Satanic Panic

What are we to make of alleged ritual satanic abuse and the moral panic that spread in the 1980s and 90s? Christian Sager joins Robert for an exploration of religion, fear and demons of the mind.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb. Hey, I'm Christian Seger guest
toasting Yes Christians, filling in for Julie. She's on a
vacation this week, and uh, she took this opportunity to
dive into a couple of darker topics. We talked about

(00:27):
Gromore's and in this episode we're talking about a little
thing called Satanic panic. And uh, I feel I feel
like depending on where our listeners are in terms of
of age and the geographical location, they're gonna have varying
levels of of intersection with this topic. Based on our

(00:47):
previous conversations, I believe we both have varying degrees of
contact with the Satanic panic of the nineteen eighties, especially
time in which there was a lot of moral panic
and outrage over the perceived threat of secret Satanic cults,
which sounds crazy. It may sound crazy to you, but

(01:09):
this was a very real atmosphere. Yeah, I mean, the
peak of Satanic panic was between nineteen eighty five and
around nineteen two, although I think you can probably trace
it even a little further back into the late seventies probably,
and that for me, I'm thirty seven, I'm about to
be thirty eight, So I grew up that was the

(01:30):
period of time when I was growing up. You know. Okay,
well we're the same age, so okay, yeah, so so yeah,
Like I was in elementary school while this was going on,
and it was a it was something that my parents
weren't necessarily as afraid of it, but I had friends
whose parents were afraid of it. Uh, And then um,

(01:50):
we talked about this off air. But I had an
experience where for a year I had to go to
a private religious school and there was a lot of
Satanic panic within this school, and in particular about demon
possession and being the need to be exercised or even Uh.
We had a classmate who was ostracized by our teacher

(02:11):
because he was purported to be possessed by the devil.
Oh wow, I mean I I definitely grew up as
well in a in a family environment where a lot
of there wasn't a lot of of of emphasis on
satanic panic. It wasn't really a thing in my family.
But would go to church and you would you would
hear about the thread or read about the thread in
various youth of publications that were that were aimed at

(02:34):
us about the dangers of say, horror literature, about of
course heavy metal music, and and then there were I
remember also having having friends who were really heavily involved
in our youth group and being at a youth coffee
house and being asked to come into a back room
to sit in on an exorcism. Uh. You know, it
was this whole atmosphere, uh, you know, it was especially

(02:57):
attractive to teens in which these these demonic forces were real.
There was this there's this war between the forces of
good and the forces of evil, and your soul, your
mind is kind of the battle ground. Yeah, and and
it's satanic panic are also you know what what the
claimed practices are generally termed under the phrase satanic ritual

(03:22):
abuse UM or s r A. For sure, we might
say that throughout the podcast. But there there was this
mm hmmm uh sort of chaos about the general chaos
about growing up as a human being in the world,
especially as an adolescent, when you're trying to figure things out,
you're trying to make sense of the world, and then

(03:42):
along comes this narrative that's basically like you are at
the center of this and either um, these underground mysterious
heavy metal cults can transform your soul into into darkness,
or you you can be guarded and uh you know,
come out on the side of right business. Uh and
it you know, it sounds silly, it sounds very um

(04:06):
black and white. Um, but yeah, having lived through it,
like it's especially like going back and then doing the
research on this and being like, oh, yeah, I remember
when that happened. And but but but my little ten
year old brain, you know, seven couldn't couldn't exactly make
sense of it, you know. Uh, yeah, it's just some
fascinating stuff. But largely satanic panic was a combination of that.

(04:35):
There was this idea of repressed memories being brought back,
and a lot of these repressed memories were supposedly of
interactions or torture within satanic underground organizations. There's secret organizations
that are worshiping the devil and as part of their rights,
they are abusing, often sexually, very young children, and that

(04:59):
that is sort of where the moral panic comes in.
That gets everyone involved, at least in the children. Yeah.
The again, the this is kind of ironic as I
wrote a comic book called this But Think of the
Children as where you always they always comes back to
these moral panics, is that something is going wrong with
the children. And in this particular case, it was actually

(05:20):
true in a lot of these incidents that there were
children that were being physically abused and sexually abused. But
there has not been by and large evidence that there
ever was an underground Satanic network or cult that was
operating and performing these these acts. Yeah. I mean, certainly
there are there their individuals out there that self identify

(05:42):
as Satanists, but Fatanist of the type that are vilified
in Satanic panic. Uh, And in this movement, they never existed,
and that's something that's key to teep in mind. But
that's one of the things that's so fascinating about it
is that there is no actual religious group that this
is Bay surround. It's all based on on hearsay and

(06:03):
myth making and fear. Yeah, and it's um that myth
making largely came out of media sensationalism in the eighties too,
And in particular, there was one hallmark that we both
watched and kind of kind of went back to, which
was Horaldo Rivera and had a uh an expose that

(06:24):
was called where is it the title of this thing,
uh Devil Worship, exposing Satan's underground And it was this
two hour talk show that he did, interspersed with various
you know, on the scene reports of Heraldo talking to
victims of Satanic ritual abuse. But then in the studio

(06:45):
he was talking to Ozzy Osbourne via satellite. And then
he had um a Catholic priest on stage, and he
had members of the Church of Satan Anton LaVey's Church
of Satan, not to be confused with the Satanic Panic
Satanist cults that we are supposedly operating. Uh FBI agents
were in the room or on stage who were supposedly,

(07:08):
you know, tracking down these underground cults uh it rewatching it.
I expected to be very skeptical, and instead I found
myself saying, Okay, I know about this. I know that
this is largely a a moral hysteria that happened thirty
years ago, but it's compelling. I could see why people

