From the Vault: Satanic Panic

What are we to make of alleged ritual satanic abuse and the moral panic that spread in the 1980s and 90s? Robert Lamb and Christian Sager enter a world of religion, fear and demons of the mind. (originally published April 16, 2015)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And it's Saturday,
time for a vault episode. And this is gonna be
one that you and Christian did way back in right, yeah, April.
This was the first episode of Stuff to Blow Your
Mind that I recorded with Christian. Uh, and it's on
Satanic panic. I figured that's appropriate. We're getting into the

(00:26):
holidays here. Uh, let's start thinking about moral panics and
uh and the War on Christmas. And they have the
War on Christmas. It's a perfect time to consider Satanic
panic and its legacy in human culture. The Satanic panic
is a fascinating subject. This is one of the ones
you did with Christian that I was kind of jealous
I didn't get to do because it's so interesting. It's

(00:47):
so I mean, there's a lot of really horrifying elements
to it, but it's also just so rich with with
interesting psychological tidbits. Why do these things happen? So I'm
glad you guys got to cover it. And Uh, I'm
I'm excited for you. Listens right now, who are about
to get to hear it? All Right, let's let's enter
the vault. Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from

(01:10):
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. Feeling in for Julie.
She's on a vacation this week, and uh, we took
this opportunity to dive into a couple of darker topics.

(01:31):
We talked about 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.

(01:51):
Based on our previous conversations, I believe we both have
varying degrees of contact with the Satanic panic of the
nineteen eighties, especially a 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

(02:13):
crazy to you, but 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

(02:34):
that was the 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, we talked about this off air. But

(02:56):
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 because he was purported to be

(03:17):
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, and various youth of publications that were

(03:38):
that were aimed at us about the dangers of say,
horror literature, about of course heavy metal music and um
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.

(03:58):
You know, it was this whole atmosphere, uh, you know,
there's especially attractive to deteens 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 it's satanic panic are also you know what what

(04:21):
the claimed practices are generally termed under the phrase satanic
ritual 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,

(04:42):
especially as an adolescent, when you're trying to figure things out,
you're trying to make sense of the world, and then
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 can be guarded and uh, you know, come

(05:03):
out on the side of righteousness. Uh. And it you know,
it sounds silly, it sounds very um 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,

(05:24):
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 m that there was this
idea of repressed memories being brought back, and a lot

(05:46):
of these repressed memories were supposedly of interactions or torture
within satanic underground organizations, their secret organizations that are worshiping
the devil and it's part of their rights. They are
abuse using, often sexually, very young children, and that that
is sort of where the moral panic comes in. That

(06:06):
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
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 true in a
lot of these incidents that there were children that were

(06:27):
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 as Satanist, but

(06:47):
Satanist of the type that are vilified in Satanic panic
and in this movement. They never existed, and that's something
that's key to deep 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 based around.
It's all based on on hearsay and myth making and fear. Yeah,

(07:09):
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 uh an expose that was called awhere is it

(07:31):
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 he was talking to Ozzy
Osbourne via satellite, and then he had um a Catholic

(07:55):
priest on stage, and he had members of the Church
of St 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, you know, tracking down these
underground cults. It rewatching it. I expected to be very skeptical,

(08:21):
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 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

(08:45):
the following claimed practices that were being acted out by
these groups. Supposedly, Uh, there was human sacrifice, sexual depravity
make of that what you will, or perversion, uh, and
that that these were actual statistics the law enforcement officials
were throwing out fifty thousand or more people were dying
a year in the United States of America from Satanic

(09:08):
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, 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.

(09:29):
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 to this point, because I kind
of think even in terms of of a bonfire, right, um,
in which you have all this kindling that's built up

(09:49):
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 threat,
a threat to the children, or you know, a threat
to you know, a real personal threat to yourself. Now,
if you go back far enough in time, you'll find
plenty of accounts of for instance, blood libel fourteen seventy

(10:11):
five assignment of Prent blood Libel, in which an entire
Jewish community was tortured over the death of a two
year old Christian boy. There, 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
hunts and which person persecutions throughout time. But when you're
looking particularly at the twentieth century, UM, there's a historian

