In Gingerbread, Buffy and her mother found two murdered children in a playground, with occult marks on their bodies. The ‘children’ were really a chaos demon which fed on negative emotion. As Giles says in the episode, “Some demons thrive by fostering hatred and persecution amongst the mortal animals. Not by destroying men, but by watching men destroy each other. Now, they feed us our darkest fear and turn peaceful communities into vigilantes.” The demon in the episode took the form of two dead children, and haunted the local community, making people believe the children were murdered by witches. The local community became fearful, leading Joyce to set up a steering committee called ‘MOO’ (Mothers Opposed to the Occult). Eventually, the people of Sunnydale decided to get rid of any occult forces in the town and tried to burn those they thought were witches, including Buffy, Willow and Amy. The demon had been tricking communities for hundreds of years, from when it first took the form of Hansel and Gretal Strauss, who were killed at the ages of eight and six in 1649 in the Black Forest. Since then it had appeared as their dead bodies every 50 years, including Omahagh in 1949, and Utah in 1899.