Behold! See for yourself…
It is safe to say that all cults are weird. After all, they’re not called “religions,” although some claim to be just that. Most cults are centered around the worship of one person. And cults have always been adept at getting people to believe things that aren’t true….to believe in alternative realities Was the context created by this picture a lie? Yes…and no. If you were a member of a community that all other communities within the greater society hated and reviled, and had only made the progress you did in obtaining something close to the rights enjoyed by other communities by casting your in your lot with the Progressive Movement, it would be strange to suddenly forget that, and put yourself in the hands of a community…the American Political and Religious Right…that had persecuted and vilified you more than any other, and think that it would work out well for you. Good cult leaders can convince you of things that others will find perplexing. They can even get you to put yourself in the hands of those who hate you.
So the Left was out to get you...the Left was planning on taking away your freedoms…the Left was going to unleash a Great Persecution…right? Right? So, despite everything that has happened for hundreds of years…political and religious extremists would protect you from your real enemies. I’ll bet that sounds different now. But, it was ridiculous from the beginning. You might say…what we saw is not what we got! For the first time in American history, the campaign for the most powerful position on earth became the Greatest Show on Earth! And who doesn’t like a circus? So you cheered and delighted in the Great Circus Clown. And it was fun…but it’s not now. For many people, of whatever community, the reality is beginning to become clear. It’s too bad that it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better. I’m sure it will be tempting to say…I was tricked! Many in the Sylvia Likens Saga made that claim. Unfortunately, very few people are ever really tricked. And so it’s true…alternative realities usually do not work out for the best.
Part 2 of this essay is a cautionary tale to be sure. Conspiracy Theories are necessary to bring down Canonical Stories? No. It is often the case that the details making up a Canonical Story, when examined and contemplated, do this just find by themselves. The Bizarre Preschool Tunnels are a fascinating detail. Essays on this website have indicated that if one simply reads or hears such a detail, it makes sense. If, however, a little bit of thought is invested in the detail, it suddenly seems less plausible. What was the height of these tunnels? By that I mean the distance from the ground to ceiling. Was this a tunnel system that, to move around in it, wasn’t very high? Keep in mind…you have to drag your victim into the tunnel system and move him or her around. If you had to crawl…the victim had to crawl. What if he put up struggle? I suppose you could drug him with a good dose of Truth Serum…or phenobarbital…or Little Puritan Lady Acid bread. No…that wouldn’t work. You can’t drag the kid around if you have to crawl. You would have to have him fully cooperating…crawling behind you…following you around this tunnel system. Perhaps you could combine amobarbital with Mesmerism. Possibly, but in reality…no way. And! The Whole Tunnel System Thing would require that the tunnels are high enough to be able to walk around. Was there an altar? Were there to be found the trappings and paraphernalia of some strange, dastardly deeds? So the height of tunnels would be…6 feet tall? How tall were all the accused?
How did the tunnel system get there? It would seem that there are two possible answers…the tunnel system was already there before the building of the preschool, or the tunnels were dug under the school after it was built. What a strange coincidence it would be if the preschool was built over an existing tunnel system, then the horrible people happened to discover it. What a find! But why was the tunnel system there? The preschool was built in 1966. Was the tunnel system limited to the preschool, or did the tunnels extend beyond the preschool? Was this a natural formation? Was this an old cave system? Of course, the alternative theory would be that the bizarre cult group constructed this tunnel system at the time that the school was built. It would seem possible that the construction company asked to create this tunnel system would find it to be a strange request. You want us to build a preschool? No problem. What do you mean that you want us build a strange labyrinth with tunnels tall enough to allow you to walk around in it? Was the construction company complicit? Were they part of this elusive group? Perhaps the goat-man owned the company.
It is actually the case that creating an underground tunnel system presupposed by the Canonical Story is no easy feat. You can’t just start digging around….your momentary tunnels will cave in. You dig and dig and dig, only to have everything collapse around you. And the soil at the sand has been described as “sandy,” making this problem even bigger. Construction of such a tunnel system would require a special construction company who has experience digging underground tunnels. Perhaps you would hire a company that digs mines for the extraction of coal or gold! Still…why do you want these tunnels dug under the preschool?
At the time of the trial, this tunnel system wasn’t found. What? Are you serious? How hard would it be to find a bizarre tunnel system under a preschool? Hey! How did the people who worked in the preschool access this tunnel system? Was the entrance located outside the preschool building? Would no one see preschool personnel taking children into an entrance to an underground complex? If so..why would police and investigators not be able to find the entrance? How could you possibly disguise the entrance so well that score of cops couldn’t find it? It seems far more likely that, if it existed, you would have to access it in the building. But again…why wouldn’t police be able to find the trapdoor?
