Satanic Panic: Michelle Remembers

In 1980, Michelle Proby and her psychiatrist published a book describing supposed horrific childhood abuse by a Satanic cult. Soon after, Satanic Panic swept across North America. But was her story accurate or the product of hypnosis techniques?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:32):
Hey, hey, welcome back to Autumn's Oddities. I'm Autumn. Well,
a little bit of business up top. I mentioned at
the end of last week's episode that I'm interested in
starting a little community on Patreon, maybe a cobin if
you will, for those of us that are interested in
folk magic, the use of herbs for healing and green witchery.

(00:56):
I'm realizing that granny or folk magic, or a latch
in folk magic, if you want to call it, that
was a big part of my upbringing, even if it
wasn't labeled that way, and I've been keeping those traditions
alive and starting some of my own. Nothing like an
organized religion or worshiping any deity, just sharing our experiences

(01:18):
and getting better attuned with nature. It would be like
a hey, what you can group like a dollar and
up and maybe we could have like a book club
or something along with it, like once a month. You know,
I don't know, I'm just spit loll in here. Let
me know in the comments of this episode if this
is something you would be interested in. And my idea
of a benign little coven certainly does lead right into

(01:43):
today's topic, Satanic panic and its modern origins. There was
a time when Satan was everywhere, or at least he
seemed to be. During the nineteen eighties and nineties, the
devil was always making headlines. It was the era of
the Satanic panic, a moment in history when heavy metal

(02:04):
and tabletop gaming weren't just the stuff of nerd culture
but a serious moral threat. That's the less harmful side
of it, anyway. At the time, the hysteria went deeper
than you know, just parental pearl clutching over Judas priest
and dungeons and dragons. It gave very real credence to

(02:26):
false reports of horrendous, horrendous deeds, rumors that destroyed lives
and led to countless wrongful convictions. Among the more infamous examples,
there's the Martinsville Nightmare, the story of a daycare in
small town, Saskatchewan that was accused of harboring a murderous cult.

(02:46):
Nine people there would ultimately face charges despite a complete
lack of evidence. Similar cases popped up worldwide as law
enforcement was trained to identify the signs of Satanic ritual abuse,
and the biggest one here in the United States was
absolutely the West Memphis three, who also was completely innocent

(03:07):
and who you know. Whoever committed the crime certainly never
paid for it. It was not those three that were arrested.
It's just the latest iteration of a moral panic that
swept the highest levels of Western society only a generation ago.
One of the most polarizing and divisive social movements in
modern history. It destroyed families, turned communities against each other,

(03:32):
and sent numerous innocent people to prison. It was known
as the Satanic Panic, a conspiracy theory that convinced millions
of well meaning, rational people that a secret cabal of
Satanists had infiltrated the highest echalons of society to sexually
molest children. And I'm not saying there's no basis in

(03:54):
fact there, because I think we know that there is.
But it wasn't Satanists that were perpetrating it. The Satanists
were accused of sacrificing animals and using women as breeders
to create an endless supply of dead babies for use
in their gory, blood filled rituals and orgies. Sounds like

(04:15):
a Tuesday. I'm just kidding, not at all, because I
don't think this is happening, and I don't think that
it was happening. And I think that anybody that does
kill someone in some sort of a ritual form or
fashion is not actually a Satanist. I think they just
think they are. It destroyed lives and ripped apart families.
Reports of ritualistic child abuse were, of course reported across

(04:38):
the English speaking world. Almost all of them were eventually
found to have been partially, if not entirely, fabricated, but
not before dozens of innocent people were falsely accused and
sentenced to years and in some cases decades in prison,
like the West Memphis three, born of a genuine historical injustice,

(04:59):
which of course is society's neglect of childhood sexual abuse.
Everybody's like, oh, it didn't happen back in my day,
you know, like people of the older generations. It's like
it absolutely did. Practically every older person I know has
some story of sexual abuse if they'll tell you about it.
But I've I personally know many, many, many people. This

(05:21):
was a panic that saw some of the world's smartest
minds taken in by accusations that at their root were
as preposterous as any raised during the medieval European witch hunts.
Or right here in Salem, Massachusetts. It was legitimized by
experts in their respective fields, captivated law enforcement, and proved

(05:41):
to be a lucrative grift for fraudsters and attention seekers. Worse,
as the conspiracy grew under its own weight and influence,
the hysteria inspired real and horrific crimes, like I just said,
usually by disturbed teenagers who claimed they were sacrificing humans
to satan. This in particular, is a case study of

(06:03):
how badly off the rails we can go when we
allow our best intentions and passions to overwhelm us. And
I had never heard of the tale. The Tale, the
tale I'm about to tell you. I had never heard
of it until like maybe last year, the year before,
and I read this book. It's batshit crazy. So the

(06:27):
story begins, and trigger warning. I'm going to say a
lot of really disgusting things. I fully don't believe that
any of them happened. Trigger warning for just everything. Really,
just if you can think of something disgusting, it's probably
in here. Also, I'm not saying that I don't believe

(06:49):
people when they come forward with allegations of sexual abuse.
This is a special, special case. So the story begins
in nineteen eighty with the publication of a book called
Michelle Remembers. It detailed the fantastic claims, not in a
good way, of Michelle Proby, who recounted several months of

(07:09):
gory and sadistic ritual abuse at the hands of a
cabal of Satanists and this is when she was a
child in nineteen fifty's Victoria BC. The memories she alleged
were repressed for decades until she sought the help of
psychiatrist Lawrence Pasder. Under hypnosis, Proby began to remember a

(07:31):
horrifying tale of murder, torture, abduction, and molestation. She claimed
to have been taken from her willing family and groomed
to be part in or to take part in a
ritual to bring forth the devil himself. Michelle claimed to
have witnessed the murder of children. She claimed she was
forced to eat human remains, that she was covered in

(07:54):
dead baby parts and locked in a cage with snakes,
and if it's already sounding on beloe believable because it
is pastor. The doctor decided that the world needed to
know Michelle's story, and the pair collaborated on a book,
an explosive bestseller, Michelle remembers would become the folkloric template

