Happy Halloween folks. With goblins, ghouls, vampires and ghost, roaming our streets in the next few days to come, it’s important to remember the real horrors that have come to pass. Whilst candy flows and folks celebrate the end of another long summer, just remember that for every yin there is a yang! Where there is light, you’ll find dark! And in times of celebration, you may just find lamentation. Dropping your happy time ten down to a weeping one, here are The Real Horrors of Halloween!

AK-47 Trick

On Halloween night in 2008, Quentin Patrick of Sumter, south Carolina, heard a knock on his door. Rather than reaching for a bowl of candy, the paranoid crack dealer grabbed his fully automatic Kalashnikov and fired 30 rounds through the door. Convinced it was masked rival gang members, he let rip his AK-47 hoping to mow down his foes in a hail of bullets. However, on the other side of the door was 12-year-old trick-or-treater T. J. Darrisaw, along with his younger brother and father.  T. J was hit  11 times, killing the young man as he celebrated Halloween. That poor young boy had gone out looking for candy and ended up in a casket.

Patrick was sentenced to 30 years for shooting dead the young trick or treater, amongst other crimes such as drug dealing and illegal possession of a gun.

Source: Dailymail

Halloween Slasher

An idyllic little town in Napa County, California, was rocked by a double murder that still haunts the residence. Doors are now bolted shut and people even sold their homes after Eric Copple went all Michael Myers on Halloween night 2004.

Lauren Meanza and her housemates Adriane Insogna and Leslie Ann Mazzara were at home on Halloween night. They had spent the evening giving out candy to trick-or-treaters and had all retired to bed before 11pm.

At around 2pm, Lauren awoke to strange noises. As she crept to the hallway to investigate, she heard a blood-curdling scream from upstairs. Suddenly there were heavy footfalls on the stairs, thundering down towards her. Realizing something was horribly wrong, she quickly ran out of the house and hid in the backyard. Whoever was in in their home was now climbing out of the basement window, and Lauren could hear them running off into the night.

She bravely re-entered the house to find both of her housemates in pools of blood. Leslie was face down in a pool of blood on the floor near the front door, she was dead. Lauren found Adraine crouched behind the bed, with multiple stab wounds. Lauren called the police and emergency services, but it was too late for Adraine, who died shortly before they arrived.

A year later, and police were still no closer to solving who had murder the two young woman. They went public with information on cigarette buts they had found at the scene, and also revealed that they had DNA evidence from those buts. It was a real punt in the dark, but it worked. Just days after going public with the evidence, Eric Copple, the husband of Adriane’s friend, turned himself in.

Upon hearing the police announcement, Eric grew nervous that the police would soon be on to him, and so he confessed to his family. They convinced Eric to hand himself in and he arrived at the station with his family by his side. Eric Copple was charged with double murder and pleaded guilty to both charges. He never gave any explanation to why he murdered them, and was sentenced to life imprisonment.

Disturbingly, his wife confirmed that her and Eric had attended the funeral of Adriane Insogna just weeks after her murder. She had no idea that the killer had been there all the time, holding her hand throughout the entire service.

Source: Swordandscale, People

Halloween Decoration is a REAL Body

Have you ever seen a Halloween decoration so life like that at first glance it looked real? Well the folks of Frederica, Delaware dismissed an actual suicide victim as nothing more than an elaborate Halloween decoration. So accustomed to finding gruesome things around Halloween, that the public ignored the body of a 42-year-old woman who had hung herself from a tree. Her lifeless body remained swinging from the tree all morning, 15 feet above the ground, directly in front of a busy road.

Neighbours had first spotted the body early in the morning, around 7:30am, but assumed it to be nothing more than a Halloween prank. It was not until around 11 that same morning that authorities arrived to discover its grim reality.

Source: Nbcnews, Snopes

Accidental Hangings!

A big part of Halloween is welcoming trick-or-treaters to your home. And whilst a few years ago, a few grinning pumpkins were enough to scare the kids. These days, people have become so competitive with their astonishing displays of horror, that the candy grabbing now plays second fiddle to the shock value of horrifying scenes.

One classic Halloween display is the fake hang. The “Victim” would wear a harness that supports his body weight, and a fake noose is put around their necks. This allows for the “hung” victim to spring to life and scare the ever-loving bejebus out of folks. However, this does not always go as planned!

