Poison Candy

Three years ago almost to the day, I wrote here about the Winston Churchill Effect – that odd mass hysteria that causes whole nations to believe they remember events that never happened. In the post I related as how, as a child, I read a newspaper article about a boy my age who'd been poisoned by Hallowe'en candy laced with heroin, ostensibly given him by a psychopathic neighbour.

I'd invented that memory, sceptics assured me, on the grounds that no such crime has ever been committed, and newspapers would never report such an unsubstantiated rumour.

Well, this week I learned from the Secretly Incredibly Fascinating podcast (Episode #62: "The Strange Origins [and Stranger Persistence] of the 'Razor Blades in Candy' Myth", presented by Alex Schmidt and guest Jason Pargin), that I did in fact read such a story.

In 1970, Detroit five-year-old Kevin Toston died after eating candy that was later found to be contaminated with heroin. This was first reported in national media as a stranger-danger poisoning, before further investigation revealed that Kevin had most probably died from ingesting heroin left in his reach during a visit to his uncle. His parents, according to police, had likely sprinkled more of the stash on Kevin's Hallowe'en candy to camouflage the uncle's guilt.

I couldn't verify whether this theory came out true in court, but what's certain is that as the less-sensationalistic story dropped, so did coverage, at least beyond greater Detroit.

So I did read a real article, though several supporting facts I either added freestyle or conflated with other stories. Kevin's name, for example, was obviously not Richard. And my distinct memory of a tiny hole found in a candy bar wrapper, with the unvoiced implication that it had been injected with heroin, is similarly invented, though I'm getting a dim recollection of a schoolmate including that detail in a drugged-candy tale (either this one or another).

And though I remember that both of us were about 12 at the time, I was significantly younger, and Kevin younger still. A press photo depicts him as a laughing kindergartner in glasses, wearing a sport coat. And most significantly: he was African-American. So my memory of the two of us being similar in appearance was wildly inaccurate.

But hold the phone: on that last count, an intriguing alternative arises. In 1974 – the year I was twelve – Timothy O'Bryan really did die from eating doctored Hallowe'en candy, which was also initially reported as a stranger poisoning. And the photo run with this article shows a smiling, Cold War-coiffed Caucasian kid in a checkered collared shirt very like I used to wear.

(Note that once again, the culprit was family – statistically, far and away the most common perpetrator of child abuse. Turns out Timothy's father poured cyanide into his candy to collect on a life insurance policy.)

So one more time, no evil neighbour, and no rational excuse to deprive kids of the wonderful Hallowe'ens we cherished. But two such articles were published, and I almost certainly read them both. Over the years the two melded in my mind, and as the media seems to have done that thing where it reports accusations on Page 1 and ignores or buries vindications, I never learned that both were completely bogus.

(By the way, seeing as we're on the topic: in the podcast, Alex makes the cogent point that heroin is enormously expensive. As is cocaine, another narcotic frequently rumoured to be slipped to trick-or-treaters. One does not waste these things pranking random kids, any more than one bakes diamonds into cookies to break their teeth. And while we're up, drug addicts never give their fix away, regardless of what they're strung out on. They obsessively hoard it until every last grain is gone, then desperately scramble for more. Thus it's highly unlikely that anyone possessing these substances scatters them about for the dubious thrill of getting unseen children high.)

So the personal experience I shared in my January 2020 post is not in fact an example of the Churchill Effect. Though I've experienced others as well, the candy thing was just a pedestrian matter of scrambled memory – an extremely common cognitive glitch.

But in the cases of Kevin Tosten and Timothy O'Bryan, notwithstanding a little drift, I remembered something that actually happened.

Or to be precise, I remember actual newspaper coverage of something that never happened.

First I believed I'd read it

then I believed I didn't

and now I believe again.


(Photo courtesy of Evan Amos and Wikimedia Commons.)

The Winston Churchill Effect

In Auntie's War: The BBC during the Second World War, Edward Stourton drops a bombshell.

He's talking about how radio – the original electronic medium – transformed Prime Minister Winston Churchill from a simple politician to a national fetish by bringing him into the sitting room of every British family. Hence all who are old enough can tell you exactly where they were when they heard him transmit these timeless words:

…we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.