(08:14):
for countless other claims of satanic ritual abuse ostensibly uncovered
during therapy during the eighties and nineties. So just kind
of kind of a similar thing to in the seventies
after The Exorcist came out, you know, there was a
rise in demonic possessions and the Catholic Church performing exorcism,

(08:35):
you know, causation correlation. I don't know. On the surface,
the book's premise seems too implausible to be taken seriously.
But neither Michelle Proby nor Lawrence Pasder gave anyone the
impression of being crazy, hysterical or liars. But I don't
think that was their motivation, and I'm going to get
into it. Proby was a married woman living just a

(08:57):
regular life in Victoria. She was measured, even tempered, with
closely cropped, curly, dark hair, and she was soft spoken pastor.
Her psychiatrist was, by all accounts, a brilliant family man,
a respected professional psychologist, and ties back to the Exorcism panic.
A devout Catholic in night. And I'm not saying all

(09:20):
Catholic people believe whatever they hear, but I think that
someone who has beliefs in demons, angels, things of that
nature and satan and cults, it's like, okay, first of all,
you should be having to go off on a side tangent.
First of all, devout Catholic be more worried about the
church perpetrating the molestation of children, and not a Satanic cult.

(09:44):
That's all I'm gonna say. In nineteen seventy three, Michelle
Proby began to visit Pastor to seek treatment for depression.
After four years of regular therapy sessions, the pair had
worked through Proby's ordinary childhood issues and it was clear
that their sessions they were just coming to their natural clothes.

(10:04):
Then in nineteen seventy six, Michelle suffered a miscarriage and
began to experience horrible nightmares, and Pastor was called in
to help. So we're seeing a traumatic event happen. Her
therapy was about to come to a close, and of
course the traumatic event that she suffered miscarriage is an

(10:26):
extremely traumatic event. Not to bring up anything that's going
to bother anyone, but I've had one myself. It's extremely physical,
physically painful, and emotionally painful as well, and of course
she suffered nightmares. I did too, and still do. But

(10:47):
you know, she decided, I'm going to go get therapy
again because I've had this traumatic experience. And she told
the doctor in one of their first return sessions that
she had a bad dream last week. And Pasder asked
bad dream, and Michelle said, yes, a very bad dream.
And she said that she had a terrifying dream about
scratching an itch on her hand, only to have the

(11:09):
skin rupture with spiders, little spiders just pouring out of
the skin on her hand. Yeah, I've had that dream too.
That's actually what is that? Oh my god, scary stories
to tell in the dark. I'm pretty sure that's one
of them where the girl gets a bump on her
face and she starts picking at it and it's a
whole bunch of spiders and they like burst out her

(11:29):
face and she dies. Yes, that is a rationable or
rationable ration motion to combine rational and reasonable to rationable.
That is a rational fear that we've all had. I
don't know if it's really rational. There are some bugs
that burrow and like get in ears and stuff, and yeah,
I know that's f and disgusting, but it's it's a fear. Okay,

(11:52):
it's an understandable fear. From there, the sessions began to
delve into increasingly bizarre territory. All would slip into a
kind of hypnotic trance in which she began to recount
long forgotten events in the childlike voice of her five
year old self. Over the following fourteen months, the pair

(12:13):
recorded six hundred hours of testimony in this hypnotic state.
It was this work that would become the basis of
the book Michelle Remembers. Funded by one hundred thousand dollars
advance in nineteen eighty dollars, it would earn another two
hundred and forty two thousand paperback rights and royalties worth

(12:34):
more than one million dollars in today's currency. So already
we're seeing some motivation to come up with a story.
And also, spoiler alert, Michelle has a big crush on
her doctor. So okay. At first, the events Michelle remembered
were merely horrific. She began to remember some kind of

(12:56):
orgiastic party at a home in the Victoria neighborhood where
guests clubbed a woman to death. She remembered an evil
man named Malachi, who packed a car with the dead
woman's body and then faked an accident on the Malahat
Highway to cover up the murder. She then recalled being
forced to eat the dead victim's ashes. I'm confused by

(13:19):
that whole thing. First of all, how did they get
a hold of her ashes? If he faked an accident
a car crash after she was already dead, How did
you get hold of her body after it was cremated?
I have questions. As the sessions wore on, the repressed
memories grew more dramatic, more detailed, and were overtly paranormal.

(13:42):
While she was at first merely an unwilling participant in
satanic rituals, Michelle claimed that she was eventually kidnapped by
a group that the pair would come to identify as
a Victoria based satanic cult. She described rituals performed at
night at the city's historic Raws Base Cemetery, being placed
in an open grave while a crying cat mewed and

(14:05):
a woman dressed in a dark robe chanted above her.
She remembered a bizarre ritual of rebirth in a nearby mausoleum,
her tormentors hissing and dancing like cats while one of
them licked her. Each session with Pastor built on the
horror of the one before eventually becoming so nightmarish that
the therapist brought in priests to offer blessings and benedictions

(14:28):
to protect Michelle from the evil of her own memory.
And to that, I say, why didn't you call the
fucking cops? Like she's telling there's no statute of limitations
on murder. I don't know how Canadian law works, but
in the United States, no statute of limitations on murder.
You're saying she witnessed a murder. Why aren't you at
least one murder? And I'm countless babies and so on

(14:50):
and so forth. Why didn't you call the authorities if
you believed her? Is my question. Eventually, Michelle said that
she was saved by the miraculous intervention of Jesus and
the Virgin Mary, who appeared to her during a Satanic ritual.
Taken together, the book's claims seem so extraordinary and its
evidence so thin that it becomes difficult to imagine anyone

(15:14):
believing Michelle's utterances to be true, And indeed, Michelle remembers
the book central claims can all be debunked with even
a cursory investigation. Again, I'm all about believing the stories
told by victims of essay, but this all seemed just
a little too on the nose. First of all, there

