Many parents believe that the potential exists that strangers will give children tainted Halloween candy. Professor Joel Best of the University of Delaware has studied contaminated candy since the 1980s and calls the fear an urban legend.
He’s tracked down news stories dating back more than 60 years, and has yet to find one substantiated case of a child who was killed or seriously hurt by contaminated Halloween candy.
Best did find a case of a man in Texas who murdered his own son with poisoned candy. He believed that it would be the perfect crime, because he erroneously thought that the crime was commonplace. He was caught in part because of the extraordinary rarity of such an event.
“It’s a very simple matter for a child to take a pin, stick it in a candy bar, run in and say, ‘Mom, look what I found,’ and be rewarded with the concerned attention of adults,” Best said. “We’ve stopped believing in ghosts and goblins, but we believe in criminals.”
Another social scientist noted that “it’s unlikely someone would give a kid their expensive gummies just because they ran out of Starbursts.”
