Stuff You Should Know - The "Satanic Panic" of the 1980s

Episode Date: January 5, 2016

In the late 1980s, the United States experienced a "Satanic Panic," leading parents to fear for the safety of their children. But were there any real examples of Satanic ritual abuse? Find out this and more in today's episode. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant.

And this is Stuff You Should Know. Hail Satan. Man, that would have gotten you locked up a few years ago. Yeah, so I want to go ahead and say that I would like to do one on Satanism. Yeah, for sure. The religion. Misunderstood.

May include the Church of Satan, or maybe those are two separate things. And the PMRC. Is that the Tipper Gord? Organization? Yeah. This brought back a lot of memories because we lived through the Satanic Panic.

For sure. And I remember it very distinctly. Yeah. Like, especially as a young Baptist, I was afraid of my friend. Right, I can imagine. I was very scared. I remember growing up thinking some of the big kids

are sacrificing things in the woods. Yeah, hell yeah. Which is, I mean, that was just part of your normal everyday thing, like walking around thinking that was happening. But it turns out in retrospect, it was almost entirely made up. Yeah, there was also,

and I imagine every neighborhood or town had this with those off Memorial Drive, that was a Satan house. Where supposedly devil worshipers were. Oh yes, yeah, yeah. Did you have one in your town? Sure, yeah. Yeah.

It's so funny to me to think about that now. They were probably just nice, normal people. It was probably some old shut-ins. Some old folks, elderly folks, who just couldn't get out of the house much. Right, they had murdered anybody for years. You ever notice you never see anyone? Yeah.

Or it was kind of like, kind of dilapidated or run down. Yeah, because they're old. Yeah. And we want to issue a big COA here. Parents, this has got some pretty grisly stuff in it. You probably don't want your kids listening to this. Even though it was all made up. Yeah, but there's some detail in some of this

that I found myself even going, ooh, we have to say that? Yeah. So yeah, it's rated R. Maybe even X for content. I'm thinking, Chuck, we should put together the Times America Lost It's Mind Suite. Yeah.

We'll include this, dissociative identity disorder. Yeah. Deep programming, cold deep programming. Sure. Salem witchcraft trials. McCarthyism. McCarthyism, that's right. We're going to do it.

One of these days, I'll actually put some of these suites together. Man, they exist, they're mental suites. Right, okay, thanks man for letting me off the hook. But I don't know if you guys have picked up on it or not, but I keep saying like they never really existed. It wasn't actually true. It wasn't real.

This whole idea that we're talking about from the roughly the mid 80s to about the mid 90s, about a 10 year period, America as a whole was gripped by, again, there's no other way to put it, satanic panic. This idea that there were cults of Satan worshipers who were very widespread, more than you would think, who were abducting, killing, raping, molesting our children.

Mutilating animals. And who had been doing it for a very long time and America was just now waking up to this reality. Yeah, it's your teachers. It's the cops, it's the mayor of your town. There's a battle between good and evil very much going on right now. And somehow, some way, and people are still studying this,

America clomped on to this idea and ran with it. Like it was for real. The idea that there were murderous, child molesting, satanic cults operating almost openly in the United States was a very deep and widespread belief. Not just among religious people, although they were at the forefront of this,

but among people who were writing academic papers and creating television shows in the news. People in the courts were subscribed to this. It was what's called a moral panic. Yeah, and when I was reading this, even though I lived through it, I kept thinking, how in the world did this happen in the 1980s, 1980s, not the 1640s, not the 1300s.

Sure. And it turns out there's a lot of reasons why. And we got to go back in time a little bit to touch on the early reasons. Got to go back in time. So this was, that should be our way back machine theme song. That was just too darn loud. What was?

Oh, I was continuing with the Back to the Future references. What was too darn loud? Remember Huey Lewis when he auditioned? He said, I'm sorry, that's just too darn loud. Yes, that's right. Thank you, thank you for that. And by the way, this is not just in the United States. Apparently it was in the UK, Australia, Canada,

South Africa, and the Netherlands. South Africa still has a cult crimes division. Yeah, I believe it. So Robert Lam wrote this article of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, and we're gonna be drawing from other articles as well, which will name drop along the way, I guess. One from Slate that was good. Boom, there's some name dropping.

I've got one for you, I'll hit it up later. So part of the groundwork was laid for this in ancient history, and Robert does a good job in pointing out that there is long, especially when it comes to Christian theology, long been a divide between us and them, heaven and hell, two sides. Good and evil.

Good and evil. Light and dark. I was gonna repeat that, too. What else? Yin and Yang is a super Christian. No, actually, I think Yin and Yang work together, right? Sure, yeah. We should do it on Yin and Yang.

But a lot of people, it's not just Christians, Chuck, there's humans subscribed to an in-group, out-group mentality. Yeah, absolutely. Like I took an anthropology class once, and the professor was like, try to go a day without using words like us, them, we, they. It's impossible.

Virtually impossible. Politics? That's just the way our minds go, in-group, out-group, and our group is safe and good. Their group is potentially threatening and possibly bad, we don't know. Absolutely, so throughout history, this has come up again and again and again,

and innocent people have been persecuted for doing nothing at all. One good example are the Jewish people. Christians accused Jews in 1475 of using blood for kidnapped Christian children in rituals. Which is pretty ironic because the Romans, just a few hundred years before, had accused the Christians of bathing and dining

and feasting on baby's blood. Us and them, once again. Baby's blood, it's a go-to thing for vilifying an out-group. Oh yeah, and usually baby's blood in a lot of these cases. Yeah. Because that's, I guess, the hardest blood to get a hold of.