(07:30):
fell for it at the time, and we're you know,
deeply concerned. Um so, yeah, it's just really interesting. But
so ultimately Satanic ritual abuse falls under the following claimed
practices that were being acted out by these groups. Supposedly, uh,
there was human sacrifice, sexual depravity make of that what

(07:50):
you will, or perversion uh, and that these were actual
statistics that the law enforcement officials were throwing out. Fifty
thousand or more people were eyeing a year in the
United States of America from Satanic ritual abuse, supposedly, and
uh during their torture or murders, they were forced to
consume urine or feces or blood. And there's just you know,

(08:13):
basically anything that you can think of as being like
depraved acts were placed upon uh at the at the
foot of these mythological groups. I mean, I don't know
if mythological is the right term to use here, but
they were fantastic. Yeah. And it's it's interesting when you
start looking back, um through history, like how we got

(08:37):
to this point because I kind of think given in
terms of of a bonfire, right um, in which you
have all this kindling that's built up and it gets
it's to the point where you all you need is
that additional spark to to really just send it ablaze,
and the spark being of course, threats a threat, a
threat to the children or you know, a threat to
you know, a real personal threat to yourself. Now, if

(08:59):
you you go back far enough in time, you'll find
plenty of accounts of for instance, blood Libel fourteen seventy
five assignment of print blood Libel, in which an entire
Jewish community was tortured over the death of a two
year old Christian boy. There were, you know, the claim
being that there was a ritual murder of the child. Um.
You can you can find parallels and uh in which

(09:21):
hunts and which person persecutions throughout time. But when you're
looking particularly at the twentieth century. Um, there's a historian
by the name of Philip Jenkins who wrote a fabulous
piece called Satanism and Ritual Abuse. And this is collected
in the Oxford Handbook of New Religious Movements. You believe
it's one of the last chapters in the book. Um. Yeah,

(09:43):
it's really interesting piece, and I think it's one of
the best things that I've read that sort of encapsulates
the whole hysteria of the time and sort of points
to their being similar themes within the Satanic panic hysteria
to the rhetorical themes that were going on with fringe
religions throughout history too. You know, there's an empathy emphasis

(10:06):
on protecting endangered children, as we already talked about. There's
also this idea that religions are shaped by mass media.
Yeah indeed, and um and yeah, it's the only this
is the only chapter in the book that deals with
a non existent religion. Like there's all deal with actual
faith and splinter groups, but this is one, as we
pointed out, never actually exists. Now you have culturally resonant

(10:29):
concepts of the Black Mass, ritual magic, uh, the witches,
Sabbath all kind of merged together, and and just just
setting back there in the public consciousness on on top
of that, you have you have en you have tales
of Alistair Crawley's Black Masses and Exotic London. Uh. They

(10:49):
were published, they were published stories about this in the
New York World. Uh. So already you have this idea
that there are there are people out there in the
world that are engaging in these dark rights. Uh. You
have of ninety seven Herbert Gorman's tale The Place called Dagon,
which is a work of fiction about Satanist or Satanist
like cults that were descended from Survivors of Salem. Yeah,

(11:13):
this was a fascinating find for me in the research
because I am a fan of weird fiction, I'm a
fan of horror fiction, and obviously a lot of that
traces back to HP Lovecraft's work, and HP Lovecraft was
apparently influenced by this book, and it's something that I
had never heard of before. I mean, or if I did,
it just never resonated with me. Yeah. Same here he

(11:36):
because he apparently mentions it in Supernatural Horror and Literature,
which I've read, but he throws out a lot of
authors and titles that, especially the modern reader is not
going to be deconnected with. But apparently it's a big
influence on on Lovecraft, Block, Henry Kuttner, Dennis Wheatley, various
other individuals who who definitely resonated at the time and
affected the weird fiction world and then the larger pulp

(11:59):
pop culture world to emerge from it. Yeah. And one
of Jenkins arguments in this piece is that you can
trace almost all the elements of the nineteen eighties Satanic
panic back to this nine seven story, the place called Dagon,
which ultimately you know it's summarizes being like it's a
thriller that's set in western Massachusetts, which is where I'm
originally from. Uh, and that descendants from Salem, Massachusetts, which

(12:22):
if if you don't know, Salem is on the east
coast of Massachusetts. Uh, practice the you know, which is
famous for the witch trials and for for witchcraft. These
descendants moved out to Western mass and essentially we're performing
the same satanic rituals and and uh, you know, usage
of it actually ties back to what we talked about

(12:43):
in a in a previous podcast about grimoires. The the
idea of this sort of ritual magic being used and
in these texts being used to perform it, it's energing.
Jenkins points out that by the nineteen thirties, uh, the
roots were already there fictionally, but you also saw a
few instances here and there of law enforcement actually beginning

(13:06):
to at least entertain the possibility of sacrificial cult activities
in some crimes. Yeah. I think that that's one of
the really interesting things that probably helped popularize it too, right,
is that, um, these various law enforcement officials, and I
don't think that they necessarily had malicious intent. They probably
thought that they were They had come upon, you know,

(13:28):
actual leads in these stories. I mean, you know what
I kept thinking of when I was reading this stuff
was True Detective, the first season of True Detective, And
I was like, you could look at the first season
of True Detective as being about, uh, these misguided uh
police officers who think that there's a secret uh ritualistic
cult somewhere that's you know, running things and abusing children,

(13:49):
which which ultimately you know, that's that's what that fictional
story is about. But ultimately that was the same narrative
that these FBI agents or police officers or whomever were,
you know, kind of on the hunt because the thought
thought was going on they they wanted to be doing
their jobs basically, Yeah, because I mean, in one hand,
you have this fictional world, but then you have in

