A Brief History of Killer Smurfs

The Smurfs are diminutive, blue-skinned humanoids with puffy white shorts and white hats. They live in mushroom shaped-houses in some unnamed forest, and have done since they were introduced by Belgian comics artist Pierre Culliford (under the pen-name Peyo) in 1958. They've always been very much kid-friendly and innocent, and so they would be some of the last characters you'd expect to have been repeatedly tangled up in accusations of demonic activity and mass supernatural murder...

## Smurf Hysteria!

A truly bizarre case of mass hysteria took ahold of the children of Houston, Texas in January of 1983. Rumours spread like a virus through local junior high schools, convincing those infected that there was a marauding army of Smurfs invading schools and murdering head-teachers. These Smurfs supposedly carried knives and machine guns, and would slaughter anyone wearing blue. Or, as a contrary rumour stated with absolute confidence, would spare anyone wearing blue. Children started refusing to go to school, and in the Aldine Independent School District - another facet of the growing rumour infestation appeared in which children were now persuaded that murderous Smurfs were lurking in the school toilets.

The panic eventually died down, as all such panics seemingly do. This process was helped by teachers saying that other cartoon characters had been drafted in to fight the killer Smurfs - and by appearances of supposedly-dead head-teachers, obviously debunking one of the major tenets of the rumours. Investigation (seemingly carried out by *Newsweek*) was able to determine that the panic had likely stemmed from a local news report about forty members of a teenage street gang nicknamed 'The Smurfs' being arrested for petty crimes. Mike Dash also mentions nearly fifty people being arrested around this time for '*Smurf-related goings-on*' - but it is unclear if this is just another reference to the Smurf street gang. No massacres or even cases of Smurf-inflicted harm were ever reported, and the panic disappeared just as quickly as it had sprung up.

## The Jehovah's Witnesses and the Smurfs

It all started in the mid 1980s - sometime around 1983 or 1984. The Smurfs were very popular among young children, and in classic concerned religious organisation fashion, the Jehovah's Witnesses convinced themselves that the little blue men were in fact demonic in nature. One ex-Jehovah's Witness wrote on a forum that the first he heard of this moral panic was when he was banned from watching the Smurfs TV show due to the presence of characters such as the wizard Gargamel and Papa Smurf, who apparently also practiced magic. Magic is greatly frowned upon among the Jehovah's Witnesses, to such an extent that a JW-produced cartoon *Caleb and Sophia* contains the eternally-amusing line '*Jehovah hates magicians*'. The story as told by this specific forum poster than broadened to include tales of JWs who had neglected to realise that Smurfs were in fact demonic and so had purchased Smurf-related paraphernalia only to soon be plagued by demons. These rumours spread like urban legends throughout the Jehovah's Witness community.

He told his neighbour's non-JW grandmother one of the Smurf stories, angering his mother because it would've made them seem insane. This story was about a little girl who had been given Smurf-themed curtains for her bedroom, only to wake the first night and find that the demonic Smurfs had leapt off the curtains and were now dancing around her bedroom while laughing satanically.

Another Jehovah's Witness by the name of Paul had an uncle called Mark, who was an Elder for a local JW congregation. According to a story Elder Mark told Paul, a new family who had just been introduced to the Church came to a Saturday meeting with their young son. However, they had clearly not been Jehovah's Witnesses for a long enough time to know that Smurfs were obviously satanic - and so their son had brought a Smurf doll into the Kingdom Hall with him. This was clearly a grave mistake, and the evil spirit inhabiting the Smurf made this very obvious to all those in the Kingdom Hall. Halfway through the meeting, the doll stood up independently and stated '*I have had enough of this shit*' before walking out of the Hall. A Reddit user by the name of *pstryder* said that he tried to prove or disprove this story by bringing a little Smurf toy into his Kingdom Hall without telling anyone. He waited through the whole meeting for it to climb out of his pocket, but nothing ever happened. He was 14 at the time.

The next Smurf story revolves around a JW family who made the rookie mistake of decorating their son's room with Smurf wallpaper, and shortly after this ill-advised decision was made they noticed that their child was covered with tiny red marks in the morning. The mother of the family asked her son if he had noticed any bugs in his bed, but to this he replied '*No, the Smurfs come out of the wallpaper and bite me at night. In the daylight they're cute and smiling but at night they have sharp teeth*'. Terrified, the parents ripped down the wallpaper and set about redecorating the room, but the wallpaper allegedly wouldn't burn without excessive quantities of gasoline being applied.

The original poster of these three tales (whose post has now seemingly been lost and only the Smurf-related information has been preserved on other forums) said that he had witnessed two instances of Smurfish paranoia in the Jehovah's Witness community. One of these involved a woman who would sometimes babysit for her non-JW ('*worldly*') neighbours. These neighbours would often allow their children to play in a Smurf-themed paddling pool, but when she was babysitting them she made certain that they were never allowed to even enter the pool. She was apparently frightened that the demonic pool would somehow make the kids slip and fall, or even attempt to drown them within its plastic-enclosed depths.

The other story was about a Jehovah's Witness mother who had brought her three-year-old child to the supermarket. The child was unhappy with being stuck in the shopping cart - and when the mother returned from having left her child for a few seconds in order to grab something off a shelf she was appalled to find the kid clutching a 3 inch bendy Smurf toy. There was no indication as to where the child had found the toy, and the mother quickly snatched it away and put it aside. The child started crying as a result of this, of course, but the mother refused to endanger her baby with Smurf exposure. However, over the course of the shopping trip, the kid somehow managed to take hold of the toy twice more. The third time this happened, the mother concluded that the toy must be following them and that demonic forces must've been trying to possess her child. She grabbed her kid, abandoned her cart and fled the shop in terror. The original poster was working at the supermarket at the time, and he was later able to discover that one of his fellow employees was responsible for repeatedly giving the child the Smurf doll to make them happier.

## One True Smurf Tale

An anonymous Reddit user (anonymous thanks to having deleted his account) was approximately seven years old when he had a terrifying encounter with a malevolent Smurf. His family would often go to a friend's house for dinner, and this family had some toys in their house from when their own children were younger that he would often play with. One of the toys in question was a roughly 1ft-tall Smurf doll. He '*never liked*' that toy, and never picked it up - instead choosing to play with a toy dog. One day, he was sitting in the toy room while the adults all talked amongst themselves. He was playing with the dog toy, facing towards the corner in which all the other toys were situated. It seemed as if this would just be another regular day, but this all changed when the Smurf toy suddenly stood up on its own. It started walking around the room. He was terrified - the walking was slow and creepy and '*not cute*'. He ran from the toy room, screaming and crying.

As part of his Reddit post discussing this story, another commenter suggested that he talk to the ex-JW community on the site and described the Jehovah's Witness urban legend about animate Smurf dolls. The Redditor reacted with shock to this revelation, seeing as he was a Jehovah's Witness at the time - but had no idea about the widespread urban legend. He also said that '*weird and horrible things*' were always happening to him at the time, but didn't elaborate on this.

## Sources

'Borderlands' by Mike Dash

'Unexplained Phenomena: A Rough Guide Special' by John Michell, Bob Rickard and Robert JM Rickard

'Urban Myths - Watchtower Style' on *Internationalskeptics.com*

 'Can We Talk About The Smurfs Please?' on *r/exjw*