As Halloween reminds us, everybody loves a good blood-curdling horror story — as long as it’s all make-believe. But just let a bunch of Satan worshippers pop up in the bucolic Ozone Belt north of Lake Pontchartrain and, well, all hell breaks loose.
That’s what happened — or seemed to happen — back in the spring of 1988.
Ronald Reagan was in the White House, "The Cosby Show" topped the television ratings, teenagers floated down the Tangipahoa River on inner rtubes, suburbs were blooming like a bouquet at the north end of the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway, and all was right with the world. Until the owners of a Ponchatoula cattle ranch found eight of their heifers mysteriously deceased and desiccated.
Judging by the holes sliced through the poor creatures’ hides and other minor mutilations, the ranchers concluded they’d been used in a ritual sacrifice. Their hearts had obviously been surgically removed.
Where's the beef?
In a nearby abandoned shed were spray-painted weird images, apparently by the cows' attackers. Among the images was a sinister horned personage, which, if you looked at it right, was clearly Beelzebub.
Just like the old lady in the 1980s Wendy’s commercials, devil worshippers had apparently been poking around Tangipahoa Parish, asking “Where’s the beef?” There was really no other explanation.
A Tangipahoa Times journalist was the first to report on the incident. But it wasn’t until a New Orleans television station took interest that the story blew up. The otherwise credible WWL investigator Bill Elder seemed to have left his skepticism back at the station as he and a camera crew raced toward satanic territory.
Saint who?
In a voice as sonorous as Edward R. Murrow reporting on the London Blitz, the late Elder described the horror he found north of Lake Pontchartrain in no uncertain terms. “The animals,” Elder explained, “have been taken as sacrifice on the eve of May, sometimes known as Walpurgis Night in medieval literature.”
St. Walpurgis, it turned out, was an eighth-century evangelist who specialized in combating incurable diseases and witchcraft. Who knew?
The abandoned shack was “a coven used by Satan worshippers,” Elder declared. “On one wall was the head of the beast,” he intoned, “on another, the snake, representing Satan in the Garden of Eden.”
There were no ifs, ands or buts about it. Elder saw evidence of Satain’s acolytes everywhere in the region: pentagrams and other devilish graffiti, a burned inverted cross on a back road, an occult cemetery ritual, etc.
Party poopers
A chill crept up the collective spine of television viewers across the region, some of whom checked the chambers of their sidearms, just in case. And Elder was just getting started. In the end, he’d enlarged his investigation far beyond the northshore, interviewing priests, horrified parents and a prison inmate, all of whom assured Elder that the threat of Satan’s minions was quite real.
Best of all, Elder interviewed an anonymous woman who claimed to be a participant in a cultish ritual that resulted in suicide and cannibalism.
The main party pooper was Tangipahoa Parish Sheriff Eddie Layrisson, who told the Times-Picayune that the cattle had been killed by feral dogs, and picked over by vultures.
Two local kids took credit for the telltale graffiti in the abandoned shack .
“We totally dismiss that in this case, any devil worshipping was involved,” Layrisson said.
And though there may have been other dubious behavior going on among a group of 10 teenagers who conducted some sort of cemetery ceremony, Layrisson said, basically northshore residents needn’t lose sleep over rampaging devil worshippers.
Geraldo Rivera materializes
The sheriff of adjoining St. Tammany Parish, Patrick J. Canulette, seemed to agree.
Though he took the possibility of devil worship seriously enough to conduct an investigation, in the end, he reassured his constituents.
“I just don’t want people to think there’s a satanic worship service going on at every street corner,” he told The Times-Picayune.
Elder, unbowed to the end, wasn’t alone in eagerly reporting on Louisiana’s struggle against the forces of darkness.
A few months later, Geraldo Rivera — known for his disco mustache and unsuccessful attempt to find gangster Al Capone’s long-lost treasure vault — swept into the Bayou State, dramatically uncovering everything Elder already had.
Outlawing Satan
Elder and Rivera’s sensational reporting was part of a nationwide wave of suspicion, accusation, and investigation into occult practices in the 1980s that touched on everything from alleged organized child molestation to heavy metal music. The widespread phenomenon was known as "satanic panic."
Not long after Elder’s report, certain satanic behaviors were banished by law in Louisiana. As The Times-Picayune reported in May 1989, a proposed bill written by David Cain of Dry Creek made it a crime to commit “deviant ritualistic acts, including mutilation, dismemberment, torture, abuse or sacrifice of animals, or the ingestion of human or animal blood or animal waste.”
In October of that year, the paper reported that the law had gone into effect and that “to date, no arrests have been made. So it must have worked.”