You're Wrong About the Satanic Panic

In the 1980s, a moral panic swept across America. Parents, prosecutors, and talk show hosts became convinced that devil worshippers were hiding in plain sight, abusing children at daycares, performing ritualistic sacrifices, and corrupting the innocent. Sarah Marshall of You're Wrong About has a new podcast about this period of Satanic Panic called The Devil You Know. She talks to Ben and Amory about the cultural forces that turned unfounded fears into a nationwide hysteria, and how would the Satanic Panic might have unfolded differently in today's age of social media. Credits: This episode was produced by Amory Sivertson with assistance from Grace Tatter. It was co-hosted by Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson, and edited by Meg Cramer. Mix and sound design by Paul Vaitkus.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken?, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questrom School of Business. A recent episode explores how AI is reshaping our schools. Stick around until the end of this podcast to preview the episode.

• 0:18Speaker 01

  Say hello to smooth, sugar-like sweetness with Truvia Alulose Plus Stevia Sweetener and Monkfruit Sweetener. This blend delivers balanced sweetness that minimizes aftertaste with zero calories per serving. Designed to fit everyday moments, Truvia Alulose Blend measures cup for cup like sugar, making it effortless to swap into beverages, baking, and even savory dishes. Find Truvia Alulose Plus Stevia Sweetener and Monkfruit Sweetener online and nationwide at Kroger, Target, and your favorite local grocery retailer.

• 0:49Speaker 02

  Fall never arrives all at once. First the air, then the light. And slowly, the things you love begin to find each other. A jacket meets a dress, a hoodie slips beneath a blazer, an old cap finds a new scarf. Because you don't simply step into the season, you create it, layer by layer, until it finally feels like fall. Find fall your way at Ross.

• 1:18Speaker 03

  WBUR Podcasts, Boston.

• 1:27Speaker 03

  Hey, Ben.

• 1:28Ben Brock Johnson?

  Hey, Emery.

• 1:30Speaker 03

  We got something a little different today. I'm feeling a little different.

• 1:34Ben Brock Johnson?

  Or do you feel bedeviled?

• 1:36Speaker 03

  I feel possessed, positively possessed.

• 1:40Ben Brock Johnson?

  Mmm, it's getting warm in here. It's getting hot.

• 1:43Speaker 03

  Thank goodness, because it's frickin' freezing where we are.

• 1:47Ben Brock Johnson?

  I know, I know. It is as if hell hath frozen over.

• 1:52Speaker 03

  Ooh, that's the spirit.

• 1:56Ben Brock Johnson?

  And we have an episode today for you that features a podcast comrade

• 2:03Ben Brock Johnson?

  Who you may be familiar with.

• 2:06Speaker 03

  My name is Sarah Marshall and I host a podcast called You're Wrong About. And I have been a longtime person obsessed with the Satanic Panic is the best way to put it. It's not a professional title. It's just, it's just something I've thought about way too much for the past 15 years. The Satanic Panic of the 1980s and 90s was basically a widespread panic fueled conspiracy theory that the devil and devilish influences were leading people to commit acts of violence. From allegations of sexual abuse taking place at daycares to ritualistic human sacrifice.

• 2:45Ben Brock Johnson?

  And Sarah has now turned her obsession into a podcast and she joined us to talk about the forces that fueled the Satanic Panic and how it might have played out differently in the age of the internet and social media. Sarah's series is called The Devil You Know.

• 3:02Speaker 03

  And it's a show that tries to tell the story of the rise of the Satanic Panic, both as a really massive phenomenon and also getting into the questions of what it was like for people who experienced it at a very unique level, both kind of watching that story being created, being in its path, being victimized by it, and also just kind of as bystanders trying to make sense of the whole thing. What's your origin story with the Satanic Panic? I think my origin story partly is because being a millennial, which is a very funny generation to belong to, as I guess they all are. You know, I was born in 1988 and so there were kind of like, not explicit mentions

• 3:47Speaker 03

  of the Satanic Panic when I was kind of in, you know, little kid elementary school, but sort of like shadows of it and of the policy that it left behind, you know? And this idea of like, and also, you know, the kind of general stranger danger of the 80s where we were told when we were pretty young about what to do if someone tried to like grab you and stuff you in a car and like to like wear layers because then you could like get rid of a layer and then, you know, run away while your potential kidnapper was holding your jean jacket or something. To which I now wonder, what were you, what were they telling kids in warmer climates? You know? And not that you don't want to give kids useful information, but there's a really fine line to be walked in terms of.