As I just said…he school was built in 1966. Why is it that no allegations were made against the people at the preschool before the early 1980s? If the tunnel system were there…did the strange group not discover it, or build it, or start using it, until the time of the first allegations? The issue of the allegations can’t be more important. By the time of the trial, there were hundreds of allegations. Ridiculous allegations. However, there were apparently no concerns noticed by the parents’ of the child involved until:
1. Judy Johnson, a well-documented mentally ill woman, began making bizarre accusations
2. The police then send a letter to the parents’ whose children attended the preschool that actually named the accused, and suggested that their children may have been abused as well.
Then, as Judy Johnson continued to harass authorities with more and increasingly stranger ravings, this was suppressed. These allegations call into question all the allegations she made, and without her allegations, it clearly appears that there wouldn’t have been any. Ouch.
It is simply hard to believe that if such an impossible underground tunnel system existed, the cops couldn’t find it. I think that the trial would have concluded in the way that the persecutor’s office…sorry, that was a misspelling for prosecutor’s office…wanted it to if photos of this tunnel could be shown to the jury. In the Likens case, photos of the house..a house..possibly the North Denny Street side of the double, were shown to the jury. These photos no doubt worked to the advantage of Leroy New’s prosecutorial gang. Hey! The jury was actually taken to Gertie Wright’s house and allowed to walk around in it. Wow! If the tunnel system existed, you could have taken the jury down into it. 10 cops? 20 cops? How many cops does it take to find a tunnel system under a preschool? No, that’s not a joke.
Ok..so much for initial, free-thinking and musing about things. The Great Enigmatic Things. But it is worth asking the question about how many secret entrances to this tunnel system existed. And boy won’t you be surprised. Let’s listen to the children, who always tell the truth, especially when they’re being manipulated by immoral adults:
Classroom 1:
1. Under the bathroom sink- led to a tunnel and underground room
2. In the NW corner of the room- led to a long tunnel leading to a room under the outer playground
Classroom 3:
3. NW corner- led to a tunnel going east to the garage next door
4. SW corner- led to tunnel going east to a garage next door
5. In the NW wall
6. In the middle of the east wall- led to a tunnel that ran to an adjacent property
Classroom 4:
7. SW corner- led to 2 rooms under the school
8. NW corner- led to a tunnel leading to a room under the outer playground
Front Office Bathroom:
9. Under the sink..led to underground room
Outer playground:
10. Underground room accessible by regular door
11. A teacher and child dug a hole that led to a tunnel which in turn to a very large room (half the size of a classroom)
12. Ladder that led to an underground concrete room
Front Playground:
13. Trap door in a playhouse floor- tunnel led west to an underground room.
Wow! There were a total of 13 entrances into a tunnel system that, since we are going to believe the testimony of children, was larger than the labyrinth that Minotaur lived in. Minotaur? What is a Minotaur? Of course..half-man, half-bull. Hey Judy! We know about the Goat-man…where does the Bull-man live? Answer…in the giant tunnel system under not just the school, but under the playgrounds as well, not to mention the garage and an adjacent property. So there were 13 entrances into the tunnel system, and the police couldn’t find a single entrance. Let’s look for the type of evidence that’s somewhat harder to find..small stuff..even microscopic stuff. And we should do this, even though this amazingly large tunnel system with 13 entrances continues to elude us. And with all these places that the McMartin Preschool Tunnel Parallel Universe led to…the cops couldn’t find any trace of it. Yes, that must be it.
The defendants had access to the preschool for more than a year after the initial allegations had come to light. Some parents believed that the defendants could have filled in the tunnel spaces by gradually by bringing in dirt in small amounts so as not to have been noticed. It was thought that an archaeologist, trained in soil compaction and artifact analysis, could best determine whether there had ever been tunnels under the preschool. So they decided to hire an archaeologist to find what they were sure was there…but wasn’t. This archaeologist investigated this in 1990, and the final report was issued in 1993. The conclusion was that there was “evidence of back-filled tunnels.” The parents, still convinced of the preposterous stories told by the children, and who themselves must have been complicit in the creation of them, believed that the police did not do a good enough job looking for the tunnels. But how could this be? Again..police are well trained in locating evidence at crime scenes. And if they can find minute traces of evidence that can win a case…how can they not find a large underground tunnel system beneath a preschool? They can find the needle in the haystack, but they can’t find the haystack. What would the Most Inconvenient of Men say?
