This is a two part series, subtitled “Things I’m Pretty Sure Are Fake But Can’t Prove,” which just about sums it up. This first one will be long, and the second, because it’s kind of a live issue, much shorter.
One of the things I used to write about a lot––like professionally, not really here as much––is the Sad Girl Lit of the 90s, including titles like Prozac Nation and Wasted . I can’t really say whether there’s a pipeline here, but my theory is one gateway drug to this genre is Sad Kid Lit. I don’t think this is a thriving genre anymore, but Sad Kid Lit were stories about “disturbed” (the parlance of the time) children with diagnoses like autism, trauma, elective mutism, and so on, often (but not always) written from the perspective of the healers who rescued them from this darkness. And the uncontested queen of this genre is Torey Hayden.
Hayden is a special education teacher, with a focus on elective mutism, who was born in Montana and worked largely in and around the Midwest and the Pacific Northwest, at clinics and in school settings. In 1980, she published her first book, One Child, about a little girl named Sheila who was a student of hers. Per the book synopsis, Sheila “never spoke, she never cried and her eyes were filled with hate.” But then Hayden put in extra time coaxing the girl out of her shell, including even saving her from her mother’s rapist boyfriend (IIRC––I haven’t read it in over twenty years), and then Sheila thrived (short version). The book was a big hit––it was reprinted as recently as 2016––and made Hayden at least somewhat famous. For some godforsaken reason, my teacher let me do an oral book report on it in the seventh grade, even though it included at least one episode of child rape. But hey, it was the nineties––things were different then.
Back in the day, I read a lot of Hayden thirteen books, except for the fiction ones, IIRC. They follow a fairly predictable pattern: Hayden enters a new environment––a new classroom, a new clinic, etc.––sees a “gem” underneath one child’s hardened or bewildering exterior (pity the poor average autistic child in her class!) and then the child is cured of his or her issues. The one that I remembered the best––nay, vividly––was called Ghost Girl: The True Story of a Child in Peril –- And the Teacher Who Saved Her. The setting this time is a small podunk town somewhere in a Plains state; Hayden has moved here, somewhat inexplicably, for a change of scenery after a stint at a clinic in a nearby larger city (she doesn’t use its real name, but it has an Omaha vibe)? She presides over a classroom of just a handful of children, one of whom is Jade Ekdahl, a selective mute who lives up the street from the school, who dresses in a slovenly way, has abhorrent posture (she’s described as being basically bent over at the waist), and is notorious for breaking the will of her previous teachers with her refusal to speak (the teacher just before Torey committed suicide, and it’s heavily implied it was because she was so despairing over her inability to make Jade talk). Hayden also mentions an awkward number of times that Jade is sort of “erotic” looking for a child.
Meanwhile, Torey saunters in, literally asks Jade two questions, and the girl responds. I can’t exactly fault Hayden for this: she says in all her nonfiction books, she has to go to some lengths to disguise the people in it. Plus, it’s a book: if it was a really protracted process, it might make the text prohibitively lengthy to tell the whole version. Still, the shortened one does really play into this whole Neurotypical Savior thing Hayden has going on.
Anyway, after Hayden breaks Jade’s spell, Jade starts to reveal little things to her, things that sound impossible, like that characters from the TV show Dallas kidnap her at night and sodomize her, and that she had a friend named Tashee who was sacrificed on an altar in front of a group of people, and that her cat was murdered on top of her Jade’s body and its guts spilled over her.
By chance, while visiting an ex-boyfriend in the city, Hayden learns that one of the symbols Jade has drawn at school has occult significance, so she starts to wonder––aloud to her boyfriend, then floated to others at the school––if Jade is being abused in a ritualistic way. This suspicion is doubled when she catches Jade about to perform a very *adult* act on a profoundly autistic classmate of hers. Hayden has met Jade’s parents and found them odd (for example, they’ve never hired a babysitter for their three daughters, for any length of time) but largely harmless; plus, Jade has always said they were asleep or otherwise not there when she and her friend, and later sisters, were abused. So that would mean a mysterious cabal of Satanists are kidnapping the Ekdahl girls and molesting them at night, murdering other kids and animals and somehow doing all of this undetected. Sure.
She spends an egregiously long (IMO) time waffling with the idea of whether or not to report suspected abuse and indulging this idea that it might be occult-related. (Also to file under “it was a different time”: the near-fellatio––which involved biting––was solved by Hayden apologizing to the boy’s mother and that was that.) Finally, with a little condensing from me here, it’s revealed that Jade’s younger sister, who appears developmentally normal, has a scar carved onto her in a shape similar to the one Jade draws, of a circle with an x inside of it. Even though Jade’s sister tells Hayden Jade carved it onto her, Hayden summons the principal and the two agree to report the abuse.