• 4:32Speaker 03

  Conveying the idea that you kind of expect kids to be kidnapped, which I think is what a lot of us didn't grow up with. And then, you know, it was a rarer problem than maybe we were trained to think. Or that there was, you know, a theme that I feel like a lot of the work I do comes back to is that kids have more to fear, often from the adults who are already in their lives than from strangers. But we train them to kind of not really imagine that that's possible. For people who are maybe less familiar with the specifics of the Satanic panic, what was happening in the country then culturally and politically that you think really gave rise to this panic? Well, I mean, there's a few, there's a few things I can name.

• 5:17Speaker 03

  And these are, you know, are ones that you could probably imagine based on the timing because this gets started in the early 80s, right? So we have, you know, the past few years of women's lib and gay liberation as movements and the inevitable conservative backlash to that. And something I think we're seeing today where marginalized groups make fairly minor gains in terms of civil rights and visibility. And then the backlash against that is severe enough to imply that something way more has happened.

• 5:50Speaker 03

  And we also have Ronald Reagan coming into the White House and kind of being the first president to bring the Christian right into the White House as well, along with him. Because previously, Christianity had been more of a moderating influence on politics than sort of a wing of king making in American politics. And that changed in the 80s. And also kind of on a smaller scale, but also on a national level, Reagan, you know, came in promising to slash the federal budget. And, and one of the things he slashed was federal funding for daycare. And so there was kind of, just in terms of like this perfect storm brewing.

• 6:34Speaker 03

  A lot of people scrambling to find adequate daycare for their kids because maybe a place that they had relied on and had really liked, I guess, closed down. And this general anxiety about, A, giving your kids two strangers to take care of. Also, the guilt that is being thrust upon you if you're kind of a boomer woman returning to work after having kids at that point, of being the focal point of anxiety, too. Because isn't it terrible for women to be in the workplace when they have young children at home and for them to be putting them in daycare? You know, this is really being, the guilt from being given to American women, and mothers especially, as usual, is massive at this point. So those are kind of the things that come to mind for me.

• 7:19Speaker 03

  Throughout the series, you ask several, several people what their definition of a moral panic is. What, what's the definition that you've kind of landed on as you've worked on this? I mean, I think in this case, it's something that kind of metabolizes the real and justifiable fear that a lot of people have. You know, if you look at the kind of explosion of moral panics in 2020, it's like, of course we were having moral panics in 2020. We were all freaking out because we were living inside like, I don't know, the largest public health emergency and several living memories. You know, that was incredible for everyone to keep trying to muscle through the way people did.

• 8:01Speaker 03

  And so, you know, I think that in times of, of anxiety over a real threat, and in this case, you know, part of what was going on and the ingredients that went into this were that we had started to talk about child sexual abuse in a real way, kind of, and largely because of the work done by women's liberation movements.

• 8:25Speaker 03

  And then there arose the question of, well, who's committing this, this child abuse and why? And

• 8:32Speaker 03

  It sort of allowed people to avoid asking any difficult questions about the kind of power that men had in the United States to terrorize their own families without consequences and the lack of the lack of social mechanisms or social safety nets that meant that you kind of often really if you had kids with someone who was trying to kill you, it was often seem, you know, seemed and probably was more dangerous for you to try and leave. And that being a structural problem and that being something that we could work on, but it would be expensive and unpopular. And it would suggest that we were handing it to the feminists, which of course, you know, a lot of people didn't want to do.

• 9:16Speaker 03

  And so it feels like Satan really emerged at a great moment, you know, where it was like, oh, my God, what if Satan is doing this? What if, what if it's all Satan? This is incredible, you know, it would be great in a way to be able to bring it back again and again to something that allows you to skip all of the hard work that the real data is pointing towards, you know?

• 9:39Ben Brock Johnson?

  How do you think the satanic panic would have been different if we had had internet and social media?

• 9:46Speaker 03

  I don't know, because I feel like we are kind of going through a satanic panic redux or something. And that it's like easier for people who disagree with what's going on to come together. And I mean, I think this is structurally different, what we're experiencing now and then it is, you know, has from the beginning been like very divided and divisive politically, right? Whereas in the eighties, the satanic panic was pretty much, at least at the beginning, a mainstream phenomenon that actually seemed to kind of, you know, put feminists and conservatives sort of allied them to an extent, the same way a little bit as the war is on porn. Which is a whole other topic.