Yeah, it's expensive blood. And the most grisly. Witchcraft, everyone, of course. Did we do one on the Salem witch trials or just McCarthyism? We did one, I believe. Yeah? Well, let's say we have, and if we haven't, we will.

I'm like, member on them being high on air got. Yeah, we did something like that. Okay. All right, so 15th century, you had witchcraft persecutions all over Europe. Innocent women being killed, drowned, burned, you name it. And of course none of this was true in all cases. When it comes to art, they laid the groundwork

in the 19th century. The French romantic artists loved painting stuff about Satan and witchcraft. And by the 1920s and the West, we had pretty firm established groundwork for believing in things like demons and Satan and a fiery hell and people who worshiped this Satan. Yeah, and the weird thing is, Chuck,

is there's this still, to this day, there's this idea that at some point, back in antiquity, at least, there were devil worshipers who killed for Satan. And all of this was born out of whole cloth fabricated from people who were doing the religious persecution along the way and the people who were being tortured to confess into this kind of stuff. It was all just fabricated,

but the fact that it was old, the fact that it was sensational, and the fact that it had been repeated so many times, it gained traction to gain this idea that it is historical fact at some point. People just take it as fact. But it's not true. No, it's not true.

It's never been true. There have never been Satanic death cults in the United States or anywhere else. Right, these people have never existed. Now, that is not to say that people haven't killed in the name of Satan or anything like that, but there's never been any kind of Satanic death cult ever in the history of the world as far as we can ever tell.

It's all made up. Right. And we wanna go further by saying that these people who have killed in the name of Satan are actually an example of life imitating art. Yeah. They're inspired by the fictitious myth because they're gullible and buy into it,

just as much as the people who think that this stuff is out there too. Like Richard Ramirez. Sure. And he was driven by Satan or something like that. There was a girl in the 80s in Georgia who supposedly killed a friend and then performed a Satanic ritual.

It's like, this stuff did happen, but it happened as a result of the hysteria. I see a movie. It is a positive feedback. Yeah, absolutely. So now we're in the 20th century and the roots of Satanic panic can be found all throughout the entertainment industry.

Yeah. Books. There was one in 1927 by Herbert Gorman called The Place Called Dagon, which was very influential and radical at the time. Complete fiction, of course, but that doesn't stop it from establishing former roots that this could be a thing.

Right, that's something that kind of keeps coming up again and again. A movie or a work of fiction will establish some storyline and then somebody will have read it and told a friend about it or something like that and then it becomes a game of telephone. Along the way, somebody stopped saying, I read in this work of fiction,

or I saw in this movie, this happened. Instead, it becomes this happened to a friend of mine's sister. Yeah, which we'll get to at Urban Legend is one theory, of course. Yeah. And I know we did a podcast on that. We did.

1968, a couple of movies came out. One horror film called The Devil Rides Out with the great Christopher Lee, because he was in every weird movie. He was great, man. He was the tall man in Fat Hasm, right? No. Who was that then?

Christopher Lee was, sure. Was he? Oh no, that's Angus Somebody, you're right. Christopher Lee was the guy from The Wicker Man. Yeah. And I mean, dozens and dozens of horror movies. Right, played Dracula a lot. Rosemary's Baby also came out that year,

which was way more mainstream, big, big hit. Great movie. Yeah, really good. Still a very creepy movie with Mia Farrow and Cassavetes and Charles Groden, weirdly. I guess it's not weird, but I just associate him with comedy. Yeah, but he always plays a straight man,

so he could go back and forth. Yeah, he could straddle worlds. Yeah. So those movies were huge as far as planning, and of course, other things like The Omen and The Exorcist, and it was just a big time for talking about Satan in movies. Yeah, it was very popular.

What's interesting is you can trace it back to, initially, that book, the place called Dagon, which inspired H.P. Lovecraft. Yeah, that started it all, basically. Music, of course, which if we ever do one on the PMRC, we'll get to that and backmasking more heavily, but Satanic imagery and everything from Iron Maiden to King Diamond and who else?

Judas Priest. Yeah, Judas Priest. Remember they got hauled in the court for backmasking? Yeah. Man, people. I know, and then you have some real life things, real life occult, like Alistair Crowley and Anton LeVe. Who really didn't help quell the Satanic panic fears.

If anything, they helped set the stage. Now, dressing up with candles and being naked with cloaks and pentagrams, Right. isn't gonna make people feel any better. No. But that's what they're doing. And if you, like I said, we'll do one of Satanism.

If you look at Satanism, it's not let's sacrifice animals and throw blood on each other. It's more like, hey, we're on this earth for a short time. Let's party and just live for ourselves. Right, yeah. It's more about hedonism and being atheist. Right.

And then some weird dark occult. Alistair Crowley was darker and more occult. Sure, and Anton LeVe definitely dressed his brand of Satanism up in that kind of like dark theatrics. Sure. But the really ironic thing about both of those guys, occult stuff, is that again, it was life imitating art or life imitating fiction.