As an adult, when I thought of this book, I couldn’t remember the exact details of the ending, only that it was anticlimactic in some way. When I read it again, to write this, I remembered why: though Hayden, despite describing herself as torn many times, clearly is favoring the Satanic explanation for Jade’s behavior and stories, no evidence for this was ever found. I remember being distinctly disappointed because, more baldly than Hayden, I completely believed Jade’s story and was incensed they couldn’t prove it. Still, even without concrete evidence of abuse, all the kids are removed from the home––another era!––and placed in foster care. Some time later, their dad is arrested for molesting a young girl, and so this seems to validate some of Jade’s claims but not the hardcore ritual stuff. (For example, they could never find any evidence of Tashee, the girl supposedly murdered by the coven, ever existing.)
When I started thinking about this book recently, it occurred to me that it must be totally made up, despite it being classified as nonfiction. It seems really odd that a teacher––a really good one, supposedly––would toy with this whole sordid theory for a long period of time without calling in the authorities. It seems even odder that someone would write this book at the height of the Satanic Panic and not once mention the McMartin Preschool trials, which overlapped exactly and were huge news (the McMartin scandal began in 1983 but the trials took place from 1987-1990; Ghost Girl was published in 1991, which means she would have been writing it as the trials were winding down.) The most she does is include a paragraph in the afterword in which she subtly lends credence to the idea of Satanic ritual abuse: “[The reports of abuse] are not only quite consistent among even very young children, but they are widespread, occurring in vastly separated parts of the United States, as well as Canada, Great Britain, and continental Europe,” she writes. “… [D]espite the elusive nature of ‘concrete evidence,’ a large body of people have chosen to believe these children.” This “large body of people,” she implies, are therapists, doctors and others from the “medical community,” thus pitting them against the bad meanies in law enforcement who have such pesky requirements like “evidence.” This is one of many, many instances in the book in which she rather transparently lends credibility to the whole Satanic thing, painting it as the kind and child-centered option, or just at least as baseline plausible, even though by the early nineties the panic was definitively beginning to wane. In 1991, a report was released by an FBI agent who dealt with many of these cases in which he explained his broad skepticism; two years later, the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect revealed research that stated they couldn’t corroborate a single one of the roughly 12,000 reported cases of Satanic ritual abuse.
So after some time sitting with it post-re-read, I don’t know that I still feel like she made the whole thing up. On her website, she describes a fairly laborious process of ensuring she is behaving ethically when writing about real people. “My experience is that one needs an extremely comprehensive consent form to deal with these kinds of eventualities, so if you plan to write about real people, my best advice is to get a good lawyer first!” Presumably these consent forms exist somewhere in Hayden’s archives or her publishers’, and it would take a really calculating person to write something like the above when such forms didn’t exist anywhere, and I don’t like to imagine this kind of personality type unless it seems warranted (see next entry in this series). I mean, stranger things have happened than this lie––see: JT LeRoy––but I wouldn’t put money on it. As a person who writes nonfiction, I also am very sympathetic to the complications of writing about your own life when it means depicting other people who may or may not be so keen to be in a book. There’s really no way to win there, unless you get everyone’s written consent and refuse their right to fact check/read over anything (because then it would get too murky). So I think it’s quite likely at least some of the story in Ghost Girl is true, but the odd, or perhaps fortuitous, timing of it, the babe-in-the-woods quality to Hayden as narrator especially vis-a-vis Satanism, the use of stock types (savior teacher, manic pixie disturbed child) makes one raise eyebrows a bit.
Here are some plausible explanations, as I see it:
- She did have a real student like Jade, but the Satanic stuff was very much downplayed in the actual case. Sensing an opportunity to ride the coattails of current events, Hayden emphasized them in the book, perhaps with all parties involved (i.e. publishers and Hayden herself) telling themselves that by doing this they were obscuring the details so much that people wouldn’t recognize themselves as characters.
- Jade was being abused by her father, and also was mentally ill in some way (whether as a result of this abuse or a birth trauma, as was her mother’s explanation; either seems possible to me) and saw some of the news footage of McMartin Preschool or another Satanic ritual abuse story and it became woven into her fantasy life/she used those details to create an outlandish story that at once revealed the abuse but also not have to name her actual abuser.
Or some combination of the two.
As one poster on Reddit said, it’s kind of surprising, given Hayden’s fame, that none of her former students have ever spoken out about their experiences, just generally and with her specifically. It’s either a testament to them/her treatment that they never felt the need, or deeply suspicious, or just the way it’s all panned out. All this to say, I’d be extremely curious if any of these kids surfaced! You know how to find me!
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