Many thousands of children around the state will be thinking of one thing tonight: candy.
How many children? By a census estimate, it’s about 143,567 to be exact. That’s the number of children estimated at ages 5 to 14 last year (of course, the number of likely Halloween candy hunters is higher).
For a spooky Halloween experiment of our own, we looked at those rough census estimates by town, to get a sense of where those prime Halloween-aged children make up the largest share of the population.
News flash to the people of Waterboro: you may need more candy.
In the York County town, about 17 percent of the residents carry de-facto Halloween candy hunting licenses.
Each county has its own likely hub for tricks and treats, though of course there’s a high degree of local knowledge that goes into selecting prime candy-grabbing grounds.
By our population estimates alone, below are the communities in each county around which Halloween activity is likely to be high (we eliminated from our calculations towns where population estimates were less reliable).