Satanic Panic
A Modern Myth
Rosie Waterhouse
Independently published (Amazon) 2023
Pb, 190pp, £6.99, ISBN 9798870691497
The longest and most expensive criminal trial in American legal history was not some sensational prosecution for murder. It was a mostly-forgotten 1980s case from California that lasted for seven years, cost $15m, secured zero convictions – and has a great deal to teach forteans about the topics that interest us. Indeed, looking back from the vantage point of 40 years, it’s possible to argue that the McMartin Preschool trial is foundational to any attempt to explore the intersections between claims and reality, belief and evidence.
McMartin was Ground Zero for the great “Satanic Panic” of the 1980s and early 1990s – a whole series of cases that occurred across the English-speaking world, from the US to the UK, Canada to New Zealand. Each involved allegations of the ritual abuse of children, generally for the apparent purpose of harnessing occult power. Most involved claims of the most baroque and implausible kind. Judy Johnson, one of the mothers involved in the McMartin case, claimed that Peggy Buckey, the woman who had founded the daycare centre, had forced her young son to watch a baby being beheaded as a sacrifice, and that he was then forced to drink its blood. There were stories of extensive tunnel systems excavated under the school, filled with ritual paraphernalia and the remains of hundreds of animal sacrifices; in other cases, children who spoke to social workers and child protection activists told of seeing huge tanks containing live sharks, or large-scale orgies held in the open air on beaches in the depths of a West Wales winter.
What makes these cases truly frightening, though, was the way that allegations, made without any shred of plausible evidence, destroyed dozens of families and ruined hundreds of lives. The police, for the most part, remained sceptical – they were never able to findand child protection people, on the other hand – many of them, it turned out, Evangelical Christians who fervently believed in the existence of real evil and a real Satan – rallied behind the slogan “Believe the Children”, and argued that the child witnesses were too young and too innocent to make these stories up.
