Episode Transcript
Hey, everybody, I want to share something special with you this week.
It's an episode of a new podcast I'm pumped about, called The Devil You Know.
In the nineteen eighties and nineties, Satan and his followers were accused of brainwashing children, sacrificing babies, and infiltrating North American society on a massive scale.
Yet these thousands of alleged Satanists were nowhere to be found.
Even so, the narrative became embedded in our cultural memory, wharping everything at touched, including the lives of innocent people, and it never quite died out.
You may know Sarah Marshall as the host of You'r Wrongabout.
In her new show, The Devil You Know, she explores the tangled web of the Satanic Panic, a journey that will take you everywhere from Victoria, BC to rural Kentucky to San Antonio, Texas.
This is a show about the people who experienced the Satanic Panic in real time, the believers, the skeptics, the bystanders, the wrongfully convicted.
What was it like to be a psychologist told to look for Satanists?
In every case?
A mother slowly recovering memories of supposed satanic abuse, a teenager accused of conspiracy to murder.
The stories of these eyewitnesses point us toward the real underlying problems, and you can probably guess the problem wasn't the Satanists, but us.
Okay, here comes the episode.
You can find the devil, you know wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 2I didn't have any clue what that was all about, but now our teacher made it clear that I should get the hell out right away.
Speaker 3This is Diane.
She's a photographer.
Diane is not her actual name, but what I've given her for her privacy and also in honor of one of my favorite women of the eighties, Diane on Cheers.
Speaker 2I'm an artist, photographer, designer, art educator, digital designer, and more.
Speaker 3Diane was telling me about a project she was working on in the late nineteen eighties.
Speaker 2I planned and I arrived in the full.
Speaker 3It had her traveling around Kentucky.
Speaker 2I wasn't staying permanently then, but I was there to kind of establish the program, find a place to live, and kind of get things going.
Speaker 3She was photographing locals and also teaching them photography.
Speaker 2The first time I went, we had this little after school club of girls who were really interested in photography and very enthusiastic.
And they went home and told their families, and their families were really friendly, and they were inviting me over for dinners and stuff.
So when I left there the first time after a two week residency, I left with a really warm place in my heart for the town and its people.
Speaker 3She worked with people of all ages, including local high schoolers.
That's what brought her to this particular small town.
Speaker 2So it was a pretty old town.
It was really scenic and beautiful, kind of nestled in the hills or maybe there were mountains.
I don't know.
Speaker 3But before Diane could really settle in and get to work, something happened that made her want to get the hell out of Dodge.
Speaker 2And the art teacher turned to me, looked at me real seriously, and he said leave right away.
So I did.
I mean?
I arrived in the town hopeful and optimistic, ready to like work hard and do good work.
Yeah, And when I left, I couldn't drive fast enough.
It was just pedal to the metal.
I just couldn't put the miles between me and that place fast enough.
I didn't know if I'd end up in a jail or if I would end up, you know, thrown in a cave.
Speaker 3Diane, a stranger in a small town, had unwittingly become the target of a conspiracy.
Speaker 2You know.
At the time, I remember hearing about, you know, pentagrams on the floor of barns and all kinds of stuff like that.
I mean, I thought maybe it could happen, but I really didn't believe it.
Where could all these like, all of a sudden, all these devil worshipers pop up.
Speaker 3What happened to Diane was a microcosm of a larger conspiracy sweeping the nation throughout the nineteen eighties.
It was a conspiracy about a conspiracy.
It was a story where rumor became panic, and eventually that panic became legend.
That legend has always fascinated me.
But to see it only from the distance of the present is to not see it at all.
The grand sweep of the narrative turns it into something that happened to a country or a culture.
But that also means it happened to individuals, and each of them saw something a little different.
I thought, could this have happened?
You know, I mean, it questioned it because it's like we had such a strange childhood.
Speaker 4Anyways, the first version of it was that this was somehow wrapped up in the mafia.
And then the next iteration I heard was that there were some group of people at the school called the Group, especially some goth people.
Speaker 5I remember two days later, maybe even a day later, I received a call from Detective Majeca.
Speaker 2You know, would you come in and come and talk to me or.
