The History of Halloween Candy

Candy and Halloween go hand-in-hand, but when did candy become the standard for trick-or-treating, and who invented the holiday's most famous sweet treats like candy corn? Read the show notes here.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Frying and I'm crazybe Wilson. So I know, uh,
as we've been leading into Halloween, we've been doing symp

(00:21):
thematic things, and I know the episode on the Valiska
Acts murders it was pretty grim, So I apologized that
was a little too dark for anybody. So I thought
to close out our Halloween episodes, it would be fun
to sweeten things up a bit and instead of talking
about another grizzly thing this year, as we kind of
edge up on the day itself, we could talk about
the history of Halloween candy. Uh. There was an episode

(00:43):
a couple of years back that Sarah was on and
Christen Conger guest hosted from Stuff Mom Never Told You,
and they talked a little bit about candy uh in
their history of trick or treating, but they focused more
on sort of a lot of the other cultural aspects
of trick or treating. So we're gonna dig a little
deep or and skip talking about the costumes and the
other trappings of Halloween night and just focus on the sweet,

(01:05):
sugary stuff. Also an interest of expectations management. We are
pretty much talking about modern trick or treating uh and
how it has existed in the twentieth century. We're not
really going to talk too much, although we'll touch on
it briefly, about the older historical rituals associated with the
holiday or the time of year that are sometimes discussed
as sort of the precursors of the trick or treating tradition.

(01:27):
So we will cover a little bit about how candy
kind of became the star of the show, and then
we'll talk about the history of a candy considered to
be a Halloween classic, even though it is apparently not
all that popular, and because I can't resist a little
bit of ghoulishness, we'll also talk briefly about the various
scares that have happened in the media, UH and in

(01:47):
sort of the urban legend arena about purposely tainted or
booby trapped candy. So to start it off, though, we're
gonna actually talk about a different day than Halloween, near Halloween,
that was also about candy. Yeah, before Halloween became the
candy holiday. I mean, there's lots of candy associated with

(02:07):
lots of other holidays, but candy Halloween is the big name,
so confectioners tried to launch a candy specific holiday and
they called it, in a huge amount of creativity, Candy Day. Yeah.
Candy Day was first launched in nineteen sixteen and it
would fall on the second Saturday of October, and it

(02:28):
was pitched to the public as a way to sort
of encourage a spirit of giving and friendship. A lot
of the ad campaigns around it were about to take
a break and make sure someone you know is getting
candy today. Uh. They also were trying to allegedly recognize
the food value of candy. In the early twenties, it
was even marketed with a campaign to give candy away

(02:49):
to the elderly and orphans, so people who were candy needy.
But really it was a manufactured holiday to boost profits
for candy companies. Can The day was even renamed to
Sweetest Day to encourage this association with kindness and generosity,
and it continued to be celebrated on the second Saturday
of October right into the fifties and beyond. I remember

(03:13):
calendars when I was a kid having Sweetest Day on
them and be very confused about what that was. Uh.
Some US cities still celebrate it, though, and if you
ask most people what they were planning for it, you
would probably be met with a blank stare, which I
think is what happened when I said what the sweetest Day?
It says it here, I'm a calendar. Yeah, I'm trying

(03:34):
to remember which I know. Detroit allegedly still celebrates it,
and I'm trying to remember a couple of the other
cities that I saw. So if you're from any of those,
write us and let us know if they actually are
celebrated or if it's kind of just a holiday that's
on the books, but no one really does anything for
The idea though, of going door to door for treats
on Halloween is believed to have started somewhere in the

(03:56):
early part of the twentieth century, so that is different
from Sweetest Day, although the exact starting point of when
trick or treating really took off is a little bit fuzzy,
But we're talking about somewhere between nineteen hundred and nineteen
teens as the window of when people think it it
was first uh started yea that the how and the
why are kind of blurry. Also, there's some speculation that is,

(04:21):
Halloween became a night for pranks and vandalism. Early in
the twentieth century, more organized to or treating outings were
sort of arranged by communities as a way to distract
people from egging houses and whatnot. This isn't certain though,
and sugar rationtioning after World War Two broke out may
have gummed up that plan anyway. And despite the haze

(04:44):
of trick or treating its origins, we do know that
by the late nineteen forties and early nineteen fifties it
was pretty established culturally as a tradition. Uh. You know,
most people will say it kind of ebbed and flowed
in terms of popularity, but there is evidence of its
popularity at this point from the world really of entertainment.
So Jack Benny actually made jokes about the practice in
his radio show as early as ninety and tricker treating

(05:07):
appeared in Peanuts comics as early as nineteen fifty one.
In nineteen fifty two, there was a Disney cartoon about
Donald Duck's nephew's Huey Dewey and Louie going trick or treating,
So we know at that point trick or treating was
firmly established. So in terms of there being an actual
recognized practice of trick or treating, it's actually really recent.

