Satanic Panic: When America Feared the Daycare

Over dinner, gently prompted, your five-year-old starts describing things no child should know: tunnels under the daycare, robed adults, an animal killed in a back room. You are terrified. It will be years before anyone explains that the questions caused the answers.

The book that lit the match

The panic had a founding text. In 1980 a Canadian psychiatrist named Lawrence Pazder published "Michelle Remembers," co-written with his patient, and later wife, Michelle Smith, purporting to recover her buried memories of childhood torture by a satanic cult. The book was later thoroughly discredited, but it sold, it toured, and it handed therapists and prosecutors a template: that ordinary suburbs concealed organized devil-worshippers abusing children, and that the proof lay in memories the children did not yet know they had.

Through the 1980s that template spread through daycare centres across the United States. Terrified parents, earnest social workers and ambitious prosecutors formed a feedback loop, and the accusations grew baroque: secret tunnels, ritual sacrifice, crimes that left no physical trace precisely because, it was said, the cults were too clever to leave one.

The trial that proved nothing

The centrepiece was the McMartin Preschool case in Manhattan Beach, California, where members of the McMartin family, chiefly Ray Buckey and his mother Peggy McMartin Buckey, were accused of horrific ritual abuse beginning in 1983. The investigation leaned heavily on interviews in which therapists, notably Kee MacFarlane, questioned small children with leading techniques, puppets and relentless encouragement until the children produced the expected stories. The trial dragged on until 1990, became the longest and costliest criminal case in American history to that point, and ended without a single conviction.

It was not alone. Similar prosecutions in Kern County, in Austin, and elsewhere sent people to prison on the strength of coached testimony and recovered "memories," some of whom spent decades locked up before their convictions were overturned.

Why it collapsed

The mechanism is now well understood, which is its own kind of horror. Young children are strikingly suggestible; ask a leading question often enough and a compliant child will confabulate a detailed answer and come to believe it. Adults in recovered-memory therapy proved equally capable of generating vivid false memories under a confident therapist's guidance. And a community gripped by shared dread can sustain a belief no evidence supports, a folie a deux scaled up to a nation.

In 1992 the FBI agent Kenneth Lanning, who had every reason to find a real conspiracy, published a report concluding there was no evidence of the organized satanic ritual abuse the panic alleged. The tunnels beneath the daycare were dug for and never found. The cult was never there. Years later, several of the convictions from that era were quietly overturned, and some of the accused walked free after a decade or more behind bars, their lives already gone.

Below, readers have filed their own accounts from that era — of accusations, interviews, memories that later shifted — and voted them True, Fake or Not sure. Read how the panic worked, then judge the cases yourself.