===TRANSCRIPT START===

Disclaimer, this episode features a disclaimer by Chris, as if I wasn't even here. Now, while that's not something you should condone, it's also not something to panic about.

Hey everybody, welcome back to Scared All The Time. I'm Chris Cullari.

And I'm Ed Voccola.

And this week, we're talking about something that has creeped me out since the day I learned about it in middle school, the Satanic Panic. Some of our listeners have probably heard of this. Ed, have you heard of the Satanic Panic?

I know of it from like movies and stuff. Like I think The Gate has to do with it, which is an awesome movie. And if, and maybe I'm wrong, but like, is the Satanic Panic also part of like, if you played records backwards, you'd hear the devil or some shit?

Yeah, that's certainly part of it, but that's kind of just the tip of the Satanic Panic iceberg. The Satanic Panic was a rash of more than 12,000 cases that occurred over about a 20 year span in America, but really all over the world. It saw a huge uptick in the belief that a secret powerful cabal of Satanists were doing really terrible things to children in the places that they should be safest, at home, at school, around trusted adults. It didn't matter where you lived, big cities and small towns were both swept up in the idea. And I find this subject particularly fascinating because it touches on so many subjects that interest me on their own, religion, urban legends, paranoia, true crime, human sacrifice and some of our favorite music. If you've ever heard rumors like Ed said about subliminal messages in rock and roll or pagan symbols in cartoons or corporate logos designed to hide a satanic meaning, you've seen just the tip of the satanic panic iceberg. People went to jail for years and in some cases are still in jail based on really not much more than widespread rumors that the devil's minions were corrupting, killing and sometimes devouring children. But the thing I find scariest about the satanic panic is that there's no good option. It either means that a mass hysteria swept this country and sparked a panic that put innocent people in prison, some of them almost to this day, or a powerful satanic cabal is doing unspeakable things to children right under our noses and there's really nothing we can do to stop them.

Yeah, I guess it could be either of those things, which isn't great. Well, let's hope it's not the second one.

Ed, are you ready to panic?

If you insist. What are we?

All right, so before Ed and I received the Mark of the Beast, a little housekeeping. Shout out to Katie, one of our listeners, who messaged us after she listened to the Booby Trap Candy episode. Turns out she lives just around the corner from my parents in Hershey, Pennsylvania, where I was recording bits and pieces of that episode from. So very cool to have a hometown listener. And shout out to my mother-in-law, who not only listens to this show, but shared it with some of her friends. Sherry, in your honor, I'm going to try to not swear for five minutes. And then we heard from listeners, Max and Derek, that Thomas Edison was a real jerk. And apparently I was also a jerk for calling him a nice guy. And I have to admit, I called him a nice guy because I don't really know much about Thomas Edison and I don't really have an opinion on him.

I'm pretty sure I called him a monster and said that he stole shit from Tesla. So if anything, knowing nothing at all, I come out looking pretty clean in this.

I knew he stole stuff from Tesla, but there was a whole bunch of other stuff that Max and Derek told us.

No, he sounds like a real piece of shit. And I'm from the birthplace of PT. Barnum. So I should know a little bit about pieces of shit.

Yeah, so he was a real jerk. So I apologize to any of Thomas Edison's victims.

Also, crazy huge shout out to Sharon in Maryland, who sent us an email of herself at the like birthplace of the Ouija board, 7-Eleven, that shows the plaque and her at the plaque. And it's rad. It's pretty, the tiling in there looks like the whole 7-Eleven might be a bathroom, from what I can see. But the plaque is pretty tasteful. It's pretty tasteful plaque.

They should have a special slushie there that's like an ectoplasm mix, like a pink goo.

Somebody blows their nose and you want to keep it.

Yeah, something to celebrate the spirits of that place.

It's pretty cool. She also sent a picture of Elijah Bond's gravestone, which has a Ouija board on it.

Oh.

Yeah.

Is it a usable Ouija board?

You have to bring your own planchette or whatever, but it seems to be, it's the board. It's the board on his gravestone. So yeah, pretty cool. Really, it seems like Maryland's got a lot of interesting Ouija history there. And I'm glad that a Maryland resident was able to introduce us to a couple of those things in real time. So thanks again, Sharon. It's so, so cool. I think we're actually gonna put a little blog post about this on the website.

Website, website. scaredallthetimepodcast.com. Hell yeah, love it. Well, hopefully no one goes exploring for anything related to the Satanic Panic because this subject is fucking Dark Man and not the cool Sam Raimi Dark Man, the really terrible, bad things. Anyway, this subject is massive and it is controversial. So right off the top, I want to lay out a few things for anyone who might be unfamiliar with the topic or cringing at the idea that we're going to even attempt to tackle this one in general. First of all, discussion of the Satanic Panic involves really violent and disgusting things done to often very small children. I did a report on this topic in high school and did not leave out the sensationalized details, which is how I learned that people really don't like hearing them.

None of those people who booed have a podcast now, so fuck them.

No, but my point is, the gory details are out there on the internet if you're curious, but we're going to avoid discussing some of those details on this episode unless they are directly relevant to the case at hand because they're just cruel and disgusting and very hard to have a laugh about.

So hold your horses. We got a call here. Yellow.

That was great, Chris. No notes.

Oh, my thoughts too.

I'd say I couldn't have done it better, but let's not kid ourselves.

And my thoughts too. Now I have a little, I guess not disclaimer, but maybe general thought. We have not been and probably likely will not be grizzly for grizzly sake here at Scared All The Time.

No, probably not.

Hard cut to everybody turning the podcast off. I came here for the grizzliness. I don't get grizzly at home. I don't get grizzly at work. I come here for grizzly. I'm sorry, I don't know what to tell you.

I wanna hang out with my fake friends, Chris and Ed, and hear them talk about all the awful and disgusting things in the universe.

We'll be your real friends if you need that.

That's true. We are here. Anyway, to that point, discussion of the Satanic Panic involves questions about how, when and why abuse survivors speak up. To be clear, the debate here is not whether or not victims who speak up should be believed. They should be. The debate is how their claims are investigated and how the investigators are trained because in many of these cases, they were investigated terribly and trained terribly and did nobody any favors. And then finally, as a note at the top of the show, discussion of the Satanic Panic involves a lot of conspiracy theories. We are gonna touch on some of them, but they stretch back as far as theories about secret medieval societies and as far into the present as theories about Pizzagate, QAnon and Jeffrey Epstein. We literally don't have all day to discuss them because we have to record two episodes today.