(05:28):
We're looking back at, you know, seventy years ago. Uh.
And why is candy part of the deal. This is
actually an interesting, um sort of sociological, anthropological approach to it.
According to candy historian Beth Kimberley, sugar and this desire
for sugar is an almost instinctive part of preparation for winter.

(05:50):
So even going back to Celtic festivals of fall, I know,
we said we were going to talk about this much,
but this is just a brief one. Uh. You know,
part of the activity was that they were using sugar
and then some honey to preserve foods to get through winter.
So to some degree there could be a little bit
of sort of ancient instinct factoring in the your craving
for caramel in autumn, you're also adding a little padding

(06:13):
to your person to get through the cold period when
fresh food might not be readily available, or at least
you would be if we needed it. And if we
were in an age, you know, in the modern era
where everything can be preserved and shifted worldwide, we're fortunate
enough in most places that would probably be hearing this
to have access to fresh food pretty much year round.
And this is kind of an aside, but last week

(06:35):
I went to a thing called bo Fest, which is
the festival of bad ad hoc hypotheses, and basically people
make up these are really off the wall hypotheses that
are weirdly supported by data but are made to be ridiculous.
And this whole candy hypothesis in the wintertime might have
had a good place at that festival. Yeah, it's it's

(06:59):
one of those that's in sticking to think about, and
I can see the logic of it. I don't know
if I buy into it, but it's fun to talk
about it is and bo Fest is fun and they say,
we hope you learn nothing because everything is saying uh so. Anyway,
once candy companies realized that trick or treating was a
for real tradition, it wasn't long before they started coming

(07:21):
up with ways to capitalize on it by making sweet
treats that had a specifically holiday focus, and initial efforts
on the parts of most of these confectioners were really
focused around not marketing directly to consumers with like special
holiday wraps and Halloween themed candy like we'd see today,
but more to shopkeepers. Uh So, they were pretty much

(07:42):
selling the same normal candy, but they were parceling them,
you know, in their palates and their big shipping cases
as autumn and Halloween specific in an effort to get
those shopkeepers to promote candy as Halloween drew near. And
this is actually important and since at the time candy
wasn't the only giveaway that you might reasonably expect as

(08:05):
a Halloween handout. Both kool Aid and Kellogg's were marketing
their products as perfect items to hand out to trick
or treaters in the nineteen fifties, and candy also competed
with nuts, brut small toys, and homemade treats. Yes, if
you know Kellogg's had one, we might all be getting
cereal on Halloween, which is not a bad thing, but

(08:26):
it would be very different holiday. Uh. Brocks, which is
a company that's still around and turning out caramels and
candy corn, among other suits, was one of the first
companies to market special Halloween candy directly to the consumer.
In nineteen sixty two, they started putting images of Jack
O lanterns on their candy boxes, and this was actually
way ahead of most other candy companies. As we got

(08:49):
into the nineteen seventies, candy makers really started to step
up their game, and this is when marshmallow peeps first
started to appear in special Halloween editions like cat and pumpkins.
Um those were originally marketed as witch mellows, and I
will just say to this day the peeps um chocolate

(09:10):
Moose kiddies are one of my very favorite Halloween treats.
I love them. Uh. Candy an individual small rapper started
to be standard. Companies were starting to make value add
candies as well, so that you could give those out
to ghosts and ghouls who might arrive on your doorstep
demanding sugar. So this is when candy packs came with
rappers that would like turn into puppets, and boxes would

(09:33):
have little punch out windows so that they could kind
of become little temporary haunted house play set kind of activities.
I loved all that stuff when I was a kid,
to like, give me a candy plus an activity to
do once I was full of sugar and I was
the happiest child around. Uh. This is also the time
in the seventies when one of my very favorites, UH
known as Mr Bones, debut and Mr Bones was a

(09:54):
candy skeleton that came in a little black coffin, so
it was basically like bones and the skull and little pieces.
And I would always spend way too much time putting
him together, Like I would make sure that all my
bones were laid out as properly as could be given
the candy molds that they used to create them, and
then I would eat him from the feet up. And
I remember I was getting really dismayed if I had