(10:35):
by the name of Philip Jenkins who wrote a fabulous
piece called Satanism and Ritual Abuse. And this is collected
in uh the Oxford Handbook of New Religious Movements. I
believe it's one of the last chapters in the book. UM. Yeah,
it's really interesting piece, and I think it is one
of the best things that I've read that sort of
encapsulates the whole hysteria of the time and sort of

(10:56):
points to there being a similar theme eames within the
Satanic panic hysteria to the rhetorical themes that we're going
on with fringe religions throughout history too. You know, there's
an empty emphasis on protecting endangered children, as we already
talked about, but there's also this idea that religions are
shaped by mass media. Yeah indeed, and um and yeah,

(11:21):
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 with actual faiths and splinter groups, but
this is one, as we pointed out, never actually exists.
Now you have culturally resonant 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

(11:43):
public consciousness. On on top of that, you have you
have nineteen fourteen, you have tales of Alistair Crawley's Black
Masses and Exotic London, uh that 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 ninety seven Herbert

(12:06):
Gorman's uh 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, 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,

(12:27):
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. Yes, same here he 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,

(12:47):
especially the modern reader is not going to be that
connected with. But apparently it's a big influence on on Lovecraft, Block,
Henry Cuttner, Dennis Wheatley, various other individuals who who definitely
resonated at the time and affected the weird fiction world
and then the larger pulp pop culture world to emerge
from it. Yeah. And one of Jenkins arguments in this

(13:08):
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 if if you don't know,
Salem is on the east coast of Massachusetts. Uh, practice

(13:32):
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 in a in a previous
podcast about grimoires. The the idea of this sort of

(13:53):
ritual magic being used and in these texts being used
to perform it, it's energing. Kins 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 to at least entertain the
possibility of sacrificial cult activities and in some crimes. Yeah.

(14:17):
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, actual leads in
these stories. I mean, you know what I kept thinking
of when I was reading this stuff was True Detective,

(14:38):
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, 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

(15:02):
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 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,

(15:25):
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 that are self identifying as Satanist. For instance, Uh,
nineteen sixty six, that's the 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

(15:45):
at heart, um LaVey's Satanism was really more grounded in
h to a certain extent, satire and also cultural commentary
and as well as sort of Carney high jinks and fun. Yeah.
I think this is one of the really important distinctions
that we should make here in the podcast so that
there isn't confusion for the listeners, is that the Anton

(16:08):
Lavay Church of Satan is UH an entirely different philosophy organization.
They refer to themselves as a religion. Uh, then what
was even 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

(16:33):
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 a metaphorical expression right of of having pride
in yourself and being enlightened because you were your own god. Uh.

(16:55):
And it was ultimately about and they they refer to
this in the Hurrah, those special rational self interest. But
you're right, it was very theatrical and it had like
elements of data is um to it. I guess that
this performance where like love a dresses up in these
robes and has you know, his his eyebrows waxed so

(17:16):
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 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

(17:39):
see members of 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 know what we're talking about here,
that they're completely two separate things. This, you know, Church
of Satan is a ironic formance philosophy piece essentially, uh.

(18:03):
Whereas like the the accusations of ritual abuse had nothing
to do with them, right. It's it is interesting that
they were kind of dude to 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,

(18:26):
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 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

(18:51):
some you know, more subliminal content, or even just media
shades cast on it, such as 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, who was largely theatrical purposes,

(19:14):
I believe that he had a quote where he said,
Satan and Christ will come together at the end of
the world to judge humanity, and he is actually in
that Haraldo special he had I think Haraldo had done
like a previous special year earlier on Murder where he'd
gone and visited Charles Manson interviewed him and he's like
he can't even like gather any kind of coherence from

(19:34):
their conversation because Manson is just rambling the whole time.
But uh, but Haraldo is able to kind of take
that and manipulate it through edits and footage to seem
like he's at the heart of the Satanic ritual abuse.
And in around ninety seven you see child abuse really
becoming a trending topic in the media with years of

(19:56):
media expose. Is to follow on child murder, child or
not to be kidnapping very much, the you know the
stranger danger, elements of of moral panic um that that really,
I mean existed before the Satanic panic and survived well
after cannoones to survive in many many ways. Yeah, And
I mean, you know, it's understandable now to look back

(20:18):
on it and to see why parents are probably terrified
at the time. You see real life things like the
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 case, religiously

