Of all today’s holidays, Halloween seems like the most primeval. Its bats, witches, spooks, skeletons and monsters surely indicate roots reaching back before the dawn of science and Christianity; the whiff of prehistoric campfires clings to its sable robes. Well, guess again.
Halloween has been creeping up on Christmas to become the second biggest annual bonanza for U.S. retailers, a Grim Reaper that harvests $6.8 billion per year in exchange for candy, costumes, cards and party supplies. That success sets it up for the kind of debunking that Christmas has endured recently, as historians have shown that what we think of as time-honored Yuletide traditions are actually only about 100 years old. Likewise, as two new books document, the seemingly ancient customs of Halloween turn out to be recent embellishments to a holiday that used to be a pretty low-key affair. And forget those Transylvanian villagers and superstitious medieval peasants — Halloween is as American as the Fourth of July.
The basic elements of an American Halloween — pranks, treat-begging, masquerade and scary images — aren’t new, of course, but gathering them together and using them to celebrate a holiday at the transition from October to November (from late summer to early winter) is. As both Nicholas Rogers’ “Halloween” and David J. Skal’s “Death Makes a Holiday” point out, those customs can be found scattered here and there among various other holidays throughout history, yet pinpointing the moment when they all came together to define Halloween as we know it is a tricky matter indeed.
It’s often said that Halloween originates with the Celtic festival of Samhain (show off your pagan cred by correctly pronouncing it as “sow-an”), but it’s hard to recognize the modern world’s gleefully ghoulish festivities in what one scholar called “an old pastoral and agricultural festival” that marked the beginning of winter. Rogers, whose book is at its best when digging up the anthropological forerunners of the holiday, says that “there is no hard evidence that Samhain was specifically devoted to the dead or to ancestor worship,” although in Ireland it was thought to be a time when mischievous spirits were particularly frisky. (The ancient Celts are rumored to have engaged in human sacrifice in some of their rites — not Samhain specifically — but those reports came from the conquering Romans and may have been propaganda.) Samhain was a time of reckoning when livestock were slaughtered for the winter stores and the days became short, cold and gloomy.
Despite the fact that conservative Christians in America have protested the “pagan” revelry of Halloween, the holiday owes its name and many of its trappings to Christianity. “Halloween” derives from All Hallows Even, the night before All Saints’ Day (Nov. 1), which is in turn followed by All Souls’ Day (Nov. 2), an occasion for praying for and visiting with the dead. In Mexico, the celebration of Los Dias de Los Muertos, or the Days of the Dead, closely resembles the old All Souls rites of the Middle Ages. The most extravagantly Catholic places had the grisliest practices: “In Naples,” writes Rogers, “the charnel houses containing the bones of the dead were opened on All Souls’ Day and decorated with flowers. Crowds thronged through them to visit the bodies of their friends and relatives. Sometimes the cadavers were dressed in robes and placed in niches along the walls.” Leaving food out for the spirits was a fairly common ritual, as it still is in Mexico today.
In the British Isles, where bloody conflicts between Protestants and Catholics disrupted the handing down of All Souls’ traditions (less so in Ireland than in Scotland), the Hallowtide holiday became more secular in the 16th century. In some places it was entirely replaced by the anti-Catholic bonfire celebration of Guy Fawkes Day on Nov. 5. (Rogers observes that Hallowtide was always the most persistent in the areas where underground Catholic sentiments lingered.)
One of the reasons Halloween, the American holiday, seems so un-Christian is that it appears to have been primarily brought over by Protestant Scots who had abandoned the religious element of the day while hanging on to its assorted folk traditions. Skal, in his cultural history, writes that when the fledgling greeting card industry of the 19th century first started churning out Halloween cards, they featured such Scottish motifs as “tartan plaid borders, thistles and heather, messages like ‘Auld Lang Syne,’ and the like.” (The Scottish connection was cemented by the fact that one of the richest surviving sources of 18th-century Halloween lore is Robert Burns’ long poem “Halloween.”)