(14:11):
these fictional accounts of Satanic rights. But then you also have,
you know, in the back of everyone's mind this idea
that black Mass and ritual mass, magic and the witches
Sabbath was real. You have these stories, uh that that
you're you're reading about when in which there are people
they're self identifying as Satanist. For instance, uh, nineteen sixty six,

(14:32):
that's when Anton LaVey founded the Church of Satan, and
obviously that makes the that makes the media rounds. People
are outraged about that, even though at heart um LaVey's
Satanism was really more grounded and to a certain extant
satire and also uh cultural commentary and as well as
sort of Carney hijinks and fun. Yeah. I think like

(14:55):
this is one of the really important distinctions that we
should make here in the podcast that there isn't confusion
for the listeners is that the Anton Lavay Church of
Satan is uh an entirely different philosophy organization. They refer
to themselves as a religion. Uh, then what was even

(15:16):
being imagined as these underground Satanic cults? And to sort
of summarize it, I'm not I'm not the best at
Anton LaVey uh philosophy, but my takeaway from it is
that ultimately it was just about a philosophy of individualism
and that Lave's thing was that each individual as their
own God. And so they used quote unquote Satan as

(15:40):
a metaphorical expression right of of having pride in yourself
and being enlightened because you were your own God. Uh.
And it was ultimately about and They refer to this
in the Heraldo Special Rational self Interest, But you're right,
it was very a theatrical and it had like elements

(16:02):
of datas them to it. I guess that this performance
were like Llvey dresses up in these robes and has
you know, his his eyebrows waxed so that they look villainous.
You know, he was playing up to it, and he
was using terms like Church of Satan or Book of
Satan in order to provoke people. But then they were

(16:25):
sort of appropriated again, uh for this this panic about
Satanic ritual abuse, and we're often conflated. It's really fascinating
when you watch that Heraldo Special to see members of
his church. I think at the time Love was dead,
but like his daughter and another member of his church
who at the time was an army colonel. We're on
stage and answering Horaldo's questions, basically trying to say, you

(16:48):
know what we're talking about here, that they're completely two
separate things. This, you know, Church of Satan is a
ironic performance philosophy piece essentially, whereas like the the accusations
of ritual abuse had nothing to do with them rights.
It is interesting that they were kind of dude to

(17:09):
a certain extent, they were riding the wave of of
the the the sort of Satanic culture, if you will,
but then also end up falling falling into the trap
of satanic panic as well, because you had, of course
satanic elements in rock music, you had satanic exploitation cinema
that you know, really came into its own, especially in

(17:30):
the nineties seventies, UM. And then on the other side,
and do you also have some real life stuff that's happening,
uh that that either has overt shades of Satanic culture
to it or some some you know, more subliminal content,
or even just media shades cast on it, such as

(17:52):
Charles Manson, right right, Yeah, So Charles Manson obviously, you know,
associated himself with quote the Devil or Satan, even in
a looser fashion, I would say that Anton Leavey did,
and again I suspect Charles Manson. For Charles Manson, it
was largely theatrical purposes. I believe that he had a
quote where he said Satan and Christ will come together

(18:13):
at the end of the world to judge humanity, and
he is actually in that Haraldo special he had I
think Carldo had done like a previous special year earlier
murder where he'd gone and visited Charles Manson interviewed him,
and he's like, you can't even like gather any kind
of coherence from their conversation because Manson is just rambling
the whole time. But uh, but Haraldo is able to

(18:35):
kind of take that and manipulate it through edits and
footage to seem like he's at the heart of the
Satanic virtual abuse. And in around nineteen seven you see
child abuse really becoming a trending topic in the media
with years of media expose is to follow on child murder,
child pornography, kidnapping very much. Though you know the stranger

(18:58):
danger elment of of moral panic um that that really,
I mean existed before the Satanic panic and survived well
after connoones to survive in many many ways. Yeah, and
I mean, you know, it's understandable now to look back
on it and to see why parents are probably terrified
at the time. You see real life things like the

(19:19):
Jonestown incident happened, where there's a massacre that included many
children that were killed by a cultist activity, and so
that really takes on a prominent role in the media
coverage of threats to children and in this this case,
religiously themed threats to children. Uh. Then of course you
have you have other murderers who end up taking elements

(19:40):
from this moral outrage and incorporating it, incorporating it into
their their crimes, or at least there uh the way
they end up talking about their crimes after the fact.
Richard Ramire's the night stalker murderer between of eighty five. Um, yeah,
he was. He was certainly more overt in it than
Charles Manson. He would mention Satan during his crimes. His

(20:03):
first court appearance, he shows up with a pentagram drawing
on his hand and he yells, Hail Satan. Uh. And
of course that's just that just throws more kindling on
the fire, this idea that there there's a danger here
with with the with satanic individuals and they want to
hurt us. And then there's this there's a danger president
culture for our children. Yeah, sort of that behind the scenes,

(20:27):
that there there's a Richard Ramirez or a Charles Manson. Uh,
you know, they could be anywhere. Basically, it's it's sort
of an invasion of the body snatchers all over again.
You know, it's this idea that anybody could be part
of these networks, anybody uh could lure your children into
danger or you, uh, and that you should be on

(20:49):
heightened alert at all times. This explains a lot about
me as an adult now having grown up in that period.
I'm like, oh, yeah, now I understand why that was
so hammered into my head. You know, don't accept candy
from strangers that one or like the old Is this
an old wives tail or not? I don't know about
a girl scout cookies with needles in them? Do you