• 10:30Speaker 03

  But I feel like the internet causes, you know, like faster rumor cycles, faster periods of burnout. I wonder if it would accelerate the whole phenomenon and make it in a way, maybe take less time and be less culturally sticky than it was. But that's very, that's very hopeful of me. Are there examples of modern day moral panics that the internet created rather than just like spread? I would love it if I could think of a great example right now, which I can. But that feels inevitable to me because it feels like the internet, you know, partly is like a great generator of like misheard and half truths, you know, and this kind of

• 11:11Speaker 03

  this social game of telephone that happens when people try and spread information feels like it's accelerated when people talk about stuff online. And so it feels like, you know, the same way information comes together and coalesces into something weirder than the sum of its parts when people are passing it around, you know, through folklore or, you know, if you look at the eighties satanic panic, a lot of that happened because of national media and because we had, you know, especially in the, the early years of it, these daycare cases of alleged sexual abuse that once they hit the national news, where it's the kind of thing that, that spread like wildfire

• 11:53Speaker 03

  across the country is something that people were talking about and were worried about and were therefore kind of, you know, spreading almost the story that that anxiety told, which caused people to look for it and then potentially believe they had found it where it wasn't. Yeah, and media felt a lot more centralized in that, like, everyone was watching Oprah, who was sort of validating the satanic panic in a way, whereas the internet is a lot more dispersed and chaotic. I mean, if you were on a daytime TV show host in the eighties, then at a certain point, talking about, you know, alleged satanic ritual abuse just kind of became what you

• 12:36Speaker 03

  did because everybody else was doing it, I think was the logic. But yeah, I mean, I think that the internet sort of behaves the way, I realize that you have bots to correct for, but I mean, that the way people behave kind of happens online and gets accelerated. So it seems inevitable that we are creating kind of new strains of moral panic through that. But I think that fundamentally, the rules remain the same. Well, and also like the, the panic is.

• 13:06Speaker 03

  It's framed as a lot of the time, this measure to protect kids. And I don't know if this resonates with you at all, but it, it, these days, it feels like social media itself might be Satan.

• 13:23Speaker 03

  Or at least, like, Australia just banned social media for kids under 16. Yeah, that seems wise.

• 13:32Speaker 03

  Well, I wonder, I want your thoughts on that, about our, like, are children the problem or the solution, or both? Right. I think, no, I, I think that adults are, are the problem generally, because we're the ones who have made the world that kids have to live in, right? And we're like, kids, you have to get off social media. And then we are on it for 13 hours a day, you know? I think one of the, one of the few things that liberals and conservatives actually can unite about today is fear of their own children, or fear of kids, and this idea that, you know, both terrible things are gonna happen to kids, and that kids are gonna become awful, and at least they're, you know, annoying to us. And so it feels like, you know, the, the, the fear of what people growing up today will

• 14:17Speaker 03

  become feels like, again, like, it's really a reflection of our fear of the world that they have to live in. And that was a world that, that they didn't create. We made that for them.

• 14:29Ben Brock Johnson?

  I agree with that, and I also think it's an interesting, as you're describing it, it also strikes me that a lot of these two different kinds of fears, like fear of what children will become, and fear of what will happen to children, are also really about ourselves and our own inability to protect children.

• 14:51Speaker 03

  It's like redirecting a feeling of powerlessness into a feeling of condemnation or something. And it, it makes sense that people will be attracted to that kind of thing, you know? And I think, again, this idea of like, well, trans kids are, are satanic. It's like, well, okay, they're not. And it makes sense that you are afraid of your child questioning your worldview and maybe becoming estranged from you ultimately because of that, if that's what you're gonna insist on. And it's scary to think of your kids growing emotionally beyond.

• 15:28Speaker 03

  The life that you've had, it doesn't mean they shouldn't do it, and it doesn't mean it isn't healthy, but it is like a difficult emotion to process. And an easy emotion to process is being the victim of something evil and Satan having taken your child away from you. And so I feel like one of the kind of bargains that's being struck here and that, you know, conservative politics in the United States today offers is you can trade in your difficult emotions for an easy emotion. And all you have to do is think that your child is in the pocket of Satan.

• 16:04Ben Brock Johnson?

  More panic and some hope from Sarah Marshall in a minute.

