Lauren Stratford

Biography: Lauren Stratford, born Laurel Rose Wilson, (1941–2002) was the author of Satan's Underground, yet another fraudulent book that was a best-seller on the Christian book market during the 1980s claiming to be the testimony of somebody who escaped Satanism. The book was published during the height of the "Satanic ritual abuse" scare of the late 1980s and championed by, among other Christian preachers, Hal Lindsey. The tall tales she spins in this book are among the goriest and sickest of any in the notoriously sensationalist field of Christian books by "ex-Satanists," recounting tales of being ritually sexually abused, forced to perform human sacrifices, brainwashed and tortured, placed in a metal drum with the bodies of babies who had been ritually sacrificed to Satan, and giving birth to children who were used in "snuff films". She was exposed as a fraud by other Christian ministries who investigated and found them to be outright fabrications. It gets weirder. She resurfaced in the late 1990s, this time using the name Laura Grabowski, claiming to have been a childhood survivor of the Nazis' Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp and that she had been experimented on by Joseph Mengele. This story was likewise exposed as fraudulent—she was from Washington State and not a Polish Jew as she claimed—and it soon surfaced that "Laura Grabowski" was the same person who a decade earlier had claimed to be a Satanic abuse survivor as "Lauren Stratford."