Joel Best

The details always shifted from one telling to the next, but the message had stayed very familiar.

Now, if you've ever wondered if any of those reports and stories are actually true, well, sociologist Joel Best dug in because he was curious too.

In 1985, Best and a fellow researcher went through nearly 30 years of newspaper stories, everything between 1958 and 1984.

And Best kept adding to the pile for years after that as well.

Some of them even still do.

There is a sociologist named Joel Best who spent a lot of his career on this exact legend.

And in 1985, he and a colleague went through every newspaper report they could find of tampered Halloween candy going back to 1958, and here is what he found.

In all of that time, that whole time he was doing the study, he never located one substantiated case of a stranger killing or seriously injuring a child with candy that was collected while trick or treating.

The early ones are almost quaint.

The sociologist, Joel Best, who had spent more than 40 years studying this stuff, says the first stories were about people heating pennies in a skillet and dropping the red-hot coins into kids' open hands.

That's the original Halloween sadist, a guy with essentially a frying pan and a grudge against kids.

Then in 1964 on Long Island, it got a little more real.

Yeah.

Uh, so this other article I was reading, uh, this is an NPR article, and uh, they talk with this guy, um, what's his name? Joel, Joel Best, who's a profess- professor-

Hmm

... of sociology and criminal justice at the University of Delaware.

He's the sociology expert.

Uh, he's not just that, Tim.

When I went to his, uh, website, 'cause it had his, uh, website linked, uh, you know, I, I told you his name is Joel Best, uh, Professor of Sociology and Criminal Justice at the University of Delaware.

Can you guess what the first line of his bio says?

Except researchers had spent decades Looking for evidence that strangers were actually using Halloween to promo- randomly poison children, and they found remarkably little.

Sociologist and criminologist Joel Best has studied reports of Halloween candy tampering going back decades.

He has been unable to find a substantiated case of a child being killed or seriously injured by a contaminated treat randomly received from a stranger while trick-or-treating.

And here's where that story gets particularly interesting because even if the tr- threat wasn't what people believed it was, the fear changed Halloween.

Was that, was that Dr. Trickity O'Treat?

It was Joel Best.

Oh, he's the worst.

[laughs] So-

Despite those two stories about the dentist giving out candy-coated laxatives and the housewife who handed out ant baits, no documented cases of Halloween poisonings prove true.

Sociologists like Joel Best have done extensive research into the urban legends and had never found any actual major incidents.

In fact, almost all of the claims that have existed since the Industrial Revolution have been proven to be hoaxes and pranks, feeding on paranoia and social tensions.

while only a select few led to injuries and may have been done by family members and in many cases the children themselves to garner attention.