Extra! Extra! Dead Toad Found on Road

I was just telling my husband about the post below on Satanic Ritual Abuse, and had to share with him this section from one of the articles I'd found on the Great Satanic Panic:

The Strange Case of the Crucified Toad

Some poor fool who had the bad fortune to be walking along the bank of a river near Oscoda, Michigan, was confronted by an unspeakably horrible sight: Occult-type graffiti, spray-painted on the base of a bridge, and on the ground beneath it, gutted candles and a dead toad. Having stumbled upon the remains of a Satanic altar, the poor fool called the police. The officers looked things over and decided that, well, there was no evidence of any crime having been committed. But they wrote up a report, and the details made it into the paper the following week.

The headlines, of course, screamed about the Great Satanic Conspiracy. The article contained an amusing reference to a "murdered toad," which prompted me to write a letter to the editor asking if killing toads was considered a capital offense in Michigan. But the poor amphibian was, undeniably, dead. It was right there in the police report. And it caused quite a stir, even though an average half-mile stretch of the state highway that ran west of town contained, oh, probably a whole bushel basket full of deceased toads. A rumor began to fly around that the toad had been (gulp) crucified, which I found to be rather creative until I recalled that Aleister Crowley had boasted about doing just that in his Confessions. Well, perhaps it had merely succumbed to a common toad disorder and shriveled up in the sun.

No one really knew how the miserable toad met its end, but the proximity of its corpse to Satanic paraphernalia and graffiti left few without a shred of doubt that the unfortunate creature's demise was the work of deranged devil-worshippers. The spectre of a sinister cabal of candle-burning, spray-painting toad-killers haunted the land.

His response? "I can just see it now:  Friday the 13th part 47: Ribbit"

He is SO no help sometimes :)