Don’t worry about the speck in someone else’s eye until you’ve removed the plank from your eye. Back-filled? Who back-filled this tunnel system? Once the arrests were made…did other members of the group surreptitiously invade the preschool, access the tunnel system, and then fill the tunnels with dirt? How much dirt would they need? How would no one see this? If the tunnels were big, which they would have to have been to carry on bizarre rituals in them, you would need earth-moving equipment to fill them in. The arrival of bulldozers, backhoe loaders, excavators, wheel tractor-scrapers, or any other equipment necessary to do this, might have raised a few eyebrows. And of course, if the police and investigators were so stupid that they couldn’t find the entrances to this tunnel system, perhaps they didn’t notice the crews and equipment. But no…that would be laughable, and the whole thing is so sensical. Instead, the “back filling” which has as much credibility as the accusations, made by the Christian Fundamentalists, that rock songs included Satanic messages placed on the records via “back masking.” Now it can be said that no will accuse these fanatics, who created the most ludicrous alternate-realities, and who prove that being loathe to thinking eventually leads to the inability to think, lashed out at Led Zeppelin’s song Stairway to Heaven. They found this:
“Oh, here’s to my sweet Satan. The one whose little path would make me sad, whose power is Satan. He will give those with him 666. There was a little tool shed where he made us suffer, sad Satan.”
Normally, I would expect someone to have at least a shred of intelligence and be unwilling to offer something so stupid. This little, imaginary stanza from one of the greatest songs ever made, says absolutely nothing. And Sad Satan made people suffer in a little tool shed? This is promoting Satan? First he’s sweet, then he’s sad. And most people who would follow Satan, I would think, would be expecting to get something to their benefit from doing so. Instead they get 666, which makes no sense and makes me wonder how many Christian Fundamentalists have actually read the book they so love to wave around…particularly the Book of Revelation. No…666 is not a magic number…nor an enigmatic one. It is a code for the name of the Beast, and that happens to be the emperor Nero. But although Satan “gives” you “666”, the sweet sad one will make you suffer in a tool shed. Hey idiots…I know! Satan gets you to the tool shed of Satanic Suffering via an underground tunnel system leading here and there and has 13 entrances. The kids said tunnels led to an old garage. I wonder where the tool shed was…if only the police had looked there…they would have found the Prince of Darkness; or at least, people stupid enough to believe in the Tool Shed of Suffering. Actually, the only people who knew of a Satanic Tool Shed were the type of religious fanatics who used the ravings of a lunatic to launch a hysterical attempt to defeat all that was evil in the world. Sorry. Although…I like the grammar… “the one whose” reminds me of “and proud of it!” It also seems a bit odd that of all the songs recorded by Led Zeppelin…you were only clever enough to find a couple of sentences. And I’ll bet that those clever ones who apparently knew rock music so well were not familiar with a song called Rain. I think it’s the Beatles best song. And John Lennon put back-masked lyrics at the end. So go and listen to it…what you hear is… unintelligible gibberish. Go listen to Fire on High by ELO…you can’t miss the back-masked lyrics at the beginning. If you played those bits forward…you’d hear the secret messages. Of course, you can’t hide back-masking…it’s obvious. But I’m sure those people knew that. Right.
“The most substantial evidence for a tunnel was discovered under the north (E/W) axis of the preschool. The apparent entrance was located under the west wall of classroom #4…the signature of the entrance was clear and it was clear that it had been filled back in with soil and debris…
Wow! The “apparent entrance” was readily found by the archaeologist hired by the parents to do just that, but the scores of cops and investigators whose prosecution of the accused would have been bolstered considerably by the discovery of the tunnel system, couldn’t find the “apparent entrance.” Archaeologists are detectives. Perhaps this archaeologist should have been recruited by the FBI to find “apparent crime scene evidence” that law enforcement couldn’t. No! That’s not right. The archaeologist was better than the cops in that he found an entrance…he just missed the other 12. So he was one entrance less stupid than the cops.
Permutation Number 2! Perhaps the cult group didn’t dig the tunnel system. Perhaps the lying parents of kids forced to tell lies surreptitiously snuck into the school and dug the tunnel system themselves, leaving an “apparent entrance” for the archaeologist to find. After digging the tunnel system themselves to show they were right, they then filled it in to make it look like the cult group did it, in an effort to hide it! That’s crazy…isn’t it? No more crazy than the other explanation…and certainly no more crazy than the raving lunatic who knocked over Domino Number 1. And I’m sure that the Satanic Tool Shed was involved; after all, it’s the 1980s in what is supposed to be the most advanced society on earth! If these people lived in Salem…I’m sure the body count would have been much higher. This is what religion, which term I use as an opposite to “spirituality”, has done through pretty much all of human history. It makes me feel comforted to remember that the Most Inconvenient of Men had no intention of founding a new religion…or a religion at all. And this is a great example of why that might have been. And that Man’s spiritual forbear, who was turned into a petty magician by people who couldn’t handle God without religion…he was the one who found God in the Whispering Voice. So he found his Stairway to Heaven…and it didn’t lead it to a tool shed.