(10:17):
not gotten enough of the proper parts to make the
full skeleton. But I loved Mr. Bones. But before we
get to another rather ghoulish candy trend, do you want
to have a quick word from a sponsor, I sure
do so. Gross out candy first appeared in the nineteen eighties.
There was just the whole trend of disgusting things. I

(10:39):
never liked it, but boy it sure was popular. Yeah,
thanks to garbage candy and garbage pale kids, this completely
gross out candy was now on the scene. And that's
when edible eyeballs and chocolate covered brains first hit the market.
And there's just really been no end to the grossness.
Since then, this turned into a trend and it quickly
grew in popularity, so a lot of companies started offering

(11:02):
this gross candy year round instead of just a Halloween
and the year round trend is something that's sort of
ironically is affecting the way in which candy is now
being offered. So Halloween candy got so popular that people
started offering it year round, But now many candy companies
are trying to find new ways to take the focus

(11:24):
off of exclusive Halloween pushes, so a lot of them
are offering treats that are more sort of autumn focused
instead of just doing Halloween specific packaging. So that way,
while the Halloween uh that's very clearly marked Halloween candy
gets marked down like half off or more on November one,
all of those yummy treats that have more general autumn

(11:44):
colored wrappers and flavors can still be offered at regular price.
So if you think about your local retail store, you
probably can quickly envision Reese's Cups and Hershey's Kisses and
other chocolates and candies that are now sort of wrapped
in gold, russet and copper foil wrappers, and that's part
of why that transition happened. Instead of marketing for one day,

(12:06):
their marketing for a season. Well, this is also reminding
me of like the rebranding of other holidays candies as
Halloween candy, like the advent of Cadbury scream eggs, which
I might need to go find some as soon as
we're done recording. Yeah, that's I have an unhealthy relationship
with the Cadbury Cream and Cadbury Scream mix. So with

(12:29):
all of this, they're hoping that candy consumption will go
right on through Thanksgiving before you transition into the winter
holiday candy. And this makes business sense. Instead of marketing
this one day holiday like Halloween, they can market through
this whole season of candy consumption. Yeah, because candy, uh
for Halloween comes out so early now, I mean that's

(12:50):
almost a full half year of just solid candy marketing
now by the time you factor in Fall and the
winter holidays. So inn it was tomated that Halloween candy
sales made up for two point three billion dollars of
the six billion dollars associated with Americans spending around the
Halloween holiday. So while costumes and decor are gobbling up

(13:13):
an ever bigger chunk of the Halloween spending numbers. Candy
still holds a strong position. They pull in more than
a third of the consumer dollars that are spent on
this holiday. According to the California Milk Processors Board, the
average candy toting Halloween jack o lantern holds two fifty
pieces of candy and that's about nine thousand calories and

(13:36):
three pounds of sugar, which if you are a long
time listener of the podcast, you know my mother would
disapprove of. Yeah, we kind of had a free for
all in our house. That's one of those statistics that
I read in. It was startling because I know how
many times I devoured a solid half of my bucket.
Or I mean, not all kids only stick to the

(13:57):
jack o lantern. We had pillowcases. Some you are just
like I remember the trick or tre getting with pillowcases
that we definitely took in more than three pounds of
sugar at a time sometimes. But now we're gonna shift.
Now that we've kind of talked about how candy and
Halloween got married, we're going to talk about candy corn.

(14:18):
And for full disclosure, I love candy corn so much.
This is my one of my very favorites. I know
that's not the case for everyone, but I love it
all caps love It's At the same time, well, a
lot of people really hate it. I am not one
of those people, but a lot of people hate it,
and that is the word they use. But somehow candy

(14:39):
corn remains a standard part of the Halloween candy repertoire.
There are thirty five million pounds of candy corn made
every year, which is nine billion pieces. Yeah. I read
one statistic. Uh, I believe it was at the National
Confectioners Association, UM and it it They had done a
survey and it was basically like most people hate more

(15:04):
people hate dislike candy corn than like it. But those
same people say that it's still like a required part
of the holiday, Like it's such a an iconic element
of Halloween candy that they're like, well, you can't have
Halloween without candy corn. Oh, I hate it. It's like
the people who eat the cranberry sauce from a can
and they don't really know why they do it at Thanksgiving,

