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You might be the one doling out treats on Halloween, but you may also end up on the receiving end of any number of mischievous tricks. What’s wrong with harmless Halloween hijinks, you ask? After all, no one wants to be the buzz kill who takes the “trick” out of “trick-or-treat.” Unfortunately for your insurance premiums and pretty much the entire insurance industry, Halloween tomfoolery has resulted in a bevy of varied insurance claims on more than one occasion.
The ghoulish holiday elicits shrieks of terror from insurance adjusters for this very reason. No ghost, goblin, or demon could scare notoriously miserly insurance companies more than the haunting prospect of having to pay out a claim. Eroding profit margins?! Now THAT is terrifying stuff. When you read the list we’ve compiled of the ten wackiest Halloween insurance claims, you just might understand why insurers, and possibly you, have more to fear on the 31st than ghouls and poltergeists.
Apparently, nothing is as thrilling to haunted house goers and Halloween hay riders as a good, old-fashioned staged hanging of a real human being. We’ll overlook this unsettling thirst for the macabre for one moment to discuss an incident in which a haunted hayride employee attempted such a stunt. In theory, the man was supposed to be supported by a harness that only gave the illusion that he had hanged himself with a noose. Something didn’t quite go to plan, and the guy ended up really hanging himself. Thankfully, the haunted hayride company has a notoriously generous benefits package, so the man had a life insurance policy. His death was indeed accidental, so the life insurer had to pay up. . .all because of a Halloween prank gone awry.
You can’t take candy from strangers even on Halloween?! WHAT?! We were disappointed, too, but it’s best to get your sugar fix elsewhere unless you also have a hankering for some cyanide with your treats. Consider this: in a reckless fit of gluttony, your kids go to the creepy guy’s house down the street that always smells like foot. . .even from the street. He surprises them with some homemade Pixie Stix that he has removed from the original packaging and lovingly repackaged in Saran Wrap for that personal touch. You see your kid downing the suspicious concoction and know instantly from your training in the crime lab that it contains cyanide. You rush junior to the hospital to get his stomach pumped. He pulls through, but you’re stuck with a pile of health insurance claims.
You get a knock on your door on Halloween night, open it, and, to your chagrin, there stands a fully grown man in goggles and a slicker wielding a chainsaw in your face. Aghast at how brazen burglars have become these days, you kick the crap out of him. You do have a family to defend. As it turns out, the hapless chainsaw wielder was on his way to a Halloween party and, because of his dyslexia, got the wrong address. In addition to dealing with the guilt of having beaten down a dyslexic innocent man, you now also have to make a homeowner’s insurance liability claim to cover chainsaw man’s medical bills. Moral of the story: when someone shows up at your house wielding a chainsaw, always ask, “Um, hi, do you have the right address?” before beating the life out of him or her.
A little boy decides to be a ninja for Halloween, and it just so happens his father is an avid collector of antique samurai swords. Oddly obsessed with realism for his age, the youngster decides his ninja costume would be more believable if he borrowed one of Dad’s swords for his weapon. He quickly gets into a mêlée over a king-size Snickers bar with some punk ninjas from down the street. The swords are drawn, and, needless to say, the boy with the “authentic” costume handily wins the fight. Thankfully, no heads rolled down the street that night, but the ninjas with the ghetto plastic swords did sustain injuries and had to be taken to the E.R., resulting in a slew of health insurance claims.
The haunted Halloween cornfield maze is always a popular destination for fright-seekers. In this scenario, the owner of the maze decides to light the visitors’ path with torches to add character to his haunted labyrinth. A torch falls over, and, minutes later, the entire maze is ablaze. The visitors are stuck in the maze, which, by definition, is rather vexing to try to escape from. Everyone eventually emerges covered in burns that require immediate medical attention. The unfortunate maze-goers then inundate their health insurers with claims.
Your neighborhood adolescent hooligans concoct a Halloween scheme whereby they plan to drive around in their mom’s minivan doing drive-by eggings on other vehicles. You hear a kerfuffle outside your house and what sounds like a minivan’s best attempt to peel out. You step outside just in time to hear a distant angry teenage voice screaming, “Jimmy, you freaking moron, those eggs were HARD-BOILED?!” You look at your car, and the hard-boiled egging has cracked your windshield. As luck would have it, you have glass coverage, but you have to file an auto insurance claim. You always knew those kids were bad eggs.
Every neighborhood has at least one—the stingy old curmudgeon who shuts his lights off, disables the doorbell, and refuses to pass out candy every year on Halloween. Tired of being repeatedly slighted, the local kids decide to band together and vandalize his house. The vigilantes egg his windows, TP his trees and front lawn, and generally wreak havoc on his property in the name of justice. He files a home insurance claim to cover the repairs and decides to start buying candy in bulk to hand out by the fistful come next year.
A man is driving in a residential area on Halloween, looking at the street signs to try to determine where he is. He needs Maple Street, but every street sign in the neighborhood appears to be covered by a suspiciously unofficial-looking “Elm Street” sign. Discombobulated, the man runs off the road and crashes his vehicle into a homeowner’s yard. Ensuing damages result in both a home insurance claim and an auto insurance claim. Now, to an insurer, that is a nightmare on Elm Street.
In your neighborhood, smashing pumpkins is not just a once-defunct-but-oh-wait-now-they’re-back-together-again-big-surprise band; it’s a favorite Halloween pastime of the brats in the area. To thwart their shenanigans, you’ve decided to put your jack o’ lanterns inside the house and spare them from that violent end. Everything’s just dandy until one of your pumpkin candles rages out of control and catches the drapes on fire. Before you know it, you have a house fire and a hefty homeowner’s insurance claim on your hands.
You get a passel of trick-or-treaters at your door, and you notice that one child is wearing a Hillary Clinton costume, while another has donned a Barack Obama costume. You accidentally drop a candy bar between child-Hillary and child-Barack, and the two have an all-out brawl over it. Though only eight, they seemed precociously politically aware as Hillary yelled things at Barack like, “This was always supposed to be mine. I had it. I was here first. You swoop in from out of nowhere and just take this nomination, er, I mean Three Musketeers from me?!” Naturally, Hillary wins the fight, but both children fall off your porch and sustain injuries. Their parents sue you, and you’re forced to file a home insurance claim to activate your liability coverage.
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