(21:12):
remember that? I never heard that one. Of course, I
always heard the the the trick or treating uh story.
You know that you need to be careful because there
might be razor blades in the apple. Yeah. We used
to have to um after we were trick or true
to bring all the candy home, and if it was
big enough to have a razor blade in it, my
my parents would, you know, break it down into smaller
pieces to make sure it was safe. You gotta be

(21:34):
you gotta be careful. I mean there was when I
was growing up, there was one house in the neighborhood
where the guy would put um razor blades in the
candied apples every year. But they were really good candied apples,
so nobody said so we just kind of ignore it
because you knew it's in there. You just know to
take it out and enjoy the treat. Yeah, it's part
of it's part of the experience. Um. And now another

(21:59):
another experience. It's another activity that's often thrown into the
the the into the Satanic Panic culture of course, is
Dungeons and Dragons. Um. I specifically remember getting into Dungeons
and Dragons. And this is in the nineties, so this
was after the Satanic Panic had died away for the
most part, but I still received, uh I think a

(22:20):
chick lit, a chick pamphlet. Oh yeah, jack chick track. Yeah,
I received it as part of a birthday present from
an ant one year anti Dungeons and dragons. Really. Oh,
that's fascinating. So so for listeners who don't know, a
chick track is a very small comic book that is
uh usually like a fundamentally Christian in nature um warning

(22:44):
about the perils of pop culture and how they can
draw you into uh not I don't know, necessarily satanic practices,
but just you know, not being a good person and
sending you to hell. Yeah, basically, damnation was always the
threat and it and it would often include a little
you know, exploitive or grizzly kind of image read to
really grab particularly young reader's attention. Yeah, they're fascinating because

(23:07):
they incorporate elements of like the early nineteen fifties horror
comps into these these comics that are ultimately against that
kind of pop culture. Yeah. I love those things. You
can actually go online and look at like the whole
library of them. They're fascinating. Yeah. The D and D
thing for me, I uh, it must have been the

(23:28):
late eighties early nineties when I probably started playing Dungeons
and Dragons as a little kid, and shortly thereafter I
had that experience where I went to the religious school
that I mentioned at the top and was sort of
terrified that that this box set of Dice and monster
Manual and and uh, you know, the silly stuff about

(23:50):
elves and dwarves and gnomes was somehow going to lead
to my demise and satanic ritual abuse. But I did
have some pretty heavy demons in there, and the orcs
and elves and then Dice. You know, there's something kind
of arcane and uh yeah, and and of course, you know,
like we mentioned this before when we talked about Remois

(24:11):
in the other episode, but there's there's a lot of
connections between the system of Dungeons and Dragons world of
magic and the Grimoire cult world of magic. You know,
they're they're they're connected. And obviously people who weren't familiar
with either of those things kind of saw them as
being one and the same and subsequently associated them with

(24:32):
satanic ritual abuse. But it's really interesting, Um, the D
and D thing, there was a group that was formed
in the nineteen eighties called Bothered about Dungeons and Dragons. Yeah,
and there the acronym was bad and I was serving
the acronym then yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely, uh And I
believe that they filed a lawsuit against whomever owned D

(24:55):
and D at the time. I don't know if that
was Gary Gygax or they had gone to TSR at
that time or not. But this group then joined forces
with this guy who's a psychiatrist named Thomas Rodecki um,
because they wanted to raise the social awareness of the
dangers of dungeons and dragons. Uh. And they basically associated
it with the idea of that in psychotherapy that you

(25:17):
act out role playing as a way to sort of
you know, recover, uh. And that but that within the
game they were using role playing for violence and sex
and fantasy, and that it would ultimately be the have
the opposite effect. It would it would lead them down
the wrong path. Uh. And it was linked with heavy
metal music, which we've talked about earlier. And the demons

(25:39):
within think that this is what's fascinating to me, is
it all comes around again. After this whole satanicchanic movement
kind of fades away in the mid nineties, Um, you
start finding out that that a lot of this, you know,
their accusations weren't true. And then academics started doing a
real research on dungeons and drags and they found that, Uh.

(26:01):
For instance, one of the accusations that bad made about
dungeons and dragons was that increased the chance of, um,
your kid committing suicide. In fact, I believe the founder
was the mother of a of a teenager who committed suicide,
and she blamed it on dungeons and dragons. Um. But
there was empirical research that proved that that, in fact
was not the case, and that rate of suicide were

(26:23):
lower in kids who probably Dungeons and Dragons, and there
was also no measurable negative impact on their psychological functioning
emotional measures, or reality testing. This is all from an
article in Psychology Today that was published in fourteen about
Dungeons and Dragons Satan in Psychology uh and uh So

(26:44):
their final conclusions here basically that the leaders of this
group bad had completely exaggerated their own credentials. They cherry
picked their data for convenience obviously of you know, making
Dungeons and Dragons look bad. And then this is the
real interesting fact. So the sec chiatrists that they associated with,
Riddecki uh he in particular, was arrested in for sexually

(27:07):
exploiting his patients. Uh he was treating basically um medicine
for sexual favors from his patients. So this same guy
who is accusing Dungeons and Dragons of being responsible responsible
for sexual abuse himself was a perpetrator. Alright. So so

(27:27):
far we've discussed the cultural kindling for the most part
that leads up to the moral panic of Satanic panic.
Uh that as uh, as historian Philip Jenkins points out
in his peace, Satanism in which will abuse. Um, you
can you can really trace a lot um of the
the s R a Satanic which will abuse outcry to

(27:52):
this particular book that comes out in nineteen eighty titled
Michelle Remembers, UH comes out and it really cements this
notion of ritualized sexual abuse by Satanic cults. Everything we've
been talking about, black robes, UM, you know, vile rights, UH,
the the abuse against children, and it entails UH so

(28:14):
called Michelle's memories that are called during therapy in the
nineteen seventies of her sexual abuse in the nineteen fifties
in Vancouver. So we're talking Ozzie and Harriet Era here
and that One of the interesting things about Michelle Remembers,
which again this was a book that I was not
familiar with before we governed any research for this UM,
is that Michelle Smith, who was the patient that underwent

(28:37):
the therapy and was the subject of this book, her
therapist later became her husband. So this man who helped
her uncover these memories, they also began an intimate relationship together.
But over the course of the years, many people have
discredited the claims that were made within the book. UM
both psychologists and I believe people from her actual past. Yeah.

