“Be my victim.” With these words, an icon of horror was born in 1992’s Candyman. The vengeful spirit of a Black artist lynched for having an illicit affair with a white woman, the titular killer begins terrorizing Helen Lyle, a graduate student researching the Candyman legend, which she’s sure is a myth.

However, he quickly proves to be all too real. And when he’s summoned after his name is said into a mirror, he kills his victims with his rusty hook-hand.
 

Universal/MGMActor Tony Todd as Candyman in the 1992 film.

Throughout the course of the movie, Lyle uncovers the true story of Candyman while encountering the more terrifying everyday realities of poverty, police indifference, and drugs that plagued the lives of Black Chicagoans and had been for decades.

Since his film debut, Candyman has become a real-life urban legend. The character’s chilling demeanor and tragic backstory have resonated with generations of horror fans, leaving a lasting legacy that keeps viewers asking: “Is Candyman real?”

From a history of racial terror in America to one Chicago woman’s disturbing murder, the true story of Candyman is even more tragic and frightening than the movie itself.

Why Ruthie Mae McCoy’s Murder Is Part Of The True Story Of “Candyman”

David WilsonABLA Homes (made up of the Jane Addams Homes, Robert Brooks Homes, Loomis Courts and Grace Abbott Homes) in Chicago’s South Side, where Ruthie May McCoy and 17,000 others lived.

Though the events of Candyman may seem like they could never happen in real life, one story suggests otherwise: the tragic murder of Ruthie Mae McCoy, a lonely, mentally ill resident of the ABLA homes on Chicago’s South Side.

On the night of April 22, 1987, a terrified Ruthie called 911 to request help from the police. She told the dispatcher that someone in the apartment next door was trying to come through her bathroom mirror. “They throwed the cabinet down,” she said, confusing the dispatcher, who thought she must be crazy.

What the dispatcher didn’t know is that McCoy was right. Narrow passages between apartments allowed maintenance workers easy access, but they also became a popular way for burglars to break in by pushing the bathroom cabinet out of the wall.

Although a neighbor reported gunshots coming from McCoy’s apartment, police chose not to break down the door due to the risk of being sued by residents had they done so. When a building superintendent finally drilled the lock two days later, he discovered McCoy’s body face-down on the floor, shot four times.

History Uncovered Podcast
Episode 7: The Real-Life Stories Behind ‘Candyman’
In 1987, Ruthie Mae McCoy was found murdered inside her Chicago apartment after telling police that someone was trying to break in through her bathroom mirror — and with that, the story of Candyman was born.

The movie contains several elements of this sad tale. Candyman’s first confirmed victim is Ruthie Jean, a Cabrini-Green resident murdered by someone who came through her bathroom mirror. Like Ruthie McCoy, neighbors, including the coincidentally-named Ann Marie McCoy, saw Ruthie Jean as “crazy.”

And like Ruthie McCoy, Ruthie Jean called the police, only to die alone and without help.

No one is quite sure how the details of McCoy’s murder ended up in the movie. It’s possible that director Bernard Rose learned of McCoy’s murder after deciding to shoot his movie in Chicago. It’s also been suggested that John Malkovich had an interest in making a movie about the story, and shared the details with Rose. Either way, the case became part of the true story behind Candyman.

And what’s also known for certain is that McCoy’s death was far from unusual in Chicago’s public housing.

Poverty And Crime In Chicago’s Cabrini-Green Homes

Ralf-Finn Hestoft / Getty ImagesA policewoman searches the jacket of a teenage Black boy for drugs and weapons in the graffiti-covered Cabrini Green Housing Project.

The movie takes place and was partially filmed at the Cabrini–Green housing project on Chicago’s Near North Side. Cabrini-Green, like the ABLA homes where Ruth McCoy lived and died, was built to house thousands of Black Americans who came to Chicago for work and to escape the terror of the Jim Crow South, largely during the Great Migration.

The modern apartments featured gas stoves, indoor plumbing and bathrooms, hot water, and climate control to offer comfort to residents through the brutal cold of Lake Michigan winters. This early promise held out, and the homes appeared in television shows like Good Times as a model of a decent standard of living.

But racism fueled neglect from the Chicago Housing Authority, which transformed Cabrini-Green into a nightmare. By the 1990s, in full view of Sears Tower, 15,000 people, almost all African American, lived in dilapidated buildings rife with crime resulting from poverty and the drug trade.
 

Library of CongressResidents Elma, Tasha Betty, and Steve in their apartment in the ABLA Homes, 1996.

Around the time Candyman premiered in 1992, a report revealed that only nine percent of Cabrini residents had access to paying jobs. The rest relied on paltry assistance grants, and many turned to crime in order to survive.

Particularly telling are some of the words Ruth McCoy spoke to the police dispatcher: “The elevator’s working.” Elevators, lights, and utilities were so often out of order that, when they did function, it was worth mentioning.

By the time the film crew arrived to shoot the disturbing interior of the Candyman’s lair, they didn’t have to do much to make it convincing. Thirty years of neglect had already done their work for them.