According to the archaeologist, the entrance was under the west wall, and the tunnel system wasn’t all that big…it stretched under Classroom 3 and Classroom 4. Actually it “meandered” under classroom #4. Wait…meandered? The definition of “meandering” is that something is following a “winding course” or “twisting” “curving” “winding” “zigzagging” “serpentine in its course.” The picture below is a meandering river:
When a river or tunnel system is meandering, then that winding course has occurred over a long period of time, and has been created naturally. If you dug this Enigmatic Tunnel System, why would you dig it so as to follow a meandering course? How much effort would be necessary to dig the tunnel in such a way that you clearly violate a fundamental principle of the universe: the shortest difference between two points is a straight line. So the meandering nature of this bizarre tunnel system must be natural, and thus we are back to the cult group being phenomenally lucky enough to find a preschool with a meandering tunnel system under it! I wonder how the preschool personnel found the entrance, or dug an entrance to the meandering tunnel system so as to fool the police? Where were these bizarre rituals held before such serendipity? Of course, it may be that Marie Antoinette is trying to have her cake and eat it too before someone fetches an axe from the French Revolution Tool Shed. Judy Johnsonian ravings? Perhaps. Actually…the children described tunnels going all over…and I’m sure that this would involve “meandering.” The Enigmatic Archaeologist and Finder of Artifacts from a Garbage Dump has, realizing how stupid the Tunnel Universe described by the children really was, shortened it considerably. Just think how many buckets of dirt a small group of people, whose contingent included older women, would have had to carry around. It would involve less work, of course, if they were clever enough to plan it out and follow a principle that would elude the Fundamentalists…make the tunnels straight. Perhaps they just started digging…and digging…and paid no attention to whether they were going straight or getting lost in an Archeological Meandering.
This is serious, so I will no longer proceed in a mocking way. I do wonder…is a tunnel an end itself, or a means to an end? A tunnel is, put simply, a way to get from point A to point B…in a stupid meandering way, such as from the playground where some kid dropped a sandwich baggie with Goofy on it to the Satanic Tool Shed…by way of example, of course. Are secret, Satanic rituals carried on in tunnels? Of course not. The tunnel, or tunnels, should lead to an Enigmatic, Spooky Room. So said the children. Maybe…an Inner Sanctum of Satanic Horror. And did the archaeologist who found what he had been paid to find actually find such an Inner Sanctum? He did, but then he said something astonishing:
“The tunnel direction changed dramatically beyond the room-like area, turning to a "dogleg" headed acutely eastward. A crucial dilemma was imminent at this point. With only two days left to complete all excavation, there was not time to both explore the full dimensions of the possible room and to follow the ultimate extent of the tunnel. Although important data may well have been missed by not fully exploring the "room", it was considered more important at that time to redirect full effort to explore the tunnel. It was hoped that the more the tunnel feature could be defined, the more possibilities there would be for making correlations with the eyewitness reports of the children.”
Excellent! The single most important thing to find was an Inner Sanctum. He found only 1 of 13 entrances to the tunnel system that became dramatically shorter in his nonsense than that presupposed by the children’s’ nonsense. But! He may have found…a “room-like area.” So he found it…but didn’t have enough time to check it out. I wonder…if the Intrepid Archaeologist found some really cool ancient underground cultic center in some far-flung corner of the world, routed around in it, and then discovered the most important part of it..the Inner Sanctum..but he ran out of time. Oh well, bummer! “Important data may well have been missed”? Perhaps he realized it was a Tool Shed, and knowing that the Devil tortures you there, he “ran out of time” so as to avoid becoming a victim of the Evil One. The actual tunnels were more important than the room that the rituals would have been carried out? The means are more important than the ends? Ah, no! As is so often the case with religious fanatics…the ends always justify the means, no matter how much suffering is involved. God hates lying…unless you are lying in His service. This “archaeological investigation” is nothing but a lame joke…and not a funny one. Just another ridiculous component of a Whole Big Ridiculousness.
