===TRANSCRIPT START===

Disclaimer, this episode features discussions of child harm, animal cruelty, and at least one call back to drug use. Additionally, this episode is the second part in the series. Part one is available anywhere you get your podcasts.

Welcome back to Scared All The Time. I'm Chris Cullari.

And I'm Ed Voccola.

In this week, we're presenting part two of our exploration into the Satanic Panic. If you missed part one, it's well worth a listen. We lay a lot of groundwork about how and why the Satanic Panic happened that should make some of the more shocking and strange stuff in this episode easier to follow. Maybe not easier to understand, but easier to follow because all of this is pretty nuts. So there's a lot to get into. We're going to start with the McMartin Preschool case, and then we've got some crazy documents that, I won't say they're exclusive because they're not exclusive. They were posted online, but they are real. And I don't think any podcast has ever read them aloud before. So it's going to be a...

Yeah, about most podcasts probably write up a nice thing about it. We were just animals who couldn't help ourselves. We were too excited like kids in a candy store. We just wanted to feel like, oh, can you believe this? Could you believe this? So get ready for that. Get ready for pure excitement.

Yeah, it's good times. It's good times. Good times for us, bad times for everybody involved in the case. But yeah, all this stuff is pretty nuts and we're going to have a lot of fun with it. So crank up the Iron Maiden, rev your firebird, crack a six pack and let out your inner dirtbag because we're back on the highway to hell and we're taking an exit to say Tannic Panic, part two. What are we?

Scared.

When are we? Now it is time for Tannic Panic.

Scandal all the time.

All right, as always, we got a little housekeeping up top. First of all, friends of the show, Max Perry and Jessica Rhodes just launched a podcast with Sony Music and Campfire called Kelly and the Satanic Panic. It's airing as part of the series infamous Inside America's Biggest Scandals, but it's pretty easy to find if you like this stuff, go Google Kelly and the Satanic Panic. I don't want to spoil anything, but I do know the story. Max is one of my good friends, and you have to hear what happened to Believe It as with all these stories. I think the show that they produced might be one of the most well-documented cases that tracks exactly how a Satanic Panic case can grow from unbelievable rumors to a shocking prosecution and all the damage that it can inflict on an innocent person's life. So go check that out. As some of you might've heard, we have a website now, scaredallthetimepodcast.com.

Yeah, you can find all our episodes there. You can get in contact with us there. You can find all of our socials there. And you can also find stuff like a blog, which is currently kind of being populated.

Our colleague Tess Spifel from Astonishing Legends has already put up the first blog. It's about the 7-Eleven Ouija board connection with photos from one of our listeners who went out to the 7-Eleven where the Ouija was invented before it was a 7-Eleven.

So you get a little behind the scenes there. And then I might be adding more to the blog soon with a new segment that will be an instant fan favorite, I'm sure, but we'll keep that under wraps at the moment.

Is it feet pics?

It's not feet pics.

The last thing we want to cover in housekeeping is that we got a pretty great response to the first part of this series, which was awesome. So if you guys dig this half just as much, let us know. We are really itching to do a part three. We have a potential really awesome guest for that. No promises, but we do have someone that could be really cool.

That said, in the world of guests and stuff like that, it might postpone things. So part three might not necessarily be next week. If we have to wait on something like that, then we would do that a little later.

We also might wait on research because I think if we did a part three, I would love to spend some time and do almost like a satanic panic iceberg, trying to go as deep as we can to find the weirdest offshoots and weirdest cases in the satanic panic. Because there were 12,000 cases documented, mostly in the United States, but also all over the world. And I only know probably about, I don't know, 10 of them off the top. Well, not even off the top of my head, but I've probably only ever heard of 10 or 15 of them that really made the news.

After this episode, I will have known two or maybe three. I'm learning, I'm new to the satanic panic game, guys.

I'd love to take some time to dig up really weird stuff or see if I could get some people who went through some of these cases to talk about it or something. I don't know. But if you guys like the satanic panic stuff, we'd love to do more. So let us know. If you hate it, we'll do something else, but we don't want to bore you.

But more importantly, or equally as important, let other people know. Let other people know. We're still growing the show. It's been a lot of fun. More and more people are showing up in the Facebook group, which has been really rad. We're hearing from a lot of people online. We love it. We love it. We love growing the show. Helping us grow the show is a very admirable thing you can do, and we love anyone who is doing that.

Yeah, and we've got Thanksgiving coming up. So if any of you have friends or family who need something to listen to instead of spending time with their friends and family, tell them to listen to the show. We'll have five episodes up by Thanksgiving.

And speaking of Thanksgiving, it's probably as good a time as any to say that I think we're going to be dark that week. I think we're going to not have an episode drop that week. So it'll be perfect time to catch up on everything. We're going to take the week off, like the many lucky people in this country who get time off during that week. We're going to do the same.

Yeah. And if you don't live in the States, I would invite you to also not go to work next week. Just stay home and listen to Scared All The Time. I think your boss will understand.

You can tell him that we said it's okay.

Yeah. We'll write you a note.

Oh, hell yeah.

But before we get to Thanksgiving or go any deeper in the Satanic Panic iceberg, there's still plenty left to cover on the surface, starting with where we left off last week with the McMartin Preschool trial. Quick recap, for anyone who forgot or didn't quite make it to the end of last week, the McMartin Preschool case is the most famous case in Satanic Panic lore because of its completely unprecedented scope and scale. And when I say unprecedented, I don't just mean for a Satanic Panic case, I mean for criminal cases in the United States in general. The McMartin Preschool trial was one of the longest and costliest trials in American history. It took seven years from 1983 to 1990 to prosecute and over $15 million in taxpayer money, all spent to stop the devil from abusing children. All that, and wouldn't you know it, the prosecution ultimately came up with nothing. Again, this case, like the West Memphis Three case, and like many of these Satanic Panic cases, is wildly complicated with so many little sub-branches of different weird stories and odd people who get involved. It's really hard to summarize how crazy this case got, but in an attempt to, let's start here.

Yeah, please do. I want to hear all about this.

So in the summer of 1983, a woman named Judy Johnson made a complaint to the Manhattan Beach Police Department. She called a report that her two-year-old son had been molested at McMartin Preschool. And a call like this would be pretty shocking anywhere, but it was really unexpected in this case because McMartin was the area's premier daycare. It was run by a local family, founded by a local woman, Virginia McMartin, run by her daughter, Peggy McMartin Buckey, and her grandchildren, Raymond Ray Buckey, and Peggy Ann Buckey. Now, Johnson's suspicions were a little hazy to begin with. She came to the conclusion that her son had been molested because he'd been attending McMartin when she noticed he'd developed a rash on his bottom and was suffering from rectal bleeding. It doesn't seem like her son actually said anything about being molested to his mother until Judy called to report this and her son was interviewed by Detective Jane Ho. He then told the Manhattan Beach police that he had been molested by Ray Buckey. Other reports suggest that Johnson's son never told Hoag this. There's a lot of back and forth on a lot of details of this case, so it's a little unclear. But whatever he said or didn't say, that report plus a follow-up examination at UCLA Medical Center was enough to get Ray Buckey arrested on September 7th, 1983. Hey, it's my birthday. Literally? Three years prior, but yeah, September 7th. But here's where things get immediately complicated. Because whatever that follow-up examination found, that was enough to get Ray Buckey arrested, and in my research, the most detail I could come up with was that whatever was found in that examination were signs consistent with molestation. But whatever it was, Buckey was released the same day because of lack of evidence. So those consistent signs couldn't have been very consistent, that they were enough to get him arrested, but not enough to hold him.