Speaker 3I'm sure you know I have nothing to hide.
Speaker 1Unfortunately, that was the worst thing I could have ever done.
Speaker 3So what did it look like to the individuals who got caught up in this panic, often in ways that they could never have imagined.
Today, we're going to see it through Diane's eyes.
Come with me as I traced the development of one small strange rumor, a rumor involving virgin sacrifice, grave robbing, and Patrick Swayzee.
I'm Sarah Marshall, and this is the devil you know, Welcome to the eighties.
Here's what's in legwarmers, Madonna, phones that look like Star Wars, trili gy and government initiative.
Michael J.
Fox, the de Laureate.
I'm Gohay Fox, Si Cha Koozi vcrgumic, cyndy, lauper, aquanett, fishnets, and also apparently Satanism.
Speaker 6Good morning everyone, I'm Richard chair and welcome to people are talking on this Monday.
We are live on Television Hill and as you know by watching previous programs on people are talking that Satanism seems to be on the rise here in the United States.
Speaker 3People, especially Americans.
We're getting this information not from the fringes, but from mainstream sources like local morning news shows and unnationally syndicated daytime talk shows like the Uprah Winfrey Show.
Speaker 5In every state in the nation, authorities are investigating some form of what they call botanic activity, which is covinar.
Speaker 3Reportedly, people also heard these stories on primetime news, like in this investigation by ABC's twenty twenty.
Speaker 7Dardling sobering results of a twenty twenty investigation, Satanism, devil worship is being practiced all across the country.
Speaker 8We have all types of perversion going on as.
Speaker 7Affecting America, perverse hideous acts, DeFi belief, suicides, murders, and the ritualistic slaughter of children and animals.
Speaker 3Satan has been in North America for a long time, at least according to some, began to enjoy a new level of notoriety.
In the nineteen sixties and seventies, Anton Levy was freaking people out with his Church of Satan in San Francisco, a church that, if you read the literature, was about worshiping not Satan, but yourself and your ability to do whatever you wanted.
The public reeled from news of the Manson family murders in the wake of their nineteen sixty nine crime spree, a case in which teenage girls ran away from home and ended up in the thrall of a man who commanded them to kill.
Surely, just some guy couldn't be responsible for such horrific crimes.
Surely it had to be Satan, and members of the growing evangelical Christian movement began arguing that the Age of Aquarius was really affront for Satan.
One day you're reading a horoscope, the next day you're sacrificing a goat.
But it's hard to know if Satan would have become quite the American obsession he was if he hadn't also been such big business.
Speaker 8Satan his father, that guy, he came up from Hell and beget a son, a mortal woman.
Speaker 7Pale Haydans his father and his name is Adrian.
Speaker 3That was Rosemary's Baby from nineteen sixty eight.
It established a market for devil movies, and there was no devil movie bigger than The Exorcist in nineteen seventy three, which told the story of an adolescent girl possessed by a demon and the two noble Catholic priests who saved her from evil.
Speaker 7An excellent day an excitator.
Speaker 3But this pervasive fixation on Satan, both religious and secular, achieved a new level of urgency in the nineteen eighties.
Now stories of Satan tanic activity were no longer just in the movies.
They were happening in your very own town, or at least that was what people were saying.
Speaker 9And we have essentially in a moral panic, a somewhat regressive movement that it's trying to restore old moral lines or old cultural habits, you know, kind of like the good old days, that the social change was really threatening to upend.
Speaker 3That is Mary to Young, professor emeritus of sociology at Grand Valley State University.
And according to Mary, many of these fears tend to center around children and teenagers.
And the harms that might befall children, both physical and moral.
Speaker 9I mean, there was a lot of anxiety about what was going on in the family during that period of time.
That was it's one of the sources of social stress.
There was a higher rate of divorce, a higher rate of what were referred to them as non traditional families.
We also were dealing with the consequences of a recession.
We had more and more women going to work, and you had a lot of social commentators who were talking with one degree of expertise or another about what the consequences were of so called latch key children and unsupervised children, and children, particularly boys who were not growing up with fathers.
