Halloween Myths

During the 1980s and 90s, America saw a wave of moral panic as Halloween was wrongly branded “Satan’s birthday” by evangelical (a more extreme branch of Protestant Christianity that focuses on the Bible as totally true and on telling others about Jesus) figures. 

New York Times reporter Judy Klemesrud's published a fear-mongering op-ed (or opinion editorial, not news, but opinion) sharing her opinion without respect to any evidence or established facts titled Those Treats May Be Tricks in the New York Times on October 28, 1970👈 which was widely shared and recirculated across America, and got all the homemakers and housewives gossiping about the new threat to their children.   

It didn't seem entirely implausible (unlikely, hysteric) because of the decade of the 1970s with its: 

• Dramatic social change brought about by the Civil Rights Era (Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, etc.), leading directly to the American Indian Movement, Cesar Chavez's Migrant Farm Workers Movement, Women's Liberation Movement, and LGBTQ movement (to many mainstream traditional Christians, it appeared America was increasingly embracing moral degeneracy), 

• New Age Neo-Paganism (people rejecting mainstream religion for astrology, occult/magickal practice, and eastern philosophies like Hinduism and Buddhism) and the Dawning of the Age of Aquarius, 

• Rejection of mainstream culture, religion, and tradition in the anti-war hippie counter-culture and communes, 

• The proliferation (sudden spreading) of cults (from Charles Manson and his girls to Jim Jones and the People's Temple to Osho and his Sannyasin, Rajneeshis to L Ron Hubbard's Scientology to Claude Vorilhon's Raëlism/Raelianism or UFO religion, and all of the spin-offs or alleged spin-offs in the 1980s and 1990s since from NXVM [Nexium] to Erhard Seminars Training [EST] and so on) and the rejection of mainstream religion by millions of Americans, 

• Media-fanned coverage of serial killings linked to the Process Church of the Final Judgment and “The Children Cult" conflated with serial killers in the “Son of Sam" David Berkowitz killings in New York as well as “Night Stalker" Richard Ramirez killings in Los Angeles were well documented, along with connections to Satanism, 

• Anton Levay created the Satanic Church (for Leveyan Satanists) in 1966 and published the Satanic Bible in 1969 and its teachings,  break with Aleister Crowley's Thelema, but encouraging wanton hedonism and degeneracy to outsiders (immorality)

• Rock bands like Coven, Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Kiss, Motley Crue, Twisted Sister, Judas Priest, Pantera, Megadeth, and Slayer using Satanic imagery and lyrics really made it seem rather plausible

It's understandable how a society where social ties were eroding, traditional gender roles changing, and more Americans than ever becoming hostile to religion, becoming irreligious, or adopting alternative religion and spirituality how many devout believers and their families began to see a spiritual battle taking place that they were losing, with Satan behind it all himself.  

The 1970s as a decade truly primed America for a decade in which we'd have a mass media induced mass delusion and hysteria that ruined lives on the scale of the first or second Red Scare or Salem Witch Trials. 

In it, she quoted Dr. Hollis S. Ingraham, New York State Health Commissioner's annual report repeating his unconfirmed reports that:

“Children should not eat any of their collected goodies until they have been care fully examined by an adult. In recent years, pins, razor blades, slivers of glass and poison have appeared in the treats gathered by Children across New York State.”

and she repeated his claims about two unconfirmed incidents (meaning no reporter had checked them out to ensure the facts checked out) in upstate New York:

“Last year in Oneida, N. Y., someone gave three children trick‐or‐treat apples with sewing needles in them. And in nearby Ilion, the father of a 5‐year‐old boy found a razor blade in an apple when he peeled it for the child."

Two days later, early media coverage of a five year old's death in Detroit on Halloween implicated heroin-tainted candy. But by mid-November that same year (1970), newspapers reported the child in Detroit had died from finding his uncle's heroin stash, yet newspapers and television news outlets that spread the hysteria did not publish or print or televise corrections or retractions until the 1990s.  

On October 31, 1974, another child did die from eating poisoned candy, but there again early media reports linked it to trick-or-treating.  Similarly, news media did not correct stories when it was learned his father had murdered his own son by placing cyanide in a pixie stick.   

After Klemesrud got America talking to prime the hysteria, these two early false mass media reports of child deaths linked to tainted Halloween candy left tongues wagging and it sparked a national sensational news media feeding frenzy.  Reporters, editors, and publishers wouldn't lift a finger to fact check any of the claims and spread the idea that Satanists all over America were using Halloween to poison or harm children.  And it's because it sold advertising and more copies and got more viewers or listeners.   Truth, once again, was a victim to profit motive.   

And to get in on the show, parents and kids all over America made more false reports, as if they were yearning for their “15 minutes of fame," as Andy Worhol put it, or were telling every news outlet who'd listen, “All right, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up," as Norma Desmond says to director Cecille DeMille in Sunset Boulevard.  Copycat lies were now a thing. 

And national news outlets didn't help the matter, clamoring to add to the hysteria.  On November 3, 1975, Newsweek Magazine's William O. O'Neil declared (falsely): 

“over the past several years, several children have died and hundreds have narrowly escaped injury from razor blades, sewing needles and shards of glass put into their goodies by adults."