Or it was just they're consistent with a thousand things. If you're looking for a molester, you could say, well, yeah, these are consistent with molestation.

It also sounds like consistent with a diaper rash. So, you know.

Well, I don't know. That's what the woman found. I don't know if that is what the examination found. I'm just saying like the examination might have found other things that would prompt an arrest more than diaper rash.

Right. In any case, after Ray was released, Judy Johnson kicked things up a notch. She wrote a letter to the district attorney claiming that her son had not just been molested at McMartin. He had taken part in satanic ritual activity with McMartin employees. And to make this all more complicated, Judy was an alcoholic paranoid schizophrenic who died from complications from her alcoholism three years after she made all these allegations.

This kind of stuff can drive you to drinking. I don't know what drives you to schizophrenia.

I think she was drinking before all of this started, although I did read that her drinking got worse the longer that this case dragged on. But, you know, all this to say, like, God bless Judy Johnson. I don't know that she was the world's most reliable person as she was making some of these accusations. Before she died, she would also go on to make the accusation that her dog had been molested and that her ex-husband was involved in all of this somehow. So Judy said a lot of things that were questionably true and accurate. The fact that she was maybe not the most reliable person in the world and the fact that she was a paranoid schizophrenic didn't stop our old friends, the Canadian bad boy himself, Larry Pazder and Michelle Smith from Canada from getting involved once the word of these accusations reached them. To quote a great article about the case on therevealer.com, there was nothing of Satan in the allegations that inspired the initial McMartin Preschool inquest. Before Smith and Pazder involved themselves in the case, the McMartin parents primarily focused their allegations on Raymond Buckey and the idea that he had sexually assaulted one or more of the children enrolled at McMartin Preschool. But when the case started receiving national attention in February 84, that's the point at which Pazder and Smith offered their services and the children's testimony became decidedly demonic. Michelle Remembers and its authors shaped investigators' questions, prosecutors' agendas and the public's understanding of the case specifically in terms of ritual abuse. So these allegations that came out after Pazder and Smith got involved are originally what caught my attention about this case and the Satanic Panic when I first read about them online back in middle school. And they're crazy. They're absolutely nuts. But there is this sort of sinister dream logic to a lot of the accusations.

You read about this in middle school? Did you have to use like keyword Satan? Middle school is early Internet, man. Real early Internet.

I know. And I don't remember how I stumbled across it. I spent a lot of time reading about ghosts and the Loch Ness Monster and aliens and Satanists and all that kind of anything. X-Files related was most of my early Internet experience. So I don't remember where I read any of this or how I found it, but I remember being very spooked by the stuff that I was reading because I didn't necessarily think it was real. But again, it had this like weird dream logic to all of it that just made my skin crawl. And at the same time, I was starting to read Stephen King. I think I was probably starting to read it. So my imagination for this stuff was primed. So imagine being a 13 year old already with your brain filled with all kinds of weird, scary shit and reading things like this. One kid at McMartin said that he'd seen a baby sacrificed in a church. Another said he'd been taken to a graveyard where he helped unearth a coffin and saw a body in the coffin that was then cut with knives.

Cut with knives? Like they got together and cut the dead body with knives? Or they saw the body had already been cut by knives?

I believe they were cutting symbols into the body.

Okay, so basically they were like, it's finger paint day at the preschool, but your canvas is a dead body.

I don't know if it was the kids being handed knives and told to draw their favorite cartoon characters in the flesh of this corpse, or if it was the teachers supposedly carving satanic symbols in the body. But either way, it pretty fucked up.

It's just one of those scenarios where the kids are all wearing an adult button down shirt backwards, like you do with finger painting, and they're all just carving up a body. I guess it would have been embalmed and stuff, so I guess there wouldn't be blood flying everywhere, but you still should probably have some sort of protective clothing on if you're going to be carving up a body.

Yeah, we don't know how fresh this body was. I mean, if it was really old, there wouldn't be much left to carve.

Well, yeah, that would be bad. That's a bad teacher, then, if you're bringing kids to a dusty old corpse. No, you want something that you can actually work on.

Something juicy.

A juicy body is probably the least you should expect in a premier preschool, like you said this one was.

Yeah, and then there were other interviews that mentioned preschoolers saw teachers flying in the air while dressed as witches, and one of my favorites, some students said they were flown in a hot air balloon to a place where they watched a giraffe get beaten to death, the baseball bat.

I'm sorry, that is not something to laugh at, but it's an amazing, like it's because a hot air balloon, someone's going to see that. It's so slow and unpredictable, like it would take forever to get to the location. Then where are you running into? What state was this? California?

Well, yes.

Where are you even running into drafts? Are you taking it to like the abandoned zoo at Hurst Castle?

Not to mention the fact that anyone flying this hot air balloon certainly would have been wearing a top hat and tails. And somebody would have noticed this man walking around with his hot air balloon.

Yeah, this nightmarish Willy Wonka who's scooping up kids in a hot, get in the basket. We're going to go beat up the drafts.

Yeah. And even crazier, some of the kids said they were flushed down the toilet into a secret room where they would be abused and then cleaned up before the end of the day and brought back up to their parents.

My dad was a plumber. There's just we're just not working with pipes that can do that. Just not 984, 984. I'll ask them. What kind of have you installed anything that can flush a whole kid? I'll ask them.

Yeah. Had ghoulies come out at this point? Were the ghoulies popping up out of toilets?

I'm pretty sure ghoulies is 85 the year of my birth. So I think this might have been inspired by this.

Maybe. And one kid was even shown a series of photographs and identified Chuck Norris as one of his abusers.

Stop it. Chuck. Chuck.

I know.

Sucks for Chuck, dude.

The defense did this to prove a point. So Mr. Norris was never asked to come testify.

But you're saying that the defense literally like put in a Chuck Norris photo to like prove these kids will just say yes to anything.

I think. I don't know exactly how it was presented, but I know the defense presented it. So I assume that the goal was or the idea was, look, the kids will just identify anyone if the right person asks them in the right way.

Sure.

One of the allegations that stuck around for a really long time was that this abuse happened in secret tunnels beneath the school, which seemed pretty easy to prove or disprove.

So we would hear that again just a couple of years ago. There's always secret tunnels, I'm not kidding, involved in all of these, whether it's Pizzagate, whether it's the Denver Airport, it always just comes back to they got secret tunnels, which is why we don't see it, why we don't hear it.