(20:38):
themed threats to children. Uh. Then of course you have
you have other murderers who end up taking elements 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 Ramires,
the night stalker murderer between of eighty five, Um, yeah,

(21:01):
he was. He was certainly more overt in it than
Charles Manson. He would mention Satan during his crimes. His
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

(21:23):
hurt us. And then there's this there's a danger president
culture for our children. Yeah, sort of that behind the scenes,
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

(21:44):
of these networks, anybody, uh could lure your children into
danger or you, uh, and that you should be on
heightened alert at all times. This explains a lot about
me as an adult, having grown up in that period.
I'm like, oh, yeah, now I understand why that was

(22:05):
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
remember that? I never heard that one. Of course, I
always heard the the the trick or treating uh story.
You know that you know you need to be careful
because there might be razor blades in the apple. Yeah.

(22:27):
We used to have to um after we would 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 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

(22:49):
candied apples, so nobody said. So you just kind of
ignore it because if you knew what's in there, you
just know to take it out and enjoy the treat. Yeah,
it's part of its part of the experience, another experience.

(23:09):
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 chick list. What is

(23:31):
it 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

(23:53):
about the perils of pop culture and how they can
draw you into Uh. No, I don't know in a
necessarily satanic practices, but just you know, not being a
good person and sending you to hell. Yeah, basically damnation
was always the threat. Yeah, and it and it would
often include a little uh you know, exploitive or grizzly
kind of image reads to really grab particularly young reader's attentions. Yeah,

(24:16):
they're fascinating because they incorporate elements of like the early
nineteen fifties horror comments 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

(24:37):
have been the 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

(24:59):
silly stuff about elves and dwarves and gnomes was somehow
going to lead to my demise its satanic ritual abuse.
But I did have some pretty heavy demons in there,
and addition of the orcs and elves and then Dice,
you know, there's something kind of arcane and uh them. Yeah,
and and of course you know, like we mentioned this
before when we talked about Gramoires in the other episode,

(25:22):
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 satanic ritual abuse. But

(25:44):
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,
reolutely uh And I believe that they followed a lawsuit
against whomever owned D and D at the time. I

(26:05):
don't know if that was Gary guy Gaxe 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 act out role playing as a

(26:29):
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
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 within think that this

(26:50):
is what's fascinating to me, is it all comes around again.
After this whole Satanic panic movement kind of fades away
in the mid nineties, Um, you start finding out that
that uh, a lot of this, you know, their accusations
weren't true. And then academics started doing a real research
on dungeons and dragons and they found that, Uh. For instance,

(27:11):
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 rates of suicide were lower

(27:33):
in kids who played 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 turteen about Dungeons and Dragons,
Satan and psychology, uh and uh. So their final conclusions

(27:55):
here basically that the leaders of this group bad had
completely exaggerated their own dentials. 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 psychiatrist that they associated with, Riddecki uh he
in particular, was arrested in for sexually exploiting his patients.

(28:18):
Uh He was trading basically um medicine for sexual favors
from his patients. So this same guy who was accusing
Dungeons and Dragons of being responsible responsible for sexual abuse
himself was a perpetrator. Alright, So so far we've discussed
the cultural kindling for the most part that leads up

(28:41):
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 UH outcry to this particular book

(29:02):
that comes out in Night, 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 the so called Michelle's memories that

(29:25):
are recalled during therapy in the nineteen seventies of her
sexual abuse in the nineteen fifties in Vancouver. So we're
talking Ozzy 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
got to the research for this UM, is that Michelle Smith,
who was the patient that underwent the therapy and was

(29:48):
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, I think literally

(30:09):
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 spring up, other

(30:30):
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. Is uh,

(30:55):
this this this scientific idea of repressed memories being a
psychological pheno aminon 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
made you the way that you are what what is
what is actually causing your problems? Um? And it was
everybody from psychotherapists to child welfare advocates, and they didn't

(31:18):
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 they
thought that this was evidence of these satanic cults actually existing,

(31:39):
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 on on

(32:02):
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 the treat the

(32:24):
treatment side and the patient side. I mean, if you,
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 carr 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, perhaps you were abused by this nefarious organization

(32:46):
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. It was called

(33:08):
the False Memory Syndrome 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. Of the

(33:32):
children within these families said that they people who were
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 entire American population. Uh.