According to Skal, the “genteel” Victorian Halloween couldn’t be more different from today’s rowdy incarnation. The main tradition the Scots associated with the holiday was fortunetelling, used for the most part to predict who the participants were going to marry. In some ways, the Victorian Halloween resembled Valentine’s Day. People stayed home and played divinatory games to glean information about future spouses. Putting two nuts in a fire to see if they jumped apart when they popped (signifying an impending break-up) was a practice Burns wrote about. Others involved a blindfolded person dipping his or her hand into one of three bowls of water, apple bobbing or a young woman peeling an apple in front of a mirror in order to glimpse the image of her future husband in the reflection. (Maybe that’s the origin of the scary “Bloody Mary” game American children play by reciting the ghoulish Mary’s name nine times in front of a mirror in a dark room, daring her to come and get them.)
The jack-o’-lantern, now an indispensable Halloween motif, didn’t emerge until the first decade of the 20th century, although the Scots had a folk tradition of carving lanterns out of turnips — a much harder job with a much smaller vegetable. Those lanterns were linked to a legendary figure named Jack who was so incorrigible that neither Heaven nor Hell would have him, and so he was condemned to walk the earth until Judgment Day, toting his turnip lamp. Like the Will-o-the-Wisp (aka marsh gas) he liked to use his lantern to lure passersby to their doom in swamps and bogs. He wasn’t particularly linked to Halloween until the dawn of the 20th century, and no one seems to know how pumpkins came to replace turnips.
Hallowtide was occasionally associated with prankish antics on the part of young boys and men, but the custom of demanding food or money, what Rogers refers to as “enforced charity,” was more common at Christmas. Recent histories of Christmas have detailed how many of the homebodyish Yuletide traditions we now embrace were cooked up by wealthy and middle-class citizens who were sick of being shaken down by the rowdy poor during the month of December. New York had an early 20th century street festival in which “ragamuffin” children dressed up in costumes and performed antics for shopkeepers and other affluent adults in exchange for money, but it was Thanksgiving, not Halloween. The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, launched in 1924, spelled the end of the ragamuffin racket, but in their heyday the revelers filled Times Square.
As Christmas and Thanksgiving became cozy domestic holidays, it seems, all the mischief and misrule gravitated to the formerly homely Halloween. Both Rogers and Skal quote a late 19th century historian who lamented “the spirit of rowdyism” that “has in a measure superseded the kindly old customs” and the vandalism and racket generated by “gangs of hoodlums” in the streets. While many European cultures had a traditional “season of misrule” — a festival in which the ordinary rules of decorum were overturned and figures of authority were mocked — it usually happened in November or December as a prelude to the Christmas observances. Those rites sometimes involved costumes and processions (Rogers quotes a contemporary description of a troupe parading through the churchyards with “their Hobby horses and other monsters shirmishyng amongst the throng … with such a confused noise that no man can heare his own voice”). By the 1920s, Halloween had become an occasion for adults to attend stylish (but still not macabre) masquerade parties and for children to wreak mischief.
Eventually Halloween pranks got so rambunctious that householders concocted the idea of bribing the miscreants to leave their property alone. A woman named Doris Hudson wrote an article for American Home magazine in 1939 that, according to Skal, is “the first time the expression ‘trick or treat’ is used in a mass-circulation periodical in the United States.” (Cooper, who began hosting her Halloween open house in the midst of the Depression, said some of the “tiny lads” devoured their treats “with too much relish and nearly broke my heart.” By all accounts, Depression-era pranking often took on the aspect of class war.)
The 1950s and early ’60s were the Golden Age of trick or treating, but no sooner had the new tradition taken hold than commentators were bemoaning the loss of inventive tricking and condemning the soliciting of candy as “a rehearsal for consumership without a rationale,” to quote one sociologist. Still, Halloween pranks never entirely vanished and that’s not necessarily a good thing. Rogers, one of those academics who is always hoping to find something “transgressive” or “subversive” to laud, describes seasons of misrule as a time when “flagrant violations of community norms might be addressed” and “rough justice” meted out. A friend of mine who grew up in a racially mixed urban neighborhood in the 1970s testifies that his Halloween often involved a lot of roughness and precious little justice. Asked what he associates with the holiday — which he hates — he says, “Eggs. Eggs and fear.”
It was really only in the 1960s and ’70s that macabre stories and films became firmly attached to Halloween. Until then, for example, movie studios didn’t make a point of releasing their horror or monster films around Oct. 31. Skal, whose book excels at outlining the popular blossoming of Halloween over the past 60 years, observes that “Frankenstein” premiered on Thanksgiving in 1931. By the early 1960s, Universal had learned the advantage of tying in their franchised characters — Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, the Mummy and the Wolf Man — to Halloween, but the holiday itself didn’t appear very often in films until John Carpenter’s groundbreaking “Halloween” initiated the slasher film genre.