Point of fact, the boys only recorded one episode and it was very, very long. So long that it's going to be split into two episodes. Episode one, the one you are listening to, covers how to define the Satanic Panic, what's scary about it, its origins and culture. The book Michelle Remembers, Satanic rumors about Fortune 500 companies and how people who make scary stuff are usually big sweeties. Stay tuned to the end to find out what will be included in part two.

So we're going to try to stay focused as tightly as possible on what we'll call Satanic Panic Classic, meaning cases that flared up from the late 70s to the mid 90s. But if you love conspiracy theories, don't worry. That's a subject we never get tired of around here. And we will go back to that well over and over until it's dry, hashtag Epstein didn't kill himself.

I can't use that last part.

You can't use Epstein didn't kill himself?

I think to me, that's like seems like a no brainer that he didn't, but I don't know.

Well, I mean, it's interesting because I think really the reason the satanic panic is such an interesting thing to study now is that QAnon and Pizzagate and even elements of the Jeffrey Epstein conspiracy lore are heavily influenced by or direct descendants of a lot of the satanic panic lore.

So I talked to my mom about this literally yesterday, which is like, I think you can draw a direct line from satanic panic to book bannings or anything else. Like you could draw a direct line from satanic panic to disco sucks, let's burn those records in a baseball stadium or whatever. Like anytime a bunch of people get fucking outraged over shit that no one's looked into is in my mind akin to satanic panic.

Yes, although I would say the direct correlations between satanic panic and QAnon and Pizzagate are sort of the, I mean, basically it evolved from satanic ritual sacrifice and blood drinking to this slightly more modern adrenochrome harvesting child sacrifice rituals, but it's all really the same idea, just like slightly different flavors, but we'll get into all that in a minute. So what is the satanic panic and why is it scary? Broadly, I would define the satanic panic as the collection of cases of satanic ritual abuse to grip people's imaginations and nightmares late in the last millennium. These cases almost always sprang up from the stories of a child about something bizarre that happened to them at home or at daycare or school. They would report being abused by members of family or faculty who were secretly practicing satanists and would involve them and usually all of their friends in these horrific rituals that would include human sacrifice, cannibalism, and much, much, much worse. No matter how terrible the abuse, though, there was rarely any physical evidence ever left behind in these cases. And oftentimes, the stories were either that the satanists were clever enough to not leave any evidence behind or because those satanists involved were powerful enough to clean up after themselves. But, you know, one of the things that's so striking about these cases is that, you know, powerful, in this case, sometimes means politically connected, but more often means that the kids said these people had literal magical powers.

Yeah, I think the politically connected aspect, I mean, I know so little about this, but I know enough anytime something like this comes up where it always just seems to be, it's never like, maybe I'm wrong, maybe I'm way wrong on this, but I feel like it's never like, oh man, all that worshiping the devil that went on in a trailer park. It's always like, did you hear that the Vanderbilts had a secret worshiping the devil tunnel under their property? It seems like there was like this powerful wealthy class that seems to dabble in the occult more than just people trying to get by regular ass people.

Well, that's the difference, I think, between 80s and 90s Satanic Panic and modern QAnon, Pizzagate, Satanic Panic kind of stuff. Like a lot of the people that we're talking about in these classic Satanic Panic cases were often locally, you know, had some degree of power or were not even influenced, but just a position of power in the community. Usually teachers, but this particular flavor was less focused on kids being, you know, trafficked to wealthy people for these rituals and more on your neighbor might be doing this to your kids or to their kids.

Okay, so which one is the, your neighbor is that, was that Satanic Panic classic or Satanic Panic modern?

Classic.

Really?

Yeah, it was this creeping fear and some people have connected it to the idea that we're gonna go through a history of some of this, but in the 70s, in the late 70s, when a lot of this got started, it was really the first generation, or I guess maybe the second generation, of women who weren't in the homes, they were out working, and it was the first time that there was a wave of kids being sent to daycare en masse and having other people watch them en masse, and that some of this might have been tied into this sort of national creeping fear that for the first time, we were really leaving our kids alone with strangers and that bad things might be happening to them while we're doing that.

Yeah, I said the same people who one generation earlier, there's photos during the Dust Bowl where it's like kids for sale, $7. Like literal photos of things like that.

Yeah, I mean, and as usual, a lot of rumors of terrible things happening to kids are often looking in the wrong places. This would have been well before any of the Catholic Church scandals were exposed or any other kind of abuse happening in the home necessarily being discussed. You know, it's always kind of looking outward and looking at the people that you might already be a little bit concerned about, which sometimes, you know, presented as these people who ran daycares and other cases touch a lot on teenagers and heavy metal and kids who liked ACDC and Iron Maiden. So yeah, there's a whole spectrum of them, but on its face, this subject is fucking scary because it's fucking scary. Satanic cults and human sacrifice are fucking scary. And I've read way too much about this stuff and had way too many nightmares, you know, where I wake up surrounded by hooded figures or I'm being burned alive or having my heart cut out. So it's scary on that level.

I mean, I have dreams that aren't great. I mean, everyone knows that. Everyone knows it about me, but I guess they're not, I didn't know how ritualistic your dreams were.

Yeah, I mean, I guess some of it's probably horror stuff. Some of it-

It's probably the music you listen to, the video games you play. That's what I've been told. That's what's causing this.

Yeah, yeah, way too much doom for my fragile little mind. But what's made the satanic panic a pet subject for me for a long time really are the implications of it. Because like I said at the top, either it's real and a satanic cult with unbelievable power operates across the world with impunity, or innocent people have had their lives ruined and been prosecuted on nothing more than hearsay and people's fears. And so if it is real, what's scary about it is that it's almost like ancient aliens or simulation theory, because it suggests that the world has a secret way of operating, that there is a veil to pierce, that there is truly forbidden knowledge just out of our reach, and that what most people would consider crazy is in fact true. On the other hand, if it's hysteria, then our judicial system has some huge holes in it, which I mean, well, let me back up. Our judicial system definitely has some very real and very huge holes in it, but this is a very specific kind of medieval witch trial type problem where otherwise rational people are willing to dole out punishment without a shred of physical evidence. And sometimes because the lack of physical evidence is literally presented as proof that Satanists are real and powerful.

