![]() ![]() Of course, the scares get a real boost every few years when someone, often a parent, dies while eating Halloween candy or immediately afterwards. Plus, after the terrifyingly random Tylenol murders of 1982 where seven Chicagoland people died after taking randomly poisoned pain medication, many people have been more than a little nervous about crazed poisoners. It’s only natural that parents would get a little nervous. After all, parents spend 364 days of every year telling their kids not to take candy from strangers precisely because it might be poisoned, then give the thumbs-up to taking snacks from every house in the neighborhood on Halloween. It’s easy to see how these urban legends have taken hold because they’re so terrifying. His family then sprinkled the drug on the boy’s Halloween candy to throw off investigators. He had stumbled across his uncle’s heroin stash and mistakenly eaten it. Tests on his Halloween candy showed that some had been sprinkled with the drug, but the police actually learned the tragic truth behind the boy’s death. In 1970, a five-year-old in Detroit died after ingesting a massive amount of heroin. Snopes has collected an impressive array of stories where randomly poisoned Halloween candy was blamed for deaths, though. So nobody’s ever died from poisoned Halloween candy?īy all indications, no. While his crime was certainly a horrific one, it was hardly the sort of random poisoning that parents fear. O’Bryan was eventually convicted and executed for murdering his son. Luckily, his daughter and the other two children had passed up the poisoned powders in favor of other treats. To help cover his tracks, O’Bryan also gave two other children cyanide Pixy Stix. Although the poisoning initially looked like it might have been the work of a deranged homeowner, the investigation into O’Bryan’s murder soon centered on his father, Ronald Clark O’Bryan.Ī bit of digging revealed that Ronald O’Bryan had recently taken out hefty life insurance policies on both of his children, and police quickly built a case, albeit a circumstantial one, that O’Bryan had given both Timothy and his daughter, Elizabeth, the poison candy to try to collect on the policies. In 1974, an eight-year-old Houston boy named Timothy O’Bryan died after eating cyanide-laced Pixy Stix while trick-or-treating. Has anyone ever really handed out poisoned Halloween candy? Of course, when kids start wolfing down their treats, there’s always one grim specter lurking in the back of parents' minds: what if some madman had filled their candy with poison, razor blades, needles, or some other decidedly terrifying foreign substance? But has this actually ever happened? Let’s take a look at how realistic these fears are. Seriously, what could be better than that? Not only do you get to put on a snappy new costume and pretend to be a monster, superhero, or princess, but you also get free candy just for ringing doorbells. Halloween has to be one of the best days on a kid’s calendar. ![]()
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