Halloween Haunts: Want Some Candy, Little Boy? by E. F. Schraeder

Halloween offers a perfect time to ponder haunting images and innermost fears, probing the question, what scares you?  The question “want some candy, little boy?” is the stuff of urban legend, though each Halloween the promise of treats sends children door to door taking candy from strangers. By turning to the history of the holiday, we are reminded that sometimes the most frightening horrors involve a treat and a trick.

Asking children if they want some candy provokes tingles up the spine, for it rests on a fine point between gift and threat.  Melting the distance between strangers and children, the question echoes a hint of danger behind a smooth as chocolate smile and hovers at a line most people would rather not cross from either side, victim or criminal.  Look a little deeper, and you find the fear evoked by the question “want some candy?” hinges on a real life Halloween horror.

The true story began one Halloween night:

In 1974 eight year old Timothy O’Bryan went Trick or Treating in his home town in Deer Park, Texas.  His night of fun ended in infamous tragedy.  After eating a Pixy Stix, the boy became violently ill and died on his way to the hospital.

The story sent shock waves of panic through the U.S. and subsequently undermined the perceived safety of Trick or Treating for decades, plaguing the holiday with fears of razor blades, poison, and drugs in Halloween candy.  Though the boy’s murder was described as “the only deliberate Halloween poisoning fatality ever documented,”^[1] the tragic event had a ripple effect, adding a sense of dread to the primarily benign, if slightly twisted, holiday.  But the fear of stranger danger amplified by this cultural memory hides an ugly trick.  Not unlike the moral lessons one discovers in a great horror tale, Timothy O’Bryan’s story revealed a malignant twist.

The investigating detectives discovered an awful truth.  The boy’s father, who was struggling with debt, planned to cash in on his children’s life insurance and poisoned the candy himself. More Pixy Stix were discovered in the home, each with two inches of cyanide poured into paper straws.  The father called to collect on the policy just hours after the boy died.

Following Timothy’s tragic death, subsequent Halloweens met a pervasive fear of strangers passing out contaminated candy.  But the threat of tampered-with treats from an unknown, perhaps masked, assailant is a false fear.  Perhaps it’s easier to remember the empty danger and warn children against strangers than to reckon with a father killing his own son for money.  However, such selective memory would leave the real villain plotting and stalking in close proximity with silent ease, a parent who remained unwatched and unchecked until it was too late.

Despite the terror, Halloween still beckons us, especially we horror aficionados, to explore our fears.  What really scares you? Perhaps discovering that evil lives within the person dearest to your heart, as the incident of 1974 reminds us: evil may be hiding nearby, closer than you think.

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E. F. SCHRAEDER’s recent work has appeared in Dark Moon Digest, Bloodbond, Glitterwolf, and other journals as well as in the anthologies Carnival of the Damned, Between the Cracks, and others. Author of a poetry chapbook, The Hunger Tree, Schraeder is working on a novella and new manuscript of poems. Find more online at www.efschraeder.com.

^[1] Best, Joel, quoted in Eric Dexheimer’s American Statesmen, “35 Years Later, Memories of Notorious Halloween ‘Candyman’ Murder Remain Vivid.” Nov 3, 2009.  http://www.statesman.com/news/news/35-years-later-memories-of-notorious-halloween-can/nRQxW/ Accessed, September 9, 2015.