Yeah. And so at McMartin, they actually, I don't know if they demolished it first, if they demolished the preschool first or if they dug and then eventually demolished the school, but there were several excavations that did turn up evidence of old buildings that had been on the site and other debris from before the school was built, but no one ever found any evidence of secret chambers or tunnels or anything. But the reason that this rumor has persisted for so long is that, of course, believers counter that, well, you know, the tunnels were filled in before anyone had a chance to dig them up. So they were there, but the Satanists got word and they filled them up or whatever, which I guess is remotely possible. And I don't know anything about excavations.

I'm not a tunnel expert. I've never claimed to be a tunnel expert. I'm not going to start claiming that today, but it feels like there needs to be some structural integrity to make a tunnel. And you would probably see evidence of whatever keystone element of that. You know what I mean? Like you'd be like, oh, yeah, it looks like it looks like here a collapsed tunnel exists or filled in.

Yeah, right. Yes. There'd be some kind of like wooden structures or like fresh dirt or I don't know. Yeah, I also don't know anything about tunnel ology, but it seems to me like it'd be pretty easy to figure out. Yeah, if these had been filled in. So after seven years of this investigation, there were two huge trials. The first ended up clearing Ray Buckey's mother, Peggy, who owned the daycare on all counts and ultimately cleared Ray Buckey on 52 of his 65 counts. And he was freed on bail after more than five years in jail.

Were any of the counts that remained for molesting kids or was all of that dropped?

That's a good question. I don't know the counts that were that remained.

Because even if one of those counts was molesting kids, then fucking I'm not a fan of this guy. But if it was like, look, if they found out none of it was fucking true.

Well, no, the the the original claims, it had something to do with the kids saying that he was having pain when he was pooping basically. And that and that prompted a story about how Ray had, again, I believe, stuck a thermometer into his butt to take his temperature, which then morphed into Ray had molested him in a lot of other ways. And then the story kind of grew from there. So nine of the 11 jurors at a press conference after the case said they believe that Ray Buckey molested the kids, but there wasn't enough evidence to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt. And then the second trial retried Ray on six of the 13 counts, but resulted in a hung jury. All the charges against Ray Buckey were dismissed, and he spent those five years in jail without ever being convicted of a crime.

Oh, wacky. I guess, you know, there's two ways to three, actually, to get someone's temperature. So that's a little bit on him. It's a little bit on him.

Yeah, you know.

And look, I know because of the circumstances of our travel right now, I know you didn't have time to maybe get into every single count of this guy in everything, but I think it's pretty safe to assume that he put himself in a position.

Hey.

Oh, Jesus. Now he put himself in a position to be a person of interest. And I think you were saying that it was seven years, ten years, whatever much long. It seems like whatever he did probably didn't warrant the cost.

No. And the big question here is how does this happen? Like how does what should have been a fairly small case as to whether or not there was a creep working at a daycare center turned into this multimillion dollar, almost decade long criminal trial? And it's hard just give one answer because there are so many fucking moving parts in this story, including a guy who shared a jail cell with Raymond Buckey and said that Buckey confessed to him in jail, but then was prosecuted and convicted of perjury for that claim. There was a kind of like spotlight hungry reporter who was kind of the main reporter making his name on the story. And then it turned out he was sleeping with the woman who was the lead investigator questioning all the McMartin kids.

What?

So there is.

How is this not a movie? Or maybe it is.

I think it was actually a TV movie with I want to say James Woods playing one of the lead detectives or lawyers or something. I haven't seen it. But yeah, it's a ridiculous story that you could truly do a season of a podcast on. But what the case really hinged on and what so many of these satanic panic cases hinge on is the idea that kids don't lie, that they wouldn't make up this horrible stuff and that they're innocent and must be telling the truth about everything, which I don't have kids, but I was a kid once. And that seems like such a wildly naive thing to believe.

My niece has I don't want to get into the whole story that leads up to it, but one time she was eating pop rocks, which you can hear when someone's eating pop rocks or like blasting and blowing up and stuff. And he asked her if she was eating pop rocks. Did you eat the pop rocks? We said you couldn't have the pop rocks. They are blowing out of her fucking mouth. And she is like dead face just goes, no, no, I'm not like just like kids lie all the time. Yeah. And we'll look you in the face. And there's also, I think, periods where they like learn what lying is. And they're just like, this is amazing. I'm going to wear this glove a little bit longer. Just seeing what lying is like, just trying it out, you know?

Yeah.

Because otherwise I don't I don't know how you explain Pop Rocks blasting out of someone's mouth. And they're looking you dead in your eyes and just like, no, I'm not having Pop Rocks. Blowing out of her mouth.

I remember the name Rachel was once carved into my childhood desk in my room. And my mom asked my sister Rachel if she had carved her name in the desk. And Rachel was like, no, it wasn't me. It's like, come on. It was obviously you. Or even closer to the Satanic Panic. I remember a time, probably first or second grade, there was this kid in my class who hadn't been in school in the morning. And he showed up on the playground a little later in the day. And I don't, I certainly never saw him arrive or anything. But we were all like, whoa, Mike, what are you doing here? And he was like, oh, I don't remember. I don't know how I got here. And then a few hours later, he said that he'd been abducted by aliens and that they had dropped him off at the playground. And so kind of a weird.

But did you ever find out?

No, I mean, it was kind of weird, but who knows? Like he probably went to the dentist or the doctor. Like it's the sort of thing that I think about, like had it happen in the middle of the satanic panic.

Was it your friend or just a kid in your class?

He was a kid I knew, like we were kind of loosely friends.

OK, yeah, yeah. What you're saying is, is that realistically, he had a dentist appointment and he didn't want to seem like a lame pedestrian loser. So people are like, where were you? And he's like, you wouldn't believe it if I told you, aliens, dude. Oh, that didn't make me any cooler and no one wants to hang out. Well, then I don't know what else I can do. I don't know what else I can do.

Satanist. I was abducted by Satanist. How's that?

Quit it. Just say you went to the dentist. Having clean teeth is cool. Telling the truth is cool.

So, you know, maybe there would have been a wild trial in Hershey if I told my teacher that this kid like just appeared on the playground and didn't know where he'd been or something. But in any case, while there isn't really any evidence that anything ever happened to the kids at McMartin, there is evidence of how the cases were investigated. And I think the technical term for it would probably be fucking crazy style. Because after Ray Buckey was initially accused and questioned, he was released due to lack of evidence. And then the police made the truly unbelievable mistake of sending 200 letters to all the parents of the kids at the daycare. Asking them to question their own kids about if anything happened at school. What? Which is insane because parents are completely untrained for that kind of questioning, first of all. And the cops included a list of things specifically to ask their kids about.

Oh my god, this is textbook don't do this.

Yeah, including if their kid ever saw Ray Buckey tie another kid up.

Oh my god, so they're like literally leading witnesses.

Yes.