In the 1970s, the scary side of Halloween also reemerged with reports of candy tampering and widespread, media-fueled paranoia about razors in apples and other sadistic “tricks.” These turned out to be urban legends. The sole documented fatality from candy-poisoning was an 8-year-old killed by his own father, who was trying to collect on a life insurance policy. Likewise, the rise of Halloween celebrations in America’s gay districts, with their fantabulous costumes and sybaritic processions, were soon troubled by visits from belligerent gay bashers looking for their own sinister notion of a good time.
Both Rogers and Skal decry the recent taming of Halloween by such domestic mavens as Martha Stewart, whose television program and magazine each October are packed with recipes for spider-shaped cupcakes, instructions for crafting ghostly party decorations and tips on elaborately rigging out your ordinarily impeccable house as an equally impressive haunted mansion. Skal rails against Halloween Martha-style as a holiday “Perfectly Under Control,” her monogrammed jack-o’-lantern an example of “boomerish narcissism” and “a pure embodiment of self-celebration with no connection whatsoever to any known form of communal holiday observance.” The modern history of Halloween seems to swing back and forth this way, from charming fun to violent chaos. It’s the most bipolar of all holidays.
The most original parts of Skal’s book concern the history of haunted houses — not the literally haunted kind, but the ones concocted to amuse one’s friends and neighbors. Using an Angeleno horror movie buff named Bob Burns as an example, Skal traces the evolution of “yard haunters,” the Halloween equivalent of those people who erect elaborate Christmas light displays. One Rochelle Santopaulo, who founded the Halloween Global Alliance and edits its magazine, Happy Halloween, says yard haunters are a cross-country folk-art phenomenon, but most of them had no idea that other Americans shared their peculiar passion until Santopaulo informed them they were part of a nationwide “movement.”
Another sort of haunted house, the kind that invites paying customers to walk through a maze of spooky and grisly scenes, began in the 1970s as fund-raising devices for charities like the Jaycees and quickly spawned a profession. Who knew there was an entire trade magazine, Haunted Attraction, devoted to this subject? According to Skal, it’s “a glossy quarterly magazine” with articles explaining how to convincingly simulate severed heads and ads offering “full haunted-house environments for resale,” complete with such interior props as “Fireplace, Piano, Living Wall, Dancing Ghost, Canopy Bed with Body, Storm Window, Kitchen Cabinet, Stove, Refrigerator, Meat Locker, Dining Table with Chairs, Metal Cage, Boiler and Pipes, Lab Tables and Bodies, 8-foot Mechanical Spider, Sacrifice Table with Body, Volcano and Pneumatic Devil.”
There’s something about this practical list of bogus nightmares (I’d like to get a look at that “Living Wall”) that strikes me as quintessentially Halloween. Armed with this kit, anyone can take an ordinary, new house and convert it into a scary, fake “old” house — just as the sequels to the slasher film “Halloween” cobbled together a bunch of ersatz legends about Samhain to explain the murderous rampaging of its masked villain — or, for that matter, as we disguise our suburban homes as “Tudor” cottages and decorate them with new furniture that’s been “distressed” to make it look old, or buy new jeans deftly faded to make them look worn. Halloween looks ancient, primal even, despite its relative youth. And that may be the most American thing about it of all.
As costumed kiddies take to the streets tonight, thousands of sex offenders across the country will be forced to turn off their lights and refuse to answer the door. Some will be required to also post “no candy” signs and refrain from decorating their yards. Some counties round them up for a mandatory movie night or an evening in jail. In some areas with prohibitively strict residency requirements, police will be rounding up several hundred transient sex offenders.
Year after year, new measures are introduced to keep registered sex offenders of all stripes from coming into contact with trick-or-treaters — and yet there is zero evidence to support the legislative trend. In fact, the available data suggest it’s a useless diversion of resources that creates a false sense of security. Just take a look at this absurdly misleading headline from a Fox News affiliate: “Police Work to Keep Halloween Free From Sexual Predators.” (Because all sex offenders faithfully register and offenses are only committed by those with previous records?) Meanwhile, other outlets are playing up the danger: Albuquerque’s KRQE advises readers to “beware of real monsters on Halloween,” and talks to a 12-year-old girl who is “excited to go Trick-or-Treating” — but only because her family has no idea that they live “in a neighborhood full of secrets.” Dun-dun-dun.