(15:35):
is no evidence of a fatal car crash on the
Malahat Highway in the time period that the book covers.
The Ross Bay Cemetery mausoleum that was pictured in the
book was just too small to accommodate several people and
a Satanic ritual. Also, Michelle's two siblings did not corroborate
any of her claims. One sibling, contacted by a journalist,

(15:57):
said only that she did not want to talk about
the book. Book. If Michelle had indeed been given, you know,
by the to these Satanists by her mother for periods
of time, wouldn't someone have noticed, say her siblings or
the schools she attended. There's no evidence that Michelle had
a prolonged absence from school during this time or the

(16:19):
time that this allegedly happened. She had a dentist letter
confirming that she missed school because of a broken tooth,
and there was a photo of a skin rash. Other
than that, she wasn't found to have any physical scars
of the intensive abuse that she had claimed. Most heartbreaking
of all, Michelle's estranged father said that the claims were

(16:39):
entirely false and that Michelle had grotesquely misrepresented her late mother,
so her mother's not even there to defend herself. He said,
it was the worst pack of lies a little girl
could ever make up. The book took me four months
to read, and I cried all the time. I kept
saying to myself, Dear God, how could anyone do this
to their dead mother? And that was an interview given

(17:00):
by Jack Proby in nineteen ninety. Under normal circumstances such
you'd say off the wall, you could say batshit crazy
claims might have generated a little interest, but Pasder was
a difficult man to dismiss, so he lent credence to
whatever Michelle was saying. He was a respected psychologist with
impeccable credentials. He had degrees from the University of Alberta,

(17:24):
Medicals or School of Medicine, University of Liverpool and McGill
in addition to being a Fellow of the Royal College
of Physicians and Surgeons, and he was also a staff
member at several local hospitals. Pasder was also deeply religious,
and it was likely no coincidence that Michelle's recollections came

(17:45):
to starkly confirm his own faith. And this is again
something we've seen in most cases of demonic possession as well,
when Michelle remembers hit bookshelves. Michelle's account even had the
endorsement of the Catholic Church, and I'm like, I don't
want it the group of organized I'm not saying every

(18:07):
priest is a sex offender, but all the lawsuits would
seem to indicate that a whole lot of mare and
the Catholic Church is like, yes, we love this book
because it's talking about the sexual abuse of a child.
One of the religious authorities brought in to investigate Michelle's
claims was Bishop of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Victoria,

(18:27):
Remy Derux, that's his real name. Deru said he was
impressed by Pastor's credentials and Michelle's storytelling. He said that
he listened to the story, and he listened to the story,
and he also accompanied the pair to the Vatican, where

(18:47):
Michelle's story was recounted to hire church authorities. While Deru
admitted that Michelle's claims did seem extraordinary, they were not
outside the realm of belief. For a deeply faithful and
spiritually committed man, a bishop requires a degree of open
mindedness to the possibility of evil. Dru quoted Bible verse

(19:10):
Matthew seven sixteen, which warns the faithful to judge false
prophets by the outcome of their actions and words. You
will know them by their fruits. As a bishop, his
role was not to debunk the claims of ritual abuse,
but rather to support his parishioners, you know, to watch
for the fruits of their revelations. He said that he

(19:32):
had dealt with a number of you know, strange things
in a number of ways, and began to describe a
Vancouver Island nurse who contacted him about a patient that
she believed to be suffering from demonic possession. Dru said
he told the nurse to gather a prayer group and
confront the allegedly possessed man with a crucifix. If he

(19:53):
reacted violently, he told her to call back. The nurse
did call back. The patient had said admired the crucifix
and asked to buy it, so he was not possessed,
and Derue wrote the foreword for Michelle Remembers and said,
the Church is well aware of the existence of mysterious
and evil forces in this world. I do not question

(20:16):
that for Michelle this experience was real. In time, we
will know how much of it can be validated. And
you see he's choosing his word and carefully. He said,
for Michelle, this experience was real. He's saying he doesn't
believe that she's lying, but that she believes the story
she's telling. When asked whether this foreword gave Proby and

(20:37):
Pastor undue credibility, he said it's possible. Cool, with the
benefit of time, he said, I didn't see very good fruits,
So that's a nice way of him saying, I don't
think any of it happened. It's tempting to write off
Michelle Remembers as a simple fraud, to assume that Michelle
and Pastor were lying in pursuit of fame and fortune,

(21:00):
much like the Amityville horror. But the details of their
story don't square with Michelle Remembers being a con. You know,
these were two people who genuinely believed in the truth
of Michelle's claims it's partially because of Michelle remembers that
cognitive scientists now understand that memory can be a very

(21:20):
malleable thing. At some level, everybody knows that memory has
reconstructive elements, and this is according to Stephen Lindsay, a
professor of psychology at the University of Victoria who has
conducted research into the limits of eyewitness testimony, that does
not mean that our memories are false, but that you know,
they are rarely as accurate as we think they are.

(21:43):
Numerous studies have demonstrated the weakness of memory. Among the
most famous is a paper from two thousand and one
which found that with only a little prompting, fully one
third of respondents could be convinced that they had met
Bugs Bunny at Disneyland, and you know, despite Bugs Bunny
not being owned by Disney and he has absolutely never

(22:07):
appeared in one of their theme parks. The creation of
false memories was supercharged by the fact that most of
Michelle's sessions occurred under hypnosis. The disinhibition of hypnosis, combined
with regular, emotionally demanding sessions, created conditions in which fantasies
can begin to acquire the hue of memory. It's a

(22:30):
phenomenon that was observed nearly one hundred years before Michelle
met doctor Pasd. In the late nineteenth century, the famed
Austrian neurologist, if we want to call on that, Sigmund Freud,
put eighteen female patients into hypnosis. The women were labeled
emotionally troubled, which I'm sure yeah, because of the conditions

(22:52):
in which they were forced to live at the time
and having absolutely no rights and being property that would
emotionally trouble me as well. And Freud surmised that through
hypnosis he might be able to extract subconscious memories of
sexual abuse and restore their mental health. Now, I don't
know why he goes straight to that that because a
woman is emotionally troubled that they were sexually abused. I

