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.

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. 

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.

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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I crouched down, the late afternoon Friday sun hot on my neck. The box was not stone, as I had originally thought, but a heavy-duty black ridged cardboard. Hmm, I thought, perhaps someone’s family heirlooms?

On a grave not too far from where we stood, someone had left several pieces of costume jewelry atop one of the headstones. I lifted the heavy box out of its shallow hole. On one end, someone had typed a white label.

A man’s name. A place of residence. And the note: “Human remains. Cremated August 1, 2011.”

My hands began to shake. “Oh. Oh my. I’ve found human cremains,” I said out loud to the dogs.

- – - – - – - – - – -

When I was a kid, my cousins and I would hold our breaths in the car. We lived in the Midwest, so it wasn’t some attempt to block out the miasma of a freshly manured field or the local pig farm that drove such behavior. We were used to those smells. But, just as we knew that stepping on a crack would surely break your mother’s back, even if we didn’t understand the mechanism by which that would happen, we understood that if you were in a car that was driving by a cemetery, you had to hold your breath.

Maybe that’s when my fascination with graveyards began. Living where I do now, and drawn to the history that can be gleaned from the gravestones here in central New York, I have walked cemeteries that were designed by Frederick Olmstead — the architect of Central and Prospect Parks — and tiny pioneer graveyards that have all but disappeared underneath the dead leaves and myrtle that cover the forest floors. In a Catholic cemetery next to one of the glens lies entombed the remains of a victim of the HMS Titanic. In many of the graveyards I have found stories of families’ heartbreaks: multiple children buried, too many young women who died in childbirth, too many sons lost in 200 years of war.

At the graveyard that is closest to my house, the border between the living and the dead is frozen. In the winter, the long, sloping hill that bounds the east serves as a training ground for young snow sledders. After school, before the sun sets by 4:30, or Saturdays and Sundays, troops of young children and their parents jump on their toboggans starting at the outer graves and slide down toward the snow bowl at the bottom. I have always thought, in a fanciful way, that the people underground are divided between those who enjoy watching the show, and others, who want to yell at the kids to “get off my lawn.”

A few weeks before I found the cremains, I had taken the two dogs up to the field adjacent to the graveyard so that they could run off-leash in the grass and into the woods. At the borders of fields, cemetery and woods, about halfway between two rows of graves and among the roots of a giant red oak, they found a freshly dug woodchuck tunnel. Excited by evidence that the woodchuck was nearby, the girls began to dig. They took turns, and at times, I watched as a head disappeared down the growing hole. I held my breath, imagining the unearthly scream of a dog with a woodchuck attached to its nose. I pulled them away.

Three weeks later, Hurricane Irene blew through, and trees throughout the area were uprooted. As if pulled by Irene’s drag, Hurricane Lee came through with even heavier rains. When I took the dogs back up to the cemetery in search of dry ground for us to walk, we returned to the field. The dogs ran over to inspect the woodchuck hole. The hole had been washed out. It was now a pan-shaped depression, maybe a foot deep. Sitting in the center of it was a marbled black box.

Having discovered that it was ashes, instinct told me to drop the box like a hot kettle, but I overruled that in order to place the box back in its original position. But now what? I felt I could not leave it there: Animals would scatter what was in the box, and that bothered me. Surely someone would know what I should do.

It was after 5, a Friday evening. I used my cellphone to call a friend who sits on the town board. No answer.

I tried another board member. Again, no answer, and I realized, as I was listening to myself explaining my conundrum to the voice mail, that I was leaving crazy messages about being in the local cemetery and did they know what I should do with the box of cremains I had found?

But why? I didn’t know this person.

I had noticed that the name on the box matched the stone closest to the hole. A birth year — 1922 — the hyphen ending in a blank space. I saw in my mind the old man’s widow, garden trowel in hand digging a hole. She had wanted him to be close to his family, but something had prevented her from having her husband properly interred. How sad, I thought. And it was her poor luck that a woodchuck had tunneled right through the ersatz plot.

I thought of my own 95-year-old grandmother. If someone in the future were to find her ashes somewhere they shouldn’t be, wouldn’t I want someone to intervene on her behalf?

The town library was still open. I asked the clerk who she thought I should call. “Wait, you found a body?” she asked.

“No. Cremains. You know. Ashes. In a box.”

