Discussion Group Report

In Mattoon, Illinois, in 1944 a woman reported that a stranger entered her bedroom and anesthetized her legs with a spray gas. The local newspaper ran the headline, "Anesthetic Prowler on Loose." Within a few days several other similar cases were reported. The headline this time was, "Mad Anesthetist Strikes Again. " The perpetrator became known as the "Phantom Gasser of Mattoon." Soon cases were occurring all over town, the state police were brought in, husbands stood guard with loaded guns, and many firsthand sightings were reported. After a fortnight, however, no one was caught, no chemical clues were discovered, the police spoke of "wild imaginations," and the newspapers began to characterize the story as a case of "mass hysteria."

"This story has the same components as an alien abduction experience," says Michael Shermer in his book, Why People Believe Weird Things. "Strange things going bump in the night, interpreted in the context of the time and culture of the victims, whipped into a phenomenon through rumor and gossip--we are talking about modern versions of medieval witch crazes."

The components of these crazes in their modern pseudoscientific descendents are still alive: 1) Victims tend to be women, the poor, the retarded, and other societally marginal people. 2) Sex or sexual abuse is typically involved. 3) Mere accusation of potential perpetrators makes them guilty. 4) Denial of guilt is regarded as further proof of guilt. 5) When a claim of victimization becomes well known, other claims appear. 6) The movement hits a critical peak of accusation, when virtually everyone is a potential suspect and almost no one is above suspicion. 7) Then the pendulum swings the other way. As the innocent begin to fight back through legal and other means, the accusers sometimes become the accused and skeptics begin to demonstrate the falsity of the accusations. 8) Finally the movement fades, the public loses interest, and proponents, while never completely disappearing, are shifted to the margins of belief.

Modern examples of witch crazes are the "satanic panic" of the 1980's and the recovered memory movement of the 1990's. In the latter case, adults who had been engaged in psychotherapy claimed to have recovered repressed memories of sexual abuse in their childhoods. In 1989 a girl accused her father, George Franklin, of killing her childhood friend, and he was imprisoned. The only evidence was her 20-year-old alleged recovered memory. When she later claimed he had committed other murders which the evidence proved he could not have committed, he was released after having been incarcerated over six and a half years.

Another troubling aspect of crazes and the sexual abuse hysteria sweeping America the past few years is that some genuine offenders may go free in the backlash. "Is it really possible that thousands of Satanic cults have secretly infiltrated our society and that their members are torturing, mutilating, and sexually abusing tens of thousands of children and animals? No. Is it really possible that millions of adult women were sexually abused as children but have repressed all memory of the abuse? No. Like the alien abduction phenomenon, these are products of the mind, not reality. They are social follies and mental fantasies, driven by a curious phenomenon called the feedback loop," explains Shermer.

Witch crazes are social systems that organize through feedback loops in which outputs are connected to inputs, producing change in response to both (like a public address system with feedback or stock market booms and busts driven by flurries of buying and selling). The underlying mechanism is the cycling of information through a closed system. There are internal and external components of the loop which periodically occur together. Internal components include the social control of one group of people by another more powerful group, a prevalent feeling of loss of personal control and responsibility, and the need to place blame for misfortune elsewhere; external conditions include socioeconomic stresses, cultural and political crises, religious strife, and moral upheavals. The system self-organizes, grows, reaches a peak, and then collapses. A few claims of ritual abuse are fed into the system through word of mouth in the 17th century or the mass media in the 20th. An individual is accused of being in league with the devil and denies the accusation. The denial serves as proof of guilt, as does silence or confession. Accusation equals guilt (as in any well-publicized sexual-abuse case). The system grows in complexity as gossip or the media increase the amount and flow of information. Witch after witch is burned and abuser after abuser is jailed, until the system reaches criticality and finally collapses under changing social conditions and pressures. In medieval witch hunts, theological imaginations, ecclesiastical power, scapegoating, the decline of magic, the rise of formal religion, interpersonal conflict, misogyny, gender politics, and possibly even psychedelic drugs were all components of the feedback loop, driving it forward. People agreed that skeptics and lawyers who defended witches were themselves witches, "Satan's accomplices."

Curiously, the medieval witch craze occurred at the very time when experimental science was gaining ground. We often think that science displaces and decreases belief in superstition. Not necessarily so. Modern believers in paranormal and other pseudoscientific phenomena try to wrap themselves in the mantle of science by asking scientists to investigate alleged strange happenings, but they still believe what they believe. However, such believers have put themselves in a double bind. As one observer at a 17th century witch trial noted, "Atheists abound in these days and witchcraft is called into question. If neither possession nor witchcraft persists, why should we think that there are devils? If no devils, no God."