Yeah, no, exactly. That's interesting. The fact that we can't find any evidence means they're very good Satanists. And that's, you know, a normal person would have left evidence, but someone who had, you know, Biazelbub is their boss or whatever, they have a way of cleaning this up. Yeah, that's not helping them in any way. Like the people who are saying I didn't do this, it's really, they're boned.

Yeah, and then to kind of land the triple Lindy on what's scary about all this is the idea that maybe the rationalists are the fools and that the greatest trick the devil ever pulled, as they often say, is making us believe he doesn't exist. Like that is scary. The idea that I'm unwittingly, potentially, unlikely, but potentially part of a coverup by saying, yeah, this shit is obviously stupid and fake, that'll keep you up at night.

I do personally, I don't know why this is exciting to me, but I do like taking out all of the elements involved, like taking out any of the sacrifice and what have you. Taking out the mechanics of being a successful Satan cult or whatever, just a little wonder put back in the world at the idea that it is real.

Yeah.

Like it's exciting in a way that like going to Hogwarts would probably be exciting, but you know, it's like, oh shit, you know, I'm going my every day, going to work like a regular idiot, but you know, you're saying I could go to Hogwarts, there's a magic is real. It's just unfortunately, you know, with Harry Potter magic also comes, I guess whatever this shit is, which is just terrible.

Yeah, I know. I mean, I agree. I think when we get into some of the more outlandish accusations later, we'll talk about it, but like I discovered all this stuff in middle school on like forums and message boards.

I feel like that's the day where you're like, it seems like you can jump some hurdles, you know, in this here world, if I just get in good with these people. If you had that kind of runway ahead of you in the know, then if you're not a high ranking member of whatever these groups are by now, then it must not exist.

No, I was afraid of it. I was, I didn't want to, I, you know, I was raised Catholic. The devil was very real and hell was very real. And even though by middle school, I was kind of not so much a believer anymore. The idea, I guess kind of the same way that people are, you know, we have that death drive. We have that kind of like, you can't look away from a train wreck. There was a really dark appeal to some of these stories that just like sounded every bit as frightening as something that Stephen King would write. But some people supposedly were saying it was real and it was happening and it was happening maybe in the house next door to mine. But I'm already tying myself in knots. Let's go back to the beginning before my head explodes.

We probably will cover at some point exploding head syndrome. I've experienced it. I don't know if Chris has, but just that's, you know, just people who heard that phrase and thought, are they gonna cover that? We might, we might.

I have, I'm experiencing it right now.

No, I mean, I'm in the traditional medical sense.

No, I know, I know. There are cases of all kinds of religious and moral panics that stretch back centuries, but the modern satanic panic gets its start at the end of the 70s. The country was already on edge. We were dealing with gas shortages and a hostage crisis. The fallout of Vietnam, disintegrating faith in institutions and deindustrialization was really starting to ravage parts of the country. On screen, satanic horror was thriving. We had the Omen and the Exorcist and serial killers, like the son of Sam and the Zodiac, were loading their communications to the police and the public with occult symbols and references. And so I think from a 30,000 foot view, it's pretty easy to see why people were getting freaked out about all this devil stuff at the end of the 1970s.

When was Rosemary's Baby? Because Rosemary's Baby, it's a great movie, but it's got the satanic aspect, but it also has my favorite subgenre, subgenre of movie, and I guess I don't want to give away, you don't want to spoil something that's 60 years old almost, but it also has my favorite subgenre of movie, which is like, they're all in on it, like the town's in on it, which is also one of my greatest fears. That for me must do so much for this, because it's like, not only is it, you see, satanic shit, but then also the, you see, it's a group of people doing satanic shit and no one knew. And so that really drives home this idea.

Yeah, Rosemary's Baby was 68. So Rosemary's Baby was before The Omen and before The Exorcist.

If anything, then Rosemary's Baby might've really like gotten this into the heads of a lot of people.

Yeah, it's in the middle of all this that a book called Michelle Remembers gets published in 1980. This book is truly one of the craziest books I've ever read, fiction or nonfiction. And as with almost every detail of The Satanic Panic, there's enough crazy about this book alone that we could do a whole episode on it, but we'll just kind of touch on just some of the overview stuff here. And if you guys want to hear more, maybe we'll read some selections from it at some point. I don't have my coffee with me in Pennsylvania right now, but.

Yeah, we're looking at some people have asked for some extra content, I guess, like this doesn't take long enough. Some people have asked us for extra stuff. So we're still figuring that out. I don't know if it's exactly that, but we are looking into that. We're not not listening to people. We're just a little busy, but we'll do some stuff that people want. We'll figure that out.

Yeah, Chris and Ed read bedtime stories.

Oh, that's not a terrible idea. That's not a terrible idea. We have terrible voices. Maybe kids will be up all night if we did it, but that's not a bad idea.

That's the secret. We're gonna pair our terrible voices with terrible books and maybe it'll be entertaining. Oh my gosh.

I'm gonna stay on this. We're gonna do this.

Michelle Remembers was co-written by two people, a woman named Michelle Smith, who I'm not entirely sure if that is a pseudonym or not. I poked around the internet trying to see and everyone just called her Michelle Smith. So I think it might be a pseudonym.

Oh, everybody calls Anne Rice Anne Rice. Is that a real name?

I don't know. I don't know. It was co-written by this woman, Michelle Smith and her psychiatrist, Lawrence Pazder.

Oh, that's great. That's a good pairing. That's what you wanna see. That should have been the pairing for Britney Spears book, maybe based on everything people are saying on the internet. I haven't read it or anything. I'm just throwing shade for no reason, I guess.

Well, this is like if Britney Spears had written her book with one of the guys that fucked her up. Because basically what the book chronicles is Pazder's...

Oh, so this is like if a book was written by Brian Wilson and that crazy doctor.

Wait, which crazy doctor?