(23:14):
don't know how you make that jump. There's lots of
things that can, you know, contribute to that. What he
found astounded him. Under hypnosis, the women recounted extraordinary tales
of not just sexual abuse, but also of cannibalism and
even the appearance of the devil himself. The sorts of

(23:37):
claims that are eerily similar to those recounted by Michelle proby.
At first, Freud was enthusiastic about the discoveries, but as
the claims grew more bizarre and implausible, he was forced
to admit that they were probably fictional. There's also a
subtext to Michelle remembers that becomes unavoidable, you know, once

(23:57):
you know the ending of the story. Her marathon therapy
session spanned hours, and they were away from their respective spouses,
and the unacknowledged motivation for much of this may have
simply been the desire to spend time with each other. Personally,
I think Michelle did not want the sessions with the
doctor to end and just kind of continued with the story.

(24:21):
In the end, Pastor left his wife and four children,
Michelle left a deeply embittered husband, and the patient and
therapist were married, which isn't a conflict of interest at all.
They appear to have remained together until he died in
two thousand and four, when Pastor passed away from a

(24:42):
heart attack at the age of sixty seven. In his obituary,
Michelle is described as his wife and soulmate, and I'm like,
she probably wrote that obituary. I'm gonna write my husband's
obituary too. Pretty soon. Actually, I'm just kidding. Kenneth Lanning
was a pioneer ring early researcher into child sex rings,

(25:02):
pedophilic grooming, and abductions. In the course of this research,
he became one of the FBI's top experts in child
sexual abuse. As such, he often helped local law enforcement
with difficult cases. In nineteen eighty three, he received a
call from a police officer. An adult woman had come
forward alleging that she had been sexually abused by a

(25:24):
satanic cult and forced to participate in rituals that involved
animal sacrifice and shadowy rituals as a child. I'd heard
pieces of cases like this, but I had never heard
it altogether like this, Landing said. Landing and the other
officer discussed investigative approaches. A conspiracy like this would of

(25:46):
course require rooting out a rat who could turn on
the others. Fortunately, for any investigators trying to build a case,
a cult that sacrificed humans and drank their blood should
be leaving behind just an as time of physical evidence.
You know, they're just popping heads off babies and drinking
the blood and killing people and staging a phony scene.

(26:08):
There should be so much evidence right, The FBI agent
remembered putting down the phone and thinking, I'll never hear
a case like this again. He was wrong, said the narrator,
because two weeks later she got another phone call. It
was a second investigator, not even at the same place,
not from the same place, with allegations that were so
similar that at first Lanning assumed that he was speaking

(26:32):
about the same one, but it was an entirely different case.
Then more and more calls like this came in, until
Lanning suddenly found himself consulting on dozens of cases of
alleged satanic ritual abuse. Lanning eventually found that the cases
tended to fall into several different categories. The first few

(26:54):
were very similar to Michelle Proby. Adults, usually women who
were living highly successful, functioning lives when they sought therapists
to deal with issues like anxiety and depression. Through therapy,
they would discover elaborate memories of cult driven sexual abuse.
Almost all of the cases, it would later be discovered,

(27:16):
could be traced to a group of therapists who bought
into sense debunked methods of using hypnosis like techniques to
recall false memories of sexual trauma. Another type of case
involved claims of satanic ritual abuse being used to gain
the upper hand in child custody disputes, which is, Jesus,

(27:37):
why would you do that. That's truly evil, like to
accuse your expouse or you know whatever, the person you
had a child with of molesting your child. And not
only that, but in a Satanic ritual like that. That's
some really out there shit. I mean, you got it,

(27:58):
that's rough. The third type usually episodes of many hysteria
that broke out in small rural communities. One of the
more famous cases occurred in Martinsville, se Yeah, I can't
talk Saskatchewan. Well, that's a hard word to say, our
city to say, where more than a dozen people were
criminally charged in the nineteen nineties for their alleged link

(28:18):
to a non existent devil church that was abducting children.
And of course I can't mention the West Memphis three
enough small town hysteria, satanic panic, all of it. The
last type of satanic abuse case identified by Landing would
become the most infamous of all the daycare cases. These

(28:39):
usually began with an allegation of sexual abuse against a
child that during the course of the investigation snowballed to
include more and more children and staff members. In police interviews,
scores of very young children would allege acts of mass
sexual abuse, orgies, sex trafficking, strange masks, rituals, and blood sacrifices.

(29:04):
Many of these cases led to year's long trials, while
most produced acquittals. Some of the accused did end up
with convictions, but the common feature of all of them
were failures of due process and a total absence of
corroboration and any physical evidence. There was the Little Rascals
daycare center in North Carolina, the Oak Hill Trial in Texas,

(29:28):
Wee Care Nursery in New Jersey, Fells Acres Daycare in Massachusetts,
Country Walk in Florida, and the Bronx five Good God,
That's so Many. In the UK, the panic insinuated itself
in a slightly different way. Social workers in the country's
various child welfare agencies became convinced of the reality of

(29:52):
widespread satanic ritual abuse, leading them to seize children from
their families in Rockdale, Orkney and Broxte in nineteen eighty eight.
These cases prompted Heraldo Rivera to air one of the
most infamous episodes of daytime talk shows and take him
with a pinch of salt. All he did was spread misinformation.