Like giving the kids, let's say 200 letters went out. Let's say 20 fucking parents ask. That's still 20 kids going to school the next day being like, did your parents ask you about any crazy shit? And the kid's like, yeah. And he's like, what'd you say? And the kid's like, no, and I did see him. And he was like, maybe I saw him too. I mean, this comes back to that, you know, Pokemon thing we talked about, which is like one kid maybe got sick watching the flashing lights in the episode. But by the end of that week, you know, 89% of the island of Japan, you know, had an epileptic seizure. So, yeah, this was a mistake. They should not do this.

Well, I mean, and I think a lot of these satanic panic cases ultimately became textbook, literal textbook cases of what you should not do. But besides even the kids talking about it, part of the problem was that the cops expected all of these parents to, or let's assume best case scenario, they expected all these parents to be level headed about this and not take the letter as evidence that something did happen.

Well, I think it probably didn't help that the letter was like, all right, when you talk to your kids, here's how you do it. Multiple choice. Did this guy A, slap your kid? Did he B, tie him up? Did he C, choose the worst thermometer option or D, all of the above? Really? There's not even an option that he didn't? There's like, no, no, no, we need one of those four and we need them by tonight.

Well, to the letter's extremely limited credit, it does include a lot of caveats about this being an ongoing investigation and that they aren't saying the school knew anything was happening. But still, you're essentially asking them and their children to help stop something from potentially happening again. Like, by sending the letter, there are parents who are going to go, oh, well, this is happening and we have to do something about it. Like, you can't assume that all the parents are just going to go, oh, gee, I'm glad the cops are being really proactive, even if there's a very small chance any of this is true.

Yeah, it is weird that the letter also came with pitchforks. What are we supposed to do with these pitchforks?

Yeah, matches, gasoline and pitchforks.

Oh, geez, it's cool. I mean, I love getting free shit. I wonder what year, because there was a time, I think maybe even as late as what we're talking about, where pretty much anything, like the police blotter, also included everyone's home addresses, which is so crazy.

Yeah, that was the era of, like, real street justice, you know? Like, someone's going to knock on your door.

Exactly, like, that's like, they don't pay us enough. Here's all the information you need.

Yeah, I mean, I assume, I mean, this is a tangent, but to me, that police blotter stuff always felt like the idea was to run someone out of town. It was like, we don't want you here, we're going to put your address out there, you know someone might come do something, so you better leave.

Which is a bummer if it ends up being bullshit. If it was, if it's in any potential situation where it was like, this is slander or whatever, or libel, like you literally did, you know, my info is out here, no one's going to unring this bell, toothpaste is out of the tube, like it's pretty rough judgment.

Yeah, and part of the reason I'm presenting all this McMartin Preschool stuff is because I think it's a really interesting, somewhat condensed, I say, in our three and a half of recording, but a somewhat condensed version of like, exactly how step by step this stuff happens. So this letter goes home, it's so sloppy to send this home. So now you have at least some parents operating from a foregone conclusion that something happened at this daycare, which means they are less likely to believe if their kid says they didn't see anything happen. Because if you're a parent who's concerned, who are you more likely to believe? The cops who sent a letter home saying, hey, something might have happened at this school, or your kid who says, no, no, no, nothing ever happened, you know, you're going to...

Well, if the kid says it the way you just did, yeah, you're going to go with the cops, oh, no, no, no, nothing happened, nothing. I didn't write my name on anyone's desk.

I don't know, Mom.

I would write someone else's name if I was going to carve into a desk. What time's dinner?

So at the same time, you have Canada's favorite bad boy, Larry Pazder and Michelle Smith.

Larry, Michelle, please, leave your shit up there. Don't come down here.

In the ear of the cops, talking about how all of this seems familiar to them, and now you have the ingredients for an investigation operating from a place from both the parents and the cops' perspective of, we know something satanic happened, and now we won't rest until we prove it. And add into this, everything that we study about the memory of children, especially, especially children, suggests that they're super suggestible. I think I said this earlier, but multiple studies have shown that researchers can create false memories in kids. We also know, and this I find fascinating, we know the kids are more likely to try to give answers to questions that don't make sense instead of saying the question doesn't make sense. So for instance, there was an experiment where researchers asked kids a bunch of nonsensical questions like, is milk bigger than water? And kids assumed there must be an answer instead of assuming that the question was flawed. So you'd have kids being like, well, you know, yeah, it is, because it comes in a bigger cup or I drink more of it, you know, but they're not really, the problem is the question doesn't make sense. And that's how kids are. They answer questions because they think there is an answer instead of saying, I don't know what you're talking about.

Also, I think kids want to feel, some adults want to be included in the conversation.

Yeah.

And if you say, I don't know or I don't understand, well, that's little kid stuff. Little kids wouldn't know and understand, but a kid, I think when they're with an adult, they want to not seem or be seen as a little kid too, because, you know, they feel like there's enough of that in their lives or they're not respected or whatever, nor should they be. They're fucking kids. They don't know anything. But here come the letters. But yeah, there is probably an element of that psychology probably as well.

Yeah, and I don't know specifically about the way that each of the kids in the McMartin case was questioned, but generally, to generalize, in a lot of these cases where the reports of abuse become crazier and crazier, they happen or they tend to revolve around really tenacious police officers who put these kids in a room for six, twelve, eighteen hours and drill them with questions because the officers are approaching it from the point of, this kid knows something and I need to get the kid to say it, even if they're afraid to say it. So the kids are crying, they're upset, they're hungry, they're tired, they want to go home, and even the most well-intentioned cop, and some of these cops, let's be clear, were not super well-intentioned. They were more interested in making a case than getting to the truth, but even the most well-intentioned cop who's thinking, I know this hurts this kid, but I need to get this out of them for their own good and for the good of these other children. So they'll say things like, look, we know what happened, we know what Mr. Bucky did, we know about the knife that he stuck in your friend Tim. We know, so just say it, just tell us. Even more so than kids talking amongst themselves, it's police officers taking statements from one kid and applying them to the next kid, and then that's how it snowballs. Because then the next kid says, oh yeah, there was a knife, and you know what? The devil was there too, you know? And then they go to the next kid and say there was the knife and the devil, and then what else? And then it just snowballs. And that's how you get to, well, there was a hot air balloon and we did kill a giraffe with a baseball bat.

Whoa, whoa, they didn't kill it, they just beat up the giraffe a little bit. Because if you kill it, then you have no second airplane left.

No, they beat it to death.

Oh no, oh no.

They beat it to death, they broke that motherfucker's long ass neck.

This whole time I've been like, I hope that giraffe's doing okay from earlier in the story.

It was not, no.

Confirmed, it's a...

Confirmed killed.

Jeffrey from Toys R Us, no longer with us, which actually died on a movie I was working on, The Real Jeffrey. And they had to just cover it with a tarp, like for a long time.

Wait, like the Toys R Us Jeffrey?

Literally Toys R Us, the same one from the commercial. It died on a movie I was working on.

The one in the commercial is a man in a suit.