Didn't Brian Wilson famously have a fucked up doctor that overprescribed him and gave him wacky shit?

Oh, probably. I don't know anything about Brian Wilson.

Brian Wilson from the Beach Boys, I'm pretty sure had a fucked up doctor who would keep them all fucked up for his own personal gain.

Well, Lawrence Pasder was Michelle Smith's psychiatrist and she had been seeing him since 1973. The trouble really started after she had a miscarriage in 1976. She told Larry at one point, at the end of one of their sessions, that she felt like she had something important that she needed to tell him, but she couldn't quite remember what it was. And instead of saying, huh, you know, that's interesting. Let me know when you think of it, like a normal guy would. Lawrence Pazder decided the only way to get to the bottom of this was to treat Michelle with recovered memory therapy.

Was that a common thing at the time or is that something he came up with at that moment?

It wasn't common, but I don't think he invented it. It was a therapy that was built around the idea that abuse and trauma survivors would forget their abuse and trauma and that by doing kind of hypnosis and memory regression, that you could unlock these buried traumas. Now, how exactly memory works is still a pretty fuzzy subject, even in 2023. And this is one of those things where it's really important to check where a study is coming from. Because like, for instance, if you do what I did and Google what percentage of abuse survivors forget their memories, the first thing that comes up is a statistic that between 31 and 64% of abuse survivors forget their memories. But then you check and the website giving you that statistic is the homepage of SMART, which stands for Stop Mind Control and Ritual Abuse Today.

Oh my God.

And I'm sure the lovely people at SMART are well intentioned, but you know, I suspect they have an agenda.

Yeah, I also can't believe that they're that high on the Google results. Yeah. An organization like that. But also I thought you were gonna say that the first thing came from some like alpha brain, better remember drug.

No, no, no, no, gorilla brain.

Yeah, it's like, wait, that came from a company that says we can help you remember stuff? No, I'm good.

Well, what's even crazier though is, and it's interesting you bring this up, it being that high in the Google results. So I just got a Windows laptop and it uses Bing and Bing I actually quite like as a search engine now that I've been being forced to use it.

I love that you don't think you can change that.

No, no, no, I know I can change it.

You're like, this is my life now. I am shackled to Bing. If anyone needs me, I'll be binging.

Google search sucks and has sucked for a long time. But what Bing does is it provides you a lot of like summary material at the top of your search. So you search it and then instead of just giving you lists of links, it gives you like little boxes that kind of summarize a little bit of Wikipedia and summarize a little bit of the top articles.

This is Bing or Google?

This is Bing.

Both of them do that to fuck people over. Like both of them do that so that you don't actually click on the website and then that website doesn't receive the clicks. Then that website doesn't receive any money from like advertising because there's no impressions being made.

My point was going to be though.

Yeah, tell me more about fucking Big Daddy Bing over here who's trying to fuck over the little guy, your best friend, Bing.

Listen, to be clear, we are not receiving any compensation from Bing.

Or anyone, we're not receiving compensation from anyone.

If they'd like to sponsor an up and coming podcast, I'll be sure to mention Bing in future episodes. But my point was just that this is where AI and like auto summary stuff gets really scary because I typed literally what percentage of abuse survivors forget their memories into Bing. And the answer comes up at the top, not even a link. It just says, according to studies, between 31 and 64% of abuse survivors forget their memories. So if you just Google that and you don't stop to think, hmm, where is the AI bot getting its information from? You just go, oh, cool. And go like repeat that to somebody, perhaps even on a podcast.

Honestly, that's 99% of humans.

No, I know.

The people who click a second link. We wouldn't even have the modern Satanic Panic shit if people just went to be like, let me click on one more fucking link. Let me see if there's any truth to this.

Truly, and I'm explaining all of this information just to discuss a little bit of this idea of repressed memories and recovered memories because that's so much a part of the birth of Satanic Panic lore.

No, it's fine. I think people like our tangents. They always say they love our tangents.

It also serves as a case study for exactly that, of always click the second link and click the third link because this is what happened. So I click the link. It takes me to the home page of SMART, Stop Mind Control and Ritual Abuse Today and-

We do need shirts from them. We need to see if they make shirts.

We do. It's like a acronym. I don't know when they started, but it's a very 80s acronym.

Well, I do love anyone who does the acronym where they throw in another fucking letter and just act like it's fine. Like, stop mind control. Where's the C in SMART?

They pulled it right out.

So they smashed mind control together either with a hyphen or made it one word. No one's gonna, it's fine.

Yeah.

Hey, why did you do it this way? Well, because it wouldn't spell SMART otherwise. It was like, well, I guess I'm the idiot, sorry.

Yeah, so it took me to SMART, and then I dive a little deeper. And the study that they're quoting, because they do provide like a bibliography or whatever, they're quoting a real study about the 31 to 64% number that seems to be real, but then the link that they provide for the study, which I clicked to go look at the study and see who performed it and everything, doesn't go to the right website. It goes to just a completely different web page, which I don't know if that was done on purpose to make it look like there was a link, or if somebody made a mistake or whatever, which wouldn't be very smart.

No. No, it wouldn't be.

But it's just a small case study in how misleading information can be. And I'm not even saying that this study was performed by somebody with an agenda, but it was certainly reported by somebody with an agenda and then not reported in a way that made it easy to go actually check the study and see what it actually said.

Yeah, my dad and I are watching the news this past year and just something came up that was like, oh, Los Angeles is the most dangerous city in the fucking world or some stupid shit, I don't know. And then I was like, that can't be the case. And then we looked it up and we went through a couple links and when you ultimately got down to it, it was a credit score company that made this listicle.

Yeah.

That was like literally being like used on the news we were watching.

Yeah.

But it ended up being like a credit score website. It was so weird. Are the people who presumably conducted it based on medium incomes, housing incomes, based on crime data, but it was all related to, I guess, credit scores. It was so weird.

Yeah, I mean, and the satanic panic subject, part of the reason it's really hard to even put a show together about the satanic panic that explores it from all angles is like, no matter which side you pick, you can find evidence and studies that kind of back up whatever you're feeling is, particularly about recovered memory and abuse and trauma and all that stuff. There's been so many studies kind of in the wake of these satanic panic cases that have been done on how the mind works and what we can remember and why and all that. But what's important here is that the American Psychological Association, who I would say are fairly mainstream experts on this sort of stuff.