(28:58):
I think literally all of the charges that that come
out of her personal accounts of this abuse comes from
West African secret societies accounts of them anyway, they were
imported into Canada in the nineteen fifties. But this narrative
becomes really popular and and it has two key things
that does here. It leads to other survivor accounts that

(29:19):
spring up, other people that are that are writing books
about their their reclaim memories of Satanic abuse in the past.
And it also really pushes into a certain example, legitimizes
the theory that traumatic memories can remain dormant only to
be recalled later by a therapist. Yeah, it's really the
common theme that runs throughout most of the Satanic panic hysteria.

(29:44):
Is uh, this this this scientific idea of repressed memories
being a psychological phenomenon that certain therapists are going to
be able to dig deep enough and pull out this
traumatic memory and make you, you know, realize what what
truly aige you the way that you are? What, what
is what is actually causing your problems? Um, And it

(30:05):
was everybody from psychotherapists to child welfare advocates, and they
didn't you know, again, like the law enforcement officials that
were involved, I don't think that they necessarily had malicious intentions.
Maybe some of them saw some profit. I would imagine
that the author of Michelle Remembers saw some good paychecks
out of that book's popularity. But uh, you know, basically

(30:26):
they thought that this was evidence of these satanic cults
actually existing, and they wanted to protect small children. That
was essentially what they saw from it, um. And so
they used hypnosis or different kinds of psychological protocols to essentially,
you know, save people from Satan, to save people from
these past traumatic events, and to dig up uh dirt

(30:51):
on on the actual you know, threat that was still
out there, um, which which led to a lot of
finger pointing and and um in some cases which we'll
talk about later with like West Memphis three uh accusations
that send people to jail unjustly. Yeah, I mean, you
can certainly see the attractiveness of it both on the

(31:13):
the treat the treatment side, and the patient side. I mean,
if you're you're feeling like you're out of sorts in
the world, like you have some problem, and if only
you could you could just tear out the root cause
of it, right, and then if there is this, uh,
this narrative that's presented to you that well, perhaps in
the past you were abused, uh, perhaps you were abused

(31:33):
by this nefarious organization and all the main thing we
need to do, or at least the first step, is
to get those memories out of the dark, out of
the you know, the closet of your mind, and pull
them out to where we can dispel them and to
give you an idea of just how prevalent this was. Uh.
An organization formed in around this idea of repressed memories.

(31:58):
It was called the False Memories Drum Foundation. And here's
some statistics I found from a USA Today article at
the time when it was first formed and they were
interviewing them, uh, they said that, um uh, they had
done a survey where they interviewed three thousand of families,
and their preliminary findings were, of just these three thousand people,

(32:20):
twenty of the children within these families said that they
people who are adults now but who had been children,
say that they had been tortured in Satanic rituals. So
of the three thousand people that they interviewed that that's
huge to me and sounds uh like like an astronomical
number when you apply that kind of generalization to the

(32:42):
entire American population. Uh. And then there's this also interesting study.
A group psychologists at the State University of New York
at Buffalo looked further into it, and they found that
of eight hundred therapists UH had at least or Sorry,
they interviewed thirty thousand therapists, and eight hundred of them

(33:04):
said that they had at least once in their sessions
with their patients, had come across cases of Satanic ritual abuse.
So this, I mean, there was hard evidence as far
as people I saw that this was happening, that it
was pervasive and it needed to be stopped. Yea. And
of course, these narratives that they're pulling out there obviously

(33:24):
informed by the the established narrative in the culture that
that of the retrieve memories. But also um, all of
these influences we've talked about before the culture of black
Masses and Sabbaths, every Devil movie that came out but
in the nineties, sixties, seventies, and eighties, all of it
coloring your perceptions, UM of the adults. Anyway, Now, what

(33:46):
happens when you attempt to pull these uh, these these
types of memories from from a small child, though, from
someone who hasn't seen Rosemary's Baby, who who doesn't listen
listen to who has heard Heraldo on television talking about
the dangerous of death metal. It's well, we see that
in UM in a very pivotal nineteen four case to

(34:09):
make Martin Preschool UM sexual abuse case in southern California.
And this is a case where prosecutors charged that a
ring of teachers were sexually abusing hundreds of small children
in rituals that involved robes and masks and pentacles and
church altars. And the case now is regarded as completely focused.