It isn’t just law enforcement that is joining in the Halloween paranoia: Tech entrepreneurs are hyping new smartphone apps — including a brand-new one for Facebook — as tools to steer kids clear of sex offenders’ homes and even allow parents to track their kids by GPS, instead of actually accompanying them in person. (Why parent in person when you can do so virtually!)
Here’s the truth: There are no documented cases where a registered sex offender abused a trick-or-treater on Halloween. The truth is that kids are most likely to be abused at home and by adults they know, not strangers — and even less so by strangers handing out mini-Milky Ways. A whopping 90 percent of child victims of sexual abuse are targeted by someone they know; nearly half of those cases involve a relative. It’s also the case that the recidivism rate among sex offenders is roughly 9 percent, according to the Department of Justice.
The urban legend of poisoned candy perfectly illustrates the misplaced and outsize concern: As Benjamin Radford of the Skeptical Enquirer pointed out several years ago, there are only two known instances where children died from tainted Halloween candy, and in both cases the child’s own parent was responsible for the intentional poisoning.
As I’ve written about in the past, a 2009 study that looked at nearly a decade of data found “no significant increase in risk for nonfamilial child sexual abuse on or just prior to Halloween.” It’s no surprise then that the data remained unchanged after the emergence of measures to keep sex offenders away from kids on Halloween. The common argument is that all this legal effort is worth it even if it only saves one child from being victimized. But, as the authors of the study noted, these initiatives cost money and take up resources that could be directed toward much greater risks. “For example, a particularly salient threat to children on Halloween comes from motor vehicle accidents,” according to the report. “Children aged 5 to 14 years are four times more likely to be killed in a pedestrian–motor vehicle accident on Halloween than on any other day of the year.”
Karen Franklin, a forensic psychologist who has long railed against the Halloween crackdown, calls it “security theater” and “the Halloween boogeyman.” She says “the scare feeds into a deep-rooted cultural fear of the boogeyman stranger.” Just as with scary movies, this holiday allows us the thrill of confronting our fears in a controlled manner. Similarly, the inevitable spate of stories about stranger danger each October both exploit and assuage parental nightmares. Canny entrepreneurs sell parents ways to protect their kids from “real monsters” – as though safety and control were but an app away — while local politicians and sheriff’s departments circulate press releases to celebrate their own valiant efforts fighting, in the words of the study mentioned above, “a problem that does not appear to exist.” All of which is to say: Kids aren’t the only ones who get caught up in the illusions of the holiday.
Here is a Halloween tradition, circa 1892, as described by an article in the New York Times: You hang a stick by a string from the ceiling. At one end of the stick is an apple; at the other end, a lit candle. You spin the stick around, and try to snag the apple with your teeth without getting your face burned off.
By the time I was a kid, in the 1980s, not much had changed.
In our town, Halloween was terrifying and thrilling, and there was a whiff of homicide. We’d travel by foot in the dark for miles, collecting candy, watching out for adults who seemed too eager to give us treats. At that time, rumors on the evening news said maniacs were injecting Almond Joys with rat poison, tucking razor blades inside candy apples before handing them out to children.
Granted, no one in my gang would touch a candy apple in the first place—caramel on a piece of fruit being so much lipstick on a pig. But we knew death was possible. If it wasn’t the psychopaths, some high school kid might shoot you in the mouth with a BB gun, or make you drink raw eggs. There were seven of us who lived a short walk from each other’s houses; perhaps by the first morning of November we’d be six. Halloween, all told, was fantastic.
Today, though, it’s tough to conceal a Gillette Mach 4 Vibrating Razor inside a Mars bar. I’ve become an adult, and having seen how adults mostly ruin Halloween, I’ve also become a Halloween Scrooge.
In our semi-rural neighborhood, children are chauffeured around on Halloween in minivans, before dusk. They trick-or-treat in broad daylight, shuffling to and from houses like refugees, between colonnades of guardians, as if Halloween was now monitored by UN peacekeepers. Our nation’s one night dedicated to horror has become a soccer-practice carpool. And sure enough, the costumes are feeble, store-bought. I’d make a joke about wishing kids these days would dress like tramps, as in hobos, rather than tramps, as in Katy Perry, but Andy Rooney would probably sue me for copyright infringement.