APA?

The APA.

I mean, they didn't even try with their acronyms.

No.

It spells out nothing, I wanna say.

Let's be real. Part of the problem here is this is a battle of acronyms.

And they're losing.

They're losing.

They're losing. The bad guys are winning yet again.

APA needs to figure out how to make their acronyms smarter and quick.

Yeah, they gotta get the scuba guys on the horn.

So they say, quote, There is 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. Concerning the issue of a recovered versus a pseudo memory, as in what memory was forgotten and retrieved versus what memory was falsified or made up and then retrieved as a memory, like many questions in science, the final answer is yet to be known. But most leaders in the field agree that although it is a rare occurrence, a memory of early childhood abuse that has been forgotten can be remembered later. However, these leaders also agree that it is possible to construct convincing pseudo memories for events that never occurred. The mechanisms by which both of these phenomena happen are not well understood. And at this point, here, this will keep you up at night too, it is impossible without other corroborative evidence to distinguish a true memory from a false one.

I don't love that. I don't love what I'm hearing there. But I also feel like I read once that we store, like where our dreams, like when we remember a dream, presumably that's stored in the same place in our brain where we, which is now dating me, but where you would remember phone numbers. And so it was like that same recall area, which is very trustworthy because it's like, oh, you know what? It might not have been dreams. It might have been remembering song lyrics. Either way, it's difficult to discern like where things are coming from. Yeah, I mean, that's the Venn diagram of that scenario. But yeah, no, but it is that thing about like, if you look at where shit's firing off in the brain, it is things where it's like dreams can be popping off in the same place as like good, real, practical memories. And so it is difficult to decipher.

I've had that happen as an adult and nothing where I've lived under the impression that like I had another sibling or something.

I've had this, but it's always like when I checked my bank account, I knew it was a dream.

Yeah, the stacks were gone, bro.

Stackless now, dude.

Yeah, I've had weird stuff of like, I remember one time I had a dream that I left my car somewhere. And for the first couple hours of that day, I kept being like, oh, that's right, I gotta go pick up my car from outside of so-and-so's house. And then like, by the time I had to drive anywhere, I was like, wait, what am I thinking? My car is outside and I must've just dreamt that. And so I can imagine in children, there's not only misplacing memories, but there have been studies. There was a study that was done once where researchers were able to fairly consistently implant, quote unquote, the memory of being lost in a mall in children, even though they were never lost in a mall.

I was lost at Disney World. It's definitely one of the scarier things that happened to me.

Yeah, I got lost. Well, I think I got lost in a Rite Aid once, but maybe that's just an implant in memory. It's hard to say. I think whatever the case, like wherever science falls on memory, I think lots of people would agree that regressive hypnosis therapy performed by a psychiatrist who was already in or what was quickly becoming a very inappropriate relationship with his patient is probably not the best way to enter into an exploration of this already really questionable subject. But unfortunately for Michelle, Canada's bad boy of psychiatry didn't give a shit about any of this.

Oh, he's Canadian?

Yeah, they're from Victoria, Canada.

Come on, Canada, you guys have a history of some of these psychiatrists and psychologists kinda playing fast and loose with this shit. Like I think they have good people trying to reign this in, but come on, Canada, get your shit together.

Yeah, so Lawrence Pazder, over 14 months and 600 hours of treatment uncovered a sprawling story of Michelle's abuse at the hands of the Church of Satan.

600 hours?

600 hours.

Fucking two hours in, I'll tell you whatever you need me to say to get out of here. Like two fucking 600 hours. If something's not working after 600 hours, throw it away.

And Michelle claims that this Church of Satan predated the Christian Church, which would later cause an issue with Anton LaVey, who threatened to sue them because he was like, no, I founded the Church of Satan in the very much post-Christian era of like 1966 or something. So Michelle's claims were that from 1954 to 1955, when she was about five years old, her mother started involving her in these like unholy rituals at the Church. Everything from being tortured and locked in cages, she was forced to watch human sacrifices, they rubbed her down with blood from the body parts of infants. And her story, the book climaxes in an 81 day ritual that summons Satan himself and as well as Jesus and the Virgin Mary and Michael the Archangel, who removed all of Michelle's physical scars that would prove that any of this ever happened to her. And also Michael is the one responsible for blocking her memories and told her that she would not remember them until the time was right.

I do not care for anything you just said, but I mostly don't care for the fact that I hate anything where it's like, oh, and all that evidence, it's gone now.

Yeah.

Well, yeah, we had a guy come in and like, we had a spiritual being take away all my scars and my stuff. So don't go looking for him. Trust me, it happened, but don't go looking for him. This like poisoning the well shit is so fucking greasy. And so yeah, sorry, Michelle. I don't love the fact like you outed yourself as a fucking liar when you all of a sudden were like, my scars are gone now.

Yeah, and you know, I, on one hand, I feel like Michelle was sort of preyed upon by Larry, but she certainly leaned in. They made her and Pazder.

I was using Michelle as like the royal Michelle. Like I just met like this whole story.

Yeah, well, I mean, she made a lot of money off of it and so did Larry Pazder.

Yeah, but it's Canadian dollars. Looney's making loonies, dude.

These two loonies ended up getting married. If you're single, your person is out there, you know? Like don't...

You have to just go through 600 hours of treatment to remember that you actually are with the one you're supposed to be with.

Yeah, I think they were both married to other people at the beginning of all this. And then by the end of it, they were together, which it's a bad look to be like, oh yeah, also we're fucking. We got married and made millions of dollars.

That's in the book or is it after the fact?

It's after the fact.

Okay, yeah, that's a huge by the way.

So the success of this book lasted the entire decade, really, because by 1989, Michelle and Larry ended up on Oprah. We're fucking Oprah. And if listeners, if anyone can dig up this episode of Oprah, I could not. It seemed very much scrubbed from the internet. I found like a four minute clip from a different Oprah episode, where she talks to a satanic ritual abuse survivor. But the writing about this Oprah episode from 89 at least says that Oprah presented the details of Michelle Remembers as fact.