Ah…but stupidity and lying are different things..even if you have copious amounts of both…to which I will add a touch of psychosis. The Great Archaeologist did his dig. The cops did theirs. But the parents had also done theirs. The parents, armed with equipment like a backhoe, conducted two archaeological expeditions in March 1985, and found nothing. They did another in April 1990. And found nothing. So the cops found nothing, and the parents found nothing three times. And we all know…three strikes and your out! Alas, no. They paid some guy to find it for them. But here’s where it gets really interesting, if it wasn’t already. When the parents decided that the cops were too stupid to find the tunnel system, they, as just noted, undertook their own search…three times. But where were they digging? The vacant lot west of the preschool. That is where they thought that the Inner Sanctum…the Satanic Tool Shed…would be found. As we know they didn’t find anything. Then the children suddenly changed the alternative reality…it’s so easy to do…just remember it differently. Re-remember it! The Dreaded Room was, prior to the failure to find anything, located away from the preschool building, and the Labyrinth that would have puzzled even the Judy Johnsonian Bull-man, lead away from the preschool. But now, they all remembered it differently. Actually, they all remembered the location of the Dreaded Room as being in a different place. What an amazing thing for all the children to suddenly remember a different thing…the same way. Despite everything they said before, now the Dreaded Room was under the preschool building itself. How easy it is create, then change, your alternative reality. Of course, you pay an archaeologist to...Hey! Here’s an interesting one! The parents want to find the Enigmatic Room, which only makes sense seeing how any tunnels would simply be passageways leading to the Satanic Tool Shed. Bully the kids into changing their memories…then hire a Garbage-Dump-Digger to find…the tunnels….but then, even though you want to find the Dreaded Room, he says he may have found it…but ran out of time, so he focused on the tunnels. I would greatly appreciate hearing from anyone who can possibly make that make sense! Based on the considerations discussed below as to what was actually under the preschool building, it is clearly true that a half-baked identification of filled in tunnels, but not the actual discovery of an Inner Sanctum, was possible. And so the parents get their tunnels…but not a possible maybe-we-could-get-a-couple-extra-days-digging-in-the-dirt Dreaded Room, we don’t have time to look at it. So Indiana Jones finally gets to the room with the Ark of the Covenant but finds that he has something more important to do.
The tunnel was indicated by many factors, according to the archeologist. These included distinctive soil color, soil texture, soil compaction, the “human sized architecture” permitting passage, presence of an earthen roof, possible shoring, and the presence of a great number (1603) of artifacts found “densely intermixed in the artificial fill within most of the tunnel.” Artifacts! The dream of every archaeologist…finding stuff! This will be interesting. Now it can be said that the only artifacts that would have been relevant, and would have supported the claim that the magical tunnel was used for cultic purposes, would be…cultic stuff. What a terrible disappoint for Indiana Jones!
1. Bones- cow, pig, dog, rabbit, rodent, reptile bones, a short list since listing everything would be unnecessary.
2. A plate with three stars drawn upon it…identified as “pentagrams.”
3. A large quantity of old bottles and tin cans dated to the 1930s and 1940s
4. Metal pipe connector straps- post 1966
5. A sandwich baggie with Disney characters on it
6. Four large containers filled with trash
7. Boards, wood fragments, cinder blocks, plywood, tar paper, roofing nails
8. An old inner tube
9. TV antenna wire
10. Scissors
11. Eye glasses
12. Exposed film
13. A one-gallon food jar
14. An old medicine bottle
15. And my favorite…the mail box of the person who owned the property from 1942 until 1977.
So much for Satan’s Tool Shed. It would seem that there was a large amount of garbage in this ritual tunnel. So they dug the tunnel, and filled it with bottles and tin cans from the 1930s and 1940s? Why did they need “metal pipe connector straps”?
Sounds like the kind of thing you would use in construction..like when you build a preschool…or fix a plumbing problem. Boards, wood fragments, cinder blocks, plywood, tar paper, roofing nails? Ever seen the stuff left over at a construction site when the preschool is finally built? Looks a lot like these things, which were clearly dumped into a rubbish pit.
Bones…bones…lot’s of bones. It's too bad our archaeologist wasn't an anthropologist! Are we to believe that this cult group were sacrificing large amounts of a large variety of animals? Were they actually sacrificing rodents? How about reptiles? Not typical sacrificial animals. Cows? Did they bring the cows in through the preschool front door, and then get them through the Enigmatic Archaeologist’s Tunnel Entrance, and then into the chamber were they were dumping bottles and cans that pre-date the construction of the school by as much as 30 years?
A sandwich baggie with Disney characters! Wait…one? Wait…not one…a piece of one. So while being taken down into the tunnel, one kid brought his lunch with him, and a small piece of the baggie tore off and ended up with the other garbage in the pit. Lunch time! Bring your sandwich with you…perhaps a sandwich made with Little Salem Ladies Acid Bread…something that the police, legal system people, and parents ate every day for lunch.
