same function a totally fabricated story …show more content…
We want our children to be wary of strangers, so we tell ourselves the legend of the Tampered Halloween Candy. We value thorough background checks so we tell ourselves the legend of the Lucifer-loving The fact that urban legends serve to reinforce common sense values like “be careful around strangers” may seem to suggest they’re harmless, but they’re not. These exaggerated macabre tales give us a picture of a world that is much more dangerous than it actually is. If parents think the world is so dangerous that their child cannot walk down the street without risking being kidnapped, then we’re raising the next generation in an unnecessary, claustrophobic atmosphere of paranoia.
“But the world actually is a very dangerous place!” the concerned parent may say. Maybe so, but it’s safer than you might think. The Department of Justice reports that, out of 800,000 missing children, only 115 were snatched off the street by a stranger; 90 percent of abductees are back home within one day. Rates of violent crime dipped to a low in 2012 that they hadn’t reached since 1963, when an average new car cost $3,233 and JFK was president (for most of the

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