Giff, was the razor blades in the apples one of those "urban legend" things? In 1974, I was in my 20's, and we were having huge Halloween block parties in the Montrose/Westheimer area, with the street blocked off and lights strung across it. The Wonder Dog was doing his tricks, and the chicks were out in their dozens, and we had so much fun. I would have sworn the razors thing was earlier... sometime in the '60's. You are right about the guy poisoning his son. I remember now. That guy should have suffered a long, long time.
it seems like every neighborhood has a story about someone who put razors in candy apples or rat poison in candy. not to say its never happened, but i think alot of those stories are urban legends. or it was an isolated incident that over the years seems to be something that happened in half the neighborhoods in town. my parents just said not to eat anything till i got home and they could look it over first (and my dad could snag all the good candy)
well ya knew Jack Chick has a pamplet to answer just this question! http://www.chick.com/reading/tracts/1053/1053_01.asp heheheh notice that the girl says that back in Old England, the people didn't know God, but yet they were all Satan worshipers
It appears there are a number of real cases of people putting sharp stuff, like pins and needles in apples and candy, but I'm not sure about the razor blades. http://www.snopes.com/horrors/mayhem/needles.asp Claim: Pins, needles, and razor blades have been found in trick-or-treaters' loot. Status: True. Origins: Unlike Halloween poisonings, many cases of tampered trick-or-treat loot involving the insertion of pins, needles, or razor blades have been documented. To my mind, these cases constitute a different class of tampering than poisoning for a couple of reasons. First, the expected level of harm is severely reduced: poison is an attempt to kill; a pin in an apple is an attempt to frighten or injure. Professor Joel Best reported that he's been able to track about eighty cases of sharp objects in food incidents since 1959, and almost all were hoaxes. Only about ten culminated in even minor injury, and in the worst case, a woman required a few stitches. Compared to "eat something and die," a couple of stitches barely registers on the scale. Second, the motivation for "pins and needles" tampering is different. As I said before, poison is an attempt to kill, but hiding a needle in an apple is almost always a prank, not a serious attempt to cause harm. (In those instances where such an insertion could be traced back to a specific person, it was almost always some kid intent on freaking out either his little brother or his parents or getting the community in an uproar as his version of a cute Halloween "trick"). Pranking (especially when it's a scary or slightly mean one) is part of Halloween, and the various kids or young adults who've tampered with treats most likely never fully considered the potential consequences of the joke prior to embarking on it. (When presented with a matchless opportunity to throw a scare into a pesky kid brother, who stops to think that Junior might get hurt?) An incident that broke with this expected pattern occurred in Minneapolis in 2000, when 49-year-old James Joseph Smith was charged with one count of adulterating a substance with intent to cause death, harm or illness after it was determined he'd put needles in Snickers bars and handed them out to children on Halloween. A 14-year-old boy was pricked by a needle hidden in a bar he'd bitten into, but no one required medical attention. As author Jack Santino noted in his history of Halloween, "pins and needles" rumors began to supplant "poisoned candy" rumors in the mid-1960s, and nearly all such reports of such rumors proved to be hoaxes: Beginning in 1967 the focus of the legend shifted dramatically from poison to razors and sharp objects hidden in apples. The emergence of the razor blade motif remains to be studied, but it apparently spread rapidly in several areas of the eastern seaboard and Canada: The New York Times reported thirteen cases from isolated communities in New Jersey and noted "several" others in Ottawa and Toronto. Outrage was so strong in New Jersey that the state legislature passed a law shortly before Halloween 1968 mandating prison terms for those caught boobytrapping apples. This did not forestall the discovery of thirteen more apples with razor blades that year in five New Jersey counties. In many cases, The New York Times story noted that "children were cut," but the more detailed accounts include suspicious details. In one case a boy came to his parents with an apple containing a razor blade. He had bit into an apple, he said, but not quite deeply enough to contact the blade. In another, the child said he found the blade while cutting out a rotten spot; in a third case, the razor was found when a child turned an apple over to his father for peeling. In all these detailed cases, the child was not injured, and because he was the immediate source of the apple, it seems possible that he was also the source of the blade. As Best and Horiuchi (authors of the Razor Blade) note, 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. Thus this legend type seems to have grown out of a tradition of ostensive hoaxes relying on an understood oral tradition, rather than on any core of authenticated incidents. Halloween of 1982 was the year it all went crazy. That year saw a number of tragic and random non-Halloween poisonings of both foodstuffs and medicines, including the Tylenol poisonings that killed seven people. Although the "crazed madman tampering with kids' Halloween treats" had been an established bogeyman for at least the previous fifteen years (I recall in the late 1960s my mother chopping up every apple I brought home from trick-or-treating and then making pies from them), it was in the aftermath of the Tylenol poisonings that a sudden spate of Halloween tampering reports erupted. It's as if the murder of those seven unfortunate people opened a forbidden door and now others were free to experiment with playing God, to dispense either life or death as the whim struck them. 1982. An awful year.
