A Phantom Fear? : Tampering With Halloween Candy Is Rare, Officials Say

Year after year they float like leaves through the chill Halloween air, ghoulish tales of booby-trapped treats.

Did you hear about the poor boy who bit into the apple and was slashed in the mouth by the razor blade concealed inside? How about the girl rushed to the hospital after munching a candy bar mined with glass?

Like scary campfire stories, the tales are passed among trick-or-treaters, and more often their skittish parents. The accounts are given fiber by the annual public service announcements by hospitals and airports offering to screen candy for signs of deadly horror on the day after the trick-or-treating is done.

But are the tales dark truths of modern life or nasty urban myths? How many sweets have turned deadly, tainted by ghoulish pranksters on Halloween?

In a decade of conducting X-ray checks of Halloween candy, officials at Centinela Hospital Airport Medical Center in Westchester have yet to come across any evidence of candy tampering. This Halloween passed without the discovery of a single razor blade, sharp object or metal item in examined bags of candy.

Centinela, like many hospitals nationwide, offers the free X-raying as a preventive measure for parents who want to be sure the candy is safe to eat. Hospital officials said they have never come across the ill-fated razor blade, safety pin or other unsafe items that many parents worry will make their way into the bag of candy their child brings home.

For the most part, said the people who do the screenings, worries about tampering are hype.

“We offer the service to the community so that they have another safety precaution available,” said Tara Igoe, public relations manager for Centinela Hospital and a network of nine clinics in the South Bay. “But we’ve never seen any problems.”

In fact, only a few worried trick-or-treaters turn up each year. Igoe said about five families showed up Halloween night and about the same number came to the hospital Wednesday.

At Gardena Memorial Hospital where Winston Karmody has headed the program for 12 years, never has he seen a foreign object among the treats. Over the last few years, the number of people who bring in their candy has dwindled to only a handful.

“The scare has gone away over the last few years,” Karmody said. “But there’s always the potential for problems.”

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Local airports also joined in the candy checking by inviting trick-or-treaters to have their bags screened by security X-ray machines. At Burbank-Glendale-Pasadena Airport, terminals A and B were designated goody-bag checkpoints, but only six children, all from the same car, showed up. According to airport spokeswoman Angela Cranon, the number is a sharp decline from last year, when 50 trick-or-treaters screened their candy.

“There are a lot of safe options for trick-or-treating these days,” Cranon said. “Malls offer programs and lots of people only get candy from people that they know. Maybe that’s why the numbers are so low; people are using different options.”

So are the evil objects showing up in the goody bags of the less zealous? Not according to law enforcement officials, who could not recall a substantiated case of ghoulish tampering, though they were well aware of the stories. Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputy Jim Hellmold said there were no reports of tainted candy this week and added that there was no problem last year either. In fact, he knows of no such cases in the Los Angeles area, ever.

“It’s always beneficial to be cautious, but parents don’t need to overburden themselves with worry about finding sharp objects in candy,” Hellmold said. “It rarely happens.”

To be sure that candy tampering is monitored, the National Confectioners Assn., a trade group based in Virginia, set up a hot line to which law enforcement officials could report cases. But according to spokeswoman Sheila Heath, there have been no reported problems in recent history, and she could not recall when the last case was.

In attempting to explain where the tales originated, Heath said, “People remember that Tylenol thing from years ago and that fear has persisted,” she said, referring to the 1982 case in which seven people were killed by cyanide that had been planted in Tylenol capsules. “Problems with tampering have been blown out of proportion.”

Still, many officials believe it cannot hurt to be too careful. In Lt. Bob Hudson’s 27 years with the Sheriff’s Department, he has never seen a candy problem, but he advocates the X-ray program as a worthwhile endeavor.

“Lots of people will say, ‘Nothing happened this year so we don’t need to worry,’ ” Hudson said, “but that’s when people start to play the part of the fool, by acting complacent.”