When I was a kid, we would go out on Halloween night and trick-or-treat without our parents. I was only eight years old, I would go out with a couple of friends and we would stay out until about 10:00 PM. We never had any problems. Well, it seems that those days are gone forever.
Maybe the Internet is to blame. The Internet allows us to connect to some of the greatest minds in the world, like mine for example. I consider the internet as a tool to expand your influence and power. It can be used for good things, but it can also be used for evil things. Unfortunately, there are a lot of evil people out there who can use the Internet to spread their evil ideas to other evil people. Monkey see monkey do.
There are extremely brilliant good people online, and on the other side of the fence, there are people who represent the worst in humankind. Most of us are somewhere in the middle of the pack.
When it comes to the Internet, we all seem to gravitate to extremes. So just about everyone has seen videos and images that are shocking. Call it entertainment, or call it a challenge, people have a tendency to copy good and bad.
Do you remember that crazy phase where stupid people looking for attention would go into the stores and take the lids of ice cream, then lick the ice cream, and replace the lid? I was glad to see that finally die out. For a long time, I completely stopped buying ice cream.
Halloween is a special time of the year where the crazies come out to play.
It was Halloween night in 1974 when a crazy person named Ronald O’Brien came up with the idea of putting cyanide in pixie sticks. He even gave some to his own son, who died. He later confessed that he was trying to kill Halloween.
Ten years earlier, a New York woman was arrested for giving out ant poison and dog biscuits to kids on Halloween night. She claimed that she was trying to teach older kids a lesson about going trick-or-treating. These were isolated incidences, probably because the Internet wasn’t around.
Nowadays, because of the Internet, if someone does something bad, it usually gets copied, several hundred times.
When did Trick or Treat first start?
History experts can trace the act of Trick to Treat all the way back to the Roman Catholics in the 1700s. In the United States, Trick or Treat became popular in the 1920s so now the tradition is about 100 years old.
Halloween, less commonly known as Allhalloween, All Hallows’ Eve, or All Saints’ Eve, is a celebration observed in many countries on 31 October, the eve of the Western Christian feast of All Hallows’ Day
The term “trick or treat” was coined, and the custom had been firmly established in American popular culture by 1951 when trick-or-treating was depicted in the Peanuts comic strip. In 1952, Disney produced a cartoon called “Trick or Treat” featuring Donald Duck and his nephews Huey, Dewey, and Louie. That was 70 years ago!
Leave it to the adults to screw everything up
The kids had the right idea. This is a perfect holiday for kids. They get to go to the doors of houses in their neighborhood, to people they don’t even know, and demand candy.
This is an activity that is forbidden for the rest of the year, so it’s like the rules for kids are suspended for one night. Oh I know, adults check the kid’s bag for bad things but don’t kid yourself. We all know the real reason to check your kid’s candy bag was to extract all of the good candy for yourself and leave the kids with all the crappy stuff.
You have to be pure evil to want to do harm to kids that you don’t even know, just to satisfy your own sick form of entertainment or thirst for power.
I think that people who do this are complete cowards. They want to poison kids and get away with it. Since the kids probably have no idea where each piece of candy came from, these sickos could easily do harm without ever getting caught.
If there were true justice in the world, these people would be sent to prison and told that someday without warning, they would be poisoned during dinner. Then they could spend years in fear of eating.
Halloween Horror, It's not always the candy
It was Halloween night in Georiga, the year was 2021, and Hailynn Parker simply disappeared. She has still not been found. Last seen wearing a black hoodie, black shirt with black jeans. She was 12 years old and the case is still unresolved. Maybe she ran away, maybe something else happened to her, it’s still a mystery.
On Oct 30th, the night before Halloween of the same year 2021, which was just last year, a 13-year-old boy was hit by a car while trick-or-treating in Utah. The kids were celebrating a day early because Halloween fell on a Sunday, and there was school the next day.
His name was Karl Finch and he was with a group of trick-or-treaters when they all crossed the street at a designated crosswalk. A car drove through and hit two of the boys. Karl was expected to live but eventually died on Nov 1st because of a brain clot.
Did you know that Halloween is the deadliest night of the year for kids under the age of 18? According to the Washing Post, 54 kids died on Halloween between 2004 and 2018.
Also, a similar study released by JAMA Pediatrics “found that children ages 4 to 8 were about 10 times more likely to be killed in the evening on Halloween than they were during other autumn evenings.” The study also found that 6:00 pm was the peak time for trick-or-treater deaths from car crashes. The likely reason for this is the combination of rush hour traffic and when it starts getting dark outside in many parts of the country.