(33:54):
And then there's this also the interesting study A group
psychologists at the State Universe 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 said that
they had at least once in their sessions with their patients,

(34:17):
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 informed by
the the established narrative in the culture that that of

(34:38):
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 in the nineties, sixties, seventies,
and eighties, all of it coloring your perceptions, um, of
the adults. Anyway, Now, what happens when you attempt to
pull these uh, the these types of memories from from

(35:02):
a small child, though, from someone who does hasn't seen
Rosemary's Baby, who who doesn't listen to uh, who hasn't
heard Heraldo on television talking about the dangers of death metal.
What's said, Well, we see that in UM in a
very pivotal nineteen four case to McMartin preschool UM sexual
abuse case in southern California. And this is a case

(35:24):
where prosecutors charge 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 focus. But at the time
it sent out these waves of fear just through throughout
the society, got picked up on the media and just

(35:45):
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, and then you haven't have an investigation
and you know, interrogate the the child and then you
get this therapist derived account from from an impressionable young

(36:09):
child regarding what happened. And since these kids, for the
most part, they have no knowledge of of adult sexuality,
but they but they can tell that this this concerned
adult authority figure is trying to get something disturbing out
of them. So what does a small child bring to
the table, what can they possibly pull out? They start

(36:29):
talking about, well, well, they made me drink peepee, they
made me eat 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.
Then uh it's the word copperphilia. Yeah yeah, yeah. And

(36:49):
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 is
an interesting part two where they talked about the McMartin

(37:11):
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 a valid form of Christianity. It was,

(37:32):
it was brief. It was kind of interesting. And so
in both of these cases we see this established in
the media, in 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 all could have been conceivably sexually abused by

(37:54):
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
goes beyond just Heraldo Rivera right. It becomes a part
of it becomes disseminated outward through professional organizations, through police, therapist,
youth workers, seminars aimed at the discovery of new Satanic

(38:16):
abuse histories. And so you reach the point by the
by the nineteen eighties where the panic is spreading outward
into the UK, into Australia, Canada. The Netherlands, South Africa,
anywhere that an American therapeutic and criminological literature is read. Yeah. Yeah,
and it's so the Netherlands part is one of the
ones that's interesting to me. Uh so Uh, I am

(38:39):
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
traditionalist movement of burning down Christian churches, and of their

(39:00):
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 against
Christianity again, the Satanic panics hysteria sort of spread over there. Yeah,

(39:24):
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 at teenagers
about the dangers of all the stuff about dungeons and

(39:46):
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 in it
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

(40:06):
Fake Necronomicon and the AI Satanic Bible. Nice paperback versions
of both. Satanic Bible was a best seller. Yeah, I
mean a lot of I think there were a lot
of both adolescents 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

(40:28):
checkout line. Yeah. I remember having both those books, listening
to Marilyn 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

(40:49):
of adolescent anti authoritarian reflex, right, combined with the um
the hysteria at the time moving around 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

(41:11):
good and evil, of God and Satan, and uh, you're
gonna have a tendency to sympathize with the villain in
that piece. And 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

(41:35):
to be possessed by a demon and you'll possibly murder
your family. I 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

(41:57):
not worse than Ozzy Osborne Box or King Diamonds. You know, Yeah,
because you 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

(42:20):
satanic organization. Yeah yeah, I mean I think of like
some of the interviews I've seen with like metal that
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
the dark, the heavy, the you know, industrial disturbing nature

(42:42):
the thing. But then you see an interview of them
and they just seem like like goofy guys their music,
you know, Yeah, absolutely, I mean I think that that's
that was probably the case with Ozzy Osbourne as well.
He's in that Heraldo thing and it's it's hilarious watching
him be interviewed. He's much more lucid than the later
Ozzy Osby one of reality TV the counter theirs. Yeah,

(43:04):
but he uh, you know, he obviously wasn't 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 in America

(43:28):
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 are 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 a little

(43:50):
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 Seawan Seller's or Pete
Rowland that was it. That was the guy. Yeah, yeah,
so it's um. You know, I think it was also

(44:12):
easy for people like that who had committed these atrocious
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

(44:32):
that the media has has crafted for them and presented
them and say, hey, it's not your fault, it's because
you 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 this
heavy metal music, that it's just a slippery, slow to
just violent outbreaks in demanding possession. Yeah, and that leads

(44:53):
us to the West Memphis three. You want to talk
about them now, 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, the worst residual effects
of satanic panic, at least on you know, an individual level.

