Meanwhile, High Court Justice Pauffley determined in March that there had been no satanic cult. "I am able to state with complete conviction that none of the allegations are true," she said. "I am entirely certain that everything Ms. Draper, her partner Abraham Christie, and the children said about those matters was fabricated. The claims are baseless. The stories came about as the result of relentless emotional and psychological pressure as well as significant physical abuse.""Both [children] P and Q have suffered significantly. Their innocence was invaded. Their grip on reality was imperilled.""Their minds were scrambled."***As bizarre as this story seems, it's far from the first time someone has contrived a story about satanic horrors—and repeated it so many times that they themselves almost began to believe it. In fact, it's been happening since the early 1980s. In a BBC Radio 4 documentary, journalist David Aaronovitch identifies the controversial book Sybil, published in 1973, as the predominant cause of what came to be known as "the satanic panic."The book, written by Flora Rheta Schreiber, tells the supposedly true story of Shirley Ardell Mason (under the pseudonym of Sybil Dorsett) and her therapist Cornelia B. Wilbur. The story goes that "Sybil" began sessions with Wilbur to treat her social anxiety.How did huge numbers of people become so frenzied over baseless accusations, and how did the line between fact and fiction become so blurred?
However, the events reported in Sybil are highly dubious. Psychiatrist Herbert Spiegel listened to taped conversations between Schreiber and Wilbur and is certain that Wilbur planted the personalities in Mason's mind using suggestive techniques during therapy.Sybil also set a precedent for pseudo-scientific literature reporting the therapy of patients with repressed memories and MPD. Dozens of these books suddenly began emerging detailing very similar stories.In 1980, Michelle Smith and her psychiatrist-turned-husband, Lawrence Pazder, coauthored a book called Michelle Remembers which effectively reintroduced the occult to the 20th century psyche, causing collective hysteria across the United States and eventually reaching the United Kingdom in what could be described as the modern day answer to the Salem Witch Trials."It is a real experience. If you talk to Michelle today, she will say, 'That's what I remember.' For her it was very real"
"Using puppets to encourage the children to reveal what happened, the therapists were able to unlock the horrible secrets of the McMartin school," explained one news reporter at the time. As the media coverage snowballed, so did the accusations, with seven other LA preschools being implicated."Many people think that memory works like a recording device, but it doesn't."
"It can happen because you don't store a very good version of the information at the time of the event, but also a lot of changes can happen afterwards when you are talking to other witnesses," she said. "Or maybe someone is interviewing you and they have a bias so they interview you in a suggestive way. These are some of the situations that can produce distorted memories out there in the real world—it's contamination that often occurs after some event is completely over."This contamination is not necessarily restricted to the minor details of a memory. Loftus is now conducting research into the theory that vivid memories of entire events that never occurred could be planted into a subject's mind."We make people believe specific things happened to them that are completely made up by us," she said. "We decided to try and see if we could convince people that when they were five or six years old, they were lost in a shopping mall and they were frightened and crying and ultimately rescued and reunited with their family."Recovered memory therapy has less to do with accessing repressed memories than implanting new ones
"Yes, they do—stop lying, you little brat" was the line Abraham Christie reportedly used when trying to convince the young girl to lie to the police. Given the power of suggestion, it is easy to see how this sort of abuse could have distorted the children's memory. Perhaps it is testament to the their character that they retained a grasp of what was and wasn't real, after enduring so much abuse.The scientific evidence to suggest that people repress memories of traumatic events is spurious, to say the least. In 2005 one of the leading experts in the field of memory, Richard McNally, wrote a letter to the California Supreme Court explaining, "The notion that traumatic events can be repressed and later recovered is the most pernicious bit of folklore ever to infect psychology and psychiatry."The scientific community seems to be in agreement that recovered memory therapy has less to do with accessing repressed memories than implanting new ones. Worryingly, a considerable division of the psychiatric community is yet to catch up.As for Ella Draper and Abraham Christie, it has been suggested that they concocted the satanic cult story in order to tarnish the children's father in an ongoing custody battle (Draper has denied that she coached her children, or that she was even involved in a custody battle). Considering she's now on the run and believed to have fled the UK, it is unclear whether these questions will be ever be answered.Jacked In is a series about brains and technology. Follow along here.There was no point at which a supposed nonstop 81 day satanic ritual she was alleged to have been involved in could have happened