So indelible was this rallying cry that in Way Back Home – his 2015 anthem to his wartime childhood – Rod Stewart included a clip of this gravelly, defiant BBC broadcast.

That never happened.

It's not unusual for people to remember things wrong. "Play it again, Sam", "I am your father, Luke", "Elementary, my dear Watson!" "Beam me up, Scotty," and enough ersatz Mark Twain quotations to double his shelf, have all entered our collective knowledge. Or properly spoke, belief.

But this case isn't just a few transposed words. An entire nation has literally hallucinated a seminal event, complete with deep affective context and a whole range of sensory cues.

I'm not old enough to remember (or misremember) this broadcast, but reading Stourton's documentation of its nonexistence, I was absolutely floored. I grew up hearing that speech! Old people wouldn't shut up about it! I've entertained/annoyed others with my impression of that Churchill broadcast since high school!

But as it happens, Churchill only ever read out this text in Commons. It was reprinted in the papers next day, and doubtless some BBC presenters quoted it in their segments. But the PM, yea though he frequently addressed his people over the national service, only spoke these particular words into a microphone in 1949, when he was asked to cut the recording we incessantly hear in historical documentaries.

This is just the latest – if most dramatic – instance of the Winston Churchill Effect that I've encountered. Another is the pretty hippy girls who spat on returning Vietnam vets in the 60s and 70s. Many of us remember reading about this in the papers, or seeing it on TV. And in his excellent, highly-recommended autobiography, hermit monk Claude AnShin Thomas relates in some detail the time it happened to him personally.

Except it didn't.

This urban legend is a little easier to bust, given the logistics such an assault would demand. The attacker would have to gain access to a military airbase; loiter around the terminal unnoticed for hours; divine who in the crowd was a returning combat veteran; then approach very near said young man without attracting any attention, even from the target.

All while harbouring jarringly unhippy convictions.

These inconsistencies have bothered me since I was a kid, but I was still dumbfounded to learn no such event has ever been confirmed. Ever. Anywhere.

To be clear, I don't believe AnShin is lying. Rather, he's as certain of this memory as I am that at age 11 I read a front-page story in the local newspaper about a kid – named Richard, wearing a striped collared shirt in the photo – dying from heroin-injected Hallowe'en candy. He gobbed a treat upon returning home, then fell sick. His parents sent him to bed, but when he got worse they rushed him to the hospital, where doctors, little suspecting the cause of his condition, were unable to save him. Later, the candy wrapper was found to be pierced by a hypodermic needle.

You're probably already there. No such crime has ever been reported.

Ever.

Anywhere.

This disturbing bug in our OS has serious implications for our survival. It also vindicates the fundamental tenet of Zen: "don't-know mind". This is the state Zenners cultivate, to the best of our ability, because those opinions we call "facts" are very contingent, and much – perhaps most – of what we remember is inconsistent and imprecise.

And every so often, complete rubbish.

In the state of don't-know mind, we remain open to further data. In this position we stop sorting input into yes, no, and maybe, and just catalogue it. Because the need to respond ethically to external stimuli arises far less often than we think. And "making up your mind" about the rest amounts to shutting off your intelligence.

By not becoming attached to discrete data, we avoid the hysterical blindness it engenders. And, with a little luck and continuing sincere practice, the insanity that leads to.

As for Churchill, he'd get another shot at posterity, as the peroration of his famous Battle of Britain speech would soon be cast in bronze:

Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves, that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, 'This was their finest hour.'

And this time he really did broadcast it, having first received tremendous acclaim in Parliament. Prevailed upon that evening, he re-read his masterful "finest hour" speech, against his will, pouting and mumbling, from the BBC desk.

At 10PM.

To very few listeners.

And critics who universally panned the whole transmission as lacklustre and forgettable in the next day's papers.

Nevertheless, a great majority of British subjects would forever recall how their hearts quickened and their spines stiffened to Churchill's electric performance, as they listened to him that afternoon.

Or after dinner.

There's some disagreement on that point.


(Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.)