My Neighbor Swears It's True... Every Halloween

He's lived on this street forever. He claims he saw it with his own eyes.

Somebody put razor blades in the apples. Poltergeist used real skeletons. Two polite kids with black eyes will ask to use your phone. And that doll in the glass case? Her head was turned the other way last year.

My Neighbor Swears It's True... Every Halloween takes place over one Halloween night on the neighbor's porch, from the first trick-or-treater at a quarter to six to the last porch light going dark at midnight, checking each story he tells along the way as far as the paper trail goes. You'll find:

• The eighteenth-century surveyor who invented "Samhain, Lord of the Dead," and whether the druids really started Halloween

• Why shelters once hid their black cats every October, and how Salem really executed its witches (it wasn't fire)

• The Canadian newspapers that printed "trick or treat" first, and the decades of Halloween vandalism that candy was meant to buy off

• The newspaper story that warned about razor blades in apples before a single confirmed case existed, the dentist and housewife who really did hand out something nasty years earlier, and the laws that now tell some people to keep their porch lights off

• Houdini's death on Halloween, his secret code, and the last séance on a Hollywood rooftop

• The radio broadcast that supposedly panicked America, and the one in Ecuador that really did cause a riot

• The train robber whose body spent sixty-five years on display before a TV crew found him hanging in a funhouse

• The real skeletons in Poltergeist and the two-dollar Captain Kirk mask that became Michael Myers

• The satanic panic that convinced grown-ups a cult was waiting on ordinary porches

• The campus massacre a psychic supposedly predicted on a talk show nobody can find, and the black-eyed children who only need to use your phone

• The doll in the glass case, the Watcher's anonymous letters to a New Jersey family, and the New York house a court declared haunted "as a matter of law"

Creepy, funny and properly sourced, it's book seven in the It's True series, and the perfect treat for anyone who still checks the candy wrappers.