(45:15):
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

(45:36):
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 it sort of documents the the cases throughout the

(45:58):
twenty years I met. 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 then 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, tried and convicted
from murdering three younger boys, and it was supposedly part

(46:21):
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 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,

(46:45):
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? Yeah,
it has a Reese Witherspoon in it as one of
the mothers of the victims. Um and Uh, Colin Firth

(47:10):
I believe plays a private investigator who's working on their
behalf to try to find evidence that that proves there.
In a sense, it's a complex case, and it's it's
dreamly 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, you definitely
have satanic panic and play. Yeah, and there's all kinds

(47:33):
of stuff to the 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
murders themselves. It's it's really confusing and disturbing, But ultimately

(47:55):
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, sadly,
crimes that we we do not we don't have an
answer for. We don't know who is responsible for exactly.
That's the sad part is that the person or persons
who did do it got away with it. But luckily,

(48:18):
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? What makes
us get away from that? What what creates a situation
so that by um, you see you see cases where

(48:41):
the media doesn't jump on the Satanic bandwagon four um
abuse charges 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 up initially in
the wake of the awful incident, Satanism is not one
of them. Right, Yeah, that could have very easily have

(49:02):
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 Panic as a Religious Studies
data as part of the journal International Review for the
History of Religions that sort of this was written in

(49:24):
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 cults existing. Uh, anything that
connected them as as ever existing, largely came from these

(49:46):
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. 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.

(50:10):
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 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,

(50:33):
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 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

(50:54):
most disturbing thing of all, because you want to be
able to position that kind of thing outside of your
and the idiot sphere out you want to place it
on another and even if they look like you and
soon 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

(51:15):
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,
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

(51:37):
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
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

(51:58):
Kenneth Lanning, FBI lead investigator on these so called sex rings,
who is a skeptical of it from the beginning and
then was an outspoken critic of it in the media.
Yet study of ritual crime allegations sponsored by the National
Center on Child Abuse and Neglect, and it discredited virtually
everything um as a massive study, and they only found
a very few cases of loan or or paired perpetrators

(52:22):
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 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

(52:45):
this up. The ming Martin 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
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

(53:06):
course you have lingering elements of it that remain in
other areas, particular in South Africa, for years to fall. Yeah,
and so one of the things that I think is
an interesting question for us to sort of pose to
ourselves and to the audience is is uh so we
have had these uh moments of hysteria throughout human history,

(53:28):
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 panic in Japan in the late nineties. There
was this idea that there was an incident where an
episode of Pokemon supposedly caused seizures kids and then like this,

(53:48):
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
talking about early or 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

(54:10):
really remember a large incident of that in the last
I don't know decade other than Ebolabola and UH and vaccines.
Oh yeah, okay, yeah, movement, Well, I guess on both
sides depending Yeah, yeah, so it's kind of fascinating they

(54:32):
have in 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 spreads information faster and further, or
is it uh, simply because you know, mass media has

(54:55):
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. There are more
people on the channels talking constantly about the subject matter.
So uh yeah, maybe there's uh maybe maybe our our

(55:17):
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, would are we as humans
uh susceptible to that? Still? I have a feeling we are.

(55:40):
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 comes down to how much information
are we willing to ignore to support this uh, this

(56:00):
this this script for what has happened or what could
happen to us that fulfill some need to either make
the danger more tolerable, more palpable. You know. It's like,
like we were saying, is sometimes the the more outrageous
explanation or something is more attractive because it's it's easier

(56:21):
to handle because it's it's it's you position it outside
of your sphere 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 try to understand experiences that are so
horrifying that normally otherwise you wouldn't be able to understand them.

(56:43):
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 you came about after Satanic Panic.
But we'd love to hear, you know, an outsider's take

(57:05):
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 at Christian
Sager dot tumbler dot com. UH and UH for the

(57:27):
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 how Stuff
Works YouTube channel as well, where we're producing shows like
what the Stuff UH and interviews and content like that
cool cool. Thanks once again to Christian for joining me

(57:48):
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. Because
it how stuff works come, we can go get gobn
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