Momo, Chickenwackers, and Our Children: Why Conspiracy Theories Never Change
By: Robert Skvarla
Tags: Folklore, Big Stories Matter, Culture, Conspiracy Theories, Sociology

Think fast! Your children are in danger. From what, you ask? A killer meme named Momo.

By now most of you have read about the Momo Challenge and correctly guessed it’s a hoax. The meme is another in the endless scroll of fakes, urban legends, and conspiracy theories that have captured our attention in the 2010s. Saturation of these ideas is at an all-time high. Researchers at Cambridge University recently discovered that 60 percent of Britons believed in some kind of conspiracy theory. The number of Americans varies depending on the theory you’re polling and who you ask, but rest assured, it’s usually above 50 percent.

It’s important to note here that when discussing subjects like this that we should distinguish between belief in conspiracies, which are often real, historical events, and conspiracy theories, which use those real conspiracies as the starting point for labyrinth-like narratives that over simplify complex chains of events and phenomena. So, while the United States government has, in the past, conducted unethical, illegal and morally repugnant medical experiments on its own citizens — and may have even theorized about continuing such experiments as recently as the 1990s — it’s unlikely that it is currently engaged in a long-term project to feminize men using “gay chemicals,” as reported by Alex Jones.

I bring this up because the Momo Challenge is a great example of the homogenous nature of conspiracy ideas. The Momo Challenge is only notable because of how mundane it is. Benjamin Radford of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry detailed in a post how the Challenge is actually an evolution of a very recent conspiracy theory, the online suicide game. The game, in which anonymous online groups coax teenagers into committing suicide, first appeared in 2017 as the Blue Whale Game. Both the Momo Challenge and the Blue Whale Game are nearly identical; in the Momo Challenge, teens must follow Momo’s demands up to and including commit suicide, and with the Blue Whale Game, they take on daily tasks that increase in intensity, culminating in their own death.

The fact that something like the Momo Challenge could go viral even after stories picked apart the veracity of the Blue Whale Game isn’t that strange. Conspiracy theories are frequently birthed from older legends and theories once the original stories lose credibility. This might take only a year, as with Blue Whale, or could take a decade or more. In fact, the Momo Challenge isn’t the first time something like this has happened in the last 12 months. You only need to look back to August of last year to find another example.

THE CHICKENWACKERS

On August 16, 2018, The Daily Sentinel, out of Grand Junction, Colorado, published an article detailing an arson arrest. Per the report, a man staying at a local motel set fire to his room using “a lighter, toilet paper, a bedspread and sheets, and a bag.” While that may not seem out of the norm, the arsonist’s motives were highly unusual. He claimed he did it to protect himself from the “Chicken whackers.” The Chicken… what? The Daily Sentinel followed up a month later, on September 15, 2018, with another article titled “Question: Who are the Chickenwackers?” The article attempted to explore the history of the Chickenwackers but offered little in the way of clarity. However, it did provide one lead in the form of an interview with the anonymous creator of a website, chickenwackers.com, which probes the urban legend in greater depth.

The homepage of chickenwackers.com

The creator of the Chickenwackers website relies on anecdotal and alleged word-of-mouth evidence to string together a kind of oral history. In the Daily Sentinel article, she claims they are a “secretive Western Slope cabal involved in Satanism and black market endeavors.” She elaborates further on her website in a series of blog posts linking the group to prostitution, drug cartels, and, naturally, child sacrifice. The website contains an overarching narrative tying the author’s alleged experience growing up in Palisade, Colorado, a few miles northeast of Grand Junction, to the growth and proliferation of the myth. In particular, she claims she first became aware of the Chickenwackers in the 1990s after the murder of a young woman named Jacie Taylor. In this telling of the Jacie Taylor story, the Chickenwackers murdered Jacie, a recent graduate of Palisade High School, after she became pregnant so they could sacrifice her baby. One post goes so far as to claim other teens at Palisade High School saw a video of the murder.

