Claim
Reporting
On October 23 2019, an Imgur screenshot purportedly showed a post to Reddit’s r/okc, containing a “friendly reminder that your children must have a resident’s lanyard to Trick or Treat in Nichols Hills”:
Originally posted one day earlier to r/okc, the screenshot initially spread to Imgur with the title “Longer tables, not higher fences.” On r/okc, the original post was undeleted, but its content was removed:
Just a friendly reminder that your children must have a resident’s lanyard to Trick or Treat in Nichols Hills. from okc
After it became popular, a screenshot of the post made its way back to r/okc:
A Reddit content retrieval tool preserved both the name of the original poster (u/Real_Blankmen, who previously posted threads about living in the United Kingdom) and the content of the viral post:
If you haven’t received your lanyards yet then you don’t live in Nichols Hills proper and your kids won’t be given treats. Thanks!
Edit: Check us out at r/nicholshills
In a second layer of putative humor, the subreddit r/NicholsHills was set to private, leading to a screen indicating that users had to be invited. Incidentally, the same user shared a post to r/okc in 2018 claiming that the r/NicholsHills subreddit was created to “avoid clogging” Reddit’s front page:
We’ve created a Nichols Hills’ subreddit to avoid clogging the front page here with posts that only pertain to the NH community. from okc
Rumors about trick-or-treat lanyards in Nichols Hills spread so far so fast that police advised WFAA that the claim was a hoax:
To find out whether this claim is true, we talked to Chief Steven Cox from the Nichols Hills Police Department.
Chief Cox said the viral post is false. Nichols Hills does not limit trick-or-treating to residents of the city. “Resident lanyards” aren’t real.
“If there’s one kid that doesn’t get to trick-or-treat because their parents saw that post and believed it, that’s disgusting,” Chief Cox said.
Chief Cox said he’s taken a few calls about the viral post.
“Just the thought of someone trying to ruin trick-or-treating for kids is wrong,” Chief Cox said.
After the “friendly reminder that your children must have a resident’s lanyard to Trick or Treat in Nichols Hills” screenshot went viral on Imgur, it spread over to Facebook and other sites. However, police in Nichols Hills flatly said that the claim was false, and likely created to troll and agitate readers and residents.