And! I wonder why the cult group took the old mail box and put it in their Enigmatic Tunnel? Do mailboxes have supernatural aspects to them? Do cult groups use mailboxes in their rituals? Perhaps they mail letters to the Underworld Abode of Non-Existent Demons.
Did any of the children report that their eye glasses had been left in this mysterious tunnel? Who brought the inner tube down there? Sounds like someone had a flat. Someone brought their old medicine bottle with them. You would need the TV antenna wire if you wanted to watch TV in the tunnel. Experts examined the bottles and it was determined that they “dated from the 1920s through the 1950s (up to 1960) with the majority from the 1930s and 1940s.” Film…child pornography? No…that would have gone a long way to proving the Persecution’s case. All charges were eventually dropped…weren’t they?
A piece of sandwich bag with Disney characters and “Disney Class 82-83” on it? That seals the deal. Wait…it doesn’t. How many little kids brought their lunch to the preschool with sandwiches in baggies decorated with Disney characters? Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse, Goofy…and, I’ve always wondered, why doesn’t Donald Duck wear pants? After all, Mickey Mouse wears pants. Daisy Duck goes bottomless as well, but Minnie Mouse always wears a dress.
So, if you're inclined to see the forces of evil lurking behind normal things like song lyrics and preschools, then I must ask what in the world are cartoons characters doing to our children?
Still…you find only one piece of one baggie? And it was found two feet underground beneath the edge of the building? The tunnel was two feet under the edge of the building? There obviously was a depression under the edge of the building and part of the baggie was blown under there…perhaps a lawn mower ran over it..after all, it’s just a piece, suggesting that it had been shredded.
The Enigmatic Pipe Fittings! These were found on a pipe connected to a toilet in classroom #3, about 2 feet under ground…the depth where we found the piece of the Disney baggie. So the pipe fittings were found exactly where they should be…connected to pipes…pipes for the toilet. A plumber obviously fixed a problem with the pipes.
Hey! Toilets..pipes…an entrance the police couldn’t find. Didn’t Judy Johnson talk about babies being flushed down the toilets? What suffering she must have gone through..imagining something like that. To have a mind filled with such horrible things…how do you make it stop? She chose to make it stop by killing herself. And I suppose I must admit that if these were the things I saw in my mind…if these were the images I saw in my dreams… But! Perhaps that’s how you entered the tunnel! No entrances found? That’s because, and all we have to do is re-remember it, the Bad Person and his victim could flush themselves down the toilet and end up in the tunnel. That is clever! And so plumbing stuff is there.
And tell me if this doesn’t sound Judy Johnson-esque…the archaeologist found evidence of an alarm system operated from fire alarm switches that there too high up on the walls to allow a child to reach them. The accused used the switches to warn one another that a child’s parents had arrive, and thus the Satanic ritual could be abruptly ended. How many naughty kids would pull the fire alarm switches if they were far enough down the wall to be within reach? And a secret system of warning each other? That’s not just alternative reality…that’s alternative insanity. But when the Prime Mover is Judy Johnson…what do you expect? Does this perhaps touch on the reason why tunnels and a Satanic Tool Shed were necessary? Methinks it does. Of course, a secret dungeon complex, or some weird Inner Sanctum under ancient ruins…or fearsome catacombs…good stuff for a horror movie about the Devil! But is that why such a feature is present in this case? I think not…and, of course, it’s just a theory. But the problem about children being horribly abused at a preschool…i.e. not a single child in a janitor’s closet or in the old garage, though I will leave out Judy Johnson’s insistence that kids were taken to carwashes to be molested…so you won’t hear it from me! What was the question I left unanswered? Oh yes…a mass exercise in ritual sexual abuse of children at a preschool will encounter the serious problem of… parents’ coming and going! And if you were performing Satanic Rituals, not just molestations, a parent or two might just notice all the cultic artifacts lying about. Why is there an altar in Classroom 3? Why is incense burning in the Teacher’s Lounge? All these sacrificial animals? Including rats and lizards of course, two animals essential to worshipping the Father of Lies. And, of course, this plate with three stars on it! You guys can’t fool me! I know what you’re about! The Canonical Story of All Canonical Stories is simply impossible at a preschool, where parents are in and out of the place all the time. And so to make it work…you need tunnels and an Inner Sanctum. Ah, but that’s not all. If you’re in the Dreaded Room under the school, and something really strange happens and Little Jimmy’s mother arrives to pick him up because he threw-up after eating the sandwich he brought with him in a baggie featuring