However, my Scrooge-ness does not extend to candy.
If I see a roll of Bubble Tape, a bag of Haribo Gold-Bears or a pouch of green-apple Big League Chew, I’m eleven again. The great thing about candy is that it can’t be spoiled by the adult world. Candy is innocent. And all Halloween candy pales next to candy corn, if only because candy corn used to appear, like the Great Pumpkin, solely on Halloween.
My mother still has a three-step system to eating candy corn. First she eats the white tip, then the orange middle, then the yellow end. She swears each segment tastes different. While writing this article, I emailed three friends versed in statistics and asked them how many ways you can eat a piece of candy corn. Assuming that no bite’s smaller than a single segment, they worked out an answer: nine. The formula they devised, which I don’t understand even slightly, is this:
W = 9 + Sum over t, t = 1 to 2 [ (Z_t | Z_t-1)*(D_t | D_t-1) ]
W= Ways to eat a candy corn
Z = Size of bite
D = Side of bite
t = bite occasion
My wife saw this and told me the statisticians had missed one option: you can also bite a piece of candy corn in half lengthwise, “so you get a little piece of each segment in each bite.”
I told her that was ludicrous.
“I have very firm opinions about candy corn,” she said, and went on to trash my preferred brand, Brach’s, saying their candy was waxy compared to her favorite, Farley’s.
If candy corn is where I still find my Halloween innocence, it was my father who set me on the road to becoming a Scrooge. In seventh grade, news spread around our town that all the kids, all the town’s children from sixth to ninth grades, were gathering on Halloween night at one of the elementary schools for an egg and shaving-cream war. Pharmacies were quickly depleted of Barbasol. I bought six cans with my allowance, and modified their aerosol tops with a hot needle in order to shoot farther.
My mother somehow heard the rumor. She came outside, where I was testing my assault range, and forbade me from even going. She went the extra mile: “No one in our family has ever gone to jail,” she said. “If you get caught by the police, we aren’t bailing you out. You’ll sit in that jail for weeks.”
I was stunned. I hadn’t even realized “jail” was a possibility. Now I’d be left there to rot? Instead, my friend John and I roamed our neighborhood that Halloween, John being likewise banned. All our friends were gone; they were having the best night of their lives. We ate candy corn and shaving-creamed a few mailboxes without much joy. When we got home at ten, we must’ve looked pitiful, because my dad came out and told us we could go ahead and shaving-cream the garage if we were going to act so pathetic about it.
The next morning, my mom found the side of her garage etched with John’s and my initials, three feet high like graffiti tags. Apparently menthol shaving cream burned through paint. Well, we hadn’t known. My mother was furious. She even called John’s mom. “But dad said we could,” I insisted.
She consulted my father, who was raking leaves. He said he didn’t know what I was talking about.
That November, John and I repainted the garage. I never trick-or-treated again. It wouldn’t be until I graduated from high school that my father copped to his betrayal, and by that time I’d crashed his car, so we were even, probably.
But this Halloween, I’ve decided to set my Scrooge aside—there’s no fun in it, only humbug. Instead, I’m carving a pumpkin with a big exclamation point, and any children brave enough to visit will receive full-size candy bars. Afterward we’ll all play spin the candle. And if a parent calls the police, my wife has promised to bail me out. It’s going to be great.
It’s the mid-1800s, and a Croatian guy goes to Egypt on vacation and buys a mummy as a souvenir. So you can already tell what kind of guy he is. The mummy turns out to be wrapped in strips made from a book handwritten on linen in Etruscan, a language that died out 2,000 years ago.
It’s known as “Liber Linteus.” It’s the longest Etruscan text ever found. It seems to be a ritual calendar of some sort, but no one really knows what it says. No one has spoken Etruscan for 20 centuries. Only a few fragments have been translated, like this one:
For the spirit of night, for the city, for the people everlasting.
You can see the “Liber Linteus” on display in a glass case in Zegreb. And quite near to it, you can also see that certain someone. You can see the unwrapped mummy that was once inside of it.
How was this treasure of Etruscan writing found? It sounds like something that happened in a frat house. The Croatian guy takes the Egyptian mummy home. He props it up in the corner. He shows it off to his friends when they come over. They make jokes about it. They rattle their drinks and point their cigars at it.
And then one night, who knows why, the Croatian guy is suddenly like, “Know what? I’m unwrapping that mummy.” You know there had to be drinking involved.
