Re: urban myth

Brian D Williams (talon57@well.com)
Mon, 14 Dec 1998 08:42:32 -0800 (PST)

From: Dan@Clemmensen.ShireNet.com (Dan Clemmensen)

>Spike Jones wrote:
>> on an unrelated: we have heard the halloween horror stories of
>> razor blades in apples, poisoned or drugged candy, etc, which
>> have all the earmarks of urban legends. does anyone here know
>> of a proven case, that can be pinned to a name, a place, a time,
>> when poisoned/drugged/bladed treats were given to
>> children at halloween? a friend says a foaf knew of such a
>> case, but i now think it is 100% urban legend... spike

>I did an AltaVista on "urban legends" as a point of departure. I
>recall seeing a very professional site last year, but couldn't
>find it. However, I did find http://www.snopes.com/ and followed
>its "halloween" link.

>The legend is essentially false, but a father did kill his own
>kid with poisoned candy on Halloween, attempting to make it look
>like somebody else did it, probably to collect the insurance.

This is a case of don't believe everything you read on the WWW. Here in Chicago there have been a number of sick incidents of this type over the years, they've been both on T.V. and in the newspaper.

After one particularly sick incident a few years ago (a needle) people stopped letting their kids trick-or-treat. Hospital emergency rooms here normally offer free x-ray of suspect items.

Check with your local big city newspaper morgue (archive).

Brian
Member, Extropy Institute
www.extropy.org