New Halloween urban legends for today’s paranoid parents

When I was a kid my parents, like everyone else’s parents, diligently spent hours going over my Halloween candy with a magnifying glass to make sure no one had stuck a needle through my Mars bars. Every parent knew they had to do this because it was an accepted fact that hundreds of kids died this way every year—technically from a Mars bar needle inserted by a madman who waited patiently until Halloween to kill the neighborhood children, but really from neglectful parenting.

Thanks to the internet, today’s parents know that exactly zero children have ever died this way. So I thought I’d whip up some new labor-intensive apocryphal Halloween dangers for parents to worry about. Pass ‘em on!

- I got an email forward that said that store-bought costumes contain a flame-retardant chemical that will give your kids mad cow disease. If you were a good mother you’d take the afternoon off work to sew your kid’s costume from scratch.

- The PTA sent home a note warning that the latest trend among teenagers is called “fwooshing,” which refers to getting drunk off shoplifted cough syrup and then chasing trick-or-treaters with flame-throwers. If you were a good mother you’d pony up the cash for a store-bought, flame-retardant costume.

- Go over your child’s bucket of candy carefully. The local news says some criminals drop small spy cameras disguised as Sour Punch Straws in trick-or-treaters’ buckets. The cameras transmit images of your home and belongings to the criminals so that after you’ve gone to sleep they can sneak into your home and do parkour on your furniture.

- Children dressed as one of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles will be snatched by white slavers while trick-or-treating and replaced with a different child dressed as the same Ninja Turtle. If this happens to you your only hope is to raise the stranger child as your own until the next Halloween, when you must dress him as a Ninja Turtle again and allow the white slavers to replace him in turn with yet another child dressed as a Ninja Turtle. Repeat every Halloween until you have your own child back. I know it’s true because my sister’s husband heard it from his cousin’s friend whose roommate is a white slaver.

- Candy Corn turns boys gay.