Halloween flashlights ignite: Target pulls them from shelves after WalletPop inquiry

When you put a battery in a flashlight the flashlight shouldn't start burning. One my son brought home from a birthday party did.

It came from Target -- three for $1 in a package marketing them for Halloween. I dropped in a new Energizer battery, screwed on the top and the flashlight got warm right away. I shut off the flashlight and placed it on the kitchen table. A few minutes later a sizzling sound could be heard that we couldn't identify. The burning smell quickly led us to the flashlight, which was now smoking and melting from the heat. I grabbed an oven mitt, grabbed the flashlight and went out on the balcony and shoved it into a pot of dirt.

I'd have to say that after writing about dangerous products for more than a decade -- many cheap Chinese imports like this -- I hadn't had one go up on me. So I purchased another package of the flashlights and dropped batteries into two of them. One melted. The other was OK. Two out of three flashlights overheating isn't a good ratio in my unscientific test.

So I contacted the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, Target and the importer, Devrian Global Industries.