Of all the Halloween horror stories, Kenneth Daigle Jr. could have the most frightening. The affable 29-year-old Lewiston bar manager was severely burned during a Halloween party last year when his homemade glue-and-cotton-ball sheep costume was set alight by a cigarette.

While constructing his costume, Daigle failed to realize his choice of glue was highly flammable. It was a simple oversight, but one that cost him $100,000 and months of painful recovery. He didn’t return to work full-time until this July. “It felt like forever,” Daigle told the Sun Journal.

Halloween, which is celebrated today, is meant to be fun. Adults leap to dress as nightmarish creatures – or farm animals, like Daigle – as enthusiastically as children. Yet the haste to celebrate, both for adults and children, must be tempered with an eye for safety and precaution. Dangers are prevalent. Not just the stereotypical dangers, either.

Though gory tales of poisoned or sabotaged candy, for example, are scary Halloween staples, lack of simple precaution pose greater dangers on this bewitching holiday. In Delaware, a university professor has combed newspaper clippings dating to 1958 for incidents of Halloween madness like candy tampering and found nothing.

“You can’t prove that something has never happened,” Joel Best, sociology professor at the University of Delaware, told the Delaware News Journal last week. “I think the fact that you can’t find any stories about this suggests it doesn’t happen.”

Real data assessing Halloween-related incidents, however, is scarier than any costume.

Around Halloween, when streets are filled with trick-or-treaters, the chances of a pedestrian death from an automobile increases four-and-a-half times, according to statistics from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and analyzed by the University of Michigan.

More unsettling is the consistency, as NHTSA data also shows the increased risk of a car-pedestrian accident around Halloween has remained unchanged since 1975, according to a separate study by the National Center for Injury Prevention.

Dozens of organizations have suggestions for Halloween safety. Checking your holiday activities or costumes against a simple safety checklist – such as those available from the Red Cross or the National Safety Council or the Lewiston Police Department – should only take a few minutes.

Though some may argue the numbers will indeed spike purely because more pedestrians roam the streets on Halloween, such thinking is reckless compared to advocating for a mere ounce of prevention before heading out. A few seconds to consider safety on this holiday is absolutely time well-spent.