Needles and Nails in Halloween Candy: The Real Danger

Like other religious festivals, food plays a big role in Halloween. While St. Nicholas and Christmas tend to be celebrated in private circles, communal Easter egg hunts, for example in zoos and amusement parks, are now widespread. Halloween is distinguished by a special gesture and sociality, if at all it can still be compared with the star singers.

The gifts come from private individuals and are therefore not subject to any control. When it's Halloween, it's the weak ones, the children, who are the ones demanding and not the eternally bullied supplicants. It is reminiscent of carnival and carnival, of the world temporarily turned upside down.

Children demand, children enter a (strange) adult sphere alone, children accept gifts from strangers and walk alone in the dark. The English-language maxim “Never take candy from a stranger” has been suspended for a day.

It is obvious that Halloween offers enough projection space for real fears and pop culture, so-called “poisoned candy” myths. These “poisoned candy” myths are a persistent phenomenon that flares up again every year on Halloween, regardless of whether the cases are real or not: According to them, sweets distributed on Halloween are said to have been laced with dangerous objects such as needles or razor blades or even poisoned in order to specifically injure children. And a look at the current news shows that this can become very real.

The majority of these cases have been refuted in the past. Sometimes it was exposed as a form of mass hysteria. In other cases, this rumor arose when a child unexpectedly died after accidentally eating a candy and a culprit was sought.

There is also a well-known case of a father from the USA who mixed cyanide into effervescent packets in 1974 in order to collect on his eight-year-old son's life insurance - and was inspired by the "Poisoned Candy" myth.

Or it was just accidental contamination, as happened in Rhineland-Palatinate this year, or a production error in which a metal object got into packaging. Incidentally, rulings by the Federal Court of Justice differentiate between “species-specific” and “foreign” foreign bodies. The consumer cannot expect complete freedom from danger.

Reports of manipulated sweets coming into the hands of children over the Halloween weekend come from German and Austrian federal states. The “Treat” investigative group of the Austrian Federal Criminal Police Office was formed in Vienna. For Germany, the BKA said in response to a taz request that they were “basically aware” of the phenomenon, but that responsibility lay with the state criminal investigation offices.

Upon request, the LKA NRW spoke of 24 reported cases. There were no injuries. There is no information about who could be behind it. “Speculating about groups of perpetrators or motives,” it goes on to say, is therefore “unserious.”

The LKA Bavaria speaks of 25 reported cases - also without injuries. 2 cases were reported in Hamburg, 3 in Brandenburg, 9 in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, with one child reportedly suffering minor injuries. The other federal states also recorded cases.

In a case in the Thuringian district of Hildburghausen, it has now emerged that a nine-year-old girl stuck the object, a wooden skewer, into a chocolate bar herself. It is not yet known why the child did this, a police spokeswoman told dpa. The girl's father had withdrawn a previous police report. In Bavaria, too, there are now two cases in which children have admitted to having prepared sweets themselves using objects.

Cases are also reported in Hungary and Canada. There have been minor injuries to children's mouths so far; the police advise caution, but also warn against panic.

But what could, if asked dubiously, be possible motives for distributing manipulated sweets, this “cowardly and underhanded crime,” as the Austrian Interior Minister Gerhard Karner (ÖVP) called it?

Lisa Natter from the criminological research group at the Bavarian State Criminal Police Office (BLKA) said in response to a dpa inquiry that the term “Halloween sadism” was coined by the US sociologist Joel Best in the 1980s.

“He examined this as a modern urban legend that is told as true and also expresses social fears, but the actual extent of which is often not covered by empirical evidence,” explained Natter. What is important is that individual cases – such as those now in Germany, but also in Austria, Ireland, Denmark and Norway, for example – are not disputed. “It turns out that the stories serve as a resonance space for more general social fears.”

The Essen police told the Süddeutsche Zeitung that they believed there were several perpetrators who could have found suggestions on the Internet. Actions coordinated via social media are also possible. However, nothing is known about the success of the investigation; many cases have been discontinued.

And yet Halloween is not a completely harmless festival. This year, too, children and young people were injured with irritant gas, threatened with knives and blank guns and insulted. Here too, the motive is diffuse.

In the end, there is a concrete danger: the risk of pedestrians being killed by a car is already increased on Halloween. For children up to 17 years of age, a study published in 2018 showed, it is three times higher on this day in the USA than on other days.

Children aged 4 to 8 are even more at risk. For them the risk is even 10 times higher. In Lower Saxony, for example, a seven-year-old girl was hit by a car during her Halloween walk and seriously injured.

The motto is to be careful on the roads. And as with other happy holidays, in the end the realization remains that you shouldn't miss out on the fun of Halloween. Anyone who thinks that a Christmas tree can catch fire and that fatal accidents can even occur during an Easter egg hunt will not downplay the risk for children on Halloween and certainly will not rule it out - but will be able to make a balanced assessment.