His brother goes, “Don’t do it, man! You’ll wreck it. That’s the easiest way to wreck a mummy!”
But the Croatian guy doesn’t care. He’s unwrapping and unwrapping and pretty soon here are the blackened hands with yellow fingernails, here are arms with elbows joints covered with shiny skin dried down tight, here are the darkened feet with perfect toenails, the hip bones — and it turns out it’s a lady mummy. Here is her face. Her shriveled ears, her dried-out eyelids with lashes still attached, her scab nose and a row of teeth in surprisingly good shape.
The Croatian guy likes her even better this way. He displays her standing up. He displays her linen bandages. His friends come over and they drink and smoke and stare and the Croatian guy talks some very stupid shit about the unwrapped mummy right in front of her.
If this was a movie and he did that, he’d have to die, right?
And he does!
He dies, then his brother inherits the mummy. But the brother does not want it. “Before he unwrapped it I would have taken it, but now that mummy is a mess. You can’t fix it back to how it was. Go ahead and sew all that shit back on. Do it. Won’t matter. That mummy is jacked-up forever.”
Other relatives are offered the mummy, but no one wants her.
And this is where I get all sad for the mummy. Where was she kept during this uncertain period? Was she in the sitting room with evening shadows passing over her face? Was she in a box in a storage unit? Was she having humidity issues?
And what if the Etruscan writing had never been discovered? What then? What do you do with a jacked-up mummy no one wants?
But because of this dead language, you do want her. You display her on a red cloth in a glass case with her head gently raised, the strangeness of her unwrapped body on full view. Her arms by her sides, her lips parted and her teeth looking so alive.
Some kind of big sadness here. Some kind of shipwreck flare. She’s naked under museum lights, she took a wrong turn and she’s stranded in the realm of the living again. Isn’t there someone, somewhere merciful enough to cover her?
For the spirit of night, for the city, for the people everlasting.
As frost bites the air and plastic Halloween bunting unfurls in suburban yards, our thoughts turn to the simple delights of candy: the pastel snap of Necco wafers, the dubious rattle of a box of Good & Plenty. Half the candies we ate as kids weren’t actually good. Even at the time we suspected as much. But candy offered an undeniable pleasure: It was fantastic, it was unreasonable, it came in colors and shapes unrelated to actual food. And on Halloween, it was free.
Although tricks and treats have been part of Halloween tradition for ages, October 31st didn’t become a candy-centric holiday until the 1950s, when aggressive marketing campaigns began to tell Americans a different story about All Hallows’ Eve. And naturally, the story was about candy. Perhaps this is appropriate. Our larger story as a people is, in a sense, a story of candy.
Leafing through the wrappers of forgotten candy bars, you see a gaudy reflection of our past. Ghostly faces stare back: The silent film star Clara Bow graced the “It” bar, the Gypsy bar honored burlesque dancer Gypsy Rose Lee. Eager to capitalize on the glitz of the Jazz Age, candy manufacturers churned out the Charleston Chew, the Black Bottom, Red Hot Liza, Big Dick, Jazz Hound and the Sloppy Sally. We asked candy expert Dr. Samira Kawash for her take on these names. “In the years between the world wars, there were real tensions and conflicts about the changes in sexual norms and the changes in propriety and manners … There were so many candy bars coming out [in the 1920s] that the candy makers really were striving in the most innovative and creative ways to catch attention — like naming candy bars after lewd dances and strippers. Just like today, sex sells.”
But it wasn’t all strippers and jazz hounds. Candy advertising has always played on the double gamut of human desire: Marketers have sold candy as a sinful indulgence while simultaneously touting it as a bona fide food, a healthy snack and even a diet aid. Candy bars like the Chicken Dinner and the Denver Sandwich were the 1920s precursors to our modern “breakfast bars”: by evoking an association with food, advertisers grant us guiltless pleasures.
In World War II, American soldiers carried D ration, one of the few packaged snacks in history that tasted vile by design not accident. Captain Paul Logan of the U.S. Quartermaster’s office explained his requirements to Hershey representatives: “a bar weighing about four ounces, able to withstand high temperatures, high in food energy value, and tasting just a little better than a boiled potato.” It sounds sadistic, but Logan had the G.I.’s survival in mind: He assumed that if the chocolate tasted too good, it wouldn’t still be around when the actual emergency hit.