According to Professor Joe Best of the around eighty cases he investigated since 1959, the vast majority of them turned out to be hoaxes committed by the reporting parent or child, and only a handful checked out of Halloween candy malice with ten cases resulting in minor injuries, concluding: 

“more than 75 percent of reported cases involved no injury, and detailed followups in 1972 and 1982 concluded that virtually all the reports were hoaxes concocted by the children or parents."

But news media through sensational coverage had enflamed and stoked the flames of the Satanic Panic of the 1980s and 1990s, making it appear to be completely real.    

State legislatures across America passed legislation with stiff penalties for tampering with Halloween candy, and hospitals and police departments and public relations campaigns across America focused upon kids having their candy x-rayed before eating it, as many Generation Xers, Xennials, and Millenials remember.   

These claims were repeated uncritically without ever being checked out, and the rest, as they say, is history.  

It turns out that when there were detailed follows up on every case in 1972 and 1982 by Professors Best and Horiuchi, virtually all of them were hoaxes by children or parents.   

If journalists had done their jobs, and verified stories before reporting, the Satanic Panic probably wouldn't have even happened, and no lives would have been ruined.

But because mass media news outlets, editors, and publishers didn't, countless lives were ruined. People all over were convicted by juries of their peers swept up in the hysteria on false accusations and false charges and were sent to prison all over England, the United States, and Canada.  This panic was not at all unlike the Salem witch trials or McCarthyism, but this time the flames of fear were fanned by mass media unlike ever before.   

Sources:  

• Snopes: Pins and Needles in Halloween Candy Fact Check

• Best, Joel, and Gerald T. Horiuchi. “The Razor Blade in the Apple: The Social Construction of Urban Legends.” Social Problems 32, no. 5 (1985): 488–99. https://doi.org/10.2307/800777.

• Pool, W. Scott.  “A brief history of poisoned Halloween candy panic."  CNN. October 30, 2019. https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/30/health/halloween-candy-panic-conversation-wellness. Accessed 12 July 2025.

This Satanic Panic coincided with fear-mongering propaganda like the film Hell’s Bells that said rock music was a tool of the devil and was further inflamed by urban legends about razor blades in candy and poisoned treats. 

Law enforcement departments across America held seminars on Satanic Ritual Abuse for teachers, churches, and concerned families to educate them about the threat of Satanic cults.   Families all over America insisted Dungeons & Dragons lead to devil worship.  Little did we know we'd lived through our own version of the Salem witch trials but this time by mass media, and just like the Salem Witch Trials, lives were completely ruined by it.  The current moral hysteria over transgender people using restrooms is a similar tempest in a teapot, or false QAnon claim that Democrats were sex trafficking children out of a D.C. Pizzaria known as “Pizzagate," is nothing new, really.   

Despite widespread belief, there is no statistical evidence supporting these fears.  While there may be cases of Satanic ritual abuse, nearly all of them claimed later appeared on further scrutiny to be hysteria, false memory, and popular panic.  

The myth of Halloween as a night of ritual evil was born from projection, Mischief Night and Devil's Night (see Halloween Parties for further explanation), not actual history or truth.  And that myth was greatly enhanced by the Hollywood blockbuster pseudo (false) folk horror films Rosemary's Baby and the Exorcist.  Together, they vastly contributed to the plausibility (it seeming to be true or likely) that there were active Satanic cults in every community involved in child sacrifice in Satanic rites for immortality.

Except there is no actual evidence to that end.  Lives were literally ruined in the 1980s and 1990s due to this hysteria, just like McCarthyism and the first red scare in the Palmer Raids.   

The FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit's Review of Satanic Ritual Abuse was parallele with two different British investigations and one Canadian one, and all of those investigations had the same conclusion:  this was moral panic and hysteria, not unlike the Salem with trials. 

✅ According to Kenneth V. Lanning, a Supervisory Special Agent in the FBI’s (Federal Bureau of Investigation, national law enforcement tasked with interstate crimes and national level crimes) Behavioral Science Unit who specialized in crimes against children, including sexual exploitation and child abduction, who in 1992 wrote the FBI’s Investigator’s Guide to Allegations of "Ritual" Child Abuse:

• He looked at hundreds of cases across the United States over many years.

• ❌ He found no proof of big, organized Satanic groups hurting kids in secret rituals.

• 🔎 In all the cases he studied deeply, there was no physical evidence of ritual killings or cult activity.

• 🗣️ Many stories came from bad or leading interviews, where people accidentally created false memories.

• ⚖️ Some real Satanic ritual abuse did happen, but it was very rare, isolated, and perpetrated by individuals, not part of an organized Satanic plan, and there was no evidence of Satanic cults engaged in child sex trafficking in every community.

  1. • When ritual elements were present, they were usually idiosyncratic — devised by individual perpetrators rather than part of an organized Satanic theology or nationwide cult.

     • These individual acts should not be taken as evidence of a grand conspiracy or a systematic plan to infiltrate communities.

     • He strongly advised law enforcement not to assume that every case involving ritualistic elements was connected or indicative of a Satanic plot.

📄 Source:
Kenneth V. Lanning, Investigator’s Guide to Allegations of "Ritual" Child Abuse, FBI Behavioral Science Unit, 1992.
👉 Link to full report (PDF):  The 1992 FBI Investigator's Guide to Allegations of  “Ritual Child Abuse" 👈

Elizabeth Loftus's TED Talk, the Fiction of Memory: How Reliable is your Memory👈, discusses some of these false memory accusations and what her research revealed about false memory from leading questions asked by investigators, social workers, and therapists that implanted false memories.