Sadly, the Jacie Taylor story is messier and far more complicated than the Chickenwacker myth. Jacie was murdered in June 1994 but none of the reporting on the case at the time suggested she was pregnant, and at no point during that time did any members of law enforcement declare any kind of ritualistic method or motive to her murder; on the contrary, she had been sexually assaulted and strangled in her own apartment. The person convicted for the crime in 1996 was a man named Ronald Dewey… but he was innocent. An investigation by the Innocence Project found that DNA evidence in the case did not match Dewey. Thankfully, that DNA did find a hit. In 2015, police matched the DNA to a man already serving a life sentence for rape and murder.

It would be easy to write off the Chickenwackers website as an example of magical thinking, a story of one person conflating details of a real case with bizarre fabrications, but the website is not alone in its loose grasp on reality. In researching this article, I encountered at least two more stories of real-life assaults tied to the Chickenwackers. The first case — and this should come as no surprise — involves the conspiracy-filled world of Reddit. The second covers a criminal trial that took place in Grand Junction in 2006.

Soon after finding chickenwackers.com, I stumbled across a comment to a post in the subreddit r/NoSleep. A user named PsychedelicAnon responded to a Creepypasta written about a user’s unusual experience while homeless in Colorado. In the comment, PsychedelicAnon states:

“People think, oh lets just go to Colorado and smoke some fire weed and camp. Nah. There’s some scary shit that goes down out there. Found out the hard way. Ended up back in good ol’ Arkansas. At least down here we don’t have to worry about tweakers kidnapping you and cutting you up over fifty bucks worth of meth and leaving your body in a suitcase in Cactus Park near Dominguez Canyon. That actually happened btw. When I was in Mesa County Jail, I foolishly asked about that girl, and the people called the chickenwackers, my cellmate scary as he was told me never to mention it because you never know where they could be. Massive guy with 970 tatted on his belly, made it real clear that shit is not a joke. Its not just rumors. The cops, district attorneys, local government officials, tweakers, and gang bangers all a part of the same fucked up nightmare crime syndicate. It still makes me nervous.”

I messaged PsychedelicAnon for more details about their time in Grand Junction, and they responded a few hours later. The message was intentionally vague but referenced the murder of Kelly Mae Meyers, a Grand Junction woman who died in 2014. PsychedelicAnon would not elaborate on the nature of the case or their cellmate, but did state that Grand Junction had a history of “cult activity” and suggested that even local drug dealers were afraid of the Chickenwackers. As with Jacie Taylor, some elements of the story were true and others less so. Kelly Mae Meyers died in Utah of an overdose but an autopsy couldn’t determine if it was an accident or a homicide. Three men cut up her body and stuffed it into a suitcase; one struck a deal with Mesa County prosecutors helping to convict the other two on drug-related charges, at which point officials in Utah charged them with desecration of a corpse.

Similarly, an archived post from an old Yahoo Group, The Paranormal & Ghost Society, revealed a Daily Sentinel article from 2006 covering a criminal trial for attempted murder. In that case, a man suffering from some kind of mental health condition attacked and stabbed another man 26 times. During the trial forensic psychologist Robert Sammons testified on the attacker’s behalf, arguing that he was experiencing a psychotic episode. In one instance, the man claimed that the “Chicken whackers” killed his brother, chopped off his brother’s head, and put it on a stick so they could taunt him when they communicated with him. According to Sammons, the attacker believed that at some point the second man had joined with the Chickenwackers and began worshipping the devil, forcing him to stab the man in fear for his own safety.

Sammons remains the man’s only supporter. “What makes this case interesting is that [the defendant] was clearly psychotic for a while,” he said during a phone interview. “He’d been in a state hospital and they said he was peculiar, but they believed he was an Indian. After stabbing this guy, he went home and burned his clothes in a barrel, then took the ashes and put them on his forehead. They said this was part of an Indian ritual.” Sammons says he spoke with members of local tribes in the Western Slope region of Colorado but couldn’t find any that used ashes in their rituals. “As a psychologist you don’t take anything at face value. [The defendant] said was he was raised as an Indian, he talked to the trees, and practiced rituals like his great-grandfather. I contacted his family and they said weren’t Indians and his great-grandfather never practiced rituals … He was raised Catholic.”