Ad agencies were quick to capitalize on military-mandated candy rations. A 1941 advertisement for Dextrose corn syrup claims: “Today people realize that candy is more than a confection. It is a veritable bulwark against between-meal fatigue. Even doctors consider candy a desirable requirement of the daily diet. It is a specified item of military rations.”
Although the Draper-esque characters who penned these ads may have been stretching the American imagination, human evolution was working in their favor. As evolutionary biologist Jason Cryan points out, “The evolutionary explanation for the sweet tooth revolved around that idea that we have physiologically associated a sweet taste with high-energy foods which would have helped our earliest ancestors survive better in their environment … if an individual has to spend time and effort foraging for food, it’s better to obtain energy-dense food items than energy-poor food items.”
And by 1941, candy had been selling as medicine and dietary supplement for over a thousand years. Ancient Indians developed special confections to feed to new mothers and invalids. In the seventh century, Persian monks learned to refine raw sugar by boiling it with lime water and bullock’s blood; they used the resulting sugar loaves as a base for developing new medicines. When the Arabs invaded Persia, they developed a taste for candy and sweet Persian remedies; to that end, they turned Sicily and Spain into sugar production centers. Enthusiasm for candy-based medicine spread across the continent — in the Middle Ages, wealthy Europeans ate confections of spices and sugar to aid digestion. In Britain, candy was touted as a cure for the common cold: Sugar was sold in twisted sticks, flavored with oil of wintergreen.
Then, as now, the sales pitch went both ways: Candy was hawked as either a health supplement or an indulgence. But whether lozenge or lollipop, up until the 19th century candy conveyed status: Sugar was expensive. Arab texts from the 13th and 14th centuries describe sugary treats as a focal point at the most elegant banquets. European kings and queens employed court confectioners to spin fantastic sugar sculptures.
Queen Isabella of Castile, as it happens, was particularly fond of sweets. The queen’s apothecary mixed her sweet cordials and kept her tables stocked with sweetmeats. When Isabella sought the perfect Christmas present for her daughters, she settled on a truly sumptuous item: a little box brimming with sugar. Perhaps it’s fitting that Isabella’s minion Christopher Columbus would lay the groundwork for the American sugar dynasties: On his second voyage of discovery, Columbus transported sugarcane cuttings from the Canary Islands to the Caribbean Island of Hispaniola. And so began one of the darkest chapters of our history.
In “Rum: A Social and Sociable History,” Ian Williams notes that sugarcane needs plenty of sunshine and water to grow. He adds that “the intensive labor needed to cut, cart, and process the cane under a broiling tropical sun has never appealed to people with other career options.” African slavery was a direct result of the world’s lust for sweets and rum. This desire created brutal places, redolent with burning sugar and blood. These small plantation fiefdoms were isolated, and enslaved Africans dramatically outnumbered planters, who relied heavily on fear as a method of control. The typical workday stretched from sweltering dawn till sweaty dusk; the typical workplace was a scorching sugar mill or a snake-infested cane field. After surviving the deadly voyage to a Caribbean sugar kingdom, an enslaved African could expect to live about seven years.
Abolitionists began calling for a sugar boycott. In 1788, the British abolitionist William Cowper condemned the sugar trade in his poem, “The Negro’s Complaint”:
Why did all-creating Nature
Make the plant for which we toil?
Sighs must fan it, Tears must water,
Sweat of ours must dress the soil.
Think ye Masters, iron-hearted,
Lolling at your jovial Boards,
Think how many Backs have smarted
For the Sweets your Cane affords!
Fifty years later, such doggerel would help spark the American Civil War, which, ironically, led to a decrease in sugar prices and a subsequent increase in candy consumption. The demand for candy triggered an explosion of new varieties: Hershey’s kisses, Goo Goo Clusters, Mary Janes, King Tut, Subway Sadie, Snow Cup, the Snirkle, the Squirrel Nut Zipper, and the unfortunately named Daddy Sucker (later changed to the Sugar Daddy). According to the late candy historian Ray Broekel, around 30,000 varieties of candy bar were introduced to American in the first three decades of the 20th century.
Although it’s difficult to imagine a workplace more terrifying than the sugar plantations of the slave era, early American candy factories were no cakewalk. The candy giants (Nestle, Lindt and Hershey) pioneered innovations in candy processing that spawned an industry characterized by low wages and questionable sanitation.
