Halloween Myths

During the 1980s and 90s, America saw a wave of moral panic as Halloween was wrongly branded “Satan’s birthday” by evangelical (a more extreme branch of Protestant Christianity that focuses on the Bible as totally true and on telling others about Jesus) figures who were convinced Satan was using daycares, role-playing games, popular music, video games, and television to foster moral degeneracy.

It didn’t seem completely unbelievable (implausible means unlikely or hysterical) because the 1970s were such a dramatic and confusing time, filled with:

• Major social change after the Civil Rights Era led to mass cultural insecurity.   The Civil Rights movement led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (say it: martin LOO-ther king) and Malcolm X began changing American social order. This gave rise to other movements like the American Indian Movement, César Chávez’s Migrant Farm Workers Movement (say it: CHAH-vez), the Women’s Liberation Movement, and the LGBTQ Rights Movement.  Increasingly after the Stonewall uprising, Wounded Knee standoff with AIM, race riots after King and X were assassinated, rise in divorce and single parenthood—a social science crisis called ‘unwed mothers' became bourgeois talk of the day, and hippie ‘tune in, turn on, and drop out' counterculture, many Americans yearned for a simpler time without so much conflict and turned to evangelical Christianity for refuge (especially in the extreme fundamentalist sects).  

• A sexual revolution was underway.  Raunch culture was pushed by figures like Hugh Hefner (say it: HEFF-ner) of Playboy magazine and Larry Flynt (say it: FLINT) of Hustler magazine, who promoted a lifestyle of sexual freedom and nudity in popular culture, along with artists like Madonna who used sexuality to sell music and push the envelope of social acceptance. Earlier, Dr. Alfred Kinsey’s sex studies (say it: KIN-zee) in the 1940s and ’50s had already shocked the public by openly discussing human sexuality in scientific reports. The rise of easier access to contraceptives (like birth control pills and condoms — also called prophylactics, or ways to prevent pregnancy) helped make casual sex and promiscuity (sleeping with many partners without long-term commitment) more common and visible, especially among the younger generation. Many Americans, especially conservative Christians, saw this as a clear sign of society's decline. The hippie movement’s “Make Love, Not War” slogan — combined with widespread drug use and abuse in the 1960s — made it seem to them like the country was turning away from morality and order and increasingly degenerate.

• The rise of New Age and Neo-Pagan Beliefs and Alternate Spirituality. People started rejecting traditional religion and turned to things like astrology (horoscopes and star signs), occult or magical practices (sometimes spelled “magick” to sound more mystical), and Eastern spiritual paths like Hinduism and Buddhism. Many talked about “the Dawning of the Age of Aquarius” — a phrase linked to the idea of a coming age of enlightenment, peace, and personal awakening.  And it did not involve the Judeo-Christian / Abrahamic God of the familiar Holy Bible, but a return to sinister pagan beliefs they associated with devil worship. Church attendance began to plummet and has continued to ever since with irreligion (atheism, agnosticism, antireligion) growing fastest and Wicca/Neo-Pagan nature religion/spirituality growing second fastest.  

• Rebellion against mainstream society through the anti-war hippie movement. People rejected traditional culture, religion, and government, choosing instead to live in communes (shared communities focused on peace and love)

• A sudden spread (proliferation) of cults and alternative belief systems. These ranged from the violent like Charles Manson and his followers, and Jim Jones and his People’s Temple (which ended in the Jonestown mass suicide), to the strange and spiritual, like Osho and his Rajneesh movement (also called Sannyasin), or L. Ron Hubbard’s Scientology, and Claude Vorilhon’s Raëlism (say it: RAY-lee-izm), a UFO-based religion. Many of these groups had spin-offs or inspired new groups in the 1980s and 1990s, such as NXIVM (say it: NEX-ee-um) and Erhard Seminars Training (called EST). These movements showed how many Americans were turning away from traditional religion altogether.

