Creepy Wikipedia

3937 readers

18 users here now

A fediverse community for curating Wikipedia articles that are oddly fascinating, eerily unsettling, or make you shiver with fear and disgust

Guidelines:

Follow the Code of Conduct
Do NOT report posts YOU don't consider creepy
Strictly Wikipedia submissions only
Please follow the post naming convention: Wikipedia Article Title - Short Synopsis
Tick the NSFW box for submissions with inappropriate thumbnails.
Please refrain from any offensive language/profanities in the posts titles, unless necessary (e.g. it's in the original article's title).

Mandatory:

If you didn't find an article "creepy," you must announce it in the thread so everyone will know that you didn't find it creepy

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

135

West Memphis Three - three teenagers received max sentences for killing three children, with no physical evidence or motive linking them to the crime, as a result of the Satanic Panic. (en.wikipedia.org)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

14 comments fedilink hide all child comments

They're still trying to clear their names. More frustrating than creepy, but deserving of a read.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 43 points 1 month ago (1 children)

IIRC one of them got out on an Alford plea, and is still trying to fight it.

People forget what this was like. Just being a weird kid and playing Dungeons & Dragons was enough to get you condemned as a devil-worshiper.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I think they all took that plea. Maybe all three had to take it. My wife reads about them a lot, so i get her ADHD info dumps about them from time to time.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

The whole case is just a nightmare.

When you start looking back at Satanic Panic legal cases, it all seem so crazy. It's hard to believe that this was in my lifetime, and it's even harder to believe that people still think that was now. For a really good deep dive into some of the child sexual abuse cases that were going on at the time, check out, "Satan's Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt" by Debbie Nathan and Michael Snedeker. I remember some of this. And there are people that still defend the witch hunts.