(30:18):
Like if he were around today, he would be some
sort of an influencer, just spewing conspiracy theories and fucking
up everyone's universe. Satanism goes far beyond teenage obsession. Today
there are cults that worship the Devil, engage in secret ceremonies,
who believe in an ancient and bizarre theology. And this
is his opening narration of the episode entitled Devil Worship,

(30:40):
exposing Satan's underground. All right, the other face of adult
Satanism is violent and fiendish, centered on sexual ritual and torture,
frequently descending into the biless crime are the most vile
crime of all, the sexual abuse of children. As the
camera flashed to clips of terrifying interviews, statements of survivors

(31:03):
and robed cultists performing arcane rituals, the narrator went on
warning that notorious serial killers and criminals had been linked
to a Satanic underground, and that Americans were being born
into lifelong Satanic cults. Some were desperate to leave, but
they feared the penalty of grotesque death. Innocent people around

(31:26):
the world would find themselves facing again, Like I said,
decades long prison sentences as a result of satanic hysteria.
In nineteen eighty four, three Arkansas teenagers who would come
to be known as the West Memphis Three, were accused
of killing three young boys in a Satanic ritual. They
did not They were just the weird kids in town
who listened to goth music and metal and painted their

(31:48):
fingernails black. The trial that convicted them was riddled with
inconsistencies and false testimony, as investigators mostly ignored the much
more compelling suspect, which was one of the boys stepfathers.
Way more compelling only after decades of lobbying by celebrities
and civil rights activists, or the three released from prison

(32:10):
in twenty eleven. In Texas, daycare operators Fran and Dan
Keller spent more than twenty one years in prison on
the completely baseless charges that they subjected children to rituals
involving dismembered babies and grave desecration. Again, if they're doing this,
where are the bodies? Truly, but the most famous daycare

(32:33):
case of the area of the era was the McMartin
preschool case, which became one of the highest profile child
sex abuse scandals in modern history. Located in Manhattan Beach, California,
the daycare would ultimately face allegations that they had sexually
abused more than three hundred and fifty children, among other allegations,

(32:56):
Some children claimed that they had been ferried around town
using secret tunnels under the daycare, even though the only
evidence of any tunnel was a sewer line and it
wasn't like leading anywhere. The case lasted seven years, resulted
in no convictions, and was ultimately one of the most
outlandish cases to be heard in a US courtroom in

(33:17):
modern times. It's no accident that the panic would coalesce
around daycare centers. The nineteen eighties saw unprecedented numbers of
women entering the workforce and placing their children into daycare
to do so you see them where I'm going with this.
The Satanic panic fed perfectly into societal fears that these

(33:37):
women were neglectful mothers abandoning their children to strangers. Take
the nineteen ninety seven letter penned by then Indiana governor
maybe you know him, Mike Pence, noting that quote daycare
kids get the short end of the emotional stick, and
that a child cared for by others was quote less
affectionate toward his mother. Okay, well, put systems in play

(34:00):
so that moms can stay home with their kids. Also,
it takes two people to have a child. I'm just saying,
why is father never mentioned in this? Why is the
onus always on the woman? I could go on for
years about it. Lannings said that the law enforcement officials
who pursue child sex abusers are often deeply religious. They

(34:22):
can cope with the horror of their work by seeing
it as a kind of divine calling. This would have
primed them to believe incredible tales of literal evil. The
Satanic abuse panic also couldn't have happened unless a faction
of social workers, pediatric specialists, and therapists bought into a
host of dubious interrogation techniques now known to prompt false

(34:46):
testimony from children. In the case of the McMartin preschool,
transcripts of interviews with the children showed that investigators often
pushed and prodded their subjects via leading questions into divulging
just ever more gruesome tales. Here's an example from the
McMartin transcripts. Interviewer, can you remember the naked pictures? Child

(35:09):
shake's head no. Interviewer can't remember that part. Child shake's
head no. No, the child doesn't remember it. Interviewer, why
don't you think about that for a while. Okay, your
memory might come back to you. Give me a break.
So this child is in a room with an adult
who is an authority figure. It's a copper, a social worker,

(35:30):
something like that, psychiatrist, who knows they're in a room
with an adult authority figure. They're a very small child.
They're asking this kid about something. The kid says, I
don't remember that happening. Ask him again, I don't remember
that happening. Then the interviewer says, well, why don't you
think about it? Maybe your memory will come back to you.
So what's the child going to do. They're going to
say something to get out of the room. That's how

(35:51):
false confessions happened. There was also rampant cross contamination of testimony.
A child who revealed something in a session would tell
his or her parents, parents who would then call other
parents at the preschool, who would then plant suggestions into
the fertile imaginations of the other children at the daycare.
These would then emerge during subsequent interrogations, which gave the

(36:12):
appearance of corroboration. Yeah, I mean, it's like a game
of telephone. But the most important factor was a dramatic
cultural shift. During the cultural revolutions of the nineteen seventies
and eighties, there was a growing awareness that sexual abuse
of children, which was once a dark family secret, was
in fact far more widespread than anyone had previously acknowledged.

(36:35):
And I'm like you, guys, don't need to be worried
about a satanic cult coming to sexually abuse your child.
It's happening with someone they likely know that you likely know,
a family member and acquaintance. Something like that. The pri
Michelle Remember's world had harbored an unknown number of pedophilic
teachers and authority figures whose inappropriateness was largely treated as

(36:59):
a joke. To compensate for the collective failures of the past,
many well meaning professionals felt that they must take all
allegations of child sex abuse with extreme seriousness, and of
course they should, But the leading and the interrogation techniques
that lead to false testimony, they're on display throughout most

(37:19):
of these children, they preached, did not make things up.
They did not lie. Well, they weren't making things up.
They were being told what to say pretty much. But
of course children do lie. Everybody lies, not maliciously, of course,
and a lot of times children will lie to please
the adults in their life. Sometimes you lie for attention.
I know I did. They lie because they struggled to

(37:40):
distinguish reality from fantasy. So it's not a malicious lie,
it's just an untruth. What we discovered is that when
you took stories of five or six year olds, they
were telling things that had been based on television. And
that's according to Lanning, professional wrestling cartoons or professional wrestling
cartoons of ghost chasing kids around. In the minds of children,

(38:02):
all of these scenes could transform into tales that seemed
far more lurid to adults. Seminars on identifying and investigating
Satanic ritual abuse became common throughout North America, where Michelle
Proby and Lawrence Pasder were frequent guests. Pasder was an
unbelievably intelligent man who was extremely skeptical of almost all