Speaker 3And is there this idea that the nuclear family must stay together to word off Satanists and therefore, you know, don't get divorced?
Speaker 8Right?
Speaker 9Well, you know, historically, the family has always been the moral foundation of society.
And when you begin changing that moral foundation, and consequentially, other things are going to happen that are either going to, depending on your belief system, invite evil influences however you define evil, or somehow make it much more difficult to resist those.
Speaker 3This panic across the board was one whose proponents and alleged victims were largely white and middle class, in part because it affected white America the way so many moral panics do by giving a monstrous face to the changes that the future might bring.
Those accused of being in league with the devil were, as you might imagine, a more diverse group than their accusers.
The weight of false accusations fell most heavily, as always, on those without the money or the power to crawl out from under them.
It feels like so many structural problems can be ignored when we say, well, these things.
Bad outcomes happen because people wake up in the morning and sort of dis direction, do their affirmations and are like, I'm evil.
I'm going to do something evil today.
Speaker 9Right right?
I mean, throughout history, there's always been something, someone, some group of people, some ideology, whatever that's been labeled as evil and evil.
The word itself is an extremely powerful word.
Throwing it into a sentence really begins to change the whole narrative about the problem that you're taking a look at.
Speaker 3De Young tells a story where the Satanic panic emerged not just from the fears of everyday people, but from a whole class of professionals.
Speaker 9All of a sudden, we had experts popping up on Satanism, on cults, on Satanic cults, even on ritual abuse, which was a brand new term.
Speaker 3Self appointed experts who could tell you how to find evidence of Satanism in a patient or at a crime scene, and who turned around and trained more experts, who trained more experts.
Across North America, social workers and therapists were urged to look for the devil in their client's memories, and teachers, parents and children were told that secret Satanic messages were hidden in heavy metal songs, comic books, and games.
Speaker 9Virtually every state that I've taken a look at has had its own version of the Satanic panic.
For example, in Kentucky, where rumors that were going around that a Satanic cult was going to kidnap blonde haired, blue eyed girls and sacrifice them meant that on one day in one community in Kentucky, four hundred and fifty kids were kept out of school by their parents.
That's a manifestation of a belief system.
Speaker 3By the time we got to the late eighties, the idea that Satan and his followers have infiltrated North America is thoroughly embedded in our culture.
Satanists, you are told, are a threat to your children, your town, your country.
And out of all this fear come people who are primed to look for Satanists whenever something a little bit out of the ordinary occurs.
Speaker 9I found training sessions where hundreds of Kentucky police officers were attending training sessions on Satanic ritual abuse in what was generically referred to as a cult crime.
You begin to look at those kinds of relationships again, and you see that you can have a community that really is primed for an allegation, prime to believe it, prime to proceed on it as if it were a credible allegation.
Speaker 10Rumors of devil worship have spread like wildfire across a large section of eastern Kentucky, stumping police officers who have fielded thousands of telephone calls from terrified line.
Speaker 5Satan worshippers are looking for blonde, blue eyed children to kill in a sacrifice to the devil.
Some versions implicate vacuum cleaner salesman.
Speaker 11Vandals painted six sixty six Satan rules and occult symbols in the city park.
Speaker 10Similar incidents or of a portacle on the floor of a mobile home the defendants are alleged to have used for Satanic ceremonies.
The words Satan rules were inscribed outside a circle around their time months.
Speaker 5Noble met with parents who were considering keeping their children home because of fears of devil worshippers.
Speaker 11Videotapes and books on the occult were confiscated, along with some heavy metal rock tapes.
Speaker 5The rumors during migrated into Leslie, clay, Lee, and Ousley Counties to the southwest, and Wolf, Powell and mcgoffin counties did All.
Speaker 10Of the law enforcement officials surveyed last week said they believe the stories were false.
Most agencies reported investigating the rumors and finding no supporting evidence.
Speaker 5The state journal Frank the Messenger Inquirer owned the Louisville Courier, Kentucky New Era Lexington Herald Reader September twelfth, nineteen eighty eight.
Speaker 3September nineteen eighty eight, that is the very same month a certain photographer travels to rural Kentucky.
Remember our friend Diane from earlier when.
