LI woman remembers Halloween she got poison with candy
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NOT SO SWEET: Stories of Helen Pfeil, a Long Islander who gave arsenic to kids in ’64, stirred parents’ worries of tainted candy.Photo: AP
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Razor blades in apples and poisoned candy have been the stuff of Halloween lore ever since the very first trick-or-treaters.
But in one Long Island town almost 50 years ago, every costumed kid’s worst nightmare actually came true.
It was Oct. 31, 1964, when Elise Drucker, her sister Irene and a school pal set out along Salem Ridge Road in Greenlawn to fill their sacks with goodies.
“We were hobos,” said Elise Gray, 60, then a teen enjoying one of her last Halloweens.
When they arrived at Helen Pfeil’s house, it started as a typical interaction between candy seeker and candy giver.
“Aren’t you a little old to be trick-or-treating?” Pfeil, then 47, softly teased.
The housewife — a mother of teenage children herself — dropped what appeared to be a load of sugary loot into each of the three bags.
The youngsters had no way of knowing that arsenic pellets had been mixed in with the candy, wrapped in napkins.
It wasn’t until the girls returned home that the sinister truth was revealed.
Gray, now married and living in Maine, said her mom dutifully spread the colorful treats out on the table at their Centerport home to investigate.
And it’s a good thing she did.
Inside a napkin was a bottle-cap-shaped ant trap with the warning “poison.”
“It would have tasted awful,” Gray said. “Somebody older like me, I would have spit it out.”
The arsenic never found its target, but the woman who put it there immediately became one for the police.
Cops set out on a manhunt with the young trick-or-treaters.
Church leaders and volunteers combed through treat bags throughout the area to look for other potentially lethal tokens. Cops found 19 pellets.
Pfeil was arrested that night.
“They went into the house, and they found what they were looking for,” Gray said.
Pfeil’s husband told cops the whole thing was “a joke.”
The housewife said she had passed out poison only to those three teens because they were “too old” for trick-or-treating.
Her own sons, 15 and 16, were out trick-or-treating.
Police sent Pfeil out for a mental evaluation at Central Islip Hospital, and she was subsequently charged with two counts of child endangerment.
She pleaded guilty in the middle of her trial, and a judge suspended her sentence in 1965, cops said. She faced two years.
“It really was what started checking candy,” Gray said.
The incident is credited with sparking the Halloween urban legend of evil people giving out toxic treats — although there are a few earlier cases, including a post-World War II incident in which a sadist in Texas heated pennies on a skillet and scorched children’s palms.
On Halloween and the three days that followed in 1982, 12 incidents of candy tampering were reported across the nation, but no children died.
“We don’t believe in ghosts and goblins,” said sociologist Joel Best, who studies Halloween sadism
“We believe in criminals. We have revised what the Halloween menace is — [from] the homicidal maniac [to] a person so crazy that he poisons the candy of strangers.”
Gray said the scare spooked her off the holiday forever. She never wore a costume again.
“That was the end of Halloween for me.”
When finished reading the article, students should begin planning their essay to the prompt
Write at least a 5 paragraph essay to answer the following prompt:
How do the authors evoke emotion within the reader by using tone, imagery, and character?
Remember to include an introduction, a conclusion, and at least three body paragraphs. Hint: Each body paragraph should have one of the literary devices as its topic. Example body paragraph one should be all about tone, body paragraph two should be all about imagery,body paragraph three should be about character. You should give one example from each text for each of the body paragraphs. These will be due on Friday 10/31.
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