Didn't she also like, what the fuck was that book? That fucking A Million Little Pieces? Is that what it was called?

I think James, James Frey.

Didn't she also have like him on and that story ended up all being bullshit? He was like on her book club.

It was, but she had him back on to be like, you know, I think she chastised him publicly as part of his like apology tour. Whereas this, you know, who did apologize in the 80s, Geraldo did an episode or two on Satanic Panic. And he did after the fact, credit where credit's due, Geraldo publicly apologized and said, you know, we should have looked into this a little bit more carefully and not presented all this stuff as fact.

Didn't Geraldo also give away our position in like one of the Iraq or Afghanistan conflicts that time very publicly?

Yeah, but you know what? We all make mistakes, man.

That guy has a lot of apologizing to do in my book. Geraldo, you're, Geraldo's on notice. Geraldo was on fucking notice.

For sure, for sure. But so is Oprah. And honestly, someone, you know, if you can dig up this episode, that would be awesome. It's also probably harder to find because when you search Michelle Remembers, Oprah, you get a lot of Oprah talking to Michelle Obama, which is definitely not what we're looking for. So anyway, by that point, by 1989, people had obviously started digging into the details and claims that were made in Michelle Remembers. And to this day, no one's found any evidence that any of the claims were true. There was never any evidence that Michelle was absent from school during any of these 81 day rituals. There's a car crash in the book that she claimed happened that no one could ever find any record of. And the cemetery where she claimed a lot of this abuse took place is surrounded by residential neighborhoods on three sides. So all the screaming and chanting and baby sacrificing, it seems like somebody would have seen something at the time, but no one ever did, so.

Those are good neighbors. Just mind your fucking business. That's what I like to do.

No fucking snitches in Victoria, BC. So Michelle Remembers comes out and lots of people are freaked out by it. It becomes a best seller and it starts spreading throughout the country.

It seems like we're hearing a lot about Michelle and the doctor, but what was the controversy exactly? What was some of the stuff they said happened?

Well, Ed, that's the stuff that I'm not sure people really want to listen to because it's almost all super fucked up. But I mean, if you want sort of a brief rundown, they took Michelle from her bed at night and they would bring her down to the graveyard where they would and sometimes they would with the blood of the dead. Is that enough?

Yeah, that's enough. Yeah. I don't even know why I asked. This is all information I wish I didn't learn, but yeah, that's some salacious shit, dude. So I can see why people kind of got into that, but that's not fit to print. No way, dude. I'm bleeping all that shit. That's not for us. But yeah, I guess you're saying it was a hit.

Anyway, that same year that it comes out, 1980, rumors start spreading around the country that the Procter and Gamble logo, who are people who make deodorant and toothpaste, there's rumors that the logo itself is satanic.

Now this I have actually heard of. This I have heard of. I don't remember where, but it was like a sun or a moon or something stupid, and it was the same thing that they've been slapping on the sides of crates going into the country forever.

Yeah, and anyone who's younger is probably like, wait, the Procter & Gamble logo that's just like a blue letters P and G? Yes, that's what it is now, because it used to be a crescent moon with a face and stars.

Yeah, I knew it.

People said it was a hidden 666 in it. And the rumors spread so far and wide, it got so crazy that they also claimed that the CEO of Procter & Gamble had gone on, and it depends which rumor you heard, either the Phil Donahue show or the Merv Griffin show, to say publicly that Procter & Gamble would be donating most of their profits to the Church of Satan and that there weren't enough Christians in America to do anything about it.

Oh my God. This is, what's funny is like, I feel, that's the 80s, like if you didn't catch it, wherever that was seen, it just wouldn't exist. So people could easily make that up to be like, oh, you missed it? You missed it at seven o'clock? He did that. But even today, I hear politicians and fucking everybody else say shit that they say something entirely different four days later and people forget or like, don't go look at the goddamn internet. And so I can't even imagine the level of like lunacy in the eighties. You can just be like, you know, I heard he also slaughtered a chicken live on the show. Yeah, yeah, you didn't see it. You were at work. It's not gonna rerun, but I'm telling you, my friend was home and they saw the CEO of Procter & Gamble, either Dave Procter, Stephen Gamble, I don't know their names, and he was slapping chickens, throwing chickens. He threw a chicken at a fucking audience member.

A publicly traded company, mind you. So like, this is the kind of rumor that if you stopped for two seconds to, like, let's say you were like a really conservative Christian person and you had bought stock in Procter & Gamble, like this would be a very big deal that would have been very easy to find some kind of evidence for. But what's even crazier is that just a few years prior to this rumor, there was a rumor that Ray Kroc had gone on TV to say the same thing about McDonald's.

Yeah, well, Ray Kroc seems like a real piece of shit.

Sure, I mean.

So I wouldn't be surprised if he was like, hey, I'll sell my soul to the devil for fast burgers.

A lot of McDonald's food probably tastes like licking Satan's butthole, so.

No way, I love McDonald's. You're fucking crazy, dude. I'll fucking lay on the track. I'll join the Church of Satan to keep McDonald's from growing.

But what I find so funny is that potentially this means there was like somebody out there who was panicked and was like, had heard both of these rumors and probably thought that like every CEO in America was going on Phil Donahue to be like, my company is giving money to the Church of Satan.

It is funny. I do imagine that, like you said, you mentioned the stock market, there had to probably be some like earnings call at the next quarter that was like, just look, we need to address the rumor about us donating huge amounts of this money to the Church of Satan. And just we want to set the record straight that it's only a small amount we're donating to the Church of Satan. Also, you ever notice, do you ever like tell someone who somehow doesn't know that there's Bible verses on Chick-fil-A and In-N-Out, where like, if you turn over your cup, it'll say like John 316 or whatever. And I have no problem with that whatsoever. But it is funny if you do like, if it was like you turn over a McDonald's cup and it was whatever Bible verse from the Satanic Bible was under there. And if it was just like in your face.

Yeah, or it just says, just says, hail Satan.

I mean, it wouldn't say hail Satan. The other one doesn't say like, you know, call Jesus for a good time.

No, that would be very controversial.

But that is to say, Bible verse without the language is coded.

Yeah.