“Well, can you take them home with you?”

“Um. No. I don’t think so. Besides, I think it’s illegal, isn’t it? But I can’t just leave them here.” I thanked her for her time.

I slapped at a lazy deer fly, looked toward the valley to see if I could see anyone out walking. No one.

But afterward the words echoed: I could take them home. I imagined reaching back into the scooped-out earth, picking up the box, and placing it on the passenger seat. I’m a klutz. Chances are, ashes would blow all over the inside of my car. Besides, the idea of bringing home a stranger’s cremains creeped me out. Aren’t half of all horror stories about disturbing the remains of the dead? He needed to be properly attended to. And I knew that the fact that I had just referred to the ashes as “he” meant that some time in the past 15 minutes, I had committed myself to seeing this through.

Next idea. I called the county sheriff’s office. “So, you’re saying that you didn’t find a body, you found ashes, and you’re in a cemetery.” The male voice on the other end of the line sighed. “Ma’am. It’s a really busy night down here, and all the cars are out, but if you leave me your number, I’ll have my sergeant give you a call. Maybe in an hour or so.”

I walked around the perimeter of the cemetery until I found a black iron sign. It listed two phone numbers. Again, I left a long, detailed message about what I had discovered on voice mails.

By this time, my partner, Rob, had arrived home from work and had driven up to join me.

“You really thought this was buried treasure?”

“I know. Pretty dumb, huh? Should we just leave it?”

Rob put his arms around me. “No. Too many scavengers around here. We’ve probably got an hour or so before sunset. Let’s keep working on this.”

When I was 8, my parents moved my brother and me to a small house whose backyard abutted a graveyard. After school, my new friends told me stories about the characters who hung out at the cemetery: the old man who came and sat by his dead wife’s grave every night; the lantern that hung by a hook on a pole over one of the graves, and how that light mysteriously turned itself on each night at dusk; the horse-and-buggy that drove through the cemetery at night, and that one of the boys sworn he had seen. “A ghost carriage,” he said. “It’s real. I’m not lying.”

I thought of those stories as I looked at the sun sinking lower in the rose-colored sky. As a kid, I had been frightened of the dead, but now, I only saw the good in the person — perhaps he had loved his wife so much he had sat vigil with her every night. Goose bumps flew up my skin.

My phone rang. It was the cemetery owner. “And what is the name on the box?” he asked.

I told him.

“I don’t have any record of such a person,” he said. “Someone must have left them there, because we bury cremains much deeper than just a foot.” He continued, “Wow. This is just like the other local cemeteries.” He was referring to the bizarre story I had seen a few weeks ago. Several cemetery owners had reported finding ashes — and bodies — buried without the knowledge of the graveyard owners. Improper burial of a body is not only illegal, it’s also considered theft. People were stealing space in a graveyard — the owners’ only source of revenue. The people who were interviewed said that improper burial was another symptom of a hard economy.

Times are lean here: Our local food pantry is feeding 15 percent of our people; the natural gas companies are trying to persuade folks to lease their land for fracking; turns out, people were also secreting their dead into shallow graves.

“Listen,” he said. “I can’t get there until tomorrow morning. I doubt anyone is going to steal the cremains tonight. It’ll be dark soon. Can you mark the hole in some way?”

“Do you want me to throw dirt on it and bury it for tonight?”

“No. I won’t be able to find it. What about a tree branch or something?”

“OK,” I said. And we hung up.

I explained to Rob what I had been told. “I don’t know, Lorraine. I’m concerned that scavengers will get to it.” He looked around. “Look, what about piling stones on top of it?”

For the next 20 minutes, we gathered the fist-and brick-size stones from the clearing by the woods, carrying them back to the hole and stacking them. Even after we had placed a half-dozen on top of the box, we continued.

I realized we were building a cairn, an ancient form of marker.

He’s here, I was thinking.

Evening sounds enveloped us as we worked: crickets, cicadas, chickadees, the keen of a hawk. In the distance, a herd of deer grazed; a murder of crows squawked in the trees; turkey vultures circled. The natural order dictated that, as the sun set, the graveyard would be ceded to the wild and the dead.

By building a cairn, I was participating in the chain of life. I had owed the old man this. It was the right thing to do. It was the human thing to do.

My old childhood ritual had been silly. This ritual — the burying of the dead — was as natural as drawing breath.