Their ideas of the black mask or the witch's Sabbath or wearing pentagrams, all that stuff, came out of those witch persecutions from before. They were fabricated from whole clots. So these guys were tapping into what was already part of the popular culture in the way of what people thought of Satanism and Satanic rituals, and we're just basically playing it up to the end

of the day. It was theory is what it was. Very much so. Yeah. But to people who are scared to death of the idea that Satan is real and his worshipers are here on earth and are ready to kill you, those guys scared those people and just proved

that this is very real. See, look at those two. Anton Lavey, Alistair Crowley, proved that there are Satanic cults. Exactly. And who knows what's going on but on that big, huge iron wooden door. All right, well, let's take a break here

and we're gonna come back and talk a little bit about the 1970s Stranger Danger Panic, which factors in. Big time. We're gonna come back and talk a little bit about it. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude,

bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews,

co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger

and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s.

Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new I Heart Podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road.

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Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, it's the 1970s. And all of a sudden, all you can hear about on the news is our stories about child pornography rings. Child murders. Child murders, kidnappings, crimes involving children

in general. And not just that, Chuck, like at that time, America was really waking up to the, to just how widespread child abuse was. Yeah. The 1970s, which is creepy that it took that long. Yeah, it really was. Yeah.

Because apparently it took just a couple of doctors to really stand up and be like, I'm not looking the other way again on these unexplained breaks to a child's arm. Yeah. It's the parents. You're breaking your kid's arm. It's abuse that's wrong.

Right. Stop doing that. And as a result, the government stood up and was like, okay, we need some laws here. One of the things that they enacted were mandatory reporting laws. If you're a doctor and you notice signs of child abuse, you have to report it.

And as a result, 1974, child abuse cases went from 60,000 nationwide to the year 2000, there were 3 million reported, right? And it was because of public education, a lot more visibility, and then mandatory reporting laws. But it had this cumulative effect of saying, America, your children are being, they're in danger. And you need to do something about it.

And this child protection movement grew out of it. Yeah. And I also get the sense that pre, the late 70s, I think the media, it was unsavory to report on this kind of stuff. It was like, that's that family's business. Yeah, and just period, it's like, no one wants to hear about this stuff.

It's awful. Right. And somehow it got transferred to, probably to drive ratings, like this is sensational is what it is. Sure. Yeah, anytime America's scared, all you have to do is poke and prod it

and you will get people to watch your TV show. That's right. And it's done very frequently. It's sad and despicable, but it happens a lot. Still does. There's another aspect to this too, Chuck, with the child protection idea. This was also a time, the 70s especially,

is when women started to go back to work after they had kids. Yeah. Before they may work and then they would have kids. And that was it for their professional career. They would just stay home. They were moms for the rest of their time. If they ever worked at all originally, right?

Right. Now in the 70s and the 80s, women were having kids going back to work. And as a result, they were having to leave their kids in more and more daycare workers' care. Oh yeah. And so this idea that their children were being abused or potentially abused really resonated with families

where their kids were in daycare and weren't constantly under their supervision all the time. How well do you know the people watching your kids? How much do you trust them? Yeah. Are they Satanists? Yeah. And this fear took root

because of that collective anxiety at the time with more and more families putting their kids in daycare. Right, or they're just latchkey kids, a little older who I remember during the Atlanta child murders, do you know where your children are? It's 10 o'clock. Oh yeah, I'll bet. Do you know where your children are?

Yeah. It was just a time of, in a good way, people were more aware of than ever of potential dangers for their children. Yeah. So it's not like it was all bad, but when it goes into panic, and well, we'll just see what happened.

Yeah, it went from like zero to 120 in just a couple of seconds, basically. So what happened was, during the Satanic Panic, largely it is based around court cases where largely daycare centers and people who cared for children were now being accused of some of the craziest things you could ever imagine in your entire life.

Yeah. And like you said, one of the reasons this was fueled was very much because parents could relate to it. I mean, should we go ahead and talk about a couple of these cases? Yeah, the whole thing sounds crazy and weird and everything, but just innocuous, I guess, until you come across the court cases.

Yes. And then you're like, oh, real people lost decades of their lives because of this, because gullible people were in position of power and locked them up. Yeah. All right, let's talk about the colors. What was the actual, this is one in Texas?

Yeah, in Austin. In Austin, Texas, Francis and Dan Keller ran a daycare center out of their home and were accused of the following things, among others. Drowning and dismembering babies in front of other children, killing animals, dogs and cats in front of children. And baby tigers. Baby tigers, that's right.

Taking the kids to Mexico to be abused sexually by Mexican army soldiers. And then brought back in time for their parents to pick them up. That's right. Dressing as pumpkin. This is my favorite. And shooting children in the arms and legs.

Yep. Putting children into a pool with sharks that ate babies. Putting blood in their Kool-Aid, forcing children to carry the bones of bodies that they had dug up. Sure. And this is just a few. And I'm getting most of this from

this great slate article, The Real Victims of Satanic Ritual Abuse, SRA, by Linda Rodriguez-McRobbie. So the killers were accused of all this stuff. And here's generally what happens, Robert points out. A lot of times it starts with one, perhaps credible case of child abuse. Yeah.

Sexual or otherwise. Right. And then that's snowballs. They tell the parents, maybe this is going on. So they tell the parents, hey, your child may be abused. The parents start looking. They start talking to other parents in that same daycare center.

They start looking. They start asking their kids. Right. And it all snowballs into these little preschoolers, basically making stuff up. And not only that, it's like, yeah, yeah, I've heard about that. That's just abuse.

