You've heard the advice before: Check your kid's candy bucket after going trick-or-treating. Throw away any homemade goodies. Sometimes hospitals even offer to X-ray the candy just to make sure there isn't a needle in that Snickers bar.
This advice turns out to be the ultimate Halloween prank, a horror that has never happened, not once, in the history of Halloween, according to a researcher who has studied reports of Halloween mischief dating back to the 1950s.
It also turns out that the incident that my mom always pointed to - the one involving tainted Pixy Stix - was also not an incident of tampering.
The best-known case of Halloween candy tampering came in 1974, when Texas dad Ronald Clark O'Bryan killed his son by lacing his Pixy Stix with cyanide to claim $20,000 in life insurance. Before that, a Detroit 5-year-old died in 1970 after eating heroin supposedly hidden in his Halloween candy. It turned out the boy had simply gotten into his uncle's stash.
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