Speaker 2We were at school.
We had a lot of fun just running inside and outside because in the pinhole cameras called you could only put one film in at a time, so you would load it up in the dark room, run outside, take a picture, and then run back into the dark room and develop it.
You know, it was this frantic, great release of energy as opposed to sitting in one of those little school desks.
Speaker 3You know, for hours, she was working in small towns across the state teaching photography to kids and teenagers.
Speaker 2I was part of an artist grant program through the Kentucky Arts Council, So as one of those artists, I packed up my car with all kinds of photo gear and I would travel around the state doing these residencies.
I think most of them were about two weeks.
The town would like find a place for you to stay, and you know, you were just kind of on your own with the students and the specific group of teachers or one teacher.
Maybe I would show up with dozens of cardboard boxes that the students would make into cameras and then photograph with them, and we made school newspapers where they would write and publish their photos.
We made photo books and had exhibits, and we made videos where they would write the story and star in it and dance in it.
And they'd write original music.
Speaker 3What was it like to be working with teenagers artistically and specifically working with young adults in that part of the country in that time.
Speaker 2Once they were on board with it, they really got inspired by it, which I really enjoyed because it's so hard to sometimes get people interested or teenagers interested.
But I think it was so different than regular school for them that they kind of latched onto it.
It was a real for them.
It was a real opportunity I had for years after.
Some of the teenagers writing me and sending me photos and you know, asking me questions because they just wanted to keep going with it.
So that was pretty amazing.
I think most people were happy to have a visitor that was going to like shed light on something brand new.
Speaker 3I'm curious about what this town was like, what it was like to drive into it, and kind of what it you know, the experience of it.
Speaker 2It was pretty small, but when you drive in, you know, you see hills and beautiful scenery.
It's like one road through the town and some other little neighborhoods around.
The woman who was the teacher that I stayed with initially, she was living in the old one room schoolhouse and she used to find like arrowheads in the front yard.
Speaker 3Was there like, was it like a dairy queen town?
Was there like a.
Speaker 2Yes, there was this.
There was this great dairy queen and I was always just amazed there was this.
One of the kids had a baby and they would put the baby through the order window, you know, place their orders.
They would like push the baby.
Speaker 3Through and you have to hold the baby upside down like a blizzard to make sure that he's thick enough.
Yeah.
Speaker 2Yeah, maybe.
Speaker 5Yeah.
Speaker 2It was like a one everything town, one doctor, one dairy queen, one movie theater.
I was staying at a local motel.
The doctor across the street.
He offered a room in his building.
I could use it as a studio slash dark room, and I'd run around the town as I was doing all this, meeting people, and when I did, i'd tell him about the project, and with their permission, I would photograph them, and I was using a Polaroid camera so I could give them the photo.
The outcome was always really friendly, and in doing my recognisance, I scheduled a meeting with the high school principal and the high school art teacher.
Day came for our meeting and I met the principal.
I thought it went fine, and then I went to meet with the our teacher, and halfway through our meeting, the principal's voice booms out of the loud speaker and he said, if anyone sees the photo woman, escort to my office immediately.
And the art teacher turned to me, looked at me real seriously, and he said leave right away.
Speaker 9So I did.
Speaker 3But during her drive through town, Diane spots a friend traveling in the opposite direction.
Speaker 2I was thinking of finding her anyway, but our paths crossed in our cars, and so we stopped.
You know, people used to, like in a small town that'd stop in Mill Street and have a conversation.
So we kind of stopped in the mill Street and you know, going in two different directions, and rolled down our windows and I told what had just happened, and she looked at me and she said, leave town right away.
She said, people have disappeared or are disappeared, like abducted, and often end up in nearby caves or mines, never to be heard from again.
So then I really freaked out.
And she said it in such a way too, that I knew it was no joke, you know, And It wasn't like a horror film where you might just stay anyway, you know.
So I was really shocked and upset.
I went back to the motel and I just grabbed all my stuff and threw it in the car and left.
And for some reason, I remember, like for some reason, I decided to change my shirt, and I wasn't hysterical, but I was definitely panicky, because I remember I had the hardest time trying to button the buttons.