Similarly, America’s troubling trend of violence against Black men, and particularly those who formed relationships with white women, set the stage for another crucial plot point in Candyman: the tragic villain’s origin story.

Is Candyman Real? True Accounts Of Interracial Relationships Inciting Violence

Wikimedia CommonsFormer champion boxer Jack Johnson and his wife Etta Duryea. Their 1911 marriage sparked violent opposition at the time, and a second marriage to another white woman resulted in Johnson being jailed for years.

In the film, the talented Black artist Daniel Robitaille fell in love with and impregnated a white woman whose portrait he was painting back in 1890. Upon discovery, her father hires a gang to beat him, saw off his hand and replace it with a hook. They then covered him in honey and let bees sting him to death. And in death, he became Candyman.

Helen Lyle is implied to be the reincarnation of Candyman’s white lover. This aspect of the story is especially terrifying because the risk to interracial couples — and to Black men in particular — was all too real throughout the history of the United States.

The timing is an important detail. By the late 19th century, white mobs took their anger out on their Black neighbors, with lynchings growing common as the years passed.

In 1880, for example, lynch mobs murdered 40 African Americans. By 1890, the year cited in the movie as the start of the Candyman legend, that number had more than doubled to 85—and those were only the recorded killings. In fact, widespread violence was so popular that mobs even organized “lynching bees,” a grotesque, murderous counterpart to quilting bees or spelling bees.
 

Wikimedia CommonsVictims of a 1908 lynching in Kentucky. Bodies were often left in public for days, their murderers having no need to fear arrest by local law enforcement.

No one was spared from this brutality. Even the world-famous boxer Jack Johnson, upon marrying a white woman, was hounded by a white mob in Chicago in 1911. In 1924, Cook County’s only known lynching victim, 33-year old William Bell, was beaten to death because “The dead man was suspected of having attempted to attack one of two white girls, but neither girl could identify Bell as the assailant.”

The lynching described in Candyman remains so terrifying because it was a lived, daily reality for generations of African Americans, whose reflection can be seen in the terror experienced by the Candyman.

In fact, it wasn’t until the 1967 Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia that interracial couples gained legal recognition for their partnerships, by which time thousands of attacks and murders had been committed against African Americans all over the country. In February 2020, the House of Representatives passed a bill making lynching a federal crime.

Beyond the real terrors of the Black experience in the United States, Candyman also expertly draws on myths, stories, and urban legends to create a new horror icon with deep roots in familiar tales.

Bloody Mary, Clive Barker, And The Legends Behind “Candyman”

Universal and MGMTony Todd was reportedly paid $1,000 for every sting he received from the live bees used in the film. He was stung 23 times.

So who is Candyman?

The original Candyman was a character in British horror writer Clive Barker’s 1985 story “The Forbidden.” In this story, the titular character haunts a public housing tower in Barker’s native Liverpool.

Barker’s Candyman draws on urban legends like Bloody Mary, who’s said to appear after repeating her name several times in a mirror, or the Hookman, infamous for stories in which he attacks teenage lovers with his hook hand.

The Biblical story of Samson is another possible influence. In the Book of Judges, the Philistines rule Israel. Samson takes a Philistine wife, crossing racial lines, and notably slays a lion in whose belly bees produce honey. This influence can be seen in Candyman’s swarms of spectral swarms of bees and the references to sweetness throughout the film.

What sets Candyman apart from other horror icons is that, unlike Jason Voorhees or Leatherface, he only ever kills one person on-screen. He has much more in common with tragic avenging anti-heroes than he does with the monstrous image associated with him.

The Candyman Story On The Silver Screen

Candyman’s bloody sudden appearance jolts Helen Lyle to the realization that what she’s dealing with is horrifically real.

So was there an actual, real-life Candyman? Is there a legend in Chicago about the ghost of a vengeful artist wrongfully killed?

Well … no. The truth is that there is no single origin to the story of Candyman, except perhaps in the mind of Tony Todd. Todd worked out Candyman’s painful human backstory in rehearsals with Virginia Madsen.

In truth, the character draws on genuine historical violence, myths, and stories like those of McCoy and countless others to reveal the pain experienced by millions and the fears they inspire.

Todd made creative use of his knowledge of history and racial injustice to give life to Barker’s character. His improvisations impressed Rose so much that the original version he had written was scrapped, and the fateful, furious ghost we now know was born.

Whether or not Candyman drew on Ruthie Mae McCoy’s murder directly for inspiration, or whether it was simply a coincidental case of local research adding realism to the movie, is impossible to say. What is known is that her tragic death was one of many like it, caused by neglect and ignorance as much as aggression or criminality.

Perhaps he scariest thing about Candyman isn’t his potential for violence and terror, but his ability to force audiences to think about the people like McCoy who were being demonized in the Cabrini-Green Homes and the very real terror Black Americans have faced throughout history. In the end, the true story of Candyman is about much more than a hook-wielding monster.