• 16:15Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken?, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questrom School of Business. How should employers measure real skills in the age of AI?

• 16:27Speaker 05

  Instead of observing the final artifact, instead of observing the final essay or the final program, observe the entire process of creation.

• 16:36Speaker 00

  Follow Is Business Broken? wherever you get your podcasts and stick around until the end of this podcast for a preview of a recent episode on rethinking academic and job assessment when AI can do the work.

• 16:54Speaker 01

  Say hello to smooth, sugar-like sweetness with Truvia Alulose Plus Stevia Sweetener and Monk Fruit Sweetener. This blend delivers balanced sweetness that minimizes aftertaste with zero calories per serving. Designed to fit everyday moments, Truvia Alulose Blend measures cup for cup like sugar, making it effortless to swap into beverages, baking, and even savory dishes. Find Truvia Alulose Plus Stevia Sweetener and Monk Fruit Sweetener online and nationwide at Kroger, Target, and your favorite local grocery retailer.

• 17:26Speaker 02

  Fall never arrives all at once. First the air, then the light, and slowly the things you love begin to find each other. A jacket meets a dress, a hoodie slips beneath a blazer, an old cap finds a new scarf. Because you don't simply step into the season, you create it layer by layer until it finally feels like fall. Find fall your way at Ross.

• 17:55Ben Brock Johnson?

  All right, we've been talking to writer and podcast host Sarah Marshall about her new series, The Devil You Know, about the satanic panic of the 80s and 90s.

• 18:05Speaker 03

  The details of which can be hard to believe today, except that some of them were put in writing and are now circulating on the internet decades later, including an exhaustive PDF from the Justice Department titled Occult Criminal Investigation. Can you explain what this is? Yeah, what a joy that is. This is something that has been sent to me many times by many people, and I think maybe there's even kind of different sources for it, for maybe the same document, I'm not sure, but the one that I shared with you was circulated by the city of Glendale.

• 18:42Speaker 03

  And it's just a wonderful 47-page-long guide for anyone in the police arts who wants to learn how to spot Sataness. And it has, you know, a guide to signs and symbols, including the sexual ritual symbol, the blood ritual symbol, the inverted cross of satanic justice, and so on, things you should look for in a crime scene to determine whether it is satanic, which is very broad. And just, it feels to me generally like it, if you look at it from a distance, and this is why it's been circulating online for, I don't know, probably at least 10 years

• 19:27Speaker 03

  now, and I would actually love to know how it got online to begin with, but it kind of is a guide to creating false positives, where it's like, we will give you a list of objects so generic that you can probably find any of them at a crime scene and therefore make it a satanic one.

• 19:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, the existence of this thing is so, it's as validating as it is frightening because it's proof that they, that this at one point, Satan at one point was taken so seriously as to put this in writing and make it. Part of the teaching, like, there's no denying, you know, there's no going back once you have a PDF like this in the world.

• 20:10Ben Brock Johnson?

  It's so crazy to read through this PDF. It's like bells, satanic, owls, satanic, nests, satan- satanic, you know, like, it's like, like, there's nothing, there's so many, eyes, satanic.

• 20:26Speaker 03

  There's eyes in my face right now. And they are satanic, Sarah.

• 20:32Ben Brock Johnson?

  Podcasts, satanic.

• 20:34Speaker 03

  Well, that is pretty satanic. Right, but it's like a way of, of, you know, having, you know, basically, expert evidence to point toward or sort of something to cite when you decide that you need to, you know, this gives you the ability to brand basically any home that you encounter as a satanic worship site and it's silly, but the ways that, um, the ways people in power, and in this case, the police can take advantage of a social fear to, to railroad people who it's advantageous to them to, you know, to, to wrongfully convict is the case maybe. And there were certainly many miscarriages

• 21:18Speaker 03

  of justice within that, you know, it's, um, it's a classic American story of a silly thing making a horrible thing possible.

• 21:24Ben Brock Johnson?

  What is the good in studying and knowing the history of something if we're going to keep doing it?