In 1990, a haunted hayride turned into a real-life horror show when Brian Jewell, a 17 year-old performer for the show, accidentally hung himself whilst strung up for the performance. The stunt had gone fine on other shows, but that Saturday night, Brain got into difficulty. The tractor driver, with 40 passengers in tow, became concerned as Jewell failed to give a speech he normally made as the wagon passed. Somehow, poor Brain had really hung himself.

Sadly, Brian is not the only person to come fowl of this nasty trick. At least three other cases have been reported

Source: Snopes

The Real Candyman

In 1974, on rainy Halloween night, the town of Deer Park, Texas, was shocked by a terrible crime that would forever taint the night of All Hallows Eve.

Father of two, Ronald O’Bryan, had racked up a considerable amount of dept, and running up to Halloween, he plotted a terrible scheme that would claim the life of his own son. Any normal person would have considered taking out a loan or maybe even filing for bankruptcy over such a huge dept, but not O’Bryan. This crazy criminal decided to go all Agatha Christie and plotted an outrageous poisoning to claim insurance on his two children, his 8-year-old son Timothy and 5-year-old daughter Elizabeth, both of whom he had recently bought new polices for.

The plan was to poison several neighbourhood children, his own included, and blame it on candy that they kids had picked up whilst trick-or-treating. We have all heard terrible urban myths of razor blades in candy, and poisoned treats. In 1974, O’Bryan planned to make it a reality. He filled several Pixy Stix candy with cyanide, re-wrapped the candy and stapling the packs shut. On that rainy night, he hid the Stix up his sleeve and took his kids and three other children out Trick and Treating. At some point during the night, he slipped the poisoned treats into their bags.  

Returning home, O’Bryan prompted Timothy to eat his before bed. Despite his sons protest that the sweets tasted bitter, he forced his son to finish the Pixy Stix and within half an hour, the young boy was dead. The hospital realised that the Timothy had been poisoned and the police were called. O’Bryan’s story that the candy came from a house they trick-or-treated was heavily scrutinized, and the discovery of the fresh life-insurance polices sealed the murders fate.

The incredible part of this story is that none of the other children ate that deadly treat. One was found asleep holding the candy, apparently unable to get into the wrapped sweet, because of the staple O’Bryan used to reseal the Pixy Stix.

O’Bryan was convicted of murder by a jury in less than an hour, and he spent 10 years in prison before his execution by lethal ejection in 1984. During his years of incarceration, the other inmates had taken to calling on O’Bryan as “The Candy Man!”

The Halloween Killer

In 1973, 9 year-old, Lisa Ann French wanted to wear a butterfly costume to go trick-or-treating. But thinking it might be to cold and flimsy for the chilly October evening, her other convinced her to pick a hobo costume instead. After finishing dinner she kissed her parents good bye, and ran out of the house in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. It was the last time her mother and step-father would ever see the little girl again.

For four days after Lisa’s disappearance a search party of 1,500 volunteers had gathered. Police had knocked on every door and turned up nothing. The search ended when a farmer found Lisa in his field about four miles outside the city.  The child’s naked body was found inside a plastic garbage bag, tossed aside like a bag of garbage. She had been rapped and strangled.

Whilst the police had several suspects, it was not until March of 1974, that Gerald Turner, a close neighbour to Lily, was finally interviewed about the crime. The police found that Turner kept contradicting his own story, and further investigation matched hair and fibres from turners bed spread with those found on Lily’s body. Turner eventually admitted to rapping the young girl, but claimed she died of shock.

Turner was sentenced to only 38 and a half years in prison for second degree murder, sexual perversion, enticing a child for immoral purposes, and indecent behaviour with a child. Shockingly, after only serving 17 years of his sentence, he was paroled in 1992.

Turner did eventually return to prison, after several parole violations. In his possession, he was found to have a letter he had written to the little girl he had brutally killed one cold Halloween night in 1973.

Dear Lisa

 

I doubt that I could ever fully realize the terror you experienced  at my hands.

 

For that night of the children to have started out so joyous for

you only to end so tragically will haunt me forever.

 

I can still see you standing in the doorway with that felt hat beaming at having recognized me. . . . Then I see the delight in your eyes turn to fear as I close the door behind you. . . .

 

The rest of my life I will have to live with what I did to you. On that night I became a monster. . . . I do swear to you on forfeiture of my life I will never harm another child.

Source: Swordandscale

“Morti” The Mortician