It's some Satanists that are molesting children and murdering them. And the parents are like, what? Yeah. Or that plays into something they'd already heard on TV, which we'll talk about the media's role in this. Yeah. And like you said, it's snowballs and snowballs.

And all of a sudden, once concerned parents get involved and start talking to one another. Panicked concerned parents. Exactly. Yeah. Then people can end up falsely accused of some pretty horrendous stuff. People stop thinking critically.

And you've got problems if you're on the receiving end of a finger being pointed at you. Well, yeah, because if you're a parent and your child goes to the daycare center, another parent and the cops come and say, hey, this parent's kid was sexually abused. What parent's going to be like, oh, I'm sure it's fine. Yeah, you're fine.

Quit complaining. I'm not going to check out my kid. Take a salt tablet. So with the McMartin case, which happened in... Southern California. Yeah. And actually ended up helping turn the tide against this. But the McMartin case and then the Keller case

in Texas, both of those were bolstered actually by bad medical testimony. Yeah. By inexperienced doctors who didn't know what they were looking at, who in their defense a little bit was at the time, no one knew. No one was looking at little kids, like three-year-olds vaginas,

in describing what normal ones looked like. Right. So since you didn't know what to look for, but thought you were looking for evidence of sexual abuse, anything could conceivably look like evidence of say vaginal trauma or something like that. And in the case of the Kellers in particular, the little girl who was basically, I guess accuser zero

of this was examined and found that her vagina showed some evidence of trauma. Later on, the doctor, after gaining decades of experience, saw that, no, that was totally normal what I saw and is not the, I basically gave false testimony unwittingly and I'm sorry. Yeah. And that was a huge thing because these people

were locked away because of medical testimony. And again, the case against the McMartins was also bolstered by bad medical advice as well or bad medical testimony. Yeah. So with the Keller case, patient or not patient, victim zero, Christy Chaviers, Chavier? I don't know how you'd say it.

She was three years old, didn't go to the daycare center much. And in 1991, told her mom that Dan Keller had spanked her. That's what started this whole thing. So all of a sudden the mom says, and here's a key fact here, the mom goes to her therapist. The kid's therapist. Yeah, Donna David Campbell, the little girl was seeing because she'd been acting out.

She's like a central figure in this whole thing. This whole snafu. Who, the doctor? Yeah, so they go to her and say, listen, something's going on here. Can you talk to her about it? And all of a sudden, Donna Campbell, Donna David Campbell starts coaxing out

all these really bizarre allegations about what's going on there. They made us take off our clothes and had a parrot peck us on the pee pee. That was one. That was the earliest accusation that that formed the foundation of this whole case, the basis of the snowball.

Yes, so this is what begins the snowball. This is when the mom goes to the other parents and you hear what's going on here. Look at what's happened to my daughter. And what's really happening here is something called, it was part of the recovered memory therapy movement, which was very big at the time in psychology. Basically the idea that we have these repressed memories

that of abuse, many people do, that they have no idea of, and it's up to the therapist to bring these out of us. Yeah, that's almost like a separate intertwined thread to this whole satanic panic thing. The satanic ritual abuse is the recovered memory therapy movement, right? And so the satanic panic can actually trace its roots

directly to a book from 1972 by a guy named Mike Warnke. He was a Christian sandup comedian. He also was totally full of it. He wrote a book called The Satan Cellar where he talked about his life as a former satanic cult priest, I believe, and drug dealer. And he was eventually exposed far too late by the Christian magazine Cornerstone

as almost entirely fraudulent and made up and just a liar. But his book just sold like wildfire through the Christian fundamentalist community and basically really established the groundwork for the idea that they were satanic cults operating in the United States, right? Yeah. For the thread of the recovered memory movement

that formed part of the satanic panic, you can trace that back to a book from 1980 called, I think, Michelle remembers. Yeah, 1980, and this was, by the way, I was on the cover of a Christian magazine in the 1980s. Cornerstone magazine? I thought it was, but it wasn't, guideposts. I've heard of that.

That's a big time Christian magazine, man. That was a cover boy one month. Nice. What were you doing on the cover? I was at a church camp one summer and that was just like, it was like a four-panel cover of just kids having fun at church camp and I was one of them.

The May 82 issue? Man, I wish I could track that thing down. That'd be great. If anyone out there has the issue of Chuck on the cover of Guidepost Magazine, do you remember the year, roughly? It would have been probably between 1985 and 1987. Okay, we need that, everyone.

I wanted to post that cover. That would be awesome. So this book, Michelle remembers, it was just like dropping a bomb in the midst of this, everybody, so everyone was transitioning from, who can we start pointing at and persecuting now that we've decided the cults are okay and we're gonna stop deprogramming them?

Yeah. What can we do next? And this book comes in the midst of that in 1980 and it's a book about a woman named Michelle and her therapist, Lawrence Pazder. Yeah, he wrote it. And he helped her uncover repressed memories of being ritually satanically abused

or satanic ritually abused in the 1950s in Vancouver. Yeah, he actually ended up marrying her and he coined the term ritual abuse. It lies directly at his feet. And this thing had a lot of traction. I mean, this lady was on Oprah. She did the talk show circuit for years. The guy was used as an expert witness in court cases.

