Now I Know (14 page)

Another astrological tradition of the East is the Chinese Wu Xing, or the Five Elements. Each two-year period is associated with one of five things: earth, fire, wood, water, or metal. The Japanese, in particular, use these as modifiers of the Chinese zodiac. A normal “snake” year could become a “water snake” (which was the case in 2013), making the intelligent but unscrupulous person into a less ambitious, somewhat oblivious version of the original. When you multiply the five elements by the dozen zodiac symbols you get sixty combinations, creating, in effect, a sixty-year cycle in both Chinese and Japanese astrology.

Nineteen sixty-six was the year of Hinoe-Uma, or in English, the Fire Horse—a particularly troubling combination for many Japanese would-be parents. (And probably for Chinese would-be parents too, but China doesn’t publish demographic data to the extent that Japan does.) People born in the year of the horse, generally, are said to be outgoing and sociable. But the “fire” modifier, legend states, makes them overly ambitious and zealous, willing to sacrifice everything to reach whatever ambition they strive after. In 1966, the culture in Japan made this okay for a boy, but for a girl it was a curse. Fire Horse Women were said to guarantee an early death for both their fathers and husbands, leaving a path of destruction along the way.

One couldn’t pick one’s child’s gender, so the Japanese simply had fewer babies. A report from Yahoo suggested that this wasn’t unique to Japan—Korea, Tibet, and China all had fewer births that year as well. There are various reports of increased abstinence, birth control use, and abortions during that year. Further, the graph above demonstrates that this was a multiyear plan for many families, as evidenced by the upticks in the birth rates in the years preceding and following the year of the Fire Horse.

For those East Asian women born in 1966, the Fire Horse brand was for decades an unwelcome one and in many cases, remains so today. Many of those women regularly lie about their birth year, claiming to have been born in 1967. But in recent years, the stigma associated with being a Fire Horse Woman has waned as skepticism over the zodiacal tradition has increased. This is probably a very good thing, as the Year of the Fire Horse comes again in 2026.

Before 1966, Daylight Saving Time in the United States was set via a patchwork of state and local laws, often causing conflict and confusion. The Uniform Time Act, passed by Congress in 1966, standardized Daylight Saving Time across the nation. As set forth by the act, Daylight Saving Time begins on the last Sunday in April and ends on the last Sunday in October. But the act has been amended twice since. First, in 1986, the beginning of Daylight Saving Time was shifted to the
first
Sunday in April, taking effect the next year. Later, in 2005, both the start and end dates were changed (effective 2007). Daylight Saving Time was to begin a few weeks earlier, at the second Sunday in March, and end a week later than previously, on the first Sunday in November.

Although the second part of the second change seems curious—it pushes Daylight Saving Time’s end date back merely a week—one of the forces behind the change is unexpected: candy pumpkins.

The 2005 changes to Daylight Saving Time were purportedly aimed at saving energy (in fact, the amendment is part of a bill called the Energy Policy Act of 2005), but many are skeptical of any such savings. Michael Downing, author of
Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time,
told NPR that “it turns out every time Congress has studied [Daylight Saving Time], it’s been told that we haven’t saved anything.” Downing continued that any savings from less at-home or at-work energy use is eaten up by additional cars on the road, as people begin to spend their additional natural-daylight leisure time shopping: “The first and most persistent lobby for Daylight Saving in this country was the Chamber of Commerce, because they understood that if their department stores were lit up, people would be tempted by them.”

But the Chamber of Commerce was not the only organization lobbying for the extension of Daylight Saving Time. And it was, perhaps, not even the most vocal. That distinction goes to the candy lobby. For them, a one-week move—from the last Sunday in October to the first in November—meant big bucks, as it allowed for an extra hour of trick-or-treating each Halloween.

In 1985, the candy industry made its first attempt to get its desired change enacted with a little bit of bribery—a very little bit. Before the relevant hearing, lobbyists took to the Senate chambers with a bag of candy pumpkins in hand, placing some of the treat on each senator’s chair. But Congress returned a trick, keeping the clock rollback date to a time before Halloween. Not until twenty years later, under the 2005 bill, did the candy industry get its desired outcome.

On October 31, 1983, advice columnist Abigail Van Buren—better known as “Dear Abby”—published a Halloween-themed column titled “A Night of Treats, not Tricks.” In that column, she wanted to “remind [readers] that,” among other things, “[s]omebody’s child will become violently ill or die after eating poisoned candy or an apple containing a razor blade.” Twelve years later, advice columnist Ann Landers (who, by the way, was Dear Abby’s sister) also wrote a Halloween article—“Twisted minds make Halloween a dangerous time”—echoing that concern. “In recent years, there have been reports of people with twisted minds putting razor blades and poison in taffy apples and Halloween candy,” Landers wrote. “It is no longer safe to let your child eat treats that come from strangers.”

Although there have been reports of razor blades and other foreign objects embedded in Halloween candy (or apples—although anyone giving out an apple on Halloween is already suspect), these dangers are almost always obvious with the most cursory glance. What about poison, which, being invisible and generally hard to detect, is the more nefarious way to taint candy? You have little reason to be concerned there either. Landers stated, “many reports” of such terrible acts have occurred, however, they are almost entirely the stuff of myth.

