[soft music] So, Halloween is coming up, and we have one question: Are sadistic strangers actually poisoning kids' candy?

[intro music] So, lots of kids who trick-or-treat can remember bringing home pillowcases and plastic pumpkins full of candy every October 31st.

And, if you were like me, you had to fork over those bags to an adult for individual inspection to make sure they weren't full of razors, needles, poison, and laxatives wrapped to look like Tootsie Rolls, which is honestly the craziest version of this story that I heard growing up.

But does all of this candy chaos come from somewhere, or is it just a ghost story?

Well, I decided to do a little digging into the killer-candy urban legend, and the answer is a resounding, "Not really, kind of, maybe."

Because even though we've been hearing this myth for decades, there isn't a whole lot of proof that any kids have actually been poisoned and killed by strangers.

In fact, it seems that most confirmed instances of candy tampering cropped up after the urban legend became legendary.

But before we get deeper into candy than Charlie in Willy Wonka's factory, we have to ask ourselves: Why do kids trick-or-treat and get candy in the first place?

So, trick-or-treating on Halloween already has a spotty history as a holiday.

Turns out that Halloween has its roots in the Celtic festival of Samhain.

Celebrated on October 31st, Samhain gathered to pay homage to the dead, or dress in costumes to fool the demons who returned to earth.

In the 9th century, when Christianity spread through Celtic regions, they converted November 2nd into All Soul's Day because they were trying to convert Pagan holidays into Christian celebrations.

Adults, and eventually children, would go around "souling," or asking for treats in exchange for praying for the souls of strangers' deceased relatives.

Another version of this tradition is Guy Fawkes Day, AKA Bonfire Night, where British children would walk around singing and begging for pennies to commemorate the foiling of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, although most of us just know the Guy Fawkes mask in "V for Vendetta."

The U.S. got in on the act in the mid-19th century, and by the early 20th century, kids begging for candy caught on along with a certain amount of pranks and vandalism.

But asking for candy door-to-door is a fairly recent custom in the U.S., popularized in part by Irish immigrants in the 19th century.

The phrase "trick-or-treating" as we know it started to emerge in the 1920s, '30s, and '40s.

Today, Americans spend an estimated $2 billion on candy a year for just Halloween, and the average pumpkin bucket carries 250 pieces of candy, which is 9,000 calories and 3 pounds of sugar.

So Halloween is now a huge industry.

Okay, so we've established a loose history of why every year, we fork over tons of candy to cute kids dressed like Spiderman and Elsa from "Frozen," but that brings us to our next question: When did we start hearing about strangers handing out candy that kills?

Well, it seems like the answer here is part truth, part hysteria, and part group-think.

Our contentious relationship to tainted treats stretches back to the late 19th century.

According to Professor Samira Kawash, there were reports as early as 1899 and the early 20th century that kids were dropping dead from poisoned candy, although all of these cases turned out to be related to meningitis and not toxic treats.

So, have strangers ever handed out tainted candy to unsuspecting kids?

Short answer is: yes.

On Halloween, 1959, a California dentist named Dr. William V. Shyne passed out approximately 450 candy-covered laxatives to children in his neighborhood.

Thirty of those kids got seriously sick, and he was charged with "outrage of public decency," among other crimes, like being the worst.

According to Professor Joel Best at the University of Delaware, there's been about 80 cases of sharp objects found in kids' Halloween candy.

But, even though there have been isolated instances of pins and needles found in candy bars, they were usually placed there by family members trying to play a prank and haven't proven fatal.

Because nothing says "gotcha" like an open blade in your kid's Snickers bar.

Okay, so a deranged dentist and some sensational media coverage helped this myth take hold, but has a child ever been killed by poisoned Halloween candy?

The answer to that is also "yes," but it wasn't by random strangers.

In 1970, a little boy's family reported he had died after ingesting tainted candy at his home in Michigan.

Police later discovered that the boy had actually died from accidentally ingesting his uncle's heroin supply, and his family tried to cover it up by sprinkling the drugs on his Halloween candy.

Then, in 1974, Ronald Clark O'Bryan poisoned his eight-year-old son with a cyanide-laced Pixy Stix.

O'Bryan had taken a life-insurance policy out on his two children in order to wipe out his debts, so he gave the poisoned candy to his son, his daughter, and several neighborhood children to make it look like a random act.

His son died, but his daughter and the other children never opened the candy, opting for other treats instead.

O'Bryan was executed in Texas in 1984.

So, it seems that while kids have been given candy with poison, needles, and razors, it's actually family members and not strangers that pose the greatest risk in terms of candy-related fatalities.

Well, that leaves us with our final question: If the evidence doesn't support the urban legend, then why do tall tales of poisoned candy persist?

Because it's starting to seem like the main reason for all the candy caution was giving my father an excuse to pick all the fun-sized Whoppers from my Halloween haul.

And, seriously, who likes Whoppers?

The '80s saw a resurgence of tainted-candy fears when stories and warnings were targeted at parents to keep their kids safe from candy criminals.

James Barron ran a 1982 article in "The New York Times" urging anxious parents to give their kids' candy the once-over before letting them rot their teeth.

And a 1983 piece by advice columnist "Dear Abby" urged the same.

And this wasn't just a media frenzy.

This urban legend was the perfect storm of fiction, fact, and spooky sensationalism.

There's just enough accuracy to make the story credible as a widespread issue, plus the holiday is all about pulling pranks and dressing up in disguises, which makes the idea of dangerous strangers more believable.

But overall, it seems like you're more likely to get a neighbor who hands out toothbrushes than toxins.

So, how does it all add up?

Well, it seems like Halloween trick-or-treating had Pagan roots that eventually evolved into kids going door-to-door around the U.S. asking for food.

And even though there are scattered instances of candy that's been tampered with, there isn't evidence to support the claim that there are hordes of strangers handing out poison to kids.

In fact, the only fatalities from Halloween candy came from family members, not strangers on the street.

So even though both sides of this story exist to a certain extent, the actual meaning of "stranger danger" and "candy that kills" isn't really a thing, and it's definitely not a rampant evil in our midst.

But, on the plus side, it's still advisable for parents to check kids' candy and to throw away any unwrapped stuff for sanitary reasons, because some neighbors still throw handfuls of dirty pennies into Halloween bags, and they're the real villains here.

Accessibility provided by the U.S. Department of Education.

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