Some cities have decided to ban cars on residential streets past sundown on Halloween night.
Halloween night 2005 in Delaware
For many hours people walked past the freaky Halloween decoration while admiring the realistic-looking body hanging in the tree. This yard actually won the contest for the most morbid Halloween yard in the neighborhood.
The only problem was, the hanging body was real. It seems that a lady had committed suicide the night before. Police were finally called and they removed the award-winning Halloween decoration.
A Halloween stunt gone wrong
A teacher in Massachusetts thought he figured out a great way to get students into the Halloween spirit. He brought a real chainsaw to the school, pulled the rip cord, and then burst into a classroom of 15-year-old students while wearing a ski mask and revving the chainsaw to max throttle.
The stampede of students was so bad that one person broke his leg while jumping over a desk to get out of the room. Several parents of the traumatized students launched a lawsuit against the school board, high school, and teacher who perpetrated the prank. Apparently, the family of the kid with the broken leg settled out of court for $100,000. Trick or treat!
A bad Halloween display gets the owner sued.
A woman in Florida ended up successfully suing her neighbor for harassment and emotional distress after the man next door set up a Halloween display that made her the butt of jokes.
The offending neighbor put a sign on his lawn for an insane asylum that pointed to the woman’s yard and erected a plastic tombstone that read: At 48 she had no mate, no date. It’s no debate, she looks 88.’ However, the woman had the last laugh after she sued her rude neighbor and got him to promise in court that he would not erect any more Halloween displays while living next door to her.
A pumkin turns into a bomb
Virginia Beach, Va. a 42-year-old man decided to show a little girl what the scooped-out insides of the pumpkin looked like. To do so, he inserted a grill lighter and lit the interior.
To his horror, the gases from the lighter rapidly built up inside the uncarved pumpkin and created an explosive flash fire. The man and child both ended up suffering first and second-degree burns.
Anytime you allow propane to build up in an air-restricted area and add fire, you have an explosion of fire. pumpkins and propane are not a good combination.
Panic on the eve of Halloween in 1938
On Halloween Eve in 1938, Americans tuning in to CBS radio got a shocking news report.: “Martians have invaded New Jersey!” Most people listening to this report didn’t realize that it was actually a radio play by Orson Welles titled “War of the Worlds.”
According to NPR, “about 12 million people were listening to the broadcast that night. It was Oct 30th, the night before Halloween. Hundreds of thousands of people were in a panic, many of them calling the police.
Several thousand of them jumped into their cars in an attempt to flee the area, causing a massive traffic jam on the freeway out of New Jersey.
As a side note, most people didn’t own a television set in 1938, so many of them would sit around the radio for entertainment. Back then, stories were broadcasted as a form of entertainment. People were tuning into the Orson Wells story and missed the introduction, so these people thought that they were listening to the news.
Orsen Welles apologized at a hastily-called news conference the next morning, and no punitive action was taken. The broadcast and subsequent publicity brought the 23-year-old Welles to the attention of the general public and gave him the reputation of an innovative storyteller and “trickster”.
The Toolbox Killers
Lawrence Bittaker and Roy Norris were known as the Tool Box Killers. These two were serial killers and rapists committed the kidnapping, rape, torture, and murder of five teenage girls in southern California over a five-month period in 1979
They were famous for picking up female hitchhikers and then torturing them with tools typically found in a toolbox, according to New York Daily News. They often took pictures of their victims during the slayings.
Their last victim died on Halloween night. Shirley Ledford was hitchhiking home from a Halloween party when the two men picked her up in a van. She had no way of knowing that she just accepted a ride from the Toolbox Killers.
After torturing and killing Shirey, they dropped her body on a stranger’s lawn. The two serial killers were captured after one of their friends turned them in to the authorities.
Bittaker was sentenced to death but died in 2019 of natural causes, NBC reports. Norris, who cooperated in the investigation, was given 45 years to life.
Have a happy and safe Halloween
I hope you have a happy and safe Halloween my little creepies. My wish is for you to come home with lots of candy and fun memories. Just beware, there are plenty of crazy people out there, so make sure you only go trick-or-treating with a group and take your cell phone.
Be extra careful running in between houses. I remember tripping on a hose as a kid and losing most of my candy. I know it takes more time but make sure you stay on the sidewalks. Walk, don’t run. Take a flashlight with you and turn it on when crossing the street.