Later, I found doubt that the sheriff was waiting for me in the principal's office, and later I found out that he had just missed me at the motel.
Speaker 11Wow.
Speaker 2So I was just so glad that I had left.
I didn't know if I'd end up in a jail or if I would end up, you know, thrown in a cave.
Speaker 3When okay, and so you got out of town, and so where did you had?
Two?
From there?
Speaker 2I just drove back to Cincinnati the next day, and you know, nobody here really really understood.
And my phone started ringing off the hook, just constant phone calls from all kinds of different media, including like People magazine, and all these people just kept calling and calling and calling I really didn't even know what to say.
I was still trying to process what happened and why.
But yeah, that's when I found out what I was being accused of.
Or you know.
Speaker 3I've been fascinated by Diane's story ever since I stumbled across it.
I first saw it in a book from the eighties about police officers who became experts in cult crimes.
So when I finally got the chance to sit down and talk with her, I had to read her this passage.
A Cincinnati photographer traveled through rural Kentucky taking photographs under a grant from the Kentucky Arts Council.
By coincidence, quote, rumors that devil worshippers were searching for blonde, blue eyed victims for sacrifices reached the town from surrounding counties about the same time.
The photographer, however, had taken photographs of children, prompting the rumor quote that a woman was taking pictures of blonde haired, blue eyed girls potential victims for devil worshipers.
After receiving threats and after the local high school principal chased her from school yelling get out, get out, the photographer fled.
Speaker 2Yeah, I don't remember.
I don't think that happened.
I really, I don't think that happened.
I think that was like some fiction that he made up to make it sound good, because I really I just kind of left.
You know, nobody was around.
I just got in the car and left.
I do want to tell you that right before I went to Kentucky, there were rumors reported in Lexington.
I think they reported it in the newspaper about a theater group that was suspected of dealing in witchcraft because they ordered yards and yards of black material.
You know, and anyone who's been to the theater knows that probably black material was used as backdrops and blockout curtains and all kinds of stuff.
Speaker 3Right, Probably they had to put on private lives, and they needed it for like the night sky.
Speaker 2Yeah, I mean it could be so many different things, so you know.
And there was another another little silly incident like that reported too, but I can't remember.
Speaker 8What it is.
Speaker 3I think that's the part of to me, the really compelling thing about this story, and also the way it compares to sort of the QAnon logic of today, is that, you know, it would be funny if it wasn't so dangerous, and if it didn't affect so many people's lives, because the sort of are sort of again, it would be comical if there weren't real lives at stake.
Speaker 2Yeah, I mean, it was not funny at all, you know.
And as a matter of fact, it's going to take me days to get over this now, I think, you know.
Speaker 3Oh yeah, yeah, I'm sure.
I think the kind of the nervous system response of remembering something like this, yeah.
Speaker 2Yeah, yeah.
I made some notes to kind of get it straight in my head, and all of a sudden, I started like getting upset.
Speaker 5You know.
Speaker 2It's like, no, I'm not the victim here, but I think also, I don't really know how much my experience had to do with Satan Satanic in it, but I do feel like it was part of the zeitgeist of that time and they needed some excuse, you know, they needed some label for it.
Even if it was you know, anti Semitism, they weren't going to say that, so they had to label it something, and that whole Satanic business was timely.
Speaker 3I find it kind of very depressing that we find ourselves in a worldview where people find it more believable that somebody is going to come from another town all the way to your town to, according to the cover story, at least try and sacrifice a virgin rather than just being interested in teaching them photography.
Speaker 2Yeah, why would anyone go all that way, go to all that trouble, Yeah, just to like try and infiltrate their lives for some other evil purpose.
Speaker 8You know.
Speaker 3It just doesn't make any sense either way.
This is the story that was left on the record and that we have now.
Satan is in the news.
It's just a matter of time until he shows up in your town.
There's a detail of Diane's story that I haven't been able to get out of my head.
The Black fabric and the theater group.
How in the world did something so small fuel a rumor that engulfed an entire state To answer that, we have to go to another small town, Hazard, Kentucky.
Speaker 8People around here we band together.