• News stories linking cults to serial killers increased.  The Process Church of the Final Judgment and “The Children” cult were tied (sometimes wrongly) to famous murderers like David Berkowitz — the “Son of Sam” in New York — and Richard Ramirez, the “Night Stalker” in Los Angeles. These stories often involved mentions of Satanic rituals, which added to public fear.

• Anton LaVey (say it: lah-VAY) founded the Church of Satan.   Its founding in 1966 and published the Satanic Bible in 1969. While his teachings were different from Aleister Crowley’s Thelema (say it: thuh-LEE-muh), outsiders often saw them both as encouraging hedonism (chasing pleasure at all costs) and immorality (breaking moral rules).

• Hollywood films popularize the idea of Satanic cults. Horror films like Rosemary's Baby and The Exorcist popularized the ideas of Satanic cults and demon possession as well as led to popular identification of standard Christian symbols from the medieval period with black masses to Satan. 

• Rock bands and Pop Stars embraced Satanic symbolism, lyrics, and imagery.  Bands like Coven, Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, KISS, Mötley Crüe, Twisted Sister, Judas Priest, Pantera, Megadeth, and Slayer used Satanic symbols and lyrics in their music and album art. To many people, especially worried parents and pastors, this made Satanism seem very real and present in youth culture — and helped make it all seem much more believable.

It’s understandable how, in a society where social ties were breaking down, traditional gender roles were shifting, and where many people believed moral decay (loss of values) was getting worse, that some deeply religious Americans began to feel alarmed. And when their fears were whipped into fervor to sell advertising in the pages of newspaper or ad time on the then-new twenty-four hour TV news cycle made possible through cable television (replacing broadcast TV in the 1980s), an unprecedented number of lives would be ruined by mass hysteria imposed and enflamed by irresponsible mass media and sensational reporting never checked out to increase ad revenues.   

More people than ever were either walking away from religion, becoming openly hostile toward it, or adopting alternative spiritual paths — from New Age beliefs to Eastern religions. In that kind of world, many devout (deeply religious) believers and their families began to believe they were witnessing a spiritual battle — one they were losing. And they believed Satan himself was behind it all. 

And so a cottage industry sprung up around demonizing Halloween rooted in evangelical Christianity spurring moral panic over trick-or-treating, tabletop games, video games, and popular music, complete with evangelical cartoon propaganda like Jack Chick's Halloween and Boo! comic (it's completely untrue that Druids went door to door demanding virgins to sacrifice and left Jack-o-Lanterns in exchange; see Halloween History for the truth) religious tracts tying all aspects of Halloween to Satanism as the devil's holiday, recycling medieval smears toward pagan folk religion.  But demonizing Halloween or the Irish Celts was nothing new it turns out (after reading about The Satanic Panic, be sure to read about Rewriting the Roots: Christianization then Demonization👈 under Halloween Myths and Trick-or-Treating👈 and Halloween Parties👈 under Halloween History).   

The 1970s set the stage for what came next: a decade where mass media helped trigger a kind of mass panic or mass delusion — a shared belief that something evil lurked everywhere. This moral hysteria (extreme fear and overreaction) ruined lives and caused serious damage, on a scale similar to the first and second Red Scares (times when thousands of  Americans lives were ruined because America became  terrified of communists as their fears were preyed upon by immoral powerful puppet masters), or even the Salem Witch Trials (where innocent people were accused and punished based on fear and false beliefs). 

New York Times reporter Judy Klemesrud's published a fear-mongering op-ed (or opinion editorial, not news, but opinion) sharing her opinion without respect to any evidence or established facts titled Those Treats May Be Tricks in the New York Times on October 28, 1970👈— widely shared and recirculated across America —  got all the homemakers and housewives gossiping about the new threat to their children.  

Tongues were set wagging across America by her op-ed, and innocent trick-or-treating became falsely associated with Satanic cults trying to poison or harm children on Halloween. 