I mean, that's just John 316. You kind of got to know where to go. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So for this one, if it was like, I don't know anybody in Satan's camp. Who wrote the letters to the Corinthians for him?

I mean, mostly Anton LaVey, because all the Church of Satan stuff really got started in the 60s.

I guess the better question is, and maybe this is coming up, and maybe it won't at all have to come up. Does the Church of Satan have their equivalent of a Bible?

Well, I don't know if they have the equivalent of a Bible in the sense that they have a book of stories that are supposed to be true, that have been collected throughout a certain period of time. But they have their commandments, the do what thou will kind of stuff.

Okay, well, I mean, that's not the same. So I have nothing to go off of for the under the cup stuff. But it also sounds like they got to get their shit together over there in the Church of Satan. Like, get a book, get some shit, get some verses. If you don't have verses, what the fuck are you? Are you even at church?

Yeah, I mean, even Scientology managed to get a mythology together.

They're not, they have no, you know, shortage of controversy over there at Scientology as well.

Oh, I will say in defense of early 80s Christian culture, I couldn't read the entire article because it was behind a paywall, and God knows I wasn't paying to read this whole thing. But there was a Christian Today article from 1982 that did call all this Procter and Gamble stuff out for just being crazy bullshit. Unfortunately, the article was called The Terrible Truth About That Procter and Gamble Symbol.

So, wait, why wouldn't it just be called the benign truth of the Procter and Gamble symbol?

I don't know.

If it's in defense of the company, you know, kind of getting slandered.

It's very silly that the terrible truth is that people have exaggerated how satanic it is. It's almost like when I read that, I was thinking it's like going into a crowded theater and screaming like, Oh my God, can you believe there isn't a fire? I don't see a raging terrible fire. Just by dint of doing it, you are raising questions about, that might spread rumors about the crazy fire that isn't there.

Yeah, just walking in being like, fire would be terrible right now.

Yeah, exactly.

Who hears with me?

Oh, fire is something I don't see.

Yeah, which is good. Proceed with Oppenheimer.

Yeah, so they did try to tamp it down, but it was too late. And what all of this, the satanic movies of the 70s, the cultural mood, Michelle Remembers, the rumors about Procter & Gamble and McDonald's, what it all set the table for was a wave of mental health and law enforcement experts or so-called experts taking recovered memory syndrome and rumors of satanism extremely seriously, which unsurprisingly ended up being very bad for lots of innocent people. I think most people, even loosely familiar with the subject of satanic panic, probably think of one of two cases. Either the McMartin Free School Trial from California or the West Memphis 3 Murder Trial. And both were unique in their own ways. Both ended up ruining people's lives. I think the McMartin Trial is a little less well known and a little bit more classically satanic panicky. So we're gonna cover that instead of West Memphis, which I feel like has kind of been covered to death between the three documentaries in the series that Joe Berlinger did and every other book and podcast that's been done about that case.

But I think we should probably still give a three-sentence synopsis of it.

Sure, the West Memphis 3 case was three teenagers who were into heavy metal music in West Memphis were essentially railroaded and prosecuted and served half their lives in prison for the murder of some boys that they certainly did not commit, but the town got up in arms over the fact that they seemed like the kind of kids who would be Satanists, and rumors spread, and they were summarily prosecuted and found guilty of these terrible crimes that they didn't commit. They have since been released, and if you haven't heard of the West Memphis Three, it's a really fascinating, really complicated murder mystery that there still aren't any great answers for. But yeah, I feel like there's just a lot out there about it. And there's a lot out there about McMartin as well, but I feel like covering some of the more obscure cases of Satanic panic almost require a knowledge of McMartin preschool for it to even make sense. So it feels like McMartin preschool is a good kind of primer on how a lot of this shit kind of spiraled out of control.

Well, that's great. I'm glad we're going to be touching something a little closer to our adopted home as well. But I'll just ask this quickly before we get into it, because you mentioned that these kids got railroaded or whatever because they're into fucking rock music and shit. What was the situation with like the Kiss Army and stuff like that? Is that part of this whole thing? Because I feel like that was always referenced in, you know, Satanic Army, Kiss got an army.

Yeah, a little. I mean, I don't know. I like Kiss songs. I know that there was a whole rumor that went around probably during this time, but maybe even before, because Kiss is old.

Yeah, no, Kiss is old. Don't let their definitely dyeing their hair fool you. They are old as fuck, those guys.

Yeah, I mean, they're old. And I know at one point they were rumored that Kiss stood for Knights in Satan's service.

Which is what I'm referencing.

Yeah, I don't know if the band started that or if someone else started that. I think they certainly embraced it at a certain point. But what's so funny to me about Kiss is that like Paul Stanley and is he the more vocal one of the whole crew? Like they are very open about we just wanted to write dumb rock music that made money.

I would bet all the money I don't have that 99.99% of this shit, whether it's Alice Cooper or them or anyone else, it's just like we were making stupid songs. There's nothing here.

Yeah, I mean, honestly, I feel like every generation has their scary musical artist or artists. And I think especially when you look back at it, Alice Cooper and Kiss and Rob Zombie are all so... They're such goofballs. They're so self-aware. Ozzy Osbourne even, I don't think he ever really thought of himself as a dark, scary guy. It was part of the act.

They're literally theater, meatloaf, what have you. It's literally theater.

Yeah, meatloaf.

And then Kiss kind of famously did a comic book with Marvel in the late 70s, where they each put their blood in the dye that was going to be used to print all the comics. They clearly were goofballs who knew this is theater. This is dumb.

The most controversial artist, I feel like, of the present day is Lil Nas X because he does the exact same stuff. That kid is so smart. He knows his history. He made the Nike blood shoes that supposedly have his blood in the air pocket. And he did a satanic music video to tweak people on purpose. But it worked. People all over the country have been...

Pissed off about it.

Yeah, pissed off about it. But I feel like he's really a student of the game, so to speak, and knows exactly what he's doing. But in a way that also I think makes him feel less dangerous, because it is sort of a wink and a nod to stuff that used to be dangerous. I think the closest we probably had to that real era of like, watch out, like, hide your kids, hide your wife, was the early Odd Future. When they were still Odd Future, Wolfgang killed them all, with Tyler, the creator, and Earl Sweatshirt and those guys. The videos and the music that they were making was like pretty genuinely upsetting and disturbing, and they said really horrible things that I think haunted at least Tyler for a long time. It never reached the level of the Satanic Panic though. Nobody was trying to burn their records or anything. And those guys really felt dangerous. Like, they felt like they were maybe real bad kids.