(34:30):
But at the time it sent out these waves of
fear just through throughout the society, got picked up on
the media and just you know, boosted, uh, you know, tenfold.
UM in this case, like cases to follow, uh, it
followed a particular flow. You had a limited plausible accusation
of abuse that emerges at a school. Then you haven't

(34:51):
have an investigation, and you interrogate the child and then
you get this therapist derived account from from an impressionable
young child child regarding what happened. And since these kids,
for the most part, they have no knowledge of adult sexuality,
but they but they can tell that this this concerned
adult authority figure is trying to get something disturbing out

(35:15):
of them. So what does a small child bring to
the table, what can they possibly pull out? They start
talking about, well, well, they made me drink peepee, they
made me yeah. Yeah. It's basically like they go for
their version of whatever the worst taboo possible thing could
be at the time. And you know, so of course
they think of it as being things like that, uh

(35:37):
it's the word copperphilia yea, yeah, yeah. And that McMartin
incident was one of many. Yeah, there's I believe in
the Heraldo special as well that they talked about a
Presidio daycare center that had a very similar kind of
uh incident that was that was labeled as being potentially
attached to Satanic ritual abuse. And there's an interesting part

(36:00):
two where they talked about the mcmartins school abuse scandal,
I believe, and they started comparing that their idea of
Satanic rituals as being somehow associated with the Episcopal Church,
which I thought was interesting. It felt like this strange
smear campaign against episcopals, as if it wasn't like a

(36:20):
a valid form of Christianity. It was, it was brief,
It was kind of interesting. And so in both of
these cases we see this established in the media and
the increasingly in the public mindset, uh that Satanic ritual
abuse is a threat to our children as well as
to the child that we used to be, that we

(36:42):
all could have been conceivably sexually abused by Satanist in
the past, and we have only to to pull that
out of our out of out of the closet of
our memory. But the thing is, it's it. It goes
beyond just Heraldo Rivera right. It becomes a part of
it becomes disseminated outward through professional organizations, through police, therapist,

(37:03):
youth workers, seminars aimed at the discovery of new Satanic
abuse histories. And so you reach the point by the
by the nineteen eighties where the panic is spreading outward
into the UK and Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, South Africa,
anywhere that American therapeutic and criminological literature is read. Yeah, yeah,

(37:23):
And it's so the Netherlands part is one of the
ones that's interesting to me. Uh. So Uh, I am
a fan of heavy metal music. Uh and uh uh.
The Netherlands and Norway in particular are are known for
as being the home of black metal, this particular genre
of metal, which was largely associated with this sort of

(37:46):
traditionalist movement of burning down Christian churches, and some of
their members were accused and tried for murder. Uh. And
so even though they didn't necessarily have I don't even
think like possibly their their song lyrics have anything to
do with Satan or devil worship, but because they were

(38:07):
against Christianity again, the Satanic panics hysteria sort of spread
over there. Yeah, so that the cultural kindling was perfect
for that spark to fly across the ocean and take root. Yeah. Absolutely,
it's interesting to uh like how much of the messaging was,
of course aimed at parents, but also a teenager's about

(38:27):
the dangers of all this stuff about dungeons and dragons
and the music. Uh. And you know, when you're a teenager,
of course, all you want to do is is is
find the significance in your life and and at times
lash out against the authority figures in their expectations, so
you actually end up fleeing to that stuff. Like I
I definitely had a copy of both that fake Necronomicon

(38:52):
and the and the Satanic Bible, nice paperback versions of both.
Satanic Bible was a bestseller. Yeah, I mean lot of
I think there were a lot of both adolescence and
adults with that same experience. They were like, oh, by
this is you know, it's kind of a I imagine
the kind of thing that you would find it urban
outfitters nowadays or something near the checkout one. Yeah, but

(39:14):
I remember having both those books listening to Marylyn Manson. Yeah,
very much engaging in that, you know, in the in
the in the on one level, in the possibility that
there was something to do all this darkness, but also
just in the you know, need to stand apart from
the adult world. Yeah, it's the traditional sort of adolescent
anti authoritarian reflex, right combined with the um the hysteria

(39:40):
at the time moving around uh Satanic ritual abuse. So yeah,
I could see whether two would be conflated. I mean,
especially in a if you're if you grow up in
like a Christian or even just vaguely Christian environment in
which you have the the the economy of good and evil,
of God and Satan, and uh, you're gonna have a
tendency to sympathize with the villain in that piece. And

(40:02):
then uh and and by his book, yeah it is,
it is right exactly. And so like my experience growing
up was literally being in one of these uh private
Christian schools where I was told constantly, if you do
the wrong thing, uh, then you're going to be possessed
by a demon and you'll possibly murder your family. I

(40:23):
mean this was like an actual thing that our pastor
would tell us in class every day. Um. And so
you know, I mean this is probably around I don't know,
so so towards the tail end of this stuff, but
but you know, uh, they fill fill your head with
this enough. It's it's as bad, if not worse than
Ozzy Osborne, ser King Diamonds. You know, Yeah, because you

(40:46):
know that stuff is just largely engaging in fun and theme.
It's theatrical. Yeah, yeah, I don't Yeah, I don't know.
As a as a person who's into heavy metal, I
don't know of a lot of people are famous metal
musicians that are serious members of a Satanic organization. Yeah, yeah,

(41:07):
I mean I think of like some of the interviews
I've seen with metal that I enjoy, and if you
just listen to their their their their lyrics and their music,
you get, you know, very much the the theme they're
going for, and this is the dark, the heavy, the
you know, industrial disturbing nature of the thing. But then

(41:27):
you see an interview with them and they seem like
like goofy guys their music, and yeah, absolutely, I mean
I think that that's that was probably the case with
Ozzy Osbourne as well. He's in that Geraldo thing and
it's it's hilarious watching him be interviewed. He's much more
lucid than the later Ozzy Osbourne of reality TV the
probably Yeah, but he uh, you know, he obviously wasn't

(41:51):
articulate enough to kind of argue on his own behalf
of why he was just using these elements, this imagery
and symbology, uh, theatrically as part of his stage persona, uh,
rather than you know, it being directly impactful on teenagers

(42:11):
in America committing crimes against other children or their or
their their peers. Even um there, yeah, there there were
moments in that in the Haraldo special where they they're
interviewing kids who were in prison for having killed uh,
their their peers in school. Like uh. I can't remember
the name of the particular um guy. He'd probably be