In it, she quoted Dr. Hollis S. Ingraham, New York State Health Commissioner's annual report repeating his unconfirmed reports that:

“Children should not eat any of their collected goodies until they have been care fully examined by an adult. In recent years, pins, razor blades, slivers of glass and poison have appeared in the treats gathered by Children across New York State.”

and she repeated his claims about two unconfirmed incidents (meaning no reporter had checked them out to ensure the facts checked out) in upstate New York:

“Last year in Oneida, N. Y., someone gave three children trick‐or‐treat apples with sewing needles in them. And in nearby Ilion, the father of a 5‐year‐old boy found a razor blade in an apple when he peeled it for the child."

Two days later, early media coverage of a five year old's death in Detroit on Halloween implicated heroin-tainted candy. But by mid-November that same year (1970), newspapers reported the child in Detroit had died from finding his uncle's heroin stash, yet newspapers and television news outlets that spread the hysteria did not publish or print or televise corrections or retractions until the 1990s.  

On October 31, 1974, another child did die from eating poisoned candy, but there again early media reports linked it to trick-or-treating.  Similarly, news media did not correct stories when it was learned his father had murdered his own son by placing cyanide in a pixie stick.   

After Klemesrud got America talking to prime the hysteria, these two early false mass media reports of child deaths linked to tainted Halloween candy left tongues wagging and it sparked a national sensational news media feeding frenzy.  Reporters, editors, and publishers wouldn't lift a finger to fact check any of the claims and spread the idea that Satanists all over America were using Halloween to poison or harm children.  And it's because it sold advertising and more copies and got more viewers or listeners.   Truth, once again, was a victim to profit motive.   

And to get in on the show, parents and kids all over America made more false reports, as if they were yearning for their “15 minutes of fame," as Andy Worhol put it, or were telling every news outlet who'd listen, “All right, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up," as Norma Desmond says to director Cecille DeMille in Sunset Boulevard.  Copycat lies were now a thing. 

And national news outlets didn't help the matter, clamoring to add to the hysteria.  On November 3, 1975, Newsweek Magazine's William O. O'Neil declared (falsely): 

“over the past several years, several children have died and hundreds have narrowly escaped injury from razor blades, sewing needles and shards of glass put into their goodies by adults."

According to Professor Joe Best of the around eighty cases he investigated since 1959, the vast majority of them turned out to be hoaxes committed by the reporting parent or child, and only a handful checked out of Halloween candy malice with ten cases resulting in minor injuries, concluding: 

“more than 75 percent of reported cases involved no injury, and detailed followups in 1972 and 1982 concluded that virtually all the reports were hoaxes concocted by the children or parents."

But news media through sensational coverage had enflamed and stoked the flames of the Satanic Panic of the 1980s and 1990s, making it appear to be completely real.    

State legislatures across America passed legislation with stiff penalties for tampering with Halloween candy, and hospitals and police departments and public relations campaigns across America focused upon kids having their candy x-rayed before eating it, as many Generation Xers, Xennials, and Millenials remember.   

These claims were repeated uncritically without ever being checked out, and the rest, as they say, is history.  

It turns out that when there were detailed follows up on every case in 1972 and 1982 by Professors Best and Horiuchi, virtually all of them were hoaxes by children or parents.   

If journalists had done their jobs, and verified stories before reporting, the Satanic Panic probably wouldn't have even happened, and no lives would have been ruined.

But because mass media news outlets, editors, and publishers didn't, countless lives were ruined. People all over were convicted by juries of their peers swept up in the hysteria on false accusations and false charges and were sent to prison all over England, the United States, and Canada.  This panic was not at all unlike the Salem witch trials or McCarthyism, but this time the flames of fear were fanned by mass media unlike ever before.   

Sources:  

• Snopes: Pins and Needles in Halloween Candy Fact Check

• Best, Joel, and Gerald T. Horiuchi. “The Razor Blade in the Apple: The Social Construction of Urban Legends.” Social Problems 32, no. 5 (1985): 488–99. https://doi.org/10.2307/800777.