He founded a whole movement in psychology. It was completely debunked. Yeah, and the whole idea is it's based on this premise that if you undergo a traumatic experience, your mind is going to try to repress that memory. But it's gonna have all sorts of horrible effects in your life. You're gonna be an alcoholic and a drug addict

and maybe a child abuser. And you won't know why, but it's because you were abused as a child, probably by satanists and you covered it up and you need to go to therapy to have it unlocked. That's right. And a lot of people went to therapy and had these memories unlocked,

which only proved Pazder's point even further. The problem is when they were reexamined, they were pseudo-memories through the power of suggestion and overzealous therapists. A lot of people form memories of stuff that never happened. Yeah, the problem is recovered memory therapy, there's little to no scientific evidence that it's a thing at all.

That people unconsciously repress these memories. The Royal College of Psychiatrists in Britain, they have officially banned its members from using it altogether. The British Psychological Society says you can use it, but you can't draw any premature conclusions. You have to have evidence, not just, well, this is what they said in therapy.

Right, so that's a repressed memory that came to the surface. Right, and the AMA, I'm sorry, the APA, and the United States, their official stance was issued in 1998. There's a consensus among memory researchers and clinicians that most people who are sexually abused as children remember all or part of what happened to them,

although they may not fully understand or disclose it. So a competent psychotherapist is likely to acknowledge that current knowledge does not allow the definite conclusion without corroborating evidence. So again, the general consensus is that people don't completely unconsciously forget everything that happened. Right, it's virtually impossible.

Yeah. And so this idea that during therapy, while you're coaxing these memories out, you're actually forming pseudo-therapy is backed up by a lot of follow-up research. Pseudo-memory. Pseudo-memory, sorry. Yeah. It's backed up by research.

There's a famous memory researcher named Elizabeth Loftus. She found that 90% of participants of this study came to believe that they had done something they hadn't when confronted with witnesses who said that they had done it. That's the real danger in all this. Sure. Is that these memories become just as valid as real memories

and do damage because they aren't real. And there's actually a real-life case that came out of all this. Dude, this one was crazy. Paul Ingram, Paul Ingram was a sheriff's deputy and he was accused by his young daughter of satanic ritually abusing her. And that he was a member of a satanic cult

and that she had been raped by this cult six to 800 times. They had been involved in the murder of 25 babies at least. And Paul Ingram said, I don't remember any of this, but you must be right. So I'm going to confess. He was a preacher too, wasn't he? Yeah, he was a fundamentalist Christian. So he was very much primed to believe

that there is a very real Satan roaming the earth. And if his daughter is telling him that he did this, what reason does she have to lie? So he, I mean, he bought into it and took the rap for this even though it never happened. No one ever showed that any of this stuff happened. Yeah, he served as full prison sentence of 20 years. 20 years.

And maybe didn't even do it. Anything. Yeah. But he himself said, well, I don't know, maybe I did. Yeah, and I think he fully bought into it over time. It's such a weird reversal in that case. It is. You know?

Yeah. Should we take another break? Maybe so. All right, we'll take another break here and talk about the media and then some other theories and cases in satanic panic. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude,

bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster?

Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy,

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Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right. If you were alive during the 1980s and early 90s, which I was. Then you remember Oprah, Geraldo. Bubble Yum. Sally Jessie Raphael. You name it.

Every single talk show, Donahue. Yeah. Doing lots and lots of shows on satanic death cults. If it's 2 p.m. on a Wednesday afternoon and you want to figure out how to get America to turn their TV to your station. You would have had a choice of different shows to watch, probably. Total. Oh, yeah.

Covering satanic. Yeah, on the same day, right? Right. And yeah, everybody did Satanists. And Geraldo was the king of this. He actually had a two hour primetime special in 1988 called Exposing Satan's Underground. And it is on YouTube. And I think about 10 parts. I watched one of them where he had Ozzy on.

Yeah. And Ozzy's like. Poor Ozzy. He's Ozzy looks like a pre golden girls Dorothy is the way he's dressed and done up. It's awesome. But he's like, I don't mean to freak anybody out with me music. And he doesn't know what to make of this. But Geraldo is like, Ozzy, just sit there.

We'll get back to you later. But there's this classic line in this, right? Geraldo goes, they're talking about a murder that was carried out by this boy. And Geraldo says to this cop, he goes, Detective, you're a cop, not a theologian. But let me ask you, was this boy possessed? Dead serious. Yes. And the cop was like, he hedges a little bit.

He's like, I think that's a state of mind. But yeah, in that sense, yes, I think he was. Geraldo doesn't give what he's looking for out of the guy. So he goes to an actual theologian, a priest. He goes, you're charged with investigating these cases for the Catholic Church. Do you think that this is a case of possession? He's like, absolutely. And Geraldo is like, yes, that's what I was looking for.

But that's the level of journalism that people were tuning into. On NBC at eight o'clock for two hours in the highest rated two hour TV documentary ever. And a third or a half of America is like, what idiot believes this? This is the most entertaining thing I've ever seen. The other half is scared to death and thinks that all of this is totally real. Yeah, it's easy to laugh about now, but shame on all of them. Well, Geraldo came out and said, I want to apologize for that bit of journalism. That was really bad, and I'm sorry for it.

But I mean, that's how he made his name with stuff like that. Well, he was caught up in the moral panic. Everyone was doing it. Yeah. There was a book in 1990, a children's picture book called Don't Make Me Go Back, Mommy. Colin, a child's book about satanic ritual abuse. Yeah. To read to your children.