Who's bought an album since they've been popular? I don't know how you burn your digital download of Tyler, the creator, but he might be just before, like, I don't know a lot of these people you're talking about, but I know Tyler, the creator, probably from skate shops on Fairfax or whatever, but he is either just before or definitely maybe part of that generation of people who do, like, McDonald's collaborations. Did he do, like, a McDonald's collab burger or whatever?

I don't...

Because that's, like, these are the scariest that I've ever heard of, and they're also...

Well, he was scary. Now he's about as mainstream as you can get. I don't know if he did a McDonald's burger, but you know who did? Oh, this is good. You know who did? Travis Scott, I'm pretty sure, did. And Travis Scott, here we bring it full circle. Travis Scott was accused of Satanism when the Astroworld Festival disaster happened, where a bunch of people in the crowd got crushed to death. And there was a brief little flare-up on the internet that that was some sort of, like, a demonic ritual that he had performed publicly as, like, a sacrifice to Satan.

But I guess that makes sense, right? Because McDonald's, the CEO, was giving money, according to several unverified claims to the Church of Satan. So, yeah, I guess this is all starting to track for me.

Maybe that's what's still going on here.

You gotta look at everyone who's done a McDonald's collab through Satanist colored glasses or whatever.

Yeah, but almost anyone since them, I feel like, has been approaching it with a very kind of silly, you know, it's all theater kind of thing. Or even, like, Sam Smith, when he came out as non-binary and started kind of, like, riling people up with that song, Body Shop, and the video for Body Shop.

I did a search, Sam Smith, McDonald's. Doesn't look like he's done a collab, but the first article that comes up is Sam Smith obsessed with McDonald's.

My God.

Almost everybody we've mentioned has had McDonald's ties. Okay, Sam Smith is obsessed with McDonald's. It's a 404 not found.

Oh, fuck!

Man, oh man, shit's getting too real, honestly. Too real.

Listeners, if Ed and I, quote unquote, commit suicide by the end of next week, you'll know exactly why. They don't want part two of this episode coming out.

Look, I don't want to make the target any bigger on our backs here, but I think we're only like a Doja Cat, McDonald's collaboration away from really blowing this wide open. Because she had that terrifying, I don't know, I thought it was rad. But I think she had that kind of terrifying music video for that song Demons that blew up the news cycle for a bit with that thing they do where it's like, we heard this upsets people, so let us show it on repeat to more people than probably would have ever seen it otherwise.

Yeah, exactly.

But that's how I discovered it. I discovered it on the news, but I was not upset and I thought it was cool. But yeah, just enough satanic imagery to get people upset again.

You know, it upsets middle Americans.

My favorite Scared All The Time listener is middle Americans, go on.

But I think to anyone who listens to music at all, it's pretty clear that it's all kind of like, man, isn't it cool that this is upsetting people? So, you know, I don't think there's anything really scary. We're too meta. We're too much, we're too, we all know too much about the way all this stuff works.

Yeah, I think I speak for Scared All The Time that we, we don't get terribly excited at the idea of like, how cool is it that we're upsetting everybody? But I do think that we absolutely objectively look at things as in like, that's what they're doing and that's sometimes very funny, or sometimes kind of amazing. I don't think it's the goal I've ever, you know, in any of the art I've worked on, reached out to achieve and achieved, but I absolutely can look at stuff and go, I see what this is. Like, I see this as art. And it's annoying to me when people lose their fucking minds over crap about how, like, they just can't see it for the joke that it is, or can't see it for the art that it is, and that it's not necessarily directed at anything or anyone, but the people making it do get excited, then people get pissed.

Oh, yeah, I mean, as a horror writer, I like upsetting people to a certain extent. You know, I, at least through my art, like, on a person-to-person basis, I never really want to upset anyone.

Man, do you know how many people I have met from that world, from your terrible world, where I, like, just the most pleasant people. Like, everything. I have met people who have made movies that, and you have too, usually together, where it's like, geez, Louise, that movie, that's very upsetting. You must be a lunatic. And they're just Fred fucking Rogers. They're just the sweetest people who are like, oh, hi, thanks so much. I really appreciate you watching it. Yeah, I know it was weird. You know, it wasn't as scary on set because, you know, we knew what we were making.

Yeah, yeah, no, for sure. I mean, I think that's a really common thread throughout the horror world. And, you know, it certainly raises an interesting conversation about the death of the artist and, like, at what point is it no longer your responsibility for how audiences interpret the work that you're putting out there, et cetera, et cetera. But that's kind of a whole other conversation.

Yeah, that was a huge aside I caused on music. I apologize. I know we're touching on music in the next episode, too, so that's on me.

So to try to keep this train somewhat on the highway to hell, to mix a metaphor, the McMartin preschool case is not only one of the country's most famous Satanic Panic cases, it's also one of the longest, craziest, and most expensive court cases in American history. And that's exactly what we're going to be talking about next week in part two of our dive into the fiery pits of Satanic Panic hell. It only gets wilder from here, so make sure to come back next Thursday to hear about what did and did not go down both above, below and in possibly the toilets of Manhattan Beach, California. Plus, Ed and I are going to take a look at an actual police training document that explores signs of Satanism in your children and community so you can see exactly how this sort of nonsense spread from town to town. And we'll discuss how all of this ties into the writing of one of the best pop rock songs of the century, if you ask me, Teenage Dirtbag by Weedus. We'll see you next week. Stay scared.

Scared All The Time is co-produced and written by Chris Cullari and Ed Voccola.

Edited by Ed Voccola.

Additional support and keeper of sanity Tess Feifel.

Our theme is the track Scared by Perpetual Stew.

And Mr. Disclaimer is ****.

No part of this show can be reproduced anywhere without permission. Copyright Astonishing Legends Productions.

Good night.

We are in this together.

Together.

===TRANSCRIPT END===