• Pool, W. Scott.  “A brief history of poisoned Halloween candy panic."  CNN. October 30, 2019. https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/30/health/halloween-candy-panic-conversation-wellness. Accessed 12 July 2025.

The McMartin Preschool Case did more to popularize and spread the mass media induced hysteria that became the Satanic Panic of the 1980s and 1990s.  Watch the New York Times Retro Report on the McMartin Preschool Case. 

This Satanic Panic coincided with fear-mongering propaganda like the film Hell’s Bells that said rock music was a tool of the devil and was further inflamed by urban legends about razor blades in candy and poisoned treats. 

Law enforcement departments across America held seminars on Satanic Ritual Abuse for teachers, churches, and concerned families to educate them about the threat of Satanic cults.   Families all over America insisted Dungeons & Dragons lead to devil worship.  Little did we know we'd lived through our own version of the Salem witch trials but this time by mass media, and just like the Salem Witch Trials, lives were completely ruined by it.  The current moral hysteria over transgender people using restrooms is a similar tempest in a teapot, or false QAnon claim that Democrats were sex trafficking children out of a D.C. Pizzaria known as “Pizzagate," is nothing new, really.   

Despite widespread belief, there is no statistical evidence supporting these fears.  While there may be cases of Satanic ritual abuse, nearly all of them claimed later appeared on further scrutiny to be hysteria, false memory, and popular panic.  

The myth of Halloween as a night of ritual evil was born from projection, Mischief Night and Devil's Night (see Halloween Parties for further explanation), not actual history or truth.  And that myth was greatly enhanced by the Hollywood blockbuster pseudo (false) folk horror films Rosemary's Baby and the Exorcist.  Together, they vastly contributed to the plausibility (it seeming to be true or likely) that there were active Satanic cults in every community involved in child sacrifice in Satanic rites for immortality.

Except there is no actual evidence to that end.  Lives were literally ruined in the 1980s and 1990s due to this hysteria, just like McCarthyism and the first red scare in the Palmer Raids.   

The FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit's Review of Satanic Ritual Abuse was parallele with two different British investigations and one Canadian one, and all of those investigations had the same conclusion:  this was moral panic and hysteria, not unlike the Salem with trials. 

✅ According to Kenneth V. Lanning, a Supervisory Special Agent in the FBI’s (Federal Bureau of Investigation, national law enforcement tasked with interstate crimes and national level crimes) Behavioral Science Unit who specialized in crimes against children, including sexual exploitation and child abduction, who in 1992 wrote the FBI’s Investigator’s Guide to Allegations of "Ritual" Child Abuse:

• He looked at hundreds of cases across the United States over many years.

• ❌ He found no proof of big, organized Satanic groups hurting kids in secret rituals.

• 🔎 In all the cases he studied deeply, there was no physical evidence of ritual killings or cult activity.

• 🗣️ Many stories came from bad or leading interviews, where people accidentally created false memories.

• ⚖️ Some real Satanic ritual abuse did happen, but it was very rare, isolated, and perpetrated by individuals, not part of an organized Satanic plan, and there was no evidence of Satanic cults engaged in child sex trafficking in every community.

  1. • When ritual elements were present, they were usually idiosyncratic — devised by individual perpetrators rather than part of an organized Satanic theology or nationwide cult.

     • These individual acts should not be taken as evidence of a grand conspiracy or a systematic plan to infiltrate communities.

     • He strongly advised law enforcement not to assume that every case involving ritualistic elements was connected or indicative of a Satanic plot.

📄 Source:
Kenneth V. Lanning, Investigator’s Guide to Allegations of "Ritual" Child Abuse, FBI Behavioral Science Unit, 1992.
👉 Link to full report (PDF):  The 1992 FBI Investigator's Guide to Allegations of  “Ritual Child Abuse" 👈

Elizabeth Loftus's TED Talk, the Fiction of Memory: How Reliable is your Memory👈, discusses some of these false memory accusations and what her research revealed about false memory from leading questions asked by investigators, social workers, and therapists that implanted false memories.