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Ohio School Officials Keep
Dictionary of Demons at Bay

Local school district officials have compromised with the parents of a Northwood (Ohio) High School student by moving Fred Gettings’s Dictionary of Demons out of the circulating collection. “I wanted the book out, but I felt that was the most I was going to get,” Terrie Richardson said in the February 22 Toledo Blade, explaining that she objected to the book’s being “influential and promoting demonic teaching, witchcraft, and the occult.”

Community reaction to the decision has been fervent on both sides. A February 26 Blade editorial questioned why parents “can’t sit with children to talk about how humans through time have viewed demons.” Emphasizing that “no one has been denied access” by reclassifying the book, Northwood schools Superintendent Ronald Matter insisted in a March 6 letter to the editor that educators there offer a “curriculum that is open and global in perspective.”

Published in 1990, Gettings’s work is an illustrated compilation of more than 2,000 entries about spirits whose stories date from pre-Christian times to the present.

Posted March 13, 2000.

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