Or if you were a therapist to use in therapy. Yeah, right. You know. Well, they also had, in many of the court cases, little anatomically correct rag dolls that they would use in court. Like, show me where you were touched and things like this. Right. Which I'm sure that has valid use as well in sex abuse cases. For sure.

I'm not completely poo-pooing that. You have to use that. I would imagine you're training in how to do that correctly without inadvertently or inadvertently leading the child on into creating some sort of pseudo memory. Yeah. Well, it should be extensive, I would guess. Yeah. You know, I mean, yeah.

So, the media was definitely complicit in all this. Really saw that there's a lot of ratings to be had in just fanning the flames of the satanic panic. And I think a lot of people bought into it as well. And then so, too, were things like the field of psychiatry and psychology very much complicit in this by allowing repressed memory therapy to really spread as much as it did without any kind of real verified research into whether it was real or not. Yeah. And to defend them a little bit, Robert also makes a point. They're probably well-meaning, probably thinking they were doing this great work like helping these kids. Well, sure.

But like, with no scientific basis whatsoever. Right. And lacking a lot of critical thinking, too. Yeah. And they dressed as pumpkins and shot the kids in the arms and the legs. Where are the bullet wounds? Yeah. How exactly did they get the kids to Mexico and then back to Austin in the average daycare day?

Secret tunnels. You know, secret tunnels. That was an explanation. There wasn't enough critical thinking. So you can definitely take the media, psychology, psychiatry, and a lot of law enforcement investigators to task for this. But really, there were a lot of hucksters and fraudsters making a lot of money as satanic experts at the time. Oh, yeah. Both as like legal representatives.

Expert witnesses. Expert witnesses. Authors. Going on shows like Geraldo and Sally Jesse Raphael. And those people really should bear the brunt of this because they were just lying. Yeah. Lying, lying, lying, their faces off and scaring people to death and making a lot of money out of it. So we said it was widespread.

There was a Red Book magazine survey in 1994. And this is at the end of the whole thing. Yeah, true. And it found that 70% of Americans believed in satanic ritual abuse. And in 1993, this is the really scary one, a survey by the American Bar Association Center on Children and the law found that 26%. A quarter, more than a quarter of prosecutors said they handled at least one case involving satanic ritual abuse during that time period. Yeah. 25%.

Yeah. 26%. So within that time, too, there was a very famous case in 1993 in West Memphis, Arkansas. The West Memphis Three who were very famously exonerated thanks to crack documentary filmmaking on HBO's half. As a matter of fact, HBO really led the vanguard against this whole satanic panic. They released a 1995 documentary, or I think it was a biopic on the McMartin trial. It wasn't a documentary. I think it was like dramatized. Oh, really?

And that really started to change the tide of how academics, intellectuals, and the media itself saw satanic ritual abuse, started to expose it as this is not real. Yeah, and this is after the McMartin trial had been the longest and most expensive trial in the history of the United States. That's right. 15 to 16 million dollars spent with zero convictions because it didn't happen. Right. And that case actually was started with a woman who believed her child had been sexually abused. And the woman actually sadly went on to die from alcohol poisoning a couple years later. And was schizophrenic.

She was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic in that time. And yet nobody stopped and said, oh, well, wait a minute. She was the center of the accusers of all this. Should we take another look at all this? It was like, no, let's spend 15 million dollars a taxpayer money trying to prosecute these people and get zero convictions out of it. The West Memphis three were successfully prosecuted in Arkansas. I mean, railroaded. Yeah.

There is no other way to put this. Thanks to something like a false confession by Jesse Miss Kelly, which is mind blowing until you should go listen to our episode on false confessions. Which I believe we did that one, right? Either that or it was a part of another one. But yeah, we covered that topic for sure. And all of that was based on the satanic panic thing as well. But you should definitely watch those. Again, HBO documentaries, Paradise Lost 1, 2, and 3.

Yeah. And they made the original in Paradise Lost, the child murders of Robin Hood Hills. And I think they thought it was the same guy. Did you see Brothers Keeper, the other documentary? Yeah, about the older brothers. Love that one, man. That's the same guy. Brothers Keepers will put him on the map.

So I think he thought that Paradise Lost 1 was just the documentary. And to his credit, Joe Burlinger, I think, he really championed this case and followed it to its conclusion over the course of two more documentaries over the years. Yeah. And from what I understand, he changed his mind about the content or the crime midstream. Like, I think, didn't he go there thinking he was just covering the crime and then where he actually saw what was going on? I was like, whoa. Yeah, I think he was, I mean, because of him, they were exonerated ultimately. Yeah. Like, he got three people out of prison, one off death row.

Yeah. Yeah, hats off. But again, this is part of the satanic panic scare. And that, not that one, that kind of came at the end of it. But the McMartin movie on HBO started to change the tide. And so, too, did the exoneration of a woman named Margaret Kelly Michaels in New Jersey. In 1993, she was let out of prison after it was revealed how coercive the questioning was of the children who ended up accusing her of this. And that was true in every case, it seems like.

It was. It shed a lot of light onto this and people started going like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait. This is coercive, huh? Let's look at these other cases. Yeah. And you go back and look at the transcripts and see, like, okay, these people were basically telling the kids what they wanted to hear. Yeah. They were using approval whenever the kids said something that pointed the finger. Right. They were using disapproval when the kids refused to talk or whatever or implicate anyone.

