[Bodleian_Girl]

This sounds exactly like the McMartin Preschool hysteria that occurred around the same time. That one included little kids claiming that a horse had been butchered and buried in the schoolyard.

Actually the boy claimed Ray Buckey killed the horse at a ranch. Not in the school yard.

[Pelham]

That could be. The “investigators” had claimed that Raymond Buckey had beaten the reputed horse to death in front of a group of the children, so I had remembered it as being at the school itself.

Either way no trace of the dead horse was ever found. Nor any of the other animals that were claimed to have been ritualistically sacrificed.

I kept holding out hope that we would actually get to see a video of Raymond Buckey flying through the air like a witch, one of my favorite claims in this modern mini-Salem extravaganza. Unfortunately this was in the pre-cellphone era.