(15:26):
but they do because I feel like they have to. Yeah,
it's a pity they should try some homemade cranberry song
and as an aside. In another survey that was conducted
by the National Confectioners Association, in they surveyed one thirty
five adults about the proper way to consume candy corn,

(15:47):
forty six point eight percent felt that you should just
pop the whole piece in your mouth at once. However,
very close behind forty two point seven think that you
should start with the narrow end, which is usually white,
but when you get into specially specialty flavors is different,
and ten points six percent things starting with the wide
end is the way to go. But I also have
to wonder, given what we were just saying about how

(16:08):
many people dislike it, how many of those respondents said
you should throw it out before actually giving their eating preference.
Regardless of how you feel about it and the reason
that we're talking about it today, it's been around for
a long time. Yeah. The invention of this ubiquitous candy
is normally credited to a candy maker named George Renninger,

(16:29):
and he was working at the wonder Lely Candy Company
in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in the eighteen eighties when he is
said to have first made it, and there were other
convectioners that were making candies with very similar texture. Uh,
and that's sort of just general sugar flavor that were
molded into foliage like you know, leaves and other nature
shapes acorns, etcetera. But Renninger was the first to create

(16:52):
this multicolored stripe design. It was the striping that really
drew people's attention, and it also made candy corner real
alans to make kettles of boiling sugar slurry were mixed
with marshmallow and fondent, and this resulting concoction was poured
into buckets. Stringers were men tasked with walking and pouring

(17:13):
out these pound buckets into the candy molds. Because of
the striping, they had to make three passes to make
every batch of candy corn. And as I was researching
this and how they did it, my first time was like,
they've never mentioned it, but that seems like a really
dangerous job to me. If any of our listeners have
ever made candy and come in contact with boiling sugar,

(17:35):
it's terrible. That's like an instant, horrifying burn on your skin. Uh.
And it sticks because it's sugar, So it's really hard
to get off, and the burn gets deeper and worse,
like while you're trying to clean it. Um. And they
didn't talk about that, but I feel like carrying forty
five pound buckets of this hot sugar mixture seemed had

(17:56):
to be like a high risk of injury or at
the very least holding um. Not the scalding isn't an injury,
but you know what I mean, Like it just seems
rough extremely bad. Seems like a really dangerous job to me.
The process has really not changed that much today, except
that now it is mechanized, so there is not risk
to human skin, uh, and it's not as time consuming

(18:19):
or backbreaking. But other than that, it's pretty close to
the original process, even though it's now really closely linked
with Halloween. This wasn't always the case. In the nineteen fifties,
there were ad campaigns promoting candy corn, which had also
gone by the name chicken feed and early incarnations as
a summertime street or something for year round. As with

(18:41):
other sweet makers, the companies that made candy corn really
started to focus their energies on Halloween marketing in the
nineteen fifties, So the fall and Halloween colors of the
candy which it had originally made it a very natural
fit for the holiday. So it's sort of made a
home there, as it were. But in recent years candy

(19:01):
corn has been made over as well, just as we
talked about other candies taking on sort of a more
seasonal approach, uh so that it could, um, you know,
kind of spread across the calendar. So Bronx and Jellybelly,
which are the two main candy corn manufacturers today, are
trying to keep it relevant year round. You can get
spring colored bunny corn for Easter baskets. They make pink

(19:24):
and red cupid corn for Valentine's Day. There is red
and green reindeer corn at Christmas time, I think one year,
and I'm not sure if this is a consistent thing
that they still offer, but I remember seeing a fourth
of July red, white, and blue candy corn one year.
I don't remember what manufacturer made it. But they're also
innumerable specialty flavors of candy corn available today in addition

(19:46):
to the classic sort of general sugar flavor. And if
you do like candy corn like I do, um Brox
caramel Machiatto flavor this year is my absolute favorite. I
have eaten uh an absolutely unconscionable amount in the last week. Um.
You can celebrate National Candy Corn Day on October so

(20:09):
we're right there at it. Go run out and buy
a bag if you want. And if you're not in
the US, you can still celebrate even though that's one
of our national holidays. Uh. But now that we have
had my candy corn fangirl situation, we're going to talk
about some of the scarier aspects of Halloween candy. But
before that, do you want to take a word from
a sponsor? I do, And now, Tracy, do you want