Over Sammons’s objections, a Mesa County court determined the man fit to stand trial. He was found guilty on all counts. When asked why he feels the man turned to the Chickenwackers as a motive for the stabbing, Sammons offered, “People need some kind of explanation for bizarre occurrences that are out of their control.”

A BRIEF HISTORY OF WEIRD COLORADO STATE HISTORY

The Chickenwacker myth is helpful in understanding how urban legends and conspiracy theories like the Momo Challenge evolve over time. The three stories above illustrate that the lifespan of a myth can persist for years even if it is consistently challenged and shown to be false. This happens because, as Robert Sammons stated, people need something to stitch together the disparate threads that make up their daily lives. If existence seems arbitrary and meaningless, that’s because it is — there are rarely links in a larger chain that unite our memories and experiences. As sociologists like Michael Barkun has argued, myths, urban legends and conspiracy theories help people to bring a sense of order to a world they don’t understand by taking real events and placing them alongside other unusual occurrences to create grand stories of good and evil.

In the case of the Chickenwackers, there is some truth that weaves together the greater fiction. Colorado is an unusual state, with a strange history and an off-kilter spirit. Occasionally, that history is wonderfully absurd, as in the annual celebration of Mike the Headless Chicken, a festival honoring the 18-month life of a headless chicken, which happens a few miles outside of Grand Junction in nearby Fruita every June. But more often than not, the state has a dark and troubling legacy.

Colorado, generally speaking, has always been a hotspot for outsiders and freethinkers. “Like attracts like, according to the Law of Attraction,” said Charmaine Ortega Getz, author of the book and blog Weird Colorado, via email, “so people seeking affirmation/validation/confirmation will flock to those places and people that already offer such.” The state’s weird history stretches back more than century, according to Ms. Getz. “The Iliff School of Theology in Denver has an interesting collection of social-science studies done by students in the early part of the 20th Century that focused on esoteric cults and new religions of the region in that day,” she wrote. “I’ve seen dozens of advertisements from old Colorado newspapers going even farther back that, promoting what we’d call now all kinds of metaphysical claimants and alternates to the conventional religious groups of the era.”

Beginning in the 1970s, New Age groups and other like-minded travelers began moving into the state with increasing frequency, drawn by a population boom and economic prosperity. A May 1988 article in the New York Times chronicled the growth of these movements from the 1960s counterculture to the 1980s mainstream. Grand Junction was no exception. In 1974, it hosted a gathering for a pre-Heaven’s Gate Marshall Applewhite; in the 1980s it was the home of the Spiral of Friends cult led by James Randazzo, a group later convicted of the sexual assault of minors under their care; in the 1990s and early 2000s it was one of a number of locations caught up in a scandal involving the First Assembly and Church of the First Born; and in 2017, two young girls died while in the care of a nearby “doomsday cult.”

To an extent, the Redditor PsychedelicAnon is right: cults did exist in Grand Junction. And the creator of the Chickenwackers website is also right: Grand Junction can seem unusually violent. The area has a disproportionately high crime rate relative to the size of its population. In 2017, Colorado Public Radio found that it had the fourth highest murder rate despite having almost half the population of the other nine cities on its list. It’s not unusual to see local stories about child sex trafficking and large-scale meth rings. So, observers might see all these unrelated events and ask, “What’s going in Grand Junction?” The easy answer is the Chickenwackers. Surely, all these things happening in the same area at roughly the same time can’t be a coincidence? Life isn’t arbitrary, it’s meaningful and linear. The real answer must be a far-reaching conspiracy of government officials who push drugs and prostitution while secretly sacrificing babies to Satan!

The problem, as it often is with conspiracy theories, is that this story isn’t new.

The front page of the Washington Times on June 29, 1989

THE FRANKLIN COVER-UP

John DeCamp was a man ahead of his time. If he were alive today you might even say he’s the type of person who’d do well in our current political climate, because DeCamp was the kind of man who could see how everything fits into its proper place. He understood how seemingly small or trivial stories could actually be something much larger and more meaningful. DeCamp knew how to connect the dots—and did he ever.