(42:34):
a little older than us now, probably in his forties,
but um, there was an interview with him and he just,
you know, straight up blames it on heavy metal and
satanic uh participation. I have a feeling it was Sean
Seller's repete Rowland Roland. That was it. That was the guy. Yeah, yeah,
so it's um. You know, I think it was also

(42:56):
easy for people like that who had committed these attra
just crimes, to say to put the locus of control
externally onto something else and to say it wasn't me,
it's not inside of me. I didn't mean to do this.
It was because of heavy metal or Dungeons and Dragons
or and they're just yeah, they're just taking the excuse

(43:16):
that the media is has crafted for them and presented
them and say, hey, it's not your fault. It's because
you've got involved in this this thing that has a
viral component, that that if you just start rolling the
Dungeons and Dragons dice, if you start listening to savy
metal music, that it's just a slippery slope to just
violent outbreaks in demonic possession. Yeah, and that leads us

(43:37):
to the West Memphis three. You want to talk about
them now? Yeah, because I think that's certainly a case.
Even though it kind of it tends to fall towards
the end of the life cycle of satanic panic. Um,
it represents some of the worst, um, the worst residual
effects of satanic panic, at least on you know, individual level.

(43:59):
So this happened in between I believe was the the
the actual murders happened in ninety three, I think. And uh,
the trial lasted or there are multiple trials I believe
for two years. Um. But essentially, if you if you
want to know more about this, I highly suggest that

(44:20):
you go watch these documentaries that they're called Paradise Lost,
Is that right? Uh? Yeah, And and they're really well
put together by a crew that was basically they're shooting
from the minute these guys were on trial. Uh, and
it and it sort of documents the the cases throughout

(44:42):
the twenty years. Maybe I don't know, does the I
don't I haven't seen the last one. I don't think
I've seen. I don't know if it goes up to
the when these guys were released, but essentially, to boil
it down to its simplest terms, these three teenagers in
West Memphis, Arkansas were accused of tr I and convicted
from murdering three younger boys and it was supposedly part

(45:05):
of a satanic ritual. Uh. These these three guys were
all fans of heavy metal. They looked the part UH,
and it was easy to to place the blame on them. However,
in eleven UH they were able to make a plea
for their innocence based on DNA that was recovered from
the scene, and they were released. Essentially, the judge said, UM,

(45:29):
you're you're you're guilty up to time served. UM, so
the time that they had served from until eleven and
and they're out. Now you've probably seen there's UH fictional
feature accounts of of this story. What's the movie that
does yet? It has a Reese Witherspoon in it as
one of the mothers of the victims um and UH.

(45:53):
Colin Firth I believe plays a private investigator who's working
on their behalf to try to find evidence that that
proves their innocence. It's a complex case and it's it's
an extremely complicated Yeah. That's why I don't feel like
we can really do it justice here without doing an
entire episode. If you have bungled investigations on one hand,

(46:13):
you definitely have Satanic Panic and play. Yeah, and there's
all kinds of stuff to weird stuff that goes on
between some of the parents and the people making the documentary,
where the the filmmakers themselves sort of become part of
the story, and there's implications that maybe one or two
of the parents might have been involved in the actual

(46:33):
murders themselves. It's it's really confusing and disturbing, but ultimately
it comes down to that the three teenagers who were
convicted of these crimes were in fact innocent, uh and
wrongfully put away for crimes they didn't commit. Yeah. Of course,
sad like crimes that we we do not we don't
have an answer for we know who is RESPONSI yeah, exactly.

(46:55):
That's the sad part is that the person or persons
who did do it, uh got away with it. But luckily,
as we said, this occurred towards the end of Satanic
Panic as it's going out as it's uh is it's
leaving the public mindset and becoming far less of a
media obsession. Uh. And you might wonder what what caused that?

(47:16):
What makes us get away from that? What what creates
a situation so that by um you see you see
cases where the media doesn't jump on the Satanic bandwagon.
Four um abuse charges that at an elementary how do
we get to the point where by you have the
Columbine shootings. And despite all the various theories that come

(47:38):
up that initially in the wake of the awful incident,
Satanism is not one of them. Right, Yeah, that could
have very easily have been tagged within the Satanic panic easily,
and if it had occurred years earlier, no doubt it
would have. Yeah. Absolutely. Uh. There's this really interesting article
that I read uh UM called the Satanic Ritual Abuse

(47:59):
pan as a Religious Studies Data as part of the
journal International Review for the History of Religions, that sort
of this was written in two thousand three that summarizes
sort of the the entire era of Satanic Panic and
looks at this this sort of ending phase, and their
conclusion is there was no evidence for abuse of Satanic

(48:22):
cults existing Uh, anything that connected them as as ever
existing largely came from these repressed memories. Uh. And or
they were extracted from small children who then subsequently recovered
from what happened to them through the use of psychotherapy.