(20:30):
to transition us to this sort of darker aspect of
Halloween candy? Unfortunately, Yes, there's a huge irony to Halloween's
candy collecting tradition. Unlike the rest of the year, when
kids are not supposed to take candy from strangers. On
October one, unless your mother is like my mother and
you only trick or treated at the homes of people

(20:50):
you knew personally and extensively, you're encouraged to do exactly that. Yeah,
the risk inherent in doing so has of course given
rise to all manner of stories and myths and third
and fourth hand accounts of horrible things that people will
allege really happen to their cousin, sisters, best friends, and
it's completely natural to be fearful of the unknown. There's

(21:11):
certainly enough real life horrors that are reported on the
news all the time to feed the fear of a wicked,
cruel person poisoning candy to pass out to kids on Halloween. Well,
and even with so many communities having like a safe
trick or treating event, I was always like that just
seems like you could hurt more kids at once. Um, yeah,

(21:32):
I don't know. If we're paranoid, I have very similar thoughts. Yeah,
I'm glad I'm not a parent, because I would be
the mom that never let my kid do any of
this stuff. Right. However, most of the stories of tainted
candy don't really stand up to close their inspection. There
are definitely a few which have made headlines over the years,
and Snopes, which I love. Snopes dot com visit if

(21:54):
you're wondering if something is true or not. They have
a long list of these events. We'll cover just a
few of them. So in a case where there was
actual poison involved, but it seems like not so much
evil intent stick with me. A woman in Green Lawn,
New York made a really terrible decision, uh when she

(22:15):
decided to teach teams a lesson about being too old
a trick or treat in nineteen four, so Helen File
prepared these special packages of non treats to hand out
to her to hand out to teenagers when they came
to her door for trick or treating. And these packages
had steel wool pads, dog biscuits, and arsenic laced candy buttons.

(22:37):
And File told the older kids that she handed them
out to that they were a joke and that they
were in fact poisonous. They had skulling crossbones on them
and poison written on them, and no one ingested any
of them. But she was handing out poison to kids.
So she was charged with child endangerment. She pled guilty
and she received a suspended sentence. That just seems like
maybe she went a little too far trying to make

(22:59):
her point. Yeah, it seems like the arsenic laced candy
buttons was was one step over the line, maybe more
than one step that was over the line. In Detroit
in v Kevin Tossen, who was five died after spending
four days in a coma following a heroin overdose, and

(23:20):
the drug was found in his Halloween candy. So while
his death was accidental, the family actually staged a cover
up of what had really happened. Kevin had gotten into
his uncle's dash and the family had been sprinkled heroin
into his Tricker treat candy in hoping that a mystery
villain would be blamed for it. Yeah, and it was

(23:44):
one of those things that even once the truth sort
of came out that he had actually gotten into separate
from his Halloween candy, his uncle's drugs, by that point,
like the newspaper headlines had already spread everywhere, you know,
that this five year old had died from poison Halloween
candy or from drug laced Halloween candy. And so that
was really the thing that people remembered. And even though

(24:06):
there was an explanation, uh, that's sort of the fear
was already pretty placed at that point. Um. And then
in nineteen seventy four, and what was really just a
horrible and tragic event, Uh, there was what initially appeared
to be a legitimate poison candy incident. Uh, there was
an eight year old in Deer Park, Texas named Timothy O'Brien,

(24:29):
and he died after eating tainted pixie sticks candy after
he went trick or treating on Halloween nights. Uh. And
the truly horrific turn of events is that the boy
had been poisoned, but not by a stranger handing out
bad candy. It was in fact the child's father, Ronald
Clark O'Brien, who was found guilty in the murder investigation
around the poisoning. Yeah, it turned out that the boy's

(24:51):
father had handed out pixie sticks laced with cyanide to
his son and daughter and to a friend's children, and
his actual target was his one because he had taken
out a forty dollar life insurance policy on him. His
distribution of the candy to other kids was to support
this story that somebody at one of the houses where

(25:11):
where they'd stopped took or treating had given out the
bad candy instead of him. He was found guilty in
the investigation and he was sentenced to death. He was
executed by lethal injection almost ten years after the murder
of his son in ur And this is one that
is bad enough on its own, but when people retell
the story. They often embellish it and they'll say exactly

(25:33):
ten years later on Halloween, but now he was executed
at a different time of year. But I've kind of
feel like that one is bad enough on its own,
you don't need to add, you know, a poignant timing
details to it. So, while there haven't actually been any
documented cases of like widespread distribution of tainted candy to

