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, Chelsea Weber-Smith, and this is American Hysteria.

Halloween is supposed to be fun, but trick-or-treat turned into a real, like, nightmare.

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

intentionally. When I saw it, I just was ready to throw all her candy away

and never take her trick-and-treating 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, always check.

Che-C-C-C-C-E! 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 to the news stories police warnings and super safe

alternatives to neighborhood trick-or-treating the legends of the Halloween poisoner may be 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,

...