No, that's post probably. Post the metaphorical hot air balloon coming for Jeffrey.

Yeah.

I just remember it was like a thing where they're like, yeah, we had an incident on set. We covered it with a tarp. And I was like, oh, Jesus Christ. I'm not saying the name of the movie in case there's some paperwork wasn't done correctly, but I wasn't in any position of power on it.

Right. So what really sucks here is, I mean, a lot of this sucks, but what really sucks to me, and I'm not making accusations, but it sucks that you now have this case that spends all this time and money trying to prove that Rape Hucky can fly and eats babies and kills giraffes instead of possibly proving that he touched some kids, which would actually keep the kids safe. You know, like instead, you're trying to prove this crazy stuff that does nothing for anyone. And even worse, now you have a case, and this is why one of the reasons I chose McMartin, because this was the first big one. So now you have this big case, it's sensationalized in the media, and each successive case that gets kind of either inspired or influenced or proven, quote unquote, off the back of the McMartin case makes at least some segment of the population more likely to believe the idea that there must be some truth to all this Satanism stuff they're hearing, because now Oprah's talking about it, Geraldo's talking about it, 2020 is talking about it. And so it just sort of snowballs into the culture. Like, you know, this first big case, there wasn't even the cultural aspect for kids to sort of absorb and then tell their own stories, and now all of a sudden there was.

I was watching an episode of Millennium just the other night, you know, 20 years too late, where there's a kid whose parents are killed or whatever, and they're the only witness, and the cops are like, we need to ask the kid what they saw, like, what does this X mean? What does these things mean? You know, we have an active, you know, killer out there, and it was Frank Black, the main character. His wife is like a child services person. It's great for the show, but the whole episode is about like fucking figure out how to do it without talking to this kid. Like, that's a level of trauma we're not trying to add here. It's more damaging for the kid than it is helpful for your case, potentially. So like, it's been five minutes. We haven't really explained to the kid what's really going on yet. Like, try and figure it out. And it's like a huge portion of the episode is them doing everything in their power to side skirt that. And it was made for a really interesting episode. But yeah, that's not real life, but it is interesting.

No, but one of the things that I think is so fascinating about all this is the fact that a lot of kids who went through these satanic panic trials, had memories implanted. And when I say implanted, I don't mean a mad scientist, like pried their eyes open, clockwork orange style, and like forced memories into their head. But they came to believe that some of these things happened to them. And some of these kids have grown up into adults who know logically that these things didn't happen, but have these weird memories of things happening to them. And it creates this weird dissonance in them. I actually, the first TV show that I ever sold was about a woman who had accidentally started a satanic panic case. And then as a grown up gets involved in a new missing persons case, and she has to sort through what was real for when she was a kid and the memories that still haunt her that may or may not have been real that were just put there by police investigators who were trying to get to the bottom of a case. So you have this weird mix of things that happen to people when they are pressured and coerced by police officers. And police officers made that much more likely to happen when they started touring around the country. And again, not every police officer is doing this, but there were some who intentionally or not took advantage of the environment and toured around the country to tell people, parents, teachers, other cops, how to look for signs of Satanism in their own communities. And we have...

So this is one of those things where it's like they're coming to like, you get called down to the auditorium or to the gym for like a special presentation from, you know, detective so-and-so to tell you about, you know, are there sixes drawn in your locker or whatever?

And we actually have at least one document. I mean, these aren't secret documents, but they're kind of ephemera that most people just threw out and kind of forgot about. But one Twitter user, this woman named Jenny Jordan posted a document that her sister found in a supply closet in the school that she worked at in 2018 that shows exactly what these cops were training people to look for. And spoiler alert, they were training people to look for basically everything and anything a teenager might ever say, do, like, or think. So we're going to open up this document right now, and we're going to provide a link to it. I highly encourage you if you were listening to this and you have access to a phone or a computer screen.

Oh my God, dude, I just opened it and it Chicago Police Department. No surprise. This is like a John Mulaney bit all of a sudden.

Yes, it's 25 pages of the most paranoid Reagan era cop posturing that really leaves signs of Satanism pretty open to interpretation. So this document is called, Identification, Investigation and Understanding of Ritualistic Criminal Activity, dated February 4th, 1989, presented by Robert Samandi, a detective with the Chicago Police Department. And the first thing that it tells us is that there are four stages of Satanic activity. Primary, number one. Secondary, number two. Third level.

They completely changed the formatting. Number three.

Third level, number three. And fourth level, number four, which is defined as dabbler or experimentalist. So I assume, even though this doesn't go out of its way to explain this to us, that fourth level is the lowest. And primary, or the first, is the primary stage of Satanic activity.

And third level, I think that's when you've become full, on an evolutionary scale, you've become full Satanist.

You've become a full Pokemon.

But third level has a subtitle of self-styled. So I guess that just means Goths.

Yeah, basically.

If you like the cure, you're probably well on your way to second and first base.

Absolutely, because the characteristics next of a teen involved in Satanism, these are some of the characteristics that might lead you to believe a teen is involved in Satanism. Before we read these, I just want you to imagine you are a parent or a high school teacher. And how many teenagers you may notice one or more of these signs in? Youth subcultures, fantasy role play, male slash female, which I think would include every teen.

Yeah, in 1989, that covers every teen in 1989. By virtue, it's just weird because I'm looking at the same document Chris is. It just says male slash female. Like it doesn't say anything more than that.

Intelligent, underachiever, middle or upper class family, creative, curiosity beyond norm, not property counseled after death, which I assume...

It's supposed to be properly, but they wrote property.

Oh, not properly counseled after death of loved one, fundamentalist religious family, low self-esteem, difficulty relating to peers, bored, alienated from family and religion. So, a sign of being a characteristic of a teen involved in Satanism could be a male or female teenager who is bored and alienated from family and religion, or a male or female teenager who is part of a fundamentalist religious family. So, there's really no, like, this includes everyone.

I mean, this is truly, if we were playing a game of guess who...

You would guess no one, or everyone.

Yeah, there's nobody left on the board, or the board, I don't remember exactly the rules, or the board remains completely up. Like, yeah, I guess because it would be like, oh, there's a person of glasses, and you would say no, and you knocked on everyone without glasses or whatever. Holy shit, yeah, this pie chart has no slices in it.

It's just every teenager. So, that's part A. Part B, what can be involvement is the question.

God, it's amazing that this was distributed and handed out. I think they mean what can be involved.

Yeah, this doesn't speak highly of the intelligence of Chicago police detectives at the time.

Well, you know how you know a surefire way to know if you're a Satanist is if you proofread.

Yeah, that's right.

So, they couldn't proofread or else they might be subject to being called a Satanist.

Yeah, exactly. So, this has to be sloppy as shit just like the investigations that they led.

It's just like the 93 year investigations. Make it longer, make it sloppier here at the Chicago PD. We learned from the District Attorney of California, you got to make it long, you got to make it sloppy.