(25:55):
stranger children, you've myths persist and pair are understandably fearful,
and you know that taking candy from people you don't
know is an inherently risky thing to do. But if
there is an upside to all of the fear surrounding
potentially tainted candy, it's actually the benefit that it offers
candy companies. So parents have become less suspicious of factory

(26:18):
sealed candies and individually ramped these little smaller packages, uh
than they would be of homemade treats, which used to
be a lot more common. I know when I was
trick or treating as a kid, we had neighbors that
would make like popcorn balls, or we had um one
neighbor that would give out she would do the little
chocolate mold candies of her own. Like that would never
fly today unless you were going to like a specific

(26:41):
friend's house for a party. You could not go to
a stranger's house and get a popcorn ball and probably
be allowed to eat it once you got home. Yeah.
I remember my mom going through all of the Halloween
candy and throwing away anything that was suspicious to her,
which was mostly stuff that was homemade. Um. Yeah, that
was even even after only trick or treating at always
the people that we knew, you know, better safe than sorry.

(27:04):
I mean I kind of can't faulter for it. I
really can't either. You know, she had your best interests
in mind. She kids were safe. She also had some
pretty strict rules about how much candy we could, Like
we are the Halloween candy at our house usually lasted
a really long time because it was sort of rationed
and we'll be on in our house. It was like
a crazy, wild free for all at our house. We

(27:26):
were very horrible. Um So yeah, that's sort of Halloween
candy through history. A lot of that's more modern history
than we usually cover, but one of those things that
we don't really get to kind of delve into. And
it's the perfect time of year to play around with
candy and sweets discussions, which I always love. So even
in some cities today, like I know, there are a

(27:48):
few local police precincts and stuff that will sometimes do
like a candy inspection station on Halloween night, or you
can go and have your candy X ray to make
sure there's nothing dicey in it of a metal nature
or anything. So those are still out there as safeguards,
even though as we said, there haven't been any documented cases.
If it makes parents feel better, I think that's great. Uh.

(28:09):
And now I just want to go eat three pounds
of candy corn, but I'm probably alone in that, so
instead I will read some listener mail. This particular piece
of listener mail is about our diatlow Pass episode and
it is from our listener J And he said, Uh,
I just listened to the diatlo of past episode. And

(28:29):
since I am an r N and have an interest
in wilderness and prehospital medicine, I would like to provide
a little insight into paradoxical undressing. While it is true
that hypothermia does cause confusion interrational behavior, the path of
physiology of paradoxical and dressing is unique Basically, all the
temperature receptors and the human body are located on the surface.

(28:49):
When you become hypothermic, your body shunts all the warm
blood to its core to keep vital organs warm and functioning.
When you're in the final stages of hypothermia and getting
close to death, your body stops stricting the blood vessels
in the extremities hold that we are holding all the
blood in the core, and when this happens, the warm
blood is released into the extremities and surface of the body,
and your previously freezing temperature receptors are bathed in warmth.

(29:13):
At this point, hypothermia victims are usually totally disoriented and
now feel like they are incredibly warm, so they take
their clothes off to try to cool down. I just
wanted to point out that paradoxical undressing is not a
result of just the standard confusion that hypothermia causes, but
instead has its own unique mechanism. It is unlikely that
the paradoxical undressing is something that would have happened to

(29:34):
a group that we're in a tent together with clothes
and sleeping bags. It's also unlikely they would have had
the energy to run around and rip through tents if
they had reached the stage of hypothermia. I was a
little sad you didn't report what cycle the moon was
in at the time of these events, because I like
the werewolf theory. Uh so in case I wasn't clear
on like how that all played out. Uh The one

(29:55):
of the popular and sort of makes the most sense
opinions is that they were in the tent fine more
or less heard a noise that they perceived to be
potentially an avalanche and ran out, and it was once
they were outside that they developed hypothermia after they had
been out in the cold. We did get a lot
of people asking about the cycle of the moon, and
I think we discovered that it was in fact a

(30:16):
new moon and not a full moon's, so the werewolf
theory not so much. Someone did say that on our Facebook.
I have not confirmed it, but I just took their
word for it. Unless they were a magical reverse werewolf,
I did say that. That was my response one time
when somebody said it was a new mood. Uh. You know,
if vampires can sparkle, werewolves can come out at other times.
That's what I know. If you would like to write

(30:38):
us and share your thoughts on werewolves or hypothermia. You
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(31:00):
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(31:23):
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(31:44):
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