Donald Duck wearing a shirt and no pants, and so he probably has a stomach flu, one of the other priestesses…sorry…witches, evil co-conspirators in this vast, secret underground conspiracy against all that is Good and Decent (which, by the way, is paranoia..and possibly Judy Johnsonian psychotic paranoia) must needs have a way to warn you if you’ve got Little Jimmy in the Subterranean Tool Shed. So the other priestess…I mean…witch, though I keep forgetting that even though it is no longer the 17th century, and we are no longer afflicted with the presence of Sadistic Little Puritan Ladies, and we are no longer at Salem, we can still denigrate women by referring to them as witches…and of course, witches are terrifying not because they can turn you into a toad..although that would be a drag..no! We fear witches because witches are women outside the System…witches are powerful…witches are women who are not under control, which is exactly what western culture insists that women must not be allowed to be. All ye men! Fear ye the witch! She has the power…not you! Merlin was impressive…but I find myself more fearful of a sudden appearance of Morgana the Sorceress..and if we went back to the World of King Arthur…I would not be the only one. The Goat-man? The Minotaur? Amateurs. Satan? Definitely no amateur…but I think that the Witches’ Tool Shed holds greater terrors than the Devil’s version. And if you lived in ancient Anatolia, you had best know all about Cybele…the Great Mother. And although we think of mothers warmly, the Romans, when they first found out about the Warm and Tender Magna Mater, thought her priestesses were rather odd. And that’s because her priestesses were actually priests, who to be so, became priestesses, functionally. And you know what they say about wearing too much eye make-up! The Romans had some pretty fierce gods, but Mars himself would probably have preferred to avoid Anatolia altogether. Was Cybele a Witch? I wouldn’t say it to her face!
Oh, yes! Indiana Jones and his Junkyard Artifacts! Actually, they aren’t artifacts at all…they’re garbage, and thus he found…a garbage pit. At one time, these were common in outlying areas where garbage men with their garbage trucks weren’t particularly common. Drive out into a rural area with old farms and you will see garbage pits and garbage piles, often at areas where different farmers’ lands met. You dump your junk in the pits, and then bury it. Or set it on fire..although that’s not very environmentally friendly.
A plate with pentagrams on it? A pentagram is simply a five pointed star, and is to be found on all manner of things. An inverted pentagram is associated with cultic nonsense. But take an inverted pentagram and turn it upside-down, and you end up with a regular pentagram. How easy it is to turn Good into Evil and Evil into Good! Maybe if Satan spent less time in the Wicked Tool Shed, he could have picked a better symbol. Look, mortal! Behold the pentagram and fear! What, the star on this plate? Hey! That’s cheating…you turned it upside down! So maybe you can best the Devil! Just turn his magical star upside down! The plate in question was a plastic plate said to have come from a child’s play tea set. It has also been described as a small, white plastic plate with three pentagrams hand drawn with light green paint that was found in the stratified dirt in the play yard. And the diabolical stars were of differing sizes.
That is a lot of pentagrams!
That is a lot of inverted pentagrams! How about this:
This is a symbol used by the rock band Rush that religious fanatics believed was indicative of Devil Worship. But! The pentagram is pointing the wrong way.
Now that is an inverted pentagram...and a rather sinister looking one at that! The inverted pentagram is often associated with Baphomet...a strange being worshiped by the Knights Templar...but the typical imagery does not derive from them.
How could a child’s plastic plate possibly be used in bizarre rituals? Surely a cult that builds a sizable tunnel under a preschool would have it’s own cultic paraphernalia, and didn’t need to take a child’s plastic tea plate and hand-draw 3 five-pointed stars on it. Green paint? I don’t suppose it could be Green Finger-paint! That would be a very strange thing to find at a preschool. Judy Johnson said that one of the accused put make-up on her son. That’s odd…especially as a Satanic cultic ritual…although, I know for a fact that the priestess priests of Cybele wore eye make-up! Still, it couldn’t be that the “make-up” was really finger-paint? Of course not! That would be boring…and Satan is never boring…that much is certain. The kids made some design on their face with finger-paint, and then wiped it off? No…remember that differently! Re-remember it! It was lipstick, rouge, and too much eye make-up, which we know makes you look….no…not like a witch. Being so boring, I must ask if the plastic pretend tea plate was one that a child simply drew some stars on? If an adult drew the stars, why are they of differing sizes…couldn’t the priestess have drawn the stars roughly the same size as one another? Hey! You should see the way my kid writes his name…each letter is bigger than the one before it. Please tell me the Devil didn’t make him do that!
