10 Halloween Urban legends

So the original Cos-play holiday is coming.  Good old All Hallows eve.  I like it for semi creepyness.  But more Halloween is the gateway to that holiday roller coaster. Once Halloween goes by it seems like the rest of they days and nights fly by with unparalleled speed.  Soon enough you are toasting a new year and wondering just what happened to the rest of the year.  Well as a kid Halloween was one of the bang up beat all holidays.  You would get to dress up as something weird, horrific or cool and go get free candy.  Nothing better.  At that age, Christmas is light years away.  Once you are older, you're lucky if you can taste Thanksgiving's pumpkin pie before you are done opening presents.  Well this list is more about the urban legends that I remember hearing during Halloween.  I can't verify one of them and I'm not going to snopes.  Here we go...

10. melt the candy -  This one was about kids who's earth grown druid hippy parents didn't want them having any candy but they didn't want them to miss out on all of the fun of the holiday, so they would let each of their children pick out one candy item and then melt the rest in a big pot.  Sometimes instead of melting the candy would be crushed so nobody could make use of this horrible capitalist treat.   No this story didn't make any sense but it did teach me a grave disdain of granola chewing hippies.  No candy, humph!  They must be communists!

9. The cat lady - This was a local tale and a bit more involved as it required people to trespass onto a persons property to witness rows of tiny cat graves.  That's the assumption anyway.  Was I ever able to prove it?  no.   I had heard about it from those that had.  Oddly enough nearly every locality has some kind of story like this that involves someones secluded property and some very tall assumptions.  If you ever have the chance to trespass on private property, I don't recommend it. It's scary at best.  Illegal at worst and these poor people are probably not at all what you think and would just like to be left alone.

8. apple razor blades - This one has been around for ages.  The kid hater that finally gets their revenge by sliding some Remington steel razor blades into a bushel basket of red delicious and hand them out as treats to all the miscreant kids wandering around.  Looking back I keep wondering what kid would be dumb enough to take a bite of an apple without looking it over.  Not to mention the parents examining the candy for potential bombs.  The truth is, no self respecting kid would ever have seen that apple make it home.  An apple is right next to a tooth brush from your neighborhood dentist in the Parthenon of sucky Halloween treats and would probably have been thrown away...or something.

7. kidnap kids - Oh yeah I heard this one a lot growing up.  There were bands of bad people scooping up kids by the dozen and kidnapping them.  Nobody would know the difference because it was Halloween.  I have yet to hear about a kidnapping during Halloween, and if there is, I don't want to hear about it.  But honestly how many witnesses are there on the streets?  Then again, nobody ever accused a criminal of being smart.  It was because of this that I never went into anyone's house to experience peeled grape eyeballs and cold spaghetti guts or the mini hallway of terrors.  I just knew I was going to suddenly be abducted.  I envisioned some kind of giant steel cage filled with costumed kids wishing they had taken heed of their friends mothers advice.

6. old folks giving away full candy bars - If I was only the one street over I would have made a HAUL!!!  Usually the day after Halloween I would hear from my friends about some house or street full of old folks that just loved the young-ins and were giving away a kings ransom in candy.  Full size candy bars of many varieties.  Take one, Take a few!  Enjoy your youth!  For some reason I never found the Eldorado of elderly handing out packaged confections.  I was just happy to have a bag full of small candy and pixy stick dust in the bottom of the bag.

5. kids getting their candy stolen - I had heard about roaming bands of punks that were stealing kid's candy.  I had never witnessed it myself, but it seemed plausible.  Those older kids were capable of anything.  Certainly stealing from the law abiding 8 year olds of the town was not beneath them.   Once again, I had never had my lollipops purloined.  In fact the only thief of my candy was mom and dad and it was never the crap candy either.  They always went for the peanut butter cups and chocolate bars leaving me with peanut butter taffy and smarties.

4. Pop Rocks Mikey - Once pop rocks started coming on the scene, they were a big deal in the Halloween candy rounds.  They were rare and wonderful.  If you did happen to get any, you would immediately hear the inaccurate tale of Mikey the kid from the life cereal commercials and how after eating more than his fair share of pop rocks he downed several carbonated soft drinks the name of the brand escapes me.  Close after he would have to be rushed to the hospital because his stomach exploded like he had an alien exchange student in his small intestine.  Never happened.  Thanks to one of the very first Mythbusters shows this was proven to be particularly impossible.  Great story though.

3. Near Death Ghost experiences - What better time to trot out the Halloween themed story about a ghost or someone you knew that was playing with a ouija board or holding a seance?  My dad had several he liked to entertain us kids with.  One he told was of a local group of 3 friends that decided to go into an abandoned house to play with a parker brothers brand ouija board.  By the end of the night.  They were all hospitalized and were unable to say anything about the horrors witnessed, but they all had shock white hair from the experience.  Oh yeah, it was a chiller.  Dad didn't appreciate a lot of followup questions about a lot of his stories, so we took him at his word.  It was vivid enough that I still remembered the images I had imagined as a kid of these poor shocked kids that were foolish enough to play with the Devil's Telegraph.

2. LSD Candy - This was the more modern version of the razor blade apple.  It was lsd laced candy.  Since LSD was often ingested on a sugar cube, why not on candy?  Once again, hippies ruin everything.

1. Hot Pennies - Along with the razor blade apples I had heard of bitter old people only scant days away from their final death rattling breath that wished nothing but ill for the youth.  The tale goes that they would heat up stacks of pennies and put them in the kids bags.  The pennies were so hot that they would melt the candy and go right through the plastic candy bag rendering it some kind of time lapsed pinata.  I'm sure they would peer out their window and laugh their bitter cold laugh as kids tried to collect their nights booty as it was spilling out into the street.  Never witnessed, but heard nearly every year.

Once again, I thought maybe this was it.  But then another idea crept into my addled brain.  Who knows?  maybe it will happen again in 15 days.  Come back and find out!