From: Brian D Williams (talon57@well.com)
Date: Mon Dec 14 1998 - 09:42:32 MST
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
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