• 21:30Speaker 03

  I've kind of struggled with this one over the years and with this feeling of frustration of like, what is the point in knowing all this stuff if it's just happening again? And like, you know, starting up again as it has in the past 10 years, I would say, you know, and with different narratives, but certainly with this idea that we can use Satan as an excuse to mistreat and further marginalize already marginalized people who are trying to get, you know, a little bit of access to social services and civil rights, which, you know, and demonizing the attempt to, to be seen as, as a whole person by society and by the US government. And I think my answer at this point is that

• 22:12Speaker 03

  when you study history, it allows you to maybe make better choices and to understand in a more systematic way, the things that are happening around you because I think moral panics are somewhat inevitable. And that doesn't mean that we can't.

• 22:28Speaker 03

  Make them less damaging when they come, but I think the feeling of powerlessness that many of us have felt at sort of seeing that unfold, that we don't, we don't have to dwell in that. And if we recognize it as something that recurs and that has, um, has things about it that we can really kind of predict and maybe even undermine, then maybe we can make it feel more like living through a slasher movie in the scream kind of a way where you at least know what the rules are and you're not gonna go around saying, I'll be right back.

• 23:09Speaker 03

  Can the internet be a better part of the solution? Or our use of the internet and social media be part of the solution in maybe not, um, repeating some of the history we've repeated or perpetuating some of the moral panics that have and are currently happening? Yeah, I think so. I still love the internet, you know? I mean, it's really like, I realize it's, it's doing terrible things every day, but it's, that makes it easy to forget that a lot of the good things in my life and honestly, a lot of the great relationships in my life have come to me

• 23:49Speaker 03

  because I was, you know, from an early age, a pretty online person. And also found community online in a way that a lot of misfits do and have. And I think that it still has the capacity to help us. And also, you know, I mean, to, to look back at, at people questioning the satanic panic, you know, back in the eighties, there always were people who were questioning things, but it was just hard for those people to find each other or to band together to kind of find, in many cases, major outlets for that, that kind of questioning. Because it was not, um, Politically expedient.

• 24:32Speaker 03

  And just was kind of a tricky proposition. And so I think that today, as we have, you know, the internet as an accelerator of conspiracy theories, it also allows people who question and debunk to find each other. And I mean, I don't know, if you're working in podcasts, then like, what would I do without the internet? I would, I would, I would simply have to make a little radio tower in my backyard, I guess. And I feel like the, the capacity for people to, the capacity for the people who need each other and who can help each other, to find each other with the technology that we have. I mean, we're not, we're not going to unring this bell, so we might as well use it. I know bells are satanic.

• 25:17Speaker 03

  We're working with what we have. Well, Sarah, thank you so much for, for telling us more about the series and taking time to think about it in an internety way with us. Thank you so much. This, this was really a joy and thank you for doing all you do. And I guess, I know we have a lot of bad things to say about it, but I still cherish our friend, the internet. We do too.

• 25:54Ben Brock Johnson?

  Sarah Marshall's series is called The Devil You Know. All the episodes are out now and you can find them in all the podcast places.

• 26:02Speaker 03

  Endless Thread is a production of WBUR in Boston. This episode was produced by Grace Tatter and us, Amory Sivertson.

• 26:09Ben Brock Johnson?

  And Ben Brock Johnson. It was edited by Meg Kramer, mix and sound design by our production manager, Paul Vikes. All right, folks, thanks for listening to us and to Sarah Marshall. She the best. See you next week.

• 26:39Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken?, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questram School of Business. Follow Is Business Broken wherever you get your podcasts and listen on for a preview of a recent episode featuring Janet Kang, Executive Director of the Just Horizons Alliance, on who stands to benefit from AI in education.

• 27:01Speaker 06

  I am absolutely in favor of AI in learning in the right context. And just to explain why you're excited about it. Oh, my gosh, individualized support, right, personalization, and to be able to scale quality education in places where it was historically impossible. So for certain kinds of learners with different kinds of learning styles and disabilities, for example, speakers of different languages, there are amazing ways AI can boost learning. It just has to be with the right context. And age appropriateness is something we do a lot of work in because it is very different depending on where in that maturity cycle you are in terms of how your brain develops.

• 27:39Speaker 00

  Find the full episode by searching for Is Business Broken? wherever you get your podcasts. And learn more about the Marotra Institute for Business, Markets, and Society at ibms.bu.edu.

• 27:59Speaker 01

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• 28:28Speaker 02

  Fall never arrives all at once. First the air, then the light. And slowly the things you love begin to find each other. A jacket meets a dress, a hoodie slips beneath a blazer, an old cap finds a new scarf. Because you don't simply step into the season, you create it layer by layer until it finally feels like fall. Find fall your way at Ross.