And if you go back and really listen to what the kids are saying, a lot of the times they're like, no, nothing happened. Well, and then they would follow that with, are you sure this didn't happen? Right. Are you sure this didn't happen? And you're not supposed to do that. And you're certainly not supposed to put people in prison for half of their lives. Well, and you're especially not supposed to do that to a kid who's highly suggestible and wants to please because most kids want to please. Right.

And when you look at some of these allegations, it sounds like if you asked a three-year-old to make up what they think ritual abuse would be, Right. Here's what a kid would say. Yeah, they locked us in a closet with spiders and snakes. Yeah, they put us in a pool with sharks that ate babies and they fed us baby parts. Right. So the real death knell of the satanic ritual abuse scare came in 1994 with a meta-survey for the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect. And this study, it contacted prosecutors, regular lawyers, social workers, psychologists.

I think that was it. Thousands and tens of thousands of them across the country ended up whittling it down to a sizable sample. And found all sorts of things. Specifically, what they found is there was no evidence whatsoever of any satanic cults operating anywhere in the U.S. or a single crime carried out by a satanic cult. They said that they found a couple of crimes that were carried out by people allegedly in the name of Satan, but that these were most likely inspired by the satanic panic itself. And solo affairs.

That's what, yeah, that's what I'm saying. Yeah. But they had, it was in a satanic cult by any means. They also found in this study that children of the ages that where they would go to daycare weren't capable of forming the type of accusations against satanic ritual abuse that people had been convicted of. That clearly the adults were the ones who were channeling themselves through their children to accuse these people. The kids were saying things like they locked us in a closet with spiders and snakes. They weren't saying like they carved open a baby and sexually abused it. And then we all drank its blood while everyone was wearing black ropes.

They're not sophisticated enough to think that kind of thing. So the study also proved that too. And then ironically, the same survey found plenty of evidence of religious based crimes, including murders, carried out things like exorcisms that went too far, that kind of stuff. They're like, that actually is real. Right. And ironically, we have a lot of laws protecting people who do that, but we have laws that step up the punishment for satanic abuse, even though that doesn't exist. And that one really changed the tide of how people saw the satanic panic. Well, yeah.

And then experts later came out and said, as far as the physical abuse and the doctors who testified at trial, the type of physical abuse these kids were enduring, they were like a layman could look at a child and say, wow, what happened to this kid? But you will obviously never be able to reproduce because you're totally mangled. And not this ambiguous, like, well, yeah, I think it seems like they had some marks where they could have been molested or something. Right. Like it would have been so obvious because these allegations were so far out there. Yeah. And of course, years later, they say this, at the time everyone was drinking the flavorade.

Yeah. You know? Nice. The blood drenched flavorade and insult to injury, that same media, all of a sudden the hot story became the outrage that was satanic panic and what a bunch of crap that it was. Right. So now let's cover that story in full. Yeah. Even though we had a lot to do with it.

Right. Yeah. So Chuck, why did people drink the flavorade? Like, what was the immediate reason for the satanic panic? Well, you found this great article. Which one? I found a lot of great articles. The three satanic ritual abuse as...

Oh yeah, the sociological article. Yeah, that was good. They have a few reasons as subversion ideology, as rumor panic, and as contemporary legend. And the subversion ideology I thought was super interesting. I didn't even know what that was. I hadn't heard of it before. They define it as a culturally constructed myth that gives shape and form to feelings of anxiety and uncertainty about the future. That our experience between periods of rapid, unpredictable social change.

Right. So we're anxious. We're not even necessarily conscious of our anxiety, but we don't feel quite right. Everything's changing. We don't know what's going on. So what exactly is making us nervous? Oh, how about that group over there? Satanists.

Yeah, basically. Whereas before it was Jews and before that it was Christians. Exactly. Now it puts a face to this underlying sense of dread we feel because the times are changing. Exactly. And it gives us an outlet at the expense of other people. But with the subversion ideology, the hallmark characteristic of it is that that other group takes everything we hold dear and values the opposite of it. Yeah, threatens it.

So Satanists, they use upside down crosses. And evil is what's really good. And it's a classic example of subversion ideology. Well, and one thing I thought was really interesting in here is they contend, and I'm sure it's true, that subversion ideology actually ends up having a stabilizing effect. Because people then go, oh, OK, well, that's why I'm so upset and worried and anxious. Is it because of these Satanists? Yeah. Not what's really going on.

Which is the end of the millennium, apparently. Oh, really? Yeah, whatever. That was another explanation I ran across is that it was millennial anxiety. There is also another one you said moral or rumor panic, which we touched on before. But basically, that is this idea that it's just buying into a rumor and really, really buying into it. And the way you buy into it is because all of a sudden professional psychiatrists and psychologists and law enforcement people and people in the newspaper are talking about this stuff like it's fact. And with that, because we trust these people as being smart, intelligent people, it becomes fact in the eyes and the minds of just normal people.

And that gives it veracity in and of itself. Once people start believing something as fact without any proof, a rumor panic is just set in. Well, and ironically too, it seems like the more out there the panic is, the more readily it's believed. Because the old, like, who would make something like that up? Right. Well, a three-year-old might, being coaxed by police and her parents and her shrink. Yeah. And then the last one is an urban legend, which we talked about before, but this sociological article pointed something out that I hadn't thought of that.