So, what can be involvement? Number one, suicide, two, drugs, three, murder, four, sexual or physical abuse, five, criminal damage to property, six, rituals, seven, burglary and eight, animal mutilation. So, every crime.

Yeah, but you can probably move six, eight and three to the front of the line. Where I think if it's like, you know, rituals with animal mutilation and murder, yeah, there might be something going on here.

And then C, warning signs of possible involvement in Satanism. Number one, withdrawn from family and religion, or perhaps a drop in grades, or perhaps a lack of humor. So, if you're just a nerd who wants to be left alone, you could be a Satanist, or if you're a goth who is hurting yourself in a ritualistic manner. Number six, just cuts and burns.

Which is not exclusive to goths, but it is mainly done by teens.

Sure. Now, part D is really, really light. What leads to involvement is either one of two things. Curiosity.

Oh, curiosity is back. Curiosity.

Or two, lured into free sex and or drug parties.

Wait, and here's the thing. I don't know if you get to free sex and drug parties without some element of curiosity. So I do see how that's a gateway drug. But man, they are all about, if you are a teen who shows interest in anything, that's bad. If you're a teen who's not blindly following the code of the school or the church or the government or what have you, there's a good chance that you're up to no good.

This document is essentially suggesting that if you are a teenager who is not somehow already a middle-aged Republican, that you are open to being preyed upon by Satanists. We won't read every single thing here because it goes on forever, but the next part is heavy metal themes, influence of aggressive behavior, graphic violence, explicit sex, etc. Symptoms of increased involvement, I assume, in Satanism, it doesn't say. Number one, padlock on bedroom door. I could tell you I was not a Satanist and I didn't have a padlock on my bedroom door, but that seems...

Well, hold on. I think there's a real thing being left out here. If the padlock's on the outside of the door versus if the padlock's on the inside of the door. If the padlock's on the outside of the door, you should be talking to these Satanist parents. If the padlock's on the inside of the door, this person just doesn't, they don't want to be left alone.

Number two, writings revealing problems. Now, the two things that they note as writing that could reveal problems are writing Natas lived in parentheses Satan devil.

Well, that's backwards.

It's Satan backwards, which is a real tricky way to write things.

It's, God, it's fucking nightmare because it's Satan lived. No, wait, what? Okay.

It's Natas lived, I see.

So Natas is Satan, lived is devil, and they're both backwards, but by virtue of one coming first in the traditional sense of how we fucking read, it's really not backwards anymore.

So that reminds me of the first time I got high, I was watching the animated Batman vs. Dracula and Dracula's name was this new guy had moved to town and his name was Dr. Acula and I was tearing my hair out that the best detective in the world could not figure out the source of the vampiric crimes was Dr. Acula.

I will say Scrubs does a really good Dr. Acula bit like a lot of I think a bunch of comedians have done Dr. Acula. It's weird that how many times people go to that well, but it's always great. And then it looks like the second thing here is Wasp. We are Satan's people.

But it's also white Anglo-Saxon Protestant, which is something that any alienated teen in the suburbs would describe their parents or their friends' parents as Waspy or something like that. They're not saying we are. This is like, you know, when people look at like, I mean, now it's not aim, but like texting slogans, you know, or texting lingo and it's like LOL means laugh out loud. But, you know, some people will post it as like, it means something horrible that your kids are texting about. This is what this was.

Yeah. Like, did you check your kid's phone? He keeps writing LOL. And it was like, yeah, that's fine. Oh, is it? You think it's fine for Lucifer only Lucifer?

Exactly. Exactly. So we're still doing that.

I think we gotta have a town meeting.

So there's a bunch of other things here. Tarot cards, candles, ceremonial knives, in parentheses, letter opener will suffice, which is completely, a letter opener is the exact opposite of a ceremonial knife, unless you're ceremonially opening your IRS forms.

God, that's so funny. That's so funny that it has a parentheses, that it will suffice.

Letter opener will suffice. Blackwall's altar, I love number 13. Use of alphabets in parentheses, more advanced stages.

I don't even know what that means. I genuinely don't even know what that means.

I guess if you're a teenager who knows how to use the alphabet in an advanced way, perhaps to spell or make words.

You know what's really funny is, this is coming from a cop, right? And the most advanced way to use the alphabet that I can think of offhand is if you're in like a DUI check and they ask you to recite it backwards. I think if you can do that, which no one can do, but I guess if you're a Satanist, you can do it.

Yeah, that's the more advanced.

So it's funny coming from them who require advanced stages of the alphabet, pretty regularly in their day to day.

Yeah, Detective Simondi. Caution. Do not destroy or take items. Seek professional evaluation. Don't confront. Identify treatment plans. So what the cops here are encouraging is...

The caution is for, I assume, the parent.

Yes, but what they're encouraging is, caution, if your children express any sort of behavior that is normal for a teenager, don't discuss it with them. Just go come up with some secret plan to essentially like throw them into a re-education camp and maybe things will be fine.

Yeah, because it's funny that part of the way to help the kid is to not confront. Like, literally, don't destroy the items. We need those for arbitrary evidence. Don't confront them about this, but do seek professional evaluation without their input at all and then have that person identify a treatment plan, which it kind of sounds like the only version, if you read that at face value, was like, all right, listen, at seven o'clock, we're putting a bag over this kid's head, and then he's going to come back loving Jesus or at the bottom of a fucking lake. Like, that's it.

And I love that the resource groups on the next page, one of the very few offered resources here is BAD, B-A-D-D, which stands for Bothered Against Dungeons and Dragons. And the last one is just a guy named Mike Wernke in Danville, Connecticut. The rest of them are organizations, but the last one is just a guy who lives in Danville, and there's no explanation of who he is or what he does. It's just like...

No idea. It's Danville, Connecticut, my home state, don't know that town, but Mike... You know what this reminds me of a little bit? Two things. One, for the people who can't see this, it's an alarming number of PO boxes, first off. And then secondly, it's very similar. Do you remember Scruff McGruff? Yes. So the thing about Scruff I always found amazing, it reminds me of the Mike Wernke of it all. The thing about Scruff McGruff is if you remember the song, it was Scruff McGruff, Chicago, Illinois, 60652. You're missing an incredible piece of information in that. There is no address. It is just Scruff McGruff in the city of Chicago. It's kind of like Santa Claus, I guess. It'll get to them.

But this isn't, it's not Detective Mike Wernke, it's not Senator Mike Wernke, it's not Reverend Mike Wernke, it's just a guy named Mike in Connecticut got his name on here.

Yeah.

So, I mean...

That's amazing. That's amazing.

The guys have since looked him up and boy oh boy is Mike Wernke a piece of work. Turns out he was this comedian who was viewed as a quote unquote expert on Satanism in the 1980s before being exposed as a fraud by a Christian magazine in 1992. Well, he sure sounds like a garbage person, and completely makes sense on this list.

Anyone know Mike? Get us in touch with Mike. We need to get Mike on the show.

I need to know how many kids...

As a fellow nutmegger, he might listen to me.

