5 Weirdly Common Ways People Get Injured On Halloween

These incidents are so common that lawyers have turned it into an industry. To quote one firm's website, "If your child was injured when carving a pumpkin at school without adequate supervision, or if you were hurt by another person who was carving a pumpkin and wielded the knife foolishly, then contact a lawyer to seek compensation from your offender." The "offender" in this case would be whoever wielded the blade or gave your kid the pumpkin in the first place, which might actually be you. So yeah, maybe do try just painting a face on there.

And then there are the fire hazards that come with combining costumes with open flames. One poor New Jersey seven-year-old suffered second-degree burns on his chest and neck after his costume brushed against a spooky candle outside. Or take the daughter of British media figure Claudia Winkleman. Eight-year-old Matilda was dressed as a witch, and her supermarket costume came with a cape, the most dangerous of all costume doodads. She wound up in the hospital for surgery after her cape caught fire, lit by a spark from a jack-o-lantern -- more proof that all pumpkins are out to kill you.

While nearly all clothes are flammable to some degree, normal outfits aren't constantly yearning to be aflame. Things get more risky with costumes, especially ones made out of found objects. One guy in Maine thought it would be a smart idea to construct a sheep costume out of cotton balls. All he did was brush up against somebody smoking a cigarette, and the costume predictably ignited. If these all sound like rare freak accidents, I should note that personal injury attorneys also advertise specifically for this kind of thing. Those damned candles at your Halloween party are a bankruptcy waiting to happen!

Take the horrifying case of 40-year-old Kimberley Kitrinos, who was struck by a drunk driver outside a Connecticut haunted house. The driver rode off, thinking the thunk was just a brick thrown by a Halloween prankster. Then everyone visiting the house ignored her, thinking she was part of the show, even as she reached up and tried to move -- she died before help arrived.

Just in general, alcohol can be dangerous for everyone in haunted houses, as Louisville performers discovered one year when a drunk customer started battering them all, and then fought policemen when they were called in. Yeah, the crew at haunted houses are often sketchy at best, but nobody deserves to be punched in the face where they work.

And no Halloween roundup is complete without a creepy clown story, so sit down and listen to what some sick fucks did outside a Chicago haunted house. A mother was arriving with her four children, and while they were still in the parking lot, having yet to buy a ticket, the clowns (who didn't even work there) attacked the family with vibrating sex toys. As one clown prodded the teen daughter with the toys, the other thrust at her a teddy bear with a vibrator attached, simulating sex acts on the bear. I'm pretty sure that last part isn't even a haunted house routine, just a sex crime -- though given that these were clowns, that might go without saying.

But, you ask, do such incidents happen enough that law firms specifically remind people they can sue for this? You bet they do! "When negligence is involved, injury may be unavoidable," they helpfully warn. "If this is the case, then you should hire a personal injury attorney." Halloween is Christmas for lawyers.

Well, you've got to realize that these wagons probably aren't going to be slow horse-drawn carriages most of the time, but rather the bed of a truck. There may be a couple dozen people squeezed in there, all without seat belts, which isn't exactly legal under most circumstances, but is specifically allowed in the case of a hayride. It's all fun right until someone falls off or until the whole vehicle flips over. Like in Maine, when a Jeep's brakes failed, sending it off a hill. The tractor-trailer it was towing as part of a hayride toppled, 22 people were injured, and one kid died. The hayride was part of a local attraction called Pumpkin Land.

In Mississippi, a pickup truck plowed into a trailer packed with riders. Three people died -- a mother and her two children, aged eight and two. To ferry all the survivors to the hospital for treatment, it took three helicopters, and while everyone involved had signed up to ride unusual vehicles that night, at no point during any hayride should it be necessary to fly in a helicopter. And then there was the ride in Illinois that ended with one hay rack falling over, sending a dad, a three-year-old, and of course a grandma to the hospital. This happened at Bengtson's Pumpkin Farm, because pumpkin patches are where Satan lays his eggs.

This kind of mishap is apparently such a thriving area of litigation that there is a personal injury lawyer who believes he was put on this planet to be the Clarence Darrow of hayride accidents. An attorney with the improbable name of Prosper Shaked bills himself as "The Miami-Dade Hayride + Tractor Ride Accident Lawyer." Everyone needs to find their niche, and I wish Prosper Shaked, Esq. all the best.

Too many people have attempted to hang themselves as part of a Halloween display or prank and had it go wrong in exactly the way you'd think it would. A 17-year-old girl was working at a St Louis haunted house that featured a noose hanging over a bathtub, and as we've established, nothing that's in a haunted house by design is really scary. So she kicked it up a notch and stuck her head in the noose. Then she slipped off the tub and lost consciousness. She was lucky a co-worker making the rounds spotted her before it was too late.

And in case you're wondering, this certainly isn't a phenomenon confined to the U.S. A 25-year-old man in the UK went to a club one Saturday night right before Halloween and saw a prop noose hanging low near the ground. It was positioned so people could take photos with it, claimed the club owner, and they'd done this several years running without anything going wrong. But then this guy went and stuck his head through, and then before he knew it, he was hanging himself. He wound up in the hospital in critical condition.

The danger isn't so much the nooses; it's that where you find a noose, you will find some young reveler who just can't resist sticking their head in there. In the end, nothing is scarier than human nature.

The novel Chris co-wrote, Deck Z: The Titanic is an absolute ray of sunshine he hopes you'll check out.

For more, check out 5 Bizarre Ways The World Can Kill You Without Warning - Spit Take Theater:

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