The Suburban Uncanny

Nokes and several other children eventually named 27 different victims of this supposed Satanic cult; when it turned out that two people on the list were still alive, and a third had died during surgery, officials were undeterred; they assumed instead that the children had been brainwashed and instructed to recount false memories to throw authorities off the trail of the true story. Judy Johnson, the accuser at the heart of the McMartin case, began leaving increasingly bizarre answering machine messages for the L.A. County investigators, relating her son Matthew’s stories of a “goatman,” accusing daycare worker, Peggy McMartin, of power-drilling “a child under the arms, armpits.” Bob Currie, a parent of one of the McMartin children who devoted his life to ferreting out Satanic ritual abuse, would later state on Geraldo:

When the children started talking, they started talking about robes and candles.

Source: lareviewofbooks.org