On this season we'll be exploring the moral panics, urban legends, and conspiracy theories

that shape our psychology and culture and why we end up believing them.

I'm your host, Chalsey Weber-Smith, and this is American hysteria.

Well, Wayne is supposed to be fun, but trick or treat her into a real-life nightmare.

They claim a nail was stuffed inside one of their child's sweets and they believed someone put it there intentionally.

When I saw it, I just was ready to throw all her candy away and never take her trick or treat me again.

You never want to think that it's going to happen in your neighborhood or anywhere, but I guess that's why you should always check.

Chik-Tiki!

Every Halloween is a window of time where kids get to do the opposite of what they're told day after day.

They get to walk around in the growing dark, literally, taking candy from strangers.

And the stories play on the local news each year without fail.

There may be a sadistic, anonymous neighbor trying to hurt or kill trick or treaters through tampering with the candy they're passing out.

Razor blades and candy apples, needles and chocolate bars, harmful drugs injected into homemade sweets.

These stories of death and serious harm by strangers are all unconfirmed or have been debunked entirely, identified as hoaxes in urban legends.

But nonetheless, the fear persists year after year, and so do the news stories, police warnings, and super safe alternatives to neighborhood trick or treating.

The legends of the Halloween poison are maybe almost entirely false, but the idea that something evil lurks at the center of the sweet things we love to eat dates back to the 1800s,

when industrialization took the creation of food out of our homes and close communities and into faraway factories.

Like the candy tampering stranger, we were suspicious of megacorporations that pumped out processed sweets.

Foods that didn't quite resemble anything we'd eaten before, with their bright colors, strange textures and intense flavors, foods that were specifically designed to fill us with want.

On this episode, I'll explore our bizarre history with sweets, both the desire and the panic.

The story starts with the influential beliefs of one John Harvey Kellogg, who believed the path to God could be found in what we ate, and that what we ate could also lead us to unforgivable sin.

We'll explore how our fanatical, guilt-ridden and suspicious relationship to junk food has led to some wild urban legends beyond just the Halloween poisoner, like spider eggs and bubble yum and death by pop rocks.

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