(38:23):
other cases of satanic ritual abuse except his own case
study and a few others. And again. That's according to Lanning,
who attended one of these conferences in the nineteen eighties.
Pasder told the assembled police officers that he could spot
the valid cases involving true intergenerational satanic cults from hoaxes

(38:44):
and mere teenage rebellion. Lanning, intrigued, recalled taking about forty
pages of notes throughout the presentation until he began to
notice something odd. Police officers would ask Michelle about her experience,
and she would simply just turn to Pasdor, who would
answer the questions. Lanning piped up, I'm curious. These are

(39:07):
all things that happened to Michelle, but you seem to
be answering all the details, he said. Pasder responded that
Michelle no longer retained any memory of the events after
she recounted them in her therapy sessions. Her brain had
locked them up again. And now I'm the keeper of
the story, is what Pastor said. And I'm like, okay,

(39:29):
I'm just not buying it. Lanning said that he immediately
put down his pen and didn't take another note after that,
and I would have done the same thing. Pasdor, meanwhile,
would continue to talk on behalf of his new wife
for years to come the same mail on Sunday reporter
who in nineteen ninety talked to Michelle's family, was denied

(39:49):
access to Michelle by Pasder. I wonder why for Michelle
to go on talking about these things is too painful.
She is totally free of satan today, he explained, And
I'm like, okay, well, then why are you having her
sit right next to you and then you're talking about them?
Isn't that the same thing? She's still hearing about the
things that allegedly happened to her. There was one more
factor crucial to understanding why the panic spread the way

(40:11):
it did or when it did exactly. Films like Rosemary's
Baby in nineteen sixty seven and books like The Satan
Seller in nineteen seventy two stoked the public's imagination of
latent Satanists. Well before Michelle Proby recounted her Tales tell
Titles to Lawrence Pasder, pop culture had already created a

(40:32):
public mythology of Satanism, but it was Michelle remembers that
launched it into the real world. For Lanning, the calls
had begun in nineteen eighty three. Remember this book was
published in nineteen eighty and They continued for almost a decade,
tail after tale, each mimicking the one before, but the
similarities didn't convince Lanning that the conspiracy was real. In fact,

(40:55):
the nearly identical nature of the stories made him even
more skeptic, as if these victims were reading from the
same invisible script. Lanning saw all of it. He watched
as the impossible testimonies of women and children coalesced into
a conspiracy, a movement, and then a full blown moral panic.

(41:16):
If people could believe this, he thought they could believe anything.
And that's why we're in the situation where in an
era that was suddenly devoted to the idea of believing children,
you know, after so long of just not and letting
everything happened to children and the parents just being like,
go outside and shut up. The irony is that therapists

(41:37):
and investigators often didn't believe the children. Many children implicated
in the daycare cases told them multiple times that nothing
bad had happened before they eventually relented, you know, because
of the intensive cajoling. The kids over and over said
nothing happened to me, and they're like, but we want
to believe the children. The child said nothing happened to them,

(41:58):
and you're like just planting shit, You're putting it in
their head. It's also not impossible that some of these
daycare cases were in fact based on legitimate claims of
molestation that were subsequently lost in the ensuing panic over Satanism.
Ross Cheat, a scholar at Brown University, made this case
in his twenty fourteen book The witch Hunt Narrative, which

(42:21):
argues that the eventual backlash to Satanic panic allowed real
abuse to go unchecked. And that's the kind of stuff
that happens. We know that there were and are child
sex trafficking rings active around the world. One need only
look at the just proliferical I don't know if you've

(42:47):
heard anything about it recently in the news, but you
know there's a big one that's being talked about constantly.
And unfortunately, child sex abuse material is very real. It's
a prev horror. I saw a just a disgusting map
of IP addresses that viewed see Sam, oh my, it's everywhere,

(43:13):
and I oh, it's so much. I just can't controversial,
but shouldn't be child molesters. Anyone who sexually abused a
child I think should die And I would like, I
would not mind at all to be the one who
carried that out. And again, if that's controversial, you need

(43:36):
to take another look at your fucking opinions and views
on things, because there's no rehabilitating a sexual predator. There's
just not that's proven. There's no rehabilitating them. They should
not be walking the earth. A New York Time series
noted the Technology that technology companies had reported forty five

(43:57):
million images and videos showing child sexual abuse in twenty twenty.
That number appears to be growing exponentially. God, what is
wrong with these fucking people. I don't understand. I don't understand.
I don't want to understand. I just want them gone gone.
The most common perpetrator of child abuse is usually in
the home. Parents and family members are statistically far more

(44:20):
likely to be a threat to a child than some
you know, remote, well connected villain. This is not a
fact that many people find easy to accept. Even today.
Distant conspiracies are far easier to process than the devil
who lives in your own home. The ultimate irony of
the Satanic abuse panic is that, as the world sought out,

(44:42):
you know, some shadowy religious cult devoted to abusing children
they overlooked an actual worldwide institution that was covering up
child sex abuse at the highest levels of power. And
it certainly wasn't Satanists. It was the Catholic Church, although
abused by priests, is now no how so well understood
that it's become a punchline. It took years of reporting

(45:04):
by the Boston Globe to reveal the details of systemic,
decades long cover ups within the Vatican. In the end,
the Satanic Panic was a grossly distorted mirror of a
real problem. The Satanic abuse panic began as a response
to a legitimate historical injustice. It was aided and embedded
by the capture of mainstream institutions such as academia and

(45:28):
law enforcement, and it was helped along by a popular
culture that normalized demonic imagery and narratives. It was also
a movement that offered its adherents, you know, the grandest
of motives, saving children from literal evil. But just as
Michelle Proby's rememberings began as mundane flashes of very terrifying

(45:49):
wrongdoing and grew into outright paranormal visions, so too did
the claims of the Satanic Panic grow more elaborate and implausible.
If all of the men, women, and children who claim
to have experienced Satanic ritual abuse were to be believed,
then Satanists had to have been murdering tens of thousands
of people every year. Lanning noted that the bodies simply