Urban legends deal in metaphors, even though we don't think of them as metaphors. So in this case, the children that were being abused by Satanists were a metaphor for our future. The children are our future. Just go ask Whitney Houston. Oh, you can't. It's true. And then as people start to buy into it, it becomes a rumor panic, and you can dress it up with some version ideology. So in the end, the McMartens, I don't think they ever, well, I think they served.

They were never prosecuted. I think they were in jail here and there while the trial was going on. Yeah, but they were never prosecuted. But never successfully prosecuted. The Kellers were eventually exonerated. But they spent 21 years in prison. Oh, their life was ruined. 21 years in prison, based on these false accusations.

I have to say, if you want to read one of the better articles I've ever read, it's called The Innocent and the Damned. It's from Texas Monthly. It was written in 1994 while this satanic panic is going on. But somehow, Texas Monthly took a critical eye to this stuff. Really good article. I thought this was so fascinating because as crazy as it seems now, and like I was saying at the very beginning, like how in the world in the 1980s did we buy into this, like it was Salem, Massachusetts, when you look at the reasons behind it, it was like the perfect storm coalescing.

It sort of makes perfect sense when you look at everything behind it. It does. But doesn't it also like even if you take into account that you're using hindsight and the perspective that's afforded by that, the gullibility that is involved in a moral panic is, it's just, it's saddening. I bet Edward Bernays would have been all over this. Oh yeah. Well, he fomented those kind of things. Yeah, it's sad.

Also, if you want some yucks, go look up Law Enforcement Guide to Satanic Cults on YouTube. The fifth of the video series? Yeah, so weird. I'm glad to know that you had a Satan house in your neighborhood too. I think everybody did, or rumors that like somebody found a cat with its head cut off in a pentagram, and you're just like, oh, that happened. Yeah. Because I'm 10, which is okay if you're 10, but if you're 50, it's not okay, especially if you're the local prosecutor.

Yeah. And also, one last thing, Chuck, it makes you wonder what moral panics are we working on right now? Oh yeah. What's brewing? It's not like this is ancient history. No. If you want to know more about moral panics and specifically the Satanic panic, you can type those words into the search bar at HowStuffWorks.com.

Since I said search bar, it's time for lesson or mail. Here's what I predict is that some people are going to write in and say, dudes, we're in the middle of another moral panic right now, and it is blank. Vocal fry. Perhaps. Somebody called me the fry master in an email. Do you see that? No, I didn't.

She was like, Chuck always uses vocal fry. And then when I listen to my voice, I'm like, I totally do. Yeah. But I totally do. I've noticed it a lot more since we did that episode. Yeah. Whatever. I'm being me.

Yeah, man. You should. I'm the trendsetter. I'm going to call this, oh, guy's sitting straight on these grocery store donations. Okay. Hey guys, long time listener. Love you guys. Never thought this would be the reason I have to reach out to you.

At the end of the podcast on Tuesday, you said, I don't know which podcast it was. At the end of the recent podcast, actually I had to stop and say no because my friends Josh and Chuck didn't just do that and told people not to donate a dollar to buy the little hot air balloons at the grocery store because the company then uses those donations to get tax credit. This is absolutely not true. That is not true with that guy.

So he says, I have actually been working with children's miracle network hospitals in Connecticut for about 20 years. And by the way, when I said the balloons, I forgot that was children's miracle network specifically. I used to do a lot of work with them in LA. So you weren't singling them out? On video shoots. No, of course not.

They're amazing. You're like, it's the shamrock side of the problem. I know. It just felt terrible after that. So he says, our corporate partners do not get tax credits for donations made by their customers. In fact, many of our corporate partners ring these donations through their registers. So the donation shows on the customer's receipt, allowing them to use that for their taxes.

What? A quick fun fact about the miracle balloon that I reference is that the first one ever sold in the entire world was at a small diner in downtown, Middletown, Connecticut in 1986. I thought he was going to say like 1904. Yeah. Soon after that, the miracle balloon became a multinational program that raises money for more than 170 local children's hospitals across the US and Canada. And its creator became very, very rich.

As I mentioned, I've been doing this job for about 20 years. And I have to tell that I always say I have the best job in the world. I get to work with amazing people like my co-workers and all of our partners. And I get to work for the most inspiring people, our patient families. Please help me get this corrected. The stuff you should know, Legion. Don't worry, I still love you guys. That is from Scott Organek, the director of Children's Miracle Network Hospitals.

Wow, from the horse's mouth. Or a director. Yeah, so I don't. We're going to have to look into this a little further, I think. We got other people that said that's not true. And other people said it is true. For Children's Miracle Network, I'm sure you know what he's talking about. Oh yeah.

But there are all kinds of things to donate to. He's also probably not a liar. I don't know. He seems like a regular guy. Not a satanic, which will be a zerk. No, not at all. In any way. Right.

So we'll look into it. I certainly did not mean to disparage the CM. No, I didn't either. And I mean, if that's the way it works, I retract that. But I need to look into it a little more first. All right, the jury's out. Thank you very much. What was his name, David?

Yep. David, you're awesome. Thank you for the work you're doing, too. If you want to get in touch with us to set us straight, we love that. You can tweet to us at S-Y-S-K podcast. You can join us on facebook.com. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com.

Hi, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts.