Welcome back to another edition of Trick or Treat, our way of helping you really lean into the spooky Halloween season.

Every Friday in October, you'll find another of these bonus episodes waiting

for you packed full of short stories built around a theme. Today, we're exploring a difficult

topic, child and infant mortality. If that's a tough subject for you to learn about or hear

about, feel free to take a pass on this one. That said, it is one of the most common elements

found in the legends

and folk tales that litter the pages of history. Life was very hard for a very long time,

and many stories reflect that. Pain and loss, as we have learned on this show over the years,

can often become the seeds of something darker. And these four tales will serve as powerful examples of

that truth. So grab a cup of tea, turn on a light, and settle in for another edition of

trick or treat. I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is Lore. lore.

Sometimes just leaving home can be treacherous.

There are a lot of perfectly innocent things out there that can kill you. You can die in your garden from a bee sting.

You can choke to death on a chicken bone in your favorite restaurant.

Even getting into your car to go to work is a dangerous thing.

You never know which commute could be your last.

But part of being human is accepting that. To live our lives to the fullest, we have

had to calculate the risk versus reward. And usually the reward wins out. The fresh flowers are

worth the sting. The fried chicken is worth the hazard. And the ability to travel anywhere we want

is worth the chance that we could collide with another driver.

Even so, sometimes, against all odds, these small moments become deadly,

sometimes the innocent die, and it's just the luck of the draw.

...