(46:13):
never showed up, nor was there any residual evidence of
animal sacrifices or fetal remains. To explain this, the conspiracy
had to widen. The evidence could only be covered up
if Satanists existed in the upper echelons of power. Police officers, judges, politicians, media, everyone,
everyone with any influence at all would have to be

(46:35):
in on it. If this were true, it would have
been the largest criminal conspiracy in the history of humanity. Really,
and I really don't think it is. Polarization turned neighbour
against neighbor. It destroyed families and towns where ritual abuse
was alleged. It even infected the academy. Lindsay, the researcher
that's not good, the researcher at the University of Victoria

(46:58):
who studies the reliability of memory, noted that the researchers
who doubted the veracity of retrieved memories were accused of
disbelieving sexual assault survivors, and that's the risk your un Unfortunately,
Lindsay said. The era is now remembered in his field
as the memory Wars, but by the mid nineteen nineties

(47:18):
the tide was turning. More Academic research poked at the
underlying assumptions of repressed memory. A nineteen ninety six study
concluded that a minimum of seventy percent of abuse allegations
obtained under hypnosis had no basis in reality, even when
the memories weren't explicitly satanic. A comprehensive nineteen ninety seven

(47:39):
essay in the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology called
for an audit into the failures of psychotherapy that had
allowed the panic to spread. A survey out of the
UK tracked the human toll of false accusations obtained under hypnosis,
saying that it caused health decline, job loss, and even
the permanent loss of children to those A nineteen ninety

(48:02):
three study and I know these are old, but I'm
just showing you historically. You know, all of the studies
done on this linked false repressed memories not only to
satanic panic, but also accounts of alien abductions and past
lives people sometimes fantasize entire complex scenarios and later define
these experiences as memories of actual events rather than as imaginings.

(48:24):
It read. Over time, the Satanic Panic, part of it
began to be discredited, Lanning said, But rather than disappear,
the conspiracy only shifted. They said the Klan was doing it,
or organized crime, or the government or the CIA. And
I think they They're right about part of it. Traces
of the Satanic Panic regularly whine their way into modern

(48:45):
conspiracy theories. Oh God. The Pizza Gate conspiracy was the
manifestation of a theory that the Democratic Party was running
child sex slaves out of the Comet Ping Pong pizza
parlor in Washington, d C. In twenty sixteen. A North
Carolina man showed up with an assault rifle to the
restaurant and shot up the door in search of the

(49:06):
enslaved children that he believed were locked in the basement.
Words have consequences. People believed them. This man thought he
was showing up and being like a hero, and he wasn't.
This was absolute bullshit. But just as the tunnels underneath
the McMartin preschool never materialized, the Pizza restaurant didn't even

(49:27):
have a basement. Should have looked into that first before
he started shooting idiot. The man was sentenced to four
years in prison in twenty seventeen. Or consider a more
recent conspiracy that the home furniture website Wayfair was actually
trafficking kidnapped children in overpriced cabinets. This stuff is just idiotic.

(49:49):
The satanic panic didn't go away. It evolved. It has
arguably even accelerated. Except you know, some people don't want
to talk about it anymore, even though their whole like
crusade has been protect the children, Pizzagate, YadA, YadA, YadA.
But when it comes to somebody they know, they don't

(50:11):
want to know anything about it. They don't want to
anything about it. The Internet and social media turbo charge
moral panics well beyond anything fin Heeraldo Rivera could have
envisioned in nineteen eighty five. The Internet. I'm sorry, but
a lot of people don't have the brain development to
be on social media or the Internet. They don't. They

(50:32):
believe everything they hear. They should not, they don't. They
lack critical thinking skills, and they should not have access
to social media. Social media. I'm very disillusioned with it
and have been for a long time, and of course
now the Epstein List and QAnon as the most obvious
modern examples. The conspiracy theory is, at its core just

(50:54):
a belief system, a way to frame and understand a
terrifying and complicated world. You want to feel in control, right,
That's what we saw with QAnon and all this other
absolute nonsense. You want to feel in control, you want
to feel important, So you latch on to this theory,
and other people latch on, and you live in an
echo chamber and you just keep bouncing it off the walls,

(51:16):
and it keeps growing and getting worse until something really
fucking bad happens. In pursuit of its goal to save
children from a legitimate problem of unaddressed abuse, the Satanic
Panic abandoned rationality and due process as necessary to the
more pressing moral ends. Its adherents libeled and exiled skeptics
and dissenters, operating on the assumption that anyone who could

(51:38):
oppose such a noble cause must be guilty of the
sin the movement was trying to abolish. Huh hmm, Wow,
that seems that seems pretty pretty relevant right now, right Okay,
I know I wrote this episode, and I'm like, huh, well,
this lot of PA parallels, doesn't it It's recruited and

(52:03):
captivated media, academia, and other mainstream institutions. And lastly, the
conspiracy theory that underpinned the panic created a set of
beliefs about the nature of the world that were unfalsifiable.
Once you strip away the core of the Satanic Panic,
the mechanics are very obvious everywhere. We are all capable

(52:24):
of falling for conspiracy theories and hysterias that confirm our
most deeply held beliefs, and all mass movements are a
form of social warfare that draws their tactics from the
same flawed human playbook. At its heart, a moral panic
is just the dark side of social progress. The last

(52:44):
lesson that we can learn from the Satanic Panic is
that really time is the master of truth. Our history
should teach us to approach everything we believe, especially, you know,
the beliefs grounded in our best, most virtuous instincts with
humility and care. Of today's most zealously defended convictions will
look absurd and hysterical to us in another forty years.

