When I was a kid, the big irrational media-pushed fear each October was to scare kids and parents about the possibility of some deranged lunatic handing out poisoned or tampered Halloween candy.
Despite the fact there were no documented cases of poisoned candy (or razor blades in apples), we were encouraged to go to boring "safe places" like shopping malls for trick-or-treating, trained to look for holes or tears in candy wrappers, and instructed to never to eat anything that was unwrapped, which was awesome because it meant we could toss the fruit grandma would give us when we stopped by her house.