In 1992 John DeCamp released The Franklin Cover-Up: Child Abuse, Satanism, and Murder in Nebraska. The book was a kind of proto-Pizzagate, pre-Alex Jones stream-of-consciousness tour through conservative bugfuckery. It had a little bit of everything: child prostitution, Republican sexual hypocrisy, and, what else, Satanism. It alleged that the 1988 trial of an Omaha credit union manager for embezzlement was actually an attempt to cover-up a government conspiracy involving a pedophilia ring, drug trafficking, and Satanic ritual abuse and cannibalism. According to DeCamp, the manager, Lawrence King, Jr. (no, not that Larry King), was a well-connected figure in the Nebraska Republican Party who used his status as a donor and board member at local youth charities to sexually exploit young boys and girls. In the second chapter, DeCamp connected high-level government officials to the pedophile ring by linking former Vice President George H.W. Bush to King, stating that King would throw all-male parties in Washington D.C. involving “sodomy” and that Bush attended at last one of the parties. Later chapters touch on two key figures, Alisha Owen and Paul Bonacci. Owen and Bonnaci accused King, among others, of sexual coercion and abuse. “Virtually all [multiple personality disorder] victims were severely abused starting before they were six years old,” DeCamp wrote of the two, “with tortures such as being hung upside down and having hot objects stuck inside them, or being forced to participate in the murder, mutilation and cannibalism of other children.”

The only crime King was guilty of was embezzlement. In 1990, a grand jury determined Owen and Bonacci lied under oath about the sexual exploitation and child trafficking and charged both with perjury. (Only Owen would serve time.) DeCamp faced no repercussions for his part. Instead, he published multiple editions of his book, using the later editions to expand on the conspiracy to include Columbine and the Catholic Church.

What the Franklin Cover-Up points to is the impossibility of closure on conspiracy theories. From the beginning of the King trial to the charges of perjury, it took almost two years for the truth to come out. But that wasn’t the end. John DeCamp’s book gave the story new life and distorted which version(s) would spread around the country. It’s not hard to imagine that coverage of both the initial King trial and the subsequent DeCamp book might have reached neighboring states. States like Colorado.

IS THIS THE END?

Whether we’re discussing the Momo Challenge, the Chickenwackers or the Franklin Cover-Up, we need to acknowledge that we’re discussing the real fears of real people. Conspiracy theories don’t appear out of the ether fully formed. They’re bits and pieces of ideas ripped from the social anxieties of specific places, peoples and periods and mashed together into terrifying stories meant to explain those anxieties in a way that reduces complexity. The Momo Challenge isn’t actually about children, just as the Chickenwackers and the Franklin Cover-Up aren’t actually about child sacrifice. It’s the same reason “Believe the children!” was a rallying cry in the both the 1690s and the 1990s. Children are frequently at the center of conspiracy theories because they’re a soft target. They can’t defend themselves from the conspirators or the conspiracy theorists so they’re a group everyone agrees needs defending. To argue otherwise would admit one’s culpability as a conspirator.

But these are really stories about adults trying to come to terms with and fight back against a world they don’t understand. Much as they can be victims, children are also a great cudgel to wield against the forces of change — be they political, social or technological. The phrase “Stranger Danger” first appeared in the 1960s as the world was going through rapid changes. What may have once only been a local or regional story could suddenly spark a moral panic that crossed continents and targeted anyone who didn’t follow the dominant culture of the era. This became clearer as the world became more and more connected through technology, as our social mores changed, and as our political differences grew — and continues as those things happen at a greater pace today.

The fear of Momo — and the Chickenwackers, and the Franklin Cover-Up — is the fear that time doesn’t belong to us anymore, that it has already passed us by and is now out there somewhere beyond our reach. It’s a fear of irrelevancy and loss of power. It’s a fear that if we don’t protect the children then someone else will.