I was talking to my therapist about my sexual anxieties, which are largely a result of being raised in a Catholic Church. To help me feel better about how difficult it can be to suppress natural urges, she told me a story about a Church or seminary or some Catholic institution, where the nuns lived in one building and the priests lived in another some distance away. Apparently, after a while somebody discovered a tunnel connecting the two buildings, and tons of baby skeletons in the tunnel. This is where the nuns and priests had come to secretly fornicate, and this is where they disposed of the resultant babies.
I had this conversation a few years ago, so I might be sketchy on the details, but does anybody know of anything like this actually happening? Where can I read more about it?
This is a common story but appears to be entirely fabricated. Such tales were regularly circulated in the anti-Catholic literature and mob violence of the 19th century. One of the most famous uses of it originated from the anti-Catholic propaganda book in 1836 Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, ghost-written by a group of Protestants. As a fabricated hoax, most of the information in the book was false, designed to stir up popular violence against Catholics, and there was no evidence of this alleged tunnel. This didn't stop the book from becoming a bestseller and its fabricated tales of lechery from becoming commonly accepted knowledge, even to the present day.