Editing Satanic Panic (section)

=='Ere We Go==
The roots of the whole mess began in 1979, when a troubled teenager named James Dallas Egbert III disappeared for a month after, reputedly, having earlier attempted to commit suicide in the utility tunnels under the campus of Michigan State University. Failing to off himself, he instead hid in a friend's house for a month. During that time, private investigator William Dear, hired by Egbert's parents, speculated to the media that he might have gotten lost during an attempt to use the utility tunnels for a [[Live Action Roleplaying]] session. The press, of course, ate this shit up, especially when Egbert went and blew his brains out in 1980.

This incident was later used by hack writers to produce the cheesy 1981 "horror" novels ''Hobgoblin'' and ''[[Mazes and Monsters]]'', both of which ran with the basic plotline of "roleplayer loses his mind because of roleplaying and ultimately ends up killing or nearly killing himself" - Mazes and Monsters even got a freaking film adaptation a year later, which you can read about on its own page.

This controversy was bad enough, but at the time the advent of real-but-mostly-harmless "Satanic" groups like the Church of Satan (itself a counterculture to the above fundie revival; incidentally, the Church of Satan doesn't actually worship Satan, but instead uses him as a symbolic entity representing individualism and rebellion against conformity), as well as other cults that allegedly kidnapped and brainwashed children, gave Christian fundamentalists more fuel for their paranoia. At the same time, therapists and social workers were pushing for greater recognition of child sexual abuse as a serious crime, and in spite of their good intentions they developed a tendency to be overzealous in investigating possible abuse; this was itself exacerbated further by the growing awareness of post-traumatic stress disorder and the assumption that memories "recovered" via hypnosis were perfectly accurate representations of events (as opposed to being unintentionally created by the therapists and social workers themselves). The end result was a bunch of people who were convinced that the US was filled with cannibalistic, child-raping, and generally evil Satanic cults that controlled the secular world from the shadows and whose very existence was a threat to society.

This ended up getting linked to tabletop RPGs because of one particular asshole.