I don't care much for Halloween as far taking part in the celebration, but I love getting candy to trick-or-treaters, so I am going to buy a bunch of candy before I go home tonight and pass it out (can't say no to the kids, they love their candy )
Yes, because all non Christian relgions, especially the pagans, are Satanic cults. I've never understood why Halloween (which comes from Samhein) gets so much attention for being 'evil' due to its pagan origins. Christmas (which comes from Yule) and Easter (Ostara) are also derived from old, pagan holidays. All three of this modern holidays still have many of the trappings associated with the ancient holidays. *shrugs* Personally, Halloween has always been one of my favorite holidays. It's all about candy and costumes and having fun. Now candy... there's a real evil.
You beat me to it. Yup. Christmas is celebrated on Dec. 25th because it was a pagan holiday. But that doesn't really have meaning. Nor does the origins of Halloween. It's all just fun.
Exactly. All of this "Oh nos! Halloween is evil and Satanic and stuff!" is nothing more than rallying around a non-existent enemy. In reality, all of the sugar from the candy is far worse for you than dressing up like a witch or whatever.
Svpernaut, Your ignorance of both history and current events is stunning... The Celtics WERE Pagans. FYI, Paganism refers to a general grouping of religions based on nature (Mother Earth) and Halloween began as the Pagan celebration of the harvest. Satanists may have co-opted the holiday for their own twisted purposes, but do not make the mistake of comparing Paganism and satanism. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paganism Yep, there are sickos all over the place, but Halloween is the excuse for those morons, not a driving force. Name even a single one that has performed such sacrifices in the last century. To support your quote, it should be a countrywide or otherwise widespread event and not the actions of some sicko cult or another. Again, you equate Pagans and satanists, which is dishonest to start with since Pagans are people who choose to worship God in terms that are based on Earthly events (Summer and winter solstices, harvest time, planting season, etc.). satanists (such a minor force that they don't even deserve capitalization at the beginning of a sentence) are typically psychos who seize on anything they can find to justify their twisted worldview. I prefer not to let satanists decide for me what is and is not "evil" as far as holidays go, but if you want to give power to those idiots, go ahead.
I never called pagans satanists, in fact I referred to the celtics celebration as a good one. There are and still have been human sacrifices on Halloween all across the world and as said in my original post Halloween does bring out the freaks. The bottom line is that Halloween is no longer considered a "family friendly" holiday because you can't even trust your neighbors to give yourselves untainted candy and treats... so we choose not to celebrate it. The history of Halloween is a potpourri of many religions, histories and traditions and has become blurred from what Christians originally celebrated it for. We choose to go back to our roots and have a religious oriented fall festival rather then a need-for-greed candy run. Celebrate how you want to, and I'll celebrate how I want to... but the bottom line is if you have one thought about giving your kids candy they got then I don't see the point in even "trick or treating" outside of a controlled setting in the first place. But hey, that's just me. Feel free to do a search of the sex offender database for the city... that should be warning enough in my opinion.
You equated Paganists and satanists and even said that the reason that Halloween was bad was because "it later morphed into a more pagan ritualistic holiday," inferring that Paganism is somehow evil. This is the statement I take the most issue with. I have not heard of any types of human sacrifices being made anywhere in the world in the last century. Do you have anything at all to back that statement up or did you pull it out of your a$$? I have not heard of tainted candy except in an infintessimally small number of isolated incidents, and none in recent memory. I suppose some people choose to let fear lead them, but I choose to let hope and love live my life, not fear. You mean like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny representing Christmas and Easter? Feel free to continue to let fear lead your life. There are freaks out there and there are plenty of sex offenders out there (just as many involved in religion as not, IMO), but the chances of me or mine encountering them, even on Halloween, is so remote that I can't see NOT letting my kids have the same fun that their friends do. I will certainly be diligent about giving the candy a once over for opened packages (and the stuff I really like), but once my kids get to the age where they are allowed candy, I won't have any problem letting them have it. I trust God to take care of me and mine, so long as I have done my due diligence.
I'm curious, does there in reality exist an appreciable following of 'Satanism' who worship an evil deity like being and practice sacrifices and other stereotypical rituals? Or is it an invented boogeyman? (Note: Wicca, neo-paganism, Leveyan Satanism, etc. are not examples of the above)
Its a fun holiday, especially for the kids. It should not be thought of any more deeply than that. Christmas is the greatest holiday ever, but I fear, with all the christian bashing that goes on in this country that perhaps Christmas won't be the same to my grandchildren as it was to me.
