Poisoned Pixie Stix, needles-stuck Snickers, and razor-wielding Raisinets lurk behind every Jack-o-lantern-guarded door. Evil ne’er-do-wells lurk ready to pluck your children off the streets and do unspeakable things to them. The dead walk the earth and seek to steal the the souls of the unwary.

I mock, but only because these myths of Halloween are so eminently mockable. As it happens, Halloween has generated a host of safety myths, turning a once wholesome celebration of zombies, vampires, and other dead, undead, and half-dead things into something rather more sinister. Let’s examine some of these myths:

• The candy is poisoned: Every year, we are bombarded with warnings to search our children’s candy carefully for puncture holes, opened wrappers, and so on. Homemade treats; popcorn balls, candy apples, and the like have completely disappeared from the Halloween repertoire for fear of poisoning. And yet there has never been an instance of a child being poisoned by Halloween candy given her or him by a stranger. Never. The only incident in which Halloween candy has been used to poison someone was a little boy in 1974 who ate Pixie Stix laced with cyanide (rat poison, essentially) by his father, ostensibly to collect on the child’s life insurance policy.
• There’s needles/razors in the candy: Unlike the fear of poisoning, this one has actually happened, though nobody’s ever been badly hurt. Almost all reported cases of needles or razor bladed being concealed in Halloween candy or other treats have been hoaxes, and the 10 or so that have been confirmed resulted in no injury. All but one of those have been pranks carried out by older siblings or friends. The one exception occurred in 2000 when a man stuck needles into Snickers bars and handed them out; nobody was injured. As it happens, needles and razor blades are easily discovered and not all that dangerous (and you can’t get HIV from them except under conditions that Halloween trick-or-treating simply can’t produce).
• There’s child molesters roaming free in my neighborhood! You might have looked at one of the scare-sites (appropriate for Halloween, I suppose) that show you how many registered sex offenders live within spitting distance of your house, maybe even mapped their addresses. What you might not have known is how someone gets to be on the sex offenders registry. Many are folks who slept with their 15-year old girlfriends or boyfriends when they were 16 or even when they were 14 (some states prosecute underage sex regardless of the age of the participants). Most, though, are in fact guilty of molesting children almost always their own (or closely related). There are very, very few cases (less than 5%) of children being accosted by strangers the number of cases over the last decade is in the hundreds, out of many thousands of child abuse cases.
• The dead walk the earth: This one’s true. Give them candy. And pray…

The reality is that your children are fairly safe from victimization by your neighbors. Statistically speaking, you and your family are the greatest threat your children. While it makes good sense to teach your children to be aware of themselves and their surroundings in the company of strangers, the feverish panic that breaks out every year in the weeks before Halloween is way out of proportion to the actual threat posed to your children.

So where does the panic come from? At least part of it has to be pinned on local news organizations and their addiction to the scare story as a way to drive ratings. “Poisoned candy rampant in the Southland! Are your children at risk??????” I can only assume that people respond to this kind of thing, since news broadcasters keep doing it, risking their credibility and seriousness in the process.

But the more important story lies in the anxieties we as a society have fostered over the last several decades. As we’ve become more and more isolated with the rise of suburban living, greater job demands, the availability of in-home and solitary entertainments, and so on, we’ve grown distrustful and suspicious of our neighbors because more than at any other time in human history we don’t know who they are. We don’t rely on them and they don’t rely on us, we don’t have any obligations to them and they don’t have any obligations to us. We are literally surrounded by strangers.

And along comes Halloween, and what do we do? We allow our children to go door to door among those strangers and beg for candy. In anthropological terms, feeding someone and eating together are powerful markers of intimacy and demonstrations of solidarity but we aren’t intimate with our neighbors and there is no sense of solidarity. So we worry. And one way we express those worries is by telling each other urban legends about the dangers of strangers with candy, especially on Halloween. This may also be a defensive strategy, allowing us to ignore the fact that the most real source of danger to our children is their own family.

So don’t panic. Take reasonable safety precautions; make sure your kids are visible in the dark, have them carry flashlights, teach them traffic safety principles, supervise young trick-or-treaters, and don’t let Halloween pranks get out of hand. Don’t let these perfectly normal anxieties develop into irrational fears that end up polluting Halloween for yourself and your children.

Do be sure, however, to teach your kids about the dangers of the walking dead. Because that fear is totally rational.

It’s safe to assume that everyone has heard about voodoo dolls and thinks they’ve pretty much grasped the concept. After all, what could be more simple? A little cloth cut to look like a person, a little stuffing (preferably some rotting Spanish moss), some twine, a Sharpie marker to make the features, and a big box of shiny new pins can provide hours of nasty, furtive fun to the discontented or just mischief-minded among us.

Or, perhaps you’ve encountered them dressed in Mardi Gras hues, complete with feathers and primitive features, glued to magnets and grinning from the refrigerator door as a little memento of a visit to New Orleans.

But is this all that’s behind the mystique and seduction of these popular little creatures? Mostly harmless and merely decorative?

Creating little effigies and figures in the form of human beings, gods, animals, etc., is as old as the history of mankind. Some of the earliest surviving forms of cultural art (the art created to entertain the masses, kind of like our arts and crafts of today) were little effigies of people involved in day-to-day activities: water bearers with buckets, farmers with pitchforks, etc. Many of these were probably children’s playthings, but others were created for more empiric purposes such as the adornment of personal altars or to accompany soldiers in battle as tiny memorials of dead cohorts or mementos of living family members.

But perhaps as long as the craft of creating these positive, reinforcing effigies has been around, a darker side has existed and a darker, more malevolent use has been found for them.

Enter the poppet. Not just a children’s doll, the poppet, in the European tradition, was truly the first “multi-task” toy.

Buckland defines a poppet as, “A figure made to represent a person…used in magical ritual. Made of cloth, wax, clay, or any other substance, it may or may not look exactly like the person it represents.” He goes on to state that cloth poppets have “always been popular in magic, especially for healing purposes.” The type of magic he is referring to is, of course, sympathetic magic, and in this regard the poppet would be created in a sort of gingerbread man format and is stuffed with healing herbs appropriate to combat the illness or malaise affecting the person it is intended to help. Often slivers of fingernail or hair from the individual will be added and the poppet will then be consecrated as the living counterpart of the person in need of healing. The practitioner will then utter the consecrating spell, “Creature of cloth, thou art (name), and all that I do unto thee be done unto (name),” or something similar.

It is a fact in human relationships that everybody doesn’t always get along, and this may have been a particularly poignant reality of daily life in ancient times when just surviving was next to impossible. This feeling of desperation, often coupled with a feeling of helplessness, and further exacerbated by frequent, deplorable victimization at the hands of more powerful tribes or individuals, led to the realization among our distant ancestors that, “Hey, life can suck sometimes!”

These harsh realities led early mankind to rely on groups of more powerful and wise individuals to explain the sometimes glaring inconsistencies of human life. These individuals might be anything from priests and shamans, to midwives and apothecaries, but all had in common the same thing: knowledge of the mysterious, intricate workings of the unseen side of the natural world. And not all confined their craft to healing and helping. From the very beginning there were those who were perfectly willing to facilitate injury and revenge; or who were, at the very least, willing to show one how to bring about these things on one’s own behalf. To say they taught by example is an understatement.