We’re in what seems like year 937 of talking about America’s “fraying social fabric,” and it often feels like when it comes to paranoia and distrust of our fellow citizens, parents are ground zero. There seems to be no action so innocuous anymore that it can’t be construed as nefarious by many of today’s parents, and a mom’s story on Reddit is a perfect example.

A mom was accused of luring kids into the woods after following her son on a nature trail.

What happened to this mom is downright disturbing and could have ended tragically. As she relayed in a Reddit postit all started with a visit to her local park with her 5-year-old son, who is autistic. When a big group of kids joined them on the merry-go-round, her son got a bit overstimulated, so they ventured down a quiet nature trail instead.

Their time down the nature trail quickly turned into a frankly ridiculous drama that ended with the mom not only being accused of harming kids, but being visited by police in her own home, all because of another parent’s frankly bizarre paranoia.

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When another little girl got lost, the mom was accused of luring her away from her parents.

What happened next is something straight out of “The Crucible.” While the mom and her son were playing on the nature trail, another little boy ventured down the trail too. He and her son played together briefly, but then the mom heard parents yelling back at the playground.

“I told the boy he better go back because it sounds like his parents might be looking for him,” she wrote, and the boy ran off back to the playground. A few minutes later, she and her son exited the trail back to the playground, and she was immediately intercepted by a man asking her if she’d seen a little girl in the woods.

She said she hadn’t seen a girl, only a little boy, and immediately a mother nearby yelled, “She’s lying! I seen her go into the woods with her!” Despite having just been accused of something horrific, the mom tried to help the parents find their daughter, but was ignored entirely. Moments later, the parents found their daughter, and she assumed that was the end of it — wrongly, it turned out.

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After she returned home, police knocked on her door to investigate her ‘suspicious’ behavior in the woods.

Shortly after she and her son got home, there was a knock on the door. “A cop showed up at my house saying I got reported as being suspicious, trying to take kids into the woods,” the mom wrote.

She was, understandably, shocked. “I don’t understand why they would call the cops on me. Nothing I did was suspicious,” she wrote. The other parents had found their daughter, and nowhere near the nature trail. Nothing about this makes a bit of sense.

Or does it? Studies have shown that a wide majority of Americans fundamentally distrust each otherincluding their own neighbors, and that this is part of what is eroding the country’s social fabric.

Studies have also shown that conspiracy theories are part of this increasingly dire issue, and given that we’re now years into an utterly fallacious, propaganda-fueled social panic about supposed rampant child trafficking in American suburbs — a panic experts say diverts resources away from actual victims — it’s hard not to assume that what happened to this mom is part of these wider trends.

For this mom, it could have ended in any number of disasters, from an arrest to her child being taken away. These are incredibly serious accusations, and it is unhinged to level them at someone without any evidence. As one Reddit commenter put it, “She called the cops because it was easier for her than admitting she was wrong about you.”

It’s left the mom feeling traumatized and unsafe in her own community. “It just makes me want to stay in my house and never go anywhere,” the mom said. “The world is turning so weird and I don’t understand it anymore.” All because some paranoiac couldn’t get a grip and mind her own business.

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John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.