Just when you thought it was safe to trick or treat.  

The Detroit Free Press has reported a terrifying event that is almost anyone's fear. A child in in Blackman Township area went trick or treating and when the family came home to check out the candy they found it tainted. The child found a thumbtack stuck into a Tootsie Roll. The family connected the Department of Public Safety and they department posted this statement on Facebook...

*Warning*

 

We are currently taking a report of a thumb-tack found in a Tootsie Roll. The child did their Trick or Treating in the Birdland Subdivision off of Lansing Avenue in Blackman Township. We recommend discarding your child's candy, if you received candy in this neighborhood. We will update you with further information as it is known.

The good news that the child is unharmed and now other parents know to double their kids candy.

This got me thinking to how often kids candy is poisoned or tampered with each year at Halloween and this is what I found.

According to the Good News Network, Joel Best, a professor of Sociology and Criminal Justice at the University of Delaware who’s been studying the urban legends of candy laced with poisons, drugs, or sharp objects since 1985 stated that he

has never found a single case where a stranger handed out candy that had been tampered with.

Another news source, Fact Checker claims that...

Nearly all such cases turn out to be nothing: they’re pranks played by children on their parents, siblings, or friends; they’re false reports generated by attention-seeking children and adults; they involve material that accidentally, rather than deliberately, ends up in children’s goodie bags; or they’re examples of coincidence mistaken for causation (e.g., a person eats a piece of candy and shortly afterwards feels ill, then erroneously attributes the illness to tainted Halloween candy). But often no follow-ups are done on such news stories after the initial, unconfirmed reports, leaving the public with the impression that all of them involved genuine cases of tainted candy being distributed to trick-or-treaters.

That is positive news, but what I find interesting, is that when I did google search for tainted Halloween candy, check out a few of the other articles I found besides of Michigan case...

CBS news reported...Police in the Massachusetts town of Marshfield are advising local residents to throw Twizzlers away after two packages were found to contain sewing needles. 

KIRO 7 reported...Police in Omark, Washington are investigating two separate reports of straight pins found in boxes of Nerds Candy. The pins tips were the same color as the candy.

FOX 40 NEWS reported that...Police say one family in the Burchell Hill neighborhood of Oakdale (CA) found metal objects inside of five pieces of their kid's trick-or-treating candy. Police have ruled out a manufacturing error, saying they are confident someone must have put the metal objects inside the candy on purpose.

That is 4 cases this Halloween...we may never know why someone would do that or if it just an urban myth moving forward. In any case, I would check the candy twice.

Old Tootsie Roll Commercial

 

More From WKFR