That's true, that's true. And then so the rest of this document, I mean, we won't take you guys page by page through everything, but there's a lot of stuff here about different symbols from horned hands to swastikas to the moon to the peace sign which according to this document signifies the cross of Nero.

I will say that there is, this is a little bit like one is not like the others. This is like, oh, horned hand, the anarchy symbol, the crescent moon. Yeah, I'm gonna go ahead and say that swastika shouldn't be on the same level as some of these other ones.

I mean, one of the symbols to look out for here is literally the circle, which has different meanings. So if you write a circle in your male or female teenager's room, it could mean that they are satanists.

I remember the late 80s, early 90s. Okay, spiral graph was a tremendous toy. Yeah, and it was just kids were drawing circles fucking nonstop.

Yeah, so and then there's trail markers. There's a sample altar that shows you how an altar might be laid out, inverted cross of satanic justice that might be carved into a victim's chest. Oh, yeah. Which I would like to point out involves a dead murder victim, which is a far cry from being a teenager who listens to heavy metal music.

Yeah, I think you have a bigger issue if it's like, yeah, you know, I read your material and we did see a lot of this stuff carved into their victims. And it was like, you have a bigger problem here. You should talk to your kid about not murdering. That is a fucking problem, dude. That should be on page one. Page one is like, murder? Did it happen? Don't keep reading. Call the fucking police. Yeah, you know, this is the funniest document I've ever seen in my life, dude. This is amazing. I also want every one of these as tattoos.

The body markings. There's a whole page of body markings that indicate you're a Satanist. Black panthers, goat heads, upside down cross, black widow spiders. So basically everything you see if you take too much Benadryl. The hat man is not on here, but clock with hands is one of them.

The traditional clock are like human hands.

It just says clock with hands. So unclear if that's a Disney style cartoon clock. And then literally a note that says, these are just some of the body markings you may come across. Do not be limited by this list as you may find many other markings indicative of involvement in ritualistic criminal activity.

I do love that. It's like, hey, I know we mentioned circles, but the thing about Satan is he will pop up in everything you see. So, you know, it's a real like don't be limited. If you're a hammer, everything's a nail.

Yeah. And there's literally in signs and symbols here, you know, talk about like, you know, the way that heavy metal got pulled into this between the symbol demon that guards the gates of hell and serpent are Eddie, the Iron Maiden mascot and Murray, the Ronnie James Dio mascot.

I thought you were going to say Rodney Dangerfield and I'm like, how did poor Rodney get pulled into this?

I don't know who Murray is, the Ronnie James Dio mascot. And then the rest of this is just drawings that I assume the police officer made. So essentially, this document is a map to how we end up at the last thing I want to discuss in this episode. The song Teenage Dirtbag by Wheatus.

Love it. Love it. Big fan.

Quick Wheatus sidebar for those of you who are not Wheatus fans.

Or as old as us.

Ed, wait, how much Wheatus are you familiar with?

I'm going to go ahead and say I know that song and only that song.

Well, first of all, that song is a Stone Cold classic. No irony or like joking. I genuinely think Teenage Dirtbag might be like one of the songs of the 2000s that is remembered a hundred years from now. It's so simple.

It's like that in Semi-Sonic's closing time. You don't have to defend it because One Direction, I'm pretty sure, plays it every concert.

Yes. I was going to mention that. Like they actually, Wheatus had a big resurgence because One Direction started covering Teenage Dirtbag. And I believe Wheatus actually opened for One Direction on a bunch of big UK shows. So they've had a big comeback. But I just want to encourage anyone. I know Brendan Brown, the singer's voice is, it's a choice for sure. And it's a little much for people. But they wrote a bunch of purely fucking sick pop songs. If you like quirky pop music, they're the best. Their first record is good. The second record was originally released, I think, as Suck Phony, which was rearranged for Fuck Sony, very Satanist style, because they were pissed at Sony, who was their record label. I think it's called Hand Over Your Loved Ones now, but they're just really fucking killer singer-songwriters, and they even have like a weird Prague experimental phase in kind of the mid-2000s that you might like more than their straightforward pop songs, but they're great. Anyway, all that said, the reason that Teenage Dirtbag and Wheatus find themselves in this episode is because in the summer of 1984, just as Brendan Brown, the singer-songwriter of Wheatus, started finding his musical identity, a 17-year-old who lived on his block, which you may remember from the song, he lives on my block, he drives an iRock, named Ricky Caso lured his friend Gary into the woods and stabbed him to death, supposedly in the name of Satan. Ed, it was absolutely a really brutal murder, no questions about it. Caso stabbed Gary between 17 and 38 times and possibly cut out his eyeballs, but they don't know for sure because his body was in the woods for so long that animals may have eaten his eyeballs. The question, though, is whether or not this had anything to do with Satanism or the fact that Gary had stolen PCP from Ricky in the past and they were all high on LSD when the murder happened.

Wait, so he stole PSP, but they take LSD recreationally? These are completely separate drugs.

Yes, Gary had stolen PCP and Ricky said that they were on mescaline when the murder happened, but evidence shows that it was probably LSD and not mescaline. So who knows what Gary actually...

So it could very well have been not about the devil and more about a grudge and their brains were fucked on drugs.

And Ricky was absolutely a fucked up guy. He and his friends, they were what we would call edgelords now. They sold weed and called themselves Knights of the Black Circle, which the cops call the satanic cult and I don't think they were, but it's a creepy name.

I mean, you get a little bit of that Columbine Trenchcoat Mafia stuff there. Nothing to do with Satan.

And Ricky was, it's in the record, his parents admitted him to the South Oaks Psychiatric Hospital, better known as, I shit you not, the Amityville Asylum in Amityville, New York for drug rehab and psychiatric care. And in the year prior to the murder, Queso had also been arrested for digging into a colonial era grave inside a local cemetery. So Ricky Queso, not a psychologically well person, but not necessarily, you know, committing his life to conjuring Satan himself. But most damning for Brendan and Wheatus was that Ricky was a metalhead or a dirtbag in the parlance of Rolling Stone at the time. And all of a sudden, Brendan's favorite music was in the spotlight. ACDC, Iron Maiden, Metallica, All Suspect, and Brendan's parents forced him to take a train an hour and a half each way to go to an all boys Catholic school instead of his local high school.

Because they didn't know, they were afraid, like, I don't know what's going on here in this town. This town seems overrun by Satan.

Exactly.

And I'm looking at your record shelf, and you've got all the same shit they're saying in the news. Obviously, you might have been infected by whatever Ricky has. You have to now take an hour and a half to commute to a new school. That sucks. That sucks.

