Sex or its deformation, rape, was the accusation; race the unavoidable fact; lynching too often the result. Together they added up to the “folk pornography”5 often carried in local newspapers, in which outrageous fictions often held violent sway over facts, much less the truth, in what must be the deadliest kind of hoax.

Online, we are all ghostwriters and spirit photographers.

The confusion the memoir has caused is actually one over form—for despite what its recent practitioners seem to think, the memoir is a form, not a genre. It is a way of saying, not a way of being. In trying to expand the memoir from a form into a genre like the broader field of nonfiction, the authors of memoir often mistake its strengths—hard

The 1890s also saw a number of other crises we might label lyrical: hysteria; new fin de siècle narratives like psychoanalysis; and a resurgence of Spiritualism. All these last kinds of lyrical crises the modern hoax took advantage of.

But Caucasian doesn’t signify a place or an actual origin—not only is the term inaccurate, it is directly descended from racist eugenics. To avoid using it, as I have learned to, is to understand where words and people actually come from.

These are all in a sense “psychographs,” as photos of occult phenomena made without a camera came to be called—the hoax is almost always a trick disguised as a wish.

MPD joined Satanic ritual abuse (known as SRA; nothing sounds more “medical” or official than an acronym) and UFO abduction stories as part of the controversial recovered memory movement. To doubt such testimony or memory, the thinking went, was to deny the childhood abuse that was presumed to be the condition’s root cause; yet with MPD, much like

In the Satanic panic of the 1980s, no case looms larger than that of the McMartin Preschool, a California day care center where accusations by one disgruntled (and unstable) parent ballooned into outrageous stories of children being forced to witness infanticide, ritual murders, cannibalism, and more. In his tremendous We Believe the Children,

The Satanic panic proved particularly American—a pseudospiritual crisis masking a sexist and classist one. By the end Beck’s assertion that the real culprit was a fear of women’s working outside the home—when in fact child sexual abuse mostly occurs at home—becomes hard to deny. But such mass panics frequently center on sex and sex roles: as a