In the first decades of industrial production, candy workers were generally young women, immigrants or the children of immigrants. In 1913, a teenage candy worker confided to a Chicago journalist: “Do you know … I laugh whenever I see a sign in a street car telling a man to show his girl how much he loves her by buying a box of somebody’s candy. It is like killing beautiful birds so women can wear aigrettes in their hats. If they only knew about candy making in factories, they would make their own candy at home or do without it.”
Even candy manufacturers conceded that the industry had its unsavory side. “The less the public knows about candy making, the better,” the manager of a large candy factory told a representative of the Consumers’ League of New York. The results of the league’s 1928 survey of candy factories backed this assertion: Temperature in factories hovered around 45 degrees, and 14-hour days were common. The investigator was appalled by the sanitary conditions in some factories: “Floors and stairs were coated with sugar and fallen candy; machinery and worktables were apparently never scrubbed; the odor of rancid chocolate permeated the atmosphere.” Of the industries that employed women, candy offered the lowest wages. And things were going downhill for the worker: Even in 1928, larger corporations were squeezing or buying out smaller competitors. The report concluded: “Working conditions have deteriorated with corporation control and quantity production. In one factory, a decrease in the beginning wage, from $14 to $12 (a week) took place.”
When we asked Steve Almond, author of the excellent “Candy-freak: A Journey through the Chocolate Underbelly of America,” about conditions today, he put it this way: “In the popular imagination, it’s all Willy Wonka, pure imagination and childish enchantment. But up close, it’s pure Darwinian capitalism.” That said, “Candy-freak” emphasizes both the dark and the light side of candy: a product that spawns both tooth decay and pure delight, an industry ruled by corporate behemoths, yet home to the rare small factory that offers workers a sense of pride and family. During his research, Almond toured the few old school American candy factories that haven’t been swallowed by the big three (Hershey, Mars and Nestle). He describes Russ Sifers of Valomilk and Dave Wagers of Idaho Candy Company (makers of the Idaho Spud as regional producers who struggle valiantly to keep afloat in a world where supermarket chains demand $25,000 slotting fees to even stock a product. These last scions of the old school are notable for their dedication to original recipes and packaging, for their genuine love of candy, and for their sense of responsibility to the nostalgic candy-freaks of the world. As Sifers himself notes: “We make Valomilks, not money.” Which reminds us: despite sugar’s sordid history, there’s a certain beauty to candy for candy’s sake alone.
A note about Trazzler's slide shows: We don't do top-tens or best-of lists. Nor are we so morbid or presumptuous as to tell you where you must go before you die. The world is far too big and fascinating to encapsulate in any kind of definitive list. We simply chose the places that our writers have contributed that make us think, laugh and dream about our next adventure. Are we missing a place that you love? Visit us at
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Let’s start from the premise that the tourism industry is, quite frequently, a freak show. And not just on Halloween … plenty of places keep it surreal all year round. Why? Luring people into your temple, museum, medical school, church or crypt isn’t as easy as you might think. You need a hook.
While severed body parts and corpses may not have a tourist-brochure ring, gore sells. Catholic churches have been collecting bodies and relics for pilgrims to visit for centuries. Little bits of the Buddha are scattered in shrines around the globe. Medical curiosities and oddities fill glass cases and jars in museum sideshows.
On occasion, one man’s stack of musty bones cluttering up a catacomb becomes another’s creative medium, a macabre opportunity to recycle earthly remains into visionary art. Visiting one such place, the Capuchin Crypt in Rome, certainly made an impression on Mark Twain, who described it with delicious detail in his travelogue “Innocents Abroad”: “On the wall were elaborate frescoes, whose curving vines were made of knotted human vertebrae; whose delicate tendrils were made of sinews and tendons; whose flowers were formed of knee-caps and toe-nails.” “What you are now, we used to be. What we are now, you will be,” a plaque on the crypt ominously announces in five languages.
So much of the tourism industry is destructive, but these grotesque places do no harm. In fact, dead folks may just be the ultimate eco-friendly, renewable resource — call them relics, taxidermy, ossuaries, medical oddities, or just a good story of legendary dismemberment — these 14 morbid spots keep the curious coming back.
Have you run across a displaced appendage or skeletal remains in your travels? Let’s reassemble them in the comments. You can find more macabre sites on Trazzler.
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