A better origin story for the urban legend about Halloween sweets containing drugs than any other.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

An hour later, Joseph Scott’s father left their home in Railroad Street to fetch a doctor for his 14-year-old son who was suddenly violently ill. By the time he returned, it was too late.

“The police were horrified to discover that there were [so many] sweets in circulation,” says Dr Lauren Padgett, assistant curator of collections at Bradford District Museums and Galleries.

What Neal didn’t know was that on the day he sent his colleague to collect the daft, druggist Charles Hodgson was sick and had simply told his untrained apprentice William Goddard where to find it.

“Goddard went to a barrel he assumed contained plaster of Paris and collected 12lbs of it, gave it to the young lad who took it back to the confectioner’s, where another employee began to make the lozenges and mixed it in,” says Dr Padgett.

Artist John Leech perhaps became as well-known for his drawing in Punch magazine of a skeleton pounding sugar in a sweet shop as he was for illustrating the first edition of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.

Neal, Goddard and Hodgson were all arrested for manslaughter and the inquest concluded the latter was guilty, though it conceded the “arsenic had been sold accidentally and mixed under the supposition that it was daft”.

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