The Satanic Panic: Inside The 1980s Hysteria Over All Things Demonic
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In 1983, police in Manhattan Beach, California, sent an alarming letter to parents whose children attended McMartin Preschool. A mother of a two-year-old at the school had told the authorities that her son had been sexually abused, and the police were looking for additional victims or possible witnesses. But that wasn’t all they were looking for.
The mother had told the police other stories as well — claiming that her son had also described seeing a “goat-man,” that he’d witnessed a “ritual-type atmosphere,” and that he had seen one of his teachers flying in the air.
Then, to the horror of parents, administrators, and the authorities, other children at McMartin began to recount similarly terrifying stories.
They described seeing teachers beat a horse to death with a baseball bat, squeeze a parakeet to death, and sacrifice a baby in a church. The children even claimed that they’d been forced to drink the baby’s blood. They described secret tunnels beneath their preschool and a game called “Lookout” in which some children would stand guard, while their teachers took turns molesting their classmates.
However, these shocking accounts quickly came under scrutiny. It later came out that the mother who had raised the original complaint suffered from paranoid schizophrenia and that the children had been asked leading questions.
Content retrieved from: https://allthatsinteresting.com/history-uncovered/satanic-panic.
