Every year around Halloween, Americans share variations on a very scary story — the story of Tainted Candy! As the story goes, there are evil people out there — probably Satanists — who are placing things inside the Halloween treats. Razorblades in apples, needles in candy bars, perhaps drugs! The machinations of these evil-doers are without bounds! The story of Tainted Candy is quiet ancient at this point (it goes all the way back to the 1950’s!), but nowadays the police are sharing the story on social media with pictures of the evidence that they’ve been given, and the public gobbles it up, hitting share as fast as their fingers can manage.
Who are these evil-doers who would pollute the sacred Halloween candy? My God — this is candy for children! What would possess them to —
Spoiler alert: It’s all bullshit. In the rare case when candy really is found to be tainted, it is the person turning it in to the police (typically, an attention-seeking, narcissistic parent) who did the actual tainting. In a recent case, a narcissistic teen who wanted some attention did the tainting and then reported it to his parents. No child is ever in actual danger, and in fact, there are exactly zero (0) cases of children being harmed by tainted candy from strangers, which brings up an interesting caveat: A case from 1974 where an evil parent gave tainted Halloween to his own child (he killed his son to get the insurance money). I hope you will appreciate how that is very different from the Tainted Candy story.
Have you ever heard of “Munchausen syndrome by proxy“? Unlike Tainted Candy, Munchausen by proxy is real. This is where a bad person uses someone else’s illness as a method to get attention for themselves, sometimes even inducing illness in the other person to make it work. In the case of a parent or other caregiver and a child, this abuse can go on for years and sometimes kills the “proxy” — and all that abuse is just so the bad person can get someone to pay attention to them. This is how motivated by attention these people are. I want to emphasis that Munchausen by proxy is very rare — and yet infinitely more common than tainted candy, because tainted candy never really happens.
While it is obvious that we all should be careful about what strangers are giving our children, we must start pushing back against the latest Satanic panic. The ongoing story of Tainted Candy is one small part of it.
Special fun fact: The guy who murdered his own son was a deacon at the Second Baptist Church in Deer Park, Texas, where he sang in the choir and was in charge of the local bus program. Spooooky!
