The whole satanism hysteria of the 1980's is pretty fascinating :-
When you once believed something that now strikes you as absurd, even unhinged, it can be almost impossible to summon that feeling of credulity again. Maybe that is why it is easier for most of us to forget, rather than to try and explain, the Satanic-abuse scare that gripped this country in the early 80s — the myth that Devil-worshipers had set up shop in our day-care centers, where their clever adepts were raping and sodomizing children, practicing ritual sacrifice, shedding their clothes, drinking blood and eating feces, all unnoticed by parents, neighbors and the authorities
This was at the same period time they were doing the whole Dungeons and Dragons scare stuff. You can see that, at the time Chick Publications' Dark Dungeons which claimed that every D&D game was backed by a real child-sacrificing coven wasn't seen as that far-fetched, considering that many people believed child care centres were a network of satanic cultists (who could literally
fly). So, naturally, if a teachers were encouraging kids to play D&D they were real-life witches. That would have gone without saying.
I'm frankly surprised people don't talk about the whole phenomena more than they do. Most media just likes to pretend this mass-histeria never happened, maybe because it makes journalism of the time look very bad.