You want some scares this week? I'm going to switch things up a bit with an urban legend.
What's true? What's false? I will leave that up for you to decide.
With Halloween right around the corner (41 days and counting), what better way to start off the spooky season with a warning about The Candy Lady? Who is the Candy Lady? Have you heard of her before?
According to urbanlegendsonline.com, around the turn of the 20th century, children started going missing in a small rural county in Texas. People blamed it on The Candy Lady, a woman who supposedly lured children to her home with candy, then they were never heard from again.
Children in the area told stories of how they would wake in the morning to find candy sitting on their window sills. Fearing that their parents might try to stop the person, or thing, leaving the candy, they didn’t tell any adults.
After a child had received the candy for a while they would start to find notes on the wrappers, many times asking the children to come and play. The notes were signed “The Candy Lady.”
Over the span of about a decade, a handful of kids went missing. As some children got a little older they started to confess that they had eaten candy left on their window sills from a “Candy Lady.”
According to the story, other strange things happened around this area that spooked the residents. A farmer found the rotten teeth of a child in a candy wrapper at the edge of one of his fields. A police deputy started investigating the disappearance of the children and a few weeks later they found his dead body in a ditch. His eyes were stabbed with a fork and his pockets were filled with candy. Yikes!!!
To this day, any time a kid goes missing, all the locals say The Candy Lady got them. Children believe that she takes them somewhere and pulls out their teeth or stabs them with a fork. I mean....wow! That's really harsh!!! And what's with the forks???
According to the article on legendofthecandylady.wordpress.com, it claims the Candy Lady's name was Clara Crane and she lived around the time of the turn of the 20th century. She was married to an older man and they had one child. Her daughter, Marcella, was killed in an accident and Clara blamed her husband. She murdered him with poisoned caramels.
She was sent to the North Texas Lunatic Asylum where she stayed for a few years until she was released because of overcrowding.
A few years after that kids started disappearing in the area she grew up in, and that’s when the Candy Lady legend begins.
In my research, I could not find any information on an actual Clara Crane from Texas, no information found about a child dying and murdering the husband. But, of course, most urban legends have some fact they are based on. So perhaps there was a Clara Crane and the information is just not out there for me to find.
Is it Clara Crane? Does she go after other children because she lost hers? If Clara really existed, I believe it could be possible. Is this an urban legend or is there really a lady trying to take kids through the bribe of candy? I guess we will never truly know. I do highly suggest if your kids find candy on their windowsill, make sure they tell Clara Crane "no thank you!" and keep them safe. I'm willing to say no to the candy...how about you?
-- Audre
Clara Crane? "The Candy Lady"
urbanlegendladies.tumblr.com
Sources:
legendofthecandylady.wordpress.com
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