(53:05):
And I can't wait for that time, others will go
on to form the very moral framework by which we
judge our past and ourselves. We will know the tree
by the fruit it bears. And that's Michelle remembers. So
what the fuck happened? I mean, I think I said
what happened? A lot of people, you know, felt bad

(53:27):
when they realized, oh shit, our children are being molested
by friends of the family or family members, and we
just told them to keep it a secret. And you know,
they're becoming adults now and they don't want the same
kind of thing to happen, and so you know, they
just kind of start creating shit. They hear one thing

(53:49):
from someone and they're like, Okay, I'm gonna piggyback off that. Michelle.
I think doctor Pasder was full by her. I think
she made it up. Unfortunately, I think she would. It's
I don't think I know, because she left her husband
and he left his wife and his children. She was

(54:12):
unhappy in her marriage. She she was okay, I don't
really want to talk about how she looks, but she
was dowdy Dowdy's buck. She had a real short term
just h just average in every single way. I think
she was bored. I think she was sick of her marriage,
and I think she had a crush on doctor Paster,

(54:35):
and I think she when she realized that the therapy
sessions were going to end, I think she decided to
ramp it up. And she did have a miscarriage. I
understand that honestly, Like she chemically might not have been okay,
Like in her brain, she might have had a total
emotional breakdown, and I do understand that. But I think

(54:56):
when she got that reaction from the doctor, when she
started talking about the nightmares and the you know, really
graphic imagery, I think once she started getting that attention
that she just started to build off of, you know,
the previous session again. I think he was just like,
oh my god, I've done it. I found it, like

(55:16):
this is my life's work. He was deeply religious, and
so he didn't even question for a second that there
are these Satanists out there doing this, because you know,
he's like, okay, so I'm on this end. I'm a Catholic,
I'm a devout Catholic, and there is on the other
side of the spectrum, there are these Satanists and they're
out there and they're abusing children, and I think he

(55:38):
just like wanted something, like wanted a big case, wanted
something to write a book about, right, like he was
an academic. I get it, But I don't think he
should have just believed her like that. Like again, if
I thought that she was an actual victim of sexual assault,

(55:58):
I would not be saying but I don't believe her.
But there are all of these case studies done on
putting someone under hypnosis and them like coming up with
some repressed memory of sexual abuse. There can't be that
many studies done and that many people that have the

(56:20):
exact same reaction, and it, you know, it not be true.
I don't know personally. I just think that she wanted
a relationship with you know, and I watched the videos
of her. I listened to some of the tapes, and
it was her just being like really like he was

(56:40):
like really infantilizing her, and she was like, oh help
listen and suck spoken woman, and he ate it up
like I think he wanted to be a night and
shining armor. I think he wanted, you know, this case,
this groundbreaking case study. And then I think other people
read her book and we're like, oh shit, like something

(57:03):
happened and they're like, oh my God, was that satanic?
Was it? And then you know the daycare things were insane.
Do I believe that that does happen in places like that? Sure?
I do. But do I think it was satanic in
any way? No? I don't. I don't. And when you
know your your whole thing is believing the children, and
the children are telling you that nothing happened, and you

(57:25):
have to repeatedly ask them over and over and tell
them to take some time and think about it. What
do you think a child's gonna do? The child knows
that you want an answer, a certain answer. They know
because you're not taking the answer you're giving them or
that they're giving you, So they're gonna give you the
answer that you want to get the fuck out of
that room, wouldn't you like again, that's exactly how false

(57:47):
confessions work. A person just wants to leave. They know
that you just want them to say something, and you've
want They've worn the person down, and those techniques like
are coercive. They they don't result in a truthful confession
a lot of the time. Somebody, again, we see it
all the freaking time. I don't know, Uh, I just

(58:10):
think it's paralleling today, Like the parallel of this panic
is the exact same of the panic that's you know,
been going on for the last I don't know, it's
like been a decade at this point. Isn't that insane?
None of it has ever come to fruition. None of
it has been proven except Jeffrey Epstein. He was indicted

(58:35):
he was running a child sex trafficking ring. Go read
the fucking endiance if you want to argue with me,
it happened. There's a list. There are people on the list.
I don't give a fuck who's on that list. Every
last one of them should go to jail and be
tortured there by the other inmates for the rest of

(58:55):
their natural life. I hope they get fucking killed in there.
That's the gods on it. Truth. I don't give a
shit who's on it. I don't give a fuck if
my own personal hero is on that list. Put them
in fucking jail. Now, it's common sense. If you can
prove that that happened, which in the case of Jeffrey Epstein,

(59:16):
it was proven. It was proven. There are indictments from
the state of fucking Florida. He was indicted. Okay, I'm
not gonna start. He wasn't convicted because he's allegedly dead.
I'm not even gonna get into that conspiracy. Okay, I'm
gonna stop before I before I go down a dark,
dark road. That one. Just this whole thing gets me

(59:38):
fired up. As I was researching this, I was like,
oh Jesus, like this is this is now, this is
a reality now, except it's not satanic panic. It's just
it's one fucking thing after another. And nobody has the
critical I'm not saying nobody has the critical thinking skills,
but a lot of people don't have the critical thinking
skills to see things on the internet and go, oh,
that might not be true. Maybe I should look into it.

(01:00:00):
So you're telling me this, this and this happened. This
person is a criminal. These documents exist, Where are they?
I want to see them? Okay, now I see them
and none of that's in there, or those documents don't exist. YadA, YadA, YadA, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. Okay,
I'm gonna stop if you like, stop before I end
up disappeared. If you like what you hear, you can

(01:00:21):
hear more episodes every Friday, released on all podcast platforms
on social media. You can find me on Instagram at
Autumns Podcast, same handle on threads, on Patreon at Autumn's Oddities.
And remember, at any level of subscription, paid subscription, you
get ad free episodes. You help offset the cost of

(01:00:43):
me making this because it costs money and it does
cost my time. I enjoy doing it, but you know
what I mean, Uh, show show me a little of
and join up if you would like to. And also
like I'll work on the on the Patreon covin thing
would I would love to do that. It's to me,
it's like a light in a dark world right now.

(01:01:03):
I feel like we need some community. I feel like
that's really what society. Our society anyway. I don't know
about every country in the world, but I feel like
the US is a very individualistic. That's what capitalism breeds, right, individualism,
And I really would like community. I would like some
form of community. And if you'd like that to just

(01:01:25):
just let me know I can. I can make it happen.
As always, I appreciate you listening. And remember, if it's
creepy and weird, you'll find it here.