Almost entirely.

For nearly thirty years, University of Delaware sociologist Joel Best has been investigating allegations of strangers poisoning kids’ Halloween candy. As of this writing, he hasn’t identified a single confirmed example of a stranger murdering a child in this fashion. He found other examples of people accidentally passing out tainted candy or, in one case, passing out ant poison as a gag gift to teenagers (no one was hurt), but the bogeyman of terrible people making trick-or-treating unsafe is a canard. One example of a person trying, explicitly, to poison children via Halloween candy was confirmed. However, the child who died wasn’t a stranger—it was the man’s son.

On Halloween, 1974, an eight-year-old boy named Timothy O’Bryan died. His candy had, indeed, been poisoned. A few days prior, his father, Ronald Clark O’Bryan, took out a $40,000 life insurance policy on Timothy and Timothy’s sister, Elizabeth (then age five), as an unimaginable way to get out of debt. The only way to collect required that at least one of his children die, so the elder O’Bryan laced some Pixy Stix with cyanide and cajoled his son into eating one before bed.

As murder would negate the insurance policy, the father had to cover his tracks. Already showing a wanton disregard for the lives of others—children, at that—he decided to potentially kill a few. He distributed some of the tainted candy to at least four other children (including his daughter), according to the
Houston Chronicle
, setting up the story that a neighborhood madman or demented factory worker had caused the tragic death of his son. Fortunately, he was unsuccessful. None of the other children ended up eating the poison, in part due to a quick reaction from authorities and in part due to dumb luck—an eleven-year-old tried to eat the sugar in the Pixy Stix he received, but could not undo the staples that O’Bryan had used to reseal the package.

As tragic as this story is, it is the only known example of a person intentionally poisoning Halloween candy and providing it to neighborhood trick-or-treaters. And Ronald Clark O’Bryan won’t be poisoning any more candy—the state of Texas executed him in 1984.

According to the FBI, insurance companies collect more than $1 trillion in premiums each year. Also according to the FBI, insurance fraud costs the industry $40 billion annually, causing premiums to increase between $400 and $700 per household. But don’t tell that to the people of Vernon, Florida.

Vernon is a small town on Florida’s panhandle, not too far from Alabama and Georgia. Its population bounces between 500 and 800, and recently has been rather poor, with one-quarter of the population at or below the poverty line. It’s been that way for generations. In the 1950s and 1960s, however, some of the people found a way out of poverty—via a handsome insurance settlement. And it would not cost them an arm and a leg. Just one of the two.

Quite literally, people in Vernon were shooting themselves, blowing off limbs, and collecting on the insurance. How the trend started, no one knows—perhaps it was an accident at a sawmill or with a plow, or perhaps it was a calculated effort to scam an insurance company out of tens of thousands of dollars (or more). Truly, it doesn’t matter. For when word got out that so-and-so just received a check for untold riches—and all it cost him was a hand or foot, perhaps even to the elbow or knee—well, the idea spread. By the time the early 1960s rolled around, according to the
Tampa Bay Times
, Vernon, Florida, was responsible for roughly two-thirds of all loss-of-limb-related insurance claims in the United States.

Over the time period in question, a total of fifty people (give or take) lost limbs of some sort, many if not all filing insurance claims thereafter. Although the insurers attempted to bring lawsuit actions against some of these people, not one was convicted of insurance fraud. One alleged transgressor was particularly egregious, but, as the
Times
notes, he avoided conviction and walked away a one-footed millionaire:

A few years later, a filmmaker named Errol Morris came to Vernon, hoping to make a movie (tentatively titled
Nub City
) about the purported scam. But faced with death threats and the like, he instead produced a much less controversial film of the town and named it, cautiously,
Vernon, Florida.
The well-regarded documentary focuses on the town more broadly, bringing to film many eccentricities about the community, but does not focus on the decision of many to dismember themselves.

The
Zong
, a slave ship, set sail from Accra, now the capital of Ghana, on August 18, 1781. It was transporting 442 slaves from Africa to Jamaica, more than it should have been able to carry. The ship made its way across the Atlantic without much incident. When the
Zong
reached the Caribbean island of Tobago, it was in fine enough shape.

Then, everything started to go wrong. The ship failed to dock at Tobago and take on additional supplies. On November 27 or 28, it passed Jamaica, thinking that the island in its sights was Hispanola. The
Zong
sailed farther west into the Caribbean Sea. By the time the crew realized these errors, they simply did not have enough food and water to bring all 442 slaves to Jamaica alive.

So they started to throw them overboard. For the insurance money.

By its very nature, slavery treats people as property. During the slave trade era, insurers sold policies to those involved in the business of shipping people in captivity from Africa to the New World. In the case of the
Zong
, the insurance company would pay the ship’s owners £30 for each slave who failed to reach Jamaica in a saleable state. The crew and the ship’s human cargo were already suffering from malnutrition, with sixty-two of the 442 slaves already dead. On November 29, just a day or two after overshooting Jamaica, fifty-four African women and children were thrown into the ocean. On December 1, another forty-two slaves—men, this time—met the same fate. This continued over the next few weeks. By the time the
Zong
landed in Jamaica on December 22, only 208 of the slaves—fewer than half—were still on board.