(48:42):
But there there was there was no actual, tenable forensic
evidence that these groups ever existed or responsible for these crimes.
Uh and and uh. There there's sort of a a
sadder thing at play here, I think, which is that, um,
that human culture maybe has a harder time dealing with

(49:06):
child abuse or violence, especially this this kind of you know,
horrific violence, as in the case of the West Memphis three,
especially sexual abuse, um, without being able to place it
into a fantastic narrative that it is somehow outside of
the every day And that's the unfortunate part about this

(49:27):
is that in a lot of these cases where these
children and people were abused were hurt, um, oftentimes it
was just their friends or relatives, you know, it was
that that is the most disturbing thing of all, because
you want to be able to position that kind of
thing outside of your immediate sphere out you want to
place it on another and even if they look like

(49:47):
you and seem to be the same group. Like, if
the narrative is, oh, well they're secretly a Satanist, that's
far It's far easier to wrap your head around, as
fantastic as some of the ramifications are, than to say, well,
they're just this person that we just thought were like us,
someone that lived within our sphere, within our family. Even. Yeah, this,
this is a good quote that I liked from that
article that addresses that the author whose last name is Frankfurter,

(50:12):
I don't know what his first name is. He says
human memory psychologists have shown is clearly not a matter
of historical snapshots, even in the cases of trauma, and
it is enormously subject to suggestion, fantasy, social conditions, and
cultural nuances. So largely I think that's what we're talking
about here. Yeah, I mean you basically had a situation

(50:33):
where the experts moved in, the actual experts, not the
ones that would appear on like the soralto Special, and
they said, look, it doesn't exist. You had people like
Kenneth Lanning, FBI lead investigator on these so called sex rings,
who is a skeptical of it from the beginning, and
then with an outspoken critic of it in the media
had study of ritual crime allegations sponsored by the National

(50:54):
Center on Child Abuse and Neglect, and it just credited
virtually everything um as a massive study, and they only
found a very few cases of loan or or paired
perpetrators using ritualized tactics to intimidate children or thrilled themselves.
And they looked at twelve thousand incidents and they couldn't
find a single one that provided evidence quote of a

(51:18):
well organized intergenerational Satanic cult who's sexually molested and tortured
children in their homes or schools for years and committed
a series of murders unquote. So UK studies end up
backing this up. The McMartin preschool case falls apart. So
the media begins to realize, oh, well, there isn't anything
to this story. This is uh. They start talking to

(51:39):
the actual experts, and that the discrediting of Satanic panic
becomes the media narrative for a while, effectively killing it
off at least in the United States. But then, of
course you have lingering elements of it that remain in
other areas, particular in South Africa, for years to follow. Yeah,
and so one of the things that I think is

(51:59):
an interesting question for us to sort of pose to
ourselves and to the audiences, is uh. So we have
had these uh moments of hysteria throughout human history, you know,
um satanic panic. Uh. One of the ones that comes
to mind for me is something that I researched here
for a video that we did about, um, the Pokemon

(52:21):
panic in Japan in the late nineties. There was this
idea that there was an incident where an episode of
Pokemon supposedly caused seizures and kids and then, like I
believe it was something like I can't remember the exact
statistics off the top of my head, but something like
three thousand kids overnight claimed that they all had seizures.
So these kinds of you know, like like we were

(52:43):
talking about earlier about how our memory and trauma is
susceptible to suggestion and cultural nuances, Um, they recur over
and over again in human history. But I can't really
remember a large incident of that in the last I
don't decade other than ebolabola and uh and vaccines. Oh yeah, okay, yeah, movement, Well,

(53:11):
I guess on both sides depending yeah, yeah, So it's
kind of fascinating. They have not, and neither of those
I think really got the traction that stuff like satanic
panic did. And I don't know why that is. Um
it's interesting to think about, though, you know. Is it
is it because of the proliferation of social media it

(53:33):
spreads information faster and further, or is it uh, simply
because you know, mass media has been around long enough
now that there's somewhat of an innoculation maybe against the
hysteria that can be spread by it. I'm not sure. Well,
there's certainly more voices in the media. Yeah, I mean
they're more they're more channels, they're more people on the

(53:54):
channels talking constantly about the subject matter. So uh, you know,
maybe there's a be maybe our our media is less
susceptible to long term UM panic with no grounded evidence. Yeah,
it does. It does make you wonder like, could could
something like which trials or Satanic panic happen today? You know,

(54:17):
would are we as humans, uh susceptible to that? Still?
I have a feeling we are. I think it's a
lot of it comes down to the particular environment that
we find ourselves in. And uh and hopefully, I mean
hopefully we are a little less susceptible to it, just
based on how much information is out there. It just

(54:38):
comes down to how much information are we willing to
ignore to support this uh, this this this script for
what has happened or what could happen to us that
fulfill some need to either make the danger more tolerable,
you know, more palpable. You know. It's like like we're saying,

(54:59):
it's sometimes the the more outrageous explanation or something is
more attractive because it's it's easier to handle, because it's
it's it's that you position it outside of the atmosphere
and it has lines and boundaries that you can sort
of use to yeah to again, like stick to the narratives,
stick to the strip, to the script, and um somewhat

(55:21):
to try to understand experiences that are so horrifying that
normally otherwise you wouldn't be able to understand them. All Right,
So there you have it, Satanic panic. Um. We took
you through it from the beginning to the end of it. Uh.
And we would love to hear from any of you
out there who, like us, have some element of their
childhood immersed in the world of Satanic panic, or if

(55:44):
you came about after Satanic panic, but we'd love to hear,
you know, an outsider's take on on all of this, UM, like,
do you see any of these elements at work in
your in your modern world? Um? If you would like
to learn more, check out the landing page for this episode,
it's Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. I'll conclude
links out to some of the resources that we mentioned
and what about you, sir? You can find me personally

(56:06):
at Christian Sager dot tumbler dot com. Uh and UH
for the how stuff Works content that I produce. I
am primarily working on the brain stuff YouTube channel. If
you haven't seen that yet, check it out. That's our
general science channel. UH. And I also work on the
main house stuff Works YouTube channel as well, where we're
producing shows like what the Stuff UH and interviews and

(56:28):
content like that cool cool. Thanks much again to Christian
for joining me here UH. And in the meantime, you
want to get in touch with me, you can reach
out to Stuff to Blow your Mind at how stuff
works dot com for more on this and thousands of
other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com