The mailbox? This is even more cool than the plastic plate with three evil stars on it! Maybe it didn’t really belong to the guy who owned the garbage dump before it was buried and a preschool was built on top of it in 1966. Of course, it is a very rare thing to find that buildings or houses have been built on top of old garbage dumps or landfills…that never happens! Maybe it was Satan’s Mailbox. If you have to communicate with Santa using the US Mail, maybe you have to send your requests to Satan by sending him letters with three stars drawn on the envelopes..after all…you don’t want to get the address wrong! And did you see what I did there! If you move the letters around in “Santa” you end up with a different name! That is my lame contribution to the great war against the Good and Decent, and I have decided that, since I am working on recording my second album, I will add a back-masked stupid reference to Santa’s Tool Shed in my cover version of Stairway to Heaven. Stop that! Maybe the strange McMartin cult simply collected antiques, after all, they had lots of old tin cans, old bottles…including an old medicine bottle to boot! Still, it would be odd to find Old Farmer Man’s mailbox sitting beside the alter in a Satanic Inner Sanctum that could only be dreamed up by religious non-thinkers.
How disappointing that the tunnels and the McMartin’s version of Satan’s Tool Shed in the Canonical Story, are fictional. Good try, Indiana Jones! Of course, the unthinking mind would see this as making sense, since evil rituals would obviously be carried out in such an evil, eerie place….and one that even has a mailbox! And catacombs were places of death. Dark places for dark things. And so the basement in the Likens story, even though the Cleric demolished the basement, figuratively speaking, by cleverly stating that the upstairs bedroom was where Sylvia Likens was kept. Phyllis Vermillion, Roy Julian, Barbara Sanders…all went into Gertie Wright’s House of Horror, but none went down into the basement. Nor did Lovable Officer Dixon. And who can forget William Kaiser starting his descent into the diabolical tunnel system under Gertie Wright’s house, only to stop before he got to the bottom. Why? It was dark..so it was scary…a dark place for dark things. So the police couldn’t find a non-existent tunnel system under the McMartin Preschool, and several policemen never found their way into the dark place under Mrs. Wright’s house. But the archaeologist found the tunnel, and Officer Harmon found the basement. And like the archaeologist, Harmon found strange artifacts…an eye-hook, four pieces of brass colored tubing, three pieces of orange colored wood, a furnace poker, and a yellow paper bag containing a pair of gray shorts. He also noticed a garbage can filled with old tin cans. Old tin cans…we know that this is a clear indication of the presence of a Satanic cult! Was there a Witches’ Coven that met in Gertie Wright’s Diabolical Basement? A poker for a coal-burning furnace in the basement? A pair of shorts? Well that’s not so strange seeing how the two laundry sinks are located in the basement. An eye-hook, tubing, wood? Things to be found in a basement, to be sure. So tunnels dug under preschools for horrible rituals and basements in Indianapolis are a lot alike…their contents easily explainable, and yet alternative reality people, with very fantasy-prone minds, can construct the most bizarre contexts to turn them into something different altogether. Why can’t alternative-realities be nice places? Why are they always dark places with malevolent figures? Perhaps it would be a nice change to move around the letters in the name “Satan” and wind up with “Santa,” rather than the other way around. It may be annoying…insisting on real reality, which is almost always a more mundane and Occam’s Razor-esque thing then alternative reality. When is garbage just garbage? When is a rubbish dump just a rubbish dump? When are basement things just basement things? When is an eye-hook just a boring eye-hook? Sometimes what you see is what you get.
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Hey…how did you get down here?”
“I don’t know! I used the restroom, flushed the toilet, and found myself in this tunnel.”
“That explains it. Come on…I can see light ahead..it must be a way out.”
“Ok. But wait a second…I have to put this letter in the mail.”
“Hey! Can we hurry?”
"Alright..alright!"
“Do you hear singing?”
“All the stars in the sky for you…”
“All the stars in the sky for you too…”
“Hey, isn’t that song by the Tornadoes?”
“No! That’s an instrumental. Two teenage girls serenading each other is not an instrumental.”
“Maybe it’s Stairway to Heaven..played backwards.”
“Come on! I think they’re gone. Hey! these bricks are loose.”
“Wow, it’s nice to be out of there. Look! It’s night! Look at all the stars!”
“Yeah, I think we…
“Would you two shut-up! Do you want Phyllis to hear? And put more coal in the furnace!
“Who was that?”
“I don’t know…I hope it’s not Judy Johnson!”
“It’s not! She’s with the Goat-man.”
“I don’t think we’re outside.”
“How can you tell?”
“There’s a woman looking in through the window.”
“Gee whiz, some people sure are nosy.”
“This could be Santa’s Tool Shed.”
“Yeah! My God…it’s full of stars!”
“You know, I don’t think we should have ate the bread.”