And Brendan hated it there. So even though the phrase Teenage Dirtbag, which was a phrase that he came up with before he ever wrote the song, the phrase would go on to help him launch this career, but so many teenagers weren't so lucky, like the West Memphis Three we discussed before. You know, they were just three guys, some of whom were not fully mentally sound, who were in the heavy metal and comic books, and ended up spending decades in prison for a murder they didn't commit. And I think it's really fascinating that literally the guy who wrote Teenage Dirtbag, if his situation had been just a little different and something else bad had happened in his town, who knows? He could have gotten wrapped into a similar thing. The West Memphis Three were basically him. He just happened to become a really talented singer-songwriter, and they went to jail. But I'm not saying Brendan was involved in any crimes. The West Memphis Three weren't either. There was obviously an unsolved crime in their town, whereas this crime was very much solved. But if it hadn't...

He did have to deal, if I'm not mistaken, I saw an interview or something a couple years ago with him, where it was like... You know, because I remember the song when it was new. Okay, I remember it.

We both did.

It's original radio play, it's original goddamn MTV play, the music video, what have you. I remember the video very vividly, and it's like he's in a high school or whatever. And they famously bleeped out the word gun, because the song was coming out on the heels of Columbine, and he has a line in the song that's talking about this dirtbag that says he brings a gun to school, and they were like, you absolutely can't do that. And he was getting all this heat about what the song was about, from the record label. Then the record label was like, we want you to record it clean. We want you to change all these lyrics. He's like, I don't want to do any of that. So like the, I believe that they were like, we'll put a record scratch over the word gun. It ran up against so much crap, misguided bad advice about how he should censor this song and censor his music because of that same fear that people had. Walmart, if I'm not mistaken, would not carry the record because of all that shit.

That's fucking crazy.

And it's such a fun song.

It's such a fun song because, like, obviously his influences were Iron Maiden and ACDC. And I think I even heard him say once that, you know, he wanted to have a big rock song in the key of E, which is like what the key that Tom Sawyer is in. And like he wanted that song. And this was that song for him. But this song is so much less, you know, not that Tom Sawyer is a particularly controversial song, but Teenage Dirtbag is literally on the soundtrack to like teenage romcoms. Like it's a very palatable, sing along, mainstream, acoustic guitar driven song. And yet people were terrified of playing it. Like it was going to conjure fucking school shootings because he said a guy had a gun on his block. Like it's so silly that he had to go through that.

And we also have to remember at the time it was written, I mean before it really came out to us, like I know America has changed so much. Like my niece and nephews and my good friends' kids are quite literally have some very different school experience than we ever had. But like at the time that was written, that wouldn't even cross his mind as to be controversial. Because there wasn't such a thing as an epidemic of school shootings in this country. There wasn't anything like that at the time.

It's true. It's true. And God bless him. I mean, I love that band. Brendan Brown, if you're listening to this, you fucking rock. You wrote an anthem literally for a generation and whatever you had to go through to make that song, I don't want to say it was worth it because I know it was really painful, but you made a lot of people's lives better by writing that song. And if you ever want to come on the podcast and talk Satanic Panic with us, we'd love to have you. I feel like this may not be the only episode we ever do on the Satanic Panic because I think it really is maybe one of the most defining moral panics of the past hundred-some-odd years because, like I said at the beginning, it speaks to urban legends, religion, conspiracy theory, politics, popular culture, music, movies, entertainment. It was both influenced and would go on to affect everything in our country in large and small ways. And I think by trying to understand the causes of the Satanic Panic, it's a window into the same kind of paranoias and panics that spread online now that Ed and I were joking about earlier being like, well, yeah, you know, no one had the internet, so of course you couldn't go look up if the CEO of Procter & Gamble actually said this on Merv Griffin or not. But what's really scary is that now we do have the internet and these things still spread. They're just, they spread in different ways and people still don't check. People still don't click the link. People still don't apply any logic or thought or research when they hear something that feels right. It feels to them and their worldview like this must be true. And so it's easy to spread.

I think that's a good segue into fear tier.

Yeah, where do you place this on the fear tier?

For exactly the reasons you were just saying, pretty high, pretty high. Not in the sense that I think I'm going to be affected tomorrow by someone knocking on my door being like, I saw a circle in your address.

As in drawing circles.

That's just the fucking zero in my apartment number or whatever. I don't think someone's going to see a circle drawn on my door and hassle me about it. So it's not such a direct fear as that, but I think the fear that should just be kind of always in existence. It's that same kind of unyielding fear of that Twilight Zone episode, The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street, which is that weird mass hysteria. How did we get here? There's no proof of anything. Why are we at each other's throats without even really knowing what's going on and whether it's the McCarthy era, communist shit or just general Cold War crap followed by, I don't know, fucking putting explicit lyrics on CDs in the 90s and early 2000s or the Wheatus stuff, Iron Maiden, all the metal shit or video games in Columbine and just trying to find so many external sources for internal issues, queer fear, you fucking name it. Like all this crap, this blanket crap, it's just going to keep happening. So for me, it's high on the fear tier because it just seems so cyclical and it's annoying as hell.

It's true.

So yeah, I would say it's high. I would say it's high.

It's interesting. You tackled this for the fear tier from a very 30,000 foot kind of philosophical view. And I agree with you. Philosophically, I place it high on the fear tier. Practically, I place it pretty low on the fear tier, especially ever since I stopped worshiping Satan. I feel like nobody's going to come and try to bang down my door.

But you've also never looked worse. I think you should go back.

Oh, my God. It's the lighting, man.

No, I'm just kidding.

But no, I mean, literally being the victim of a satanic panic investigation is more likely than being the victim of Satanist. And being the target of a satanic panic investigation is fairly low. So like practically and immediately, I would place it low.

I feel like maybe that's a little bit just to interrupt for a moment. I wonder if how much of this changes if we had kids, just because if our kids were anything like us, they would absolutely be the targets of a satanic panic. Like in the next satanic panic, whatever it is, they would definitely be curious. They'd be fucking cool. They'd be artsy.

Yeah.

And they would absolutely have a problem. So I'd be a little bit more afraid that like, yeah, my kid is going to be subject to this if it passed on my generation.

When I was a teenager, for sure. I mean, I was a teenager in the early 2000s. So 20 years after, well, 15 years after this was really an issue. But certainly, I mean, my attitudes and tastes as a teenager could have been swept up in some of this. But I agree with you that psychologically, in terms of the things that caused the satanic panic, I would place this very high on the fear tier. I still would put Hat Man higher on the fear tier and hot piss and shit. But you know, satanic panic is definitely up there.

So I'm starting to think that because we don't have a clearly defined iconography of the fear tier, I don't think it's too late to potentially put a sidecar on there. And the sidecar could be more of the existential fears. And then the actual motorcycle itself, which motorcycles are not tier based, but I'm just saying the actual main ladder would be immediate and physical and direct where we have this sidecar, which is more existentially.

Existentially, satanic panic frightens me. And that's why I'm obsessed with it, because it just feels like it will always happen in some form or another. And maybe, Ed, that's because the devil exists. This has been Scared All The Time.

Brought to you in part by the devil.

Brought to you by the devil. I'm Chris Cullari.

I'm Ed Voccola.

This has been Scared All The Time, and we'll see you next week.

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.

We are in this together.

Together.

Together.

===TRANSCRIPT END===