Witchcraft scares have spooked schools across Europe since the Middle Ages. In 1639, a “supernatural riot” broke out at a girls’ school in Lille, France. There, 50 students confessed to witchcraft after a headteacher saw “devil’s imps” circling their heads. By the turn of the 20th century, hysterical outbursts in elite European schools became commonplace. “Mass spirit possessions” are also routine at Malaysia’s ultra-strict schools, where, like at the Miami Aerospace Academy, students scream, writhe on the ground and smash windows.

Robert Bartholomew, an American sociologist who studies “mass psychogenic illness” blames the regime at these strict institutions. He wrote: “All work and no play fosters abnormal states of mind that reflect local beliefs in the existence of an array of supernatural creatures.” In Miami, demons.

In an email, Professor Christopher French of the University of London wrote that “demonic possession…has certain benefits if used strategically. It allows those with little power to indirectly protest about their lot in life and engage in behaviors which, under normal circumstances, would never be tolerated.” He added that the possessed “genuinely believe…that they are under the control of some kind of spirit.”

An Indian professor of Clinical Psychology who has studied demonic possessions, Y.S. Vagrecha, said that mass possessions often grip “marginalized” groups. The Academy students in Miami, he wrote, were “at a subconscious level, revolting or protesting against the regime which oppressed them.”

Psychologists believe that what drove the students to madness wasn’t evil spirits or a weakness of heart, but pent up anger and hearts finally emboldened to do something about it. Marina’s hidden microphones, the cricket bat, and calisthenics might have caused the “supernatural riot.” But it doesn’t explain what happened to Wolf.

As his Corvette weaved through the Little Havana traffic, Wolf quizzed the students about what he had seen back at the school. They promised him they were “just watching” the Ouija experiment. When they arrived at the girl’s house, the students didn’t want to wait alone for her mother to arrive home from work, so Wolf stayed. They poured him a soda, and they were “just chit-chatting” until about 8 o’clock at night, he said. That was when the lights suddenly went out.

The house was pitch black. Wolf said a door slammed shut. The television flickered on and off. In the dark, the teenagers made a terrified confession, Wolf recalled. “The boyfriend admitted he was doing stuff with the Ouija board.”

Wolf said he fumbled his way to the front door, heart pumping, as he struggled to open the lock. He said he had to practically kick the door open. He ran to his Corvette, leapt in.

Then he turned the key.

“It was like the car didn’t have a transmission,” he said. “I’m putting the pedal to the metal and the car wouldn’t move.”

He was trapped.

When he finally got the engine started, he tore out of the neighborhood. He said he never saw the teenage couple again, and told this story for the first time on Facebook, decades later. Like many staff at the Academy, Wolf quit his job immediately, and said he enrolled in the local police academy. “I’d lost all control over myself,” he said, “and over the students.” Today he describes himself as a skeptic, but strongly believes something supernatural occurred at the school. It changed the course of his life.

Headlines from the News Journal, and The Courier-News, Oct. 26. 1979

Rumors of demons at the school circulated among superstitious parents. Many students were yanked out of the Academy that week, including Manny Ruiz, even though he was in another part of the campus and hadn’t seen the hysteria. “It was because there was a sense of something horrible going on in the school,” he said. “I was very distraught when I was moved.”

The empty seats in class infuriated Marina. His political war chest suffered. His own investigation into the riot was hampered by the fact that his hidden microphones were just a myth. Then, a few months later, a “Santería vigil” just miles away from the school exploded in violence. Police found a sacrificed chicken, a “voodoo cane,” and two dead Cuban refugees.

The Civil Air Patrol withdrew its association with the school. When the student officer system collapsed, chaos ruled. Within a year of the riot, Marina had lost the election and his school building, due to financial mis-management.

Marina moved the school to a grim motel and lawyers’ office nearby, as attendance dropped to just 300 students. Boys and girls were thrown in together. Forty student boarders slept in spartan dormitories, six or eight to a room. In 1980, Marina moved in too, leaving his fancy condo to sleep in an apartment in the building.

Elsewhere in Florida, supernatural happenings seemed to be on the rise. In August of 1981, a fire-rescue team was called to a Boynton Beach home, where a 16-year-old boy was thrashing uncontrollably, claiming to be possessed by Satan. It took four men to hold the boy down, while an Episcopal priest and a Baptist minister performed an exorcism. “Unless you were experienced on how Satan disguises himself, you would think it was drugs or alcohol,” said the Rev. Richard Bass.

Back at the Academy, Florida’s satanic panic made it hard for Marina to attract top teaching talent. Classes became a joke. When a new enrollee asked about the aerospace lessons, a teacher pointed to the sky and said: “Look, that’s as much aerospace training you’re going to get here.” Marina’s son won Cadet of the Year in 1982.

That year, Marina ran for the Legislature, spending $38,059 on his campaign— more than any other candidate. An outraged Marina finished third by 75 votes, and demanded a recount. A judge threw out the result after finding evidence of ballot tampering. Marina was getting desperate, yet, a small, loyal base of parents fiercely backed him.

In 1983 the school hired a Latvian teacher, who told the Miami Herald he was fired for striking a boy with a billy club. “I couldn’t help myself,” confessed Adrie Winzentowitsch, 62. “The black boy was of rich parents and he managed to terrorize spiritually all the other boys by boasting.” The Latvian shocked the community when he admitted he was a former volunteer in Hitler’s army. Marina told a journalist: “I don’t know that guy.” But a former student, Maurice Miselem, 20, told the Herald: “He told us he was a Nazi.”

Manny Ruiz pictured in the mid-1980s. Source: Manny Ruiz

In 1984, Manny Ruiz persuaded his grandparents to let him re-enroll, and found the school in ruins. Gone were his Kiss bandmates. “I don’t know what happened to that jet,” he said. “It felt like the school was demon-possessed. It bordered on the paranormal, there was a bad spirit in that place.” Ruiz said gym teachers forced kids to fight each other for sport. Bullies beat him. Everywhere was cocaine. Ruiz sunk into a depression, listening to the same Iron Maiden song: “666 — the number of the beast.”

“I cried to God from the bottom of my heart,” Ruiz recalled. “And I said, ‘If you are a reality, I need to do something right now because I can’t bear it anymore.’ I just wanted to die.” Ruiz said he found a small Bible and started reading from the Book of Revelation. “The devil will put some of you in prison to test you,” it read. Ruiz carried the Bible daily for “protection.”

During that first semester of 1984, another new student arrived at the Academy. “He was quiet, stayed to himself, kinda the awkward kid,” recalled Ana Maria Cooper, a former student. The 14-year-old didn’t always answer to his name, Arthur Simpson, and told some students that he’d come straight from jail. They assumed the red-haired kid was making it up “to be macho.” But when another new cadet arrived, the pair quickly recognized each other from behind bars. A new terror haunted the school’s overnight boarders.

One night in May of 1984, a six-year-old boy escaped from the dormitory at the Academy and made a dash for the chain link fence. He had just started to climb when the alarm was raised, and police officers pulled him down. As he was carried back inside the school, he cried: “The monsters are after me!”

The boy’s mother claimed the monsters were older cadets at the school. After an investigation, Miami police said there could be as many as a dozen victims of abuse, and in May of 1985, they charged five Academy students with sexual assault, including Simpson. Police soon discovered the teenager’s real name, sending shockwaves through the school. He was Clarence Carr, a teenage murderer.

Carr had snapped one night in March of 1984, after his mother once again took back his father. The 33-year-old security guard regularly abused them both, a court heard. That night, the boy recorded a last will and testament on his tape deck: “I leave all my toys and things to the Salvation Army,” he said sweetly, before his tiny voiced flashed with anger. “When I die, I want my body to help other people. I love my mom, and I love my dad, and I love my grandparents, but I don’t want to die. I don’t want my mom to be hurt…so please, God help us.”

Carr slipped on a pair of shooting-range ear mufflers and loaded his father’s .38-caliber handgun. The whole world was silent as he took off his shoes and padded into his parent’s bedroom. He approached the bed, lifted the gun and unloaded three rounds into the head of his sleeping father.

Clarence Carr, tape recording of his last will and testament — WTVJ, June 6, 1984

After his arrest, Carr was marched into court wearing a light blue jacket. Onlookers described his troubled expression as that of a much older man. The judge, who sentenced him to 10 years probation, sent Carr not to an official correctional facility, but to the Miami Aerospace Academy — possibly in a clerical error. The decision was mired in mystery. Carr’s education was paid for by a secret benefactor: Count Tassilo Szechenyi.

Born in a castle in Budapest in 1912, Count Szechenyi was reportedly fifth in line to the Austro-Hungarian throne. During the postwar Soviet occupation of Hungary he fled to Cuba, later arriving in Miami in 1954, where the Miami New Times described him as “a wastrel, a rotter, a stumblebum.” The Count had met Carr’s mother at a sports club, reports said. Marina couldn’t say no to his money.

Carr’s attorney insisted his client was a “follower, not a leader” in the alleged abuse. Marina claimed a conspiracy. He said the victim’s mother had blackmailed him, and demanded $5,000 to drop the charges. The State Attorney for Dade County, Janet Reno, who would later become Attorney General under President Clinton, investigated, and filed no charges.

During a court hearing, the mother of Carr’s alleged victim had to flee a throng of angry pro-Marina parents, in scenes described by the Herald as “straight out of a Franz Kafka novel.” Even after Carr was sentenced to 10 years, dozens of female parents chanted: “Miami Aerospace! Miami Aerospace!” But Marina’s finely crafted façade was continuing to crack.

A Herald exposé discovered that the Academy was “entirely unregulated, unlicensed, unaccredited and unsupervised.” Anyone with $15 could start up a private school like it. Meanwhile, Miami police arrested Dr. Gregory Macyke, 52, a former teacher at the academy, who had two arrest warrants for passing worthless checks. “Sometimes the press makes problems,” said Marina. “They kill my political career. Please don’t crucify me like they crucified Jesus Christ.”

At the school, Ruiz was also tired of his tormentors. He tucked his Bible inside his faded blue shirt and confronted the ringleader of the school bullies. “I felt like it was God’s armor. God was protecting me,” he said. “I had my bible that day when I kicked the crap out of that kid.” He never returned to the school.