You mess with us, we'll mess you up.
Speaker 3That is Patrick Balch.
He's in his forties now, and he grew up in Hazzard.
Speaker 8About four bars on my and they had a store called Dollars and a dime store.
Oh my god, that brings back so many memories.
Hazard was just like a ghost town when I was a kid.
Speaker 3In nineteen eighty eight, when Patrick was about eight years old, Hollywood came to town.
Speaker 8They had an open casting call for locals to come in at the Holiday Inn and hazard.
My mom just took me because she was interested.
She wanted to meet Patrick Swazey because she basically thought he was a god.
But ironically, when we went to the casting call, he was sitting in the hotel bar.
You've seen dirty dancing ass and do you know the sleeveless shirt that he wore in it.
He was wearing that shirt.
And we go into the hotel bar and I immediately located and She's like, that's not him.
I was like, yes, it is, and I walked up to him.
I said, hey, Patrick, he's turning around and started talking to me, and Mom's.
Speaker 7Joll just like.
Speaker 3Liam Neeson, Helen Hunt, Patrick Swayze, all of them were there to film scenes for a movie called Next of Ken.
Patrick Swayze is Detective Truman Gates.
Speaker 2He's a country boy.
We are gonna find Gerald's killer.
Speaker 3But he's got some unfinished business in the city.
Speaker 8Howdy brothers who've been separated for a while.
One of them gets murdered.
The other one dressed to salve it because he's a Chicago police officer, and he gets in trouble and then his other brother comes to help to get revenge more or less, so they're kind of fatten with each other.
End of it is the best part.
If you haven't seen it, I'm not gonna tell you, but the end of it is.
The cemetery scene is the best part of it.
It shows you how family comes together.
And Whoop says he.
Speaker 3Ended up with only one line in the theatrical cut, but he basically got to spend a couple of weeks hanging out with Patrick Swayzey.
Speaker 8Yeah, I was little Patrick.
He was big Patrick on the set.
Patrick Swayzy actually is the one that taught me how to shoot the bow and arrow, and he taught me in about fifteen minutes.
I was doing great, but at the time that I actually shot for the scene, I missed the haystack by probably half a mile.
I guess I was nervous, but I completely missed the target.
It's a wonder I didn't shoot somebody in the background, but luckily no one was hit.
Speaker 3In the end, it was one of the high points of his childhood and looking back on it now, he says that it changed his life.
Speaker 8Just kind of opened my eyes the fact that the world was a lot bigger than what I thought it was at the time, because I didn't know there was anything beyond hazard.
I mean, you know, I was eight years old, very naive.
Here all these big Hollywood actors come in.
It just kind of woke me up and made me realize that there's mortal life than just Perry County.
Speaker 3There's another way.
Next to Ken left to Mark in Kentucky.
Patrick talked to my producer Mary.
Speaker 12Do you remember a scene where a lot of people would have been wearing like black dresses.
Speaker 8The funeral scene when I was doing the funeral and having the wake.
It's in the deleted scenes.
It's also the one where I got my handslapped for stealing cookies or something off a plate.
Speaker 3Remember Diane mentioning the theater group buying the black fabric.
Well, just like the story of her being chased through the school, this is a detail that suffered from some historical mistranslation to.
Speaker 12Okay, I'm going to read you something from this newspaper.
And this was in the Louisville Courier Journal on September twelfth, nineteen eighty eight.
It was also reprinted in a lot of other places, like papers across the state because it was originally from the Associated Press.
And the article is called devil Worshiped Rumors keep officials busy in Eastern Kentucky, and it says rumors of devil worship have spread like wildfire across a large section of eastern Kentucky, stumping police officials who are fielding thousands of telephone calls from fearful residents.
Police in Hazard said employees of a department store were frantic after someone bought twenty black dresses.
Authorities later learned the dresses were sewn together for use in movie lighting.
During the filming of Next of Kin last month in Jackson and Perry Counties, a dispatcher said people believed Satan worshippers were looking for virgin girls and blonde, blue eyed children to sacrifice to the devil.
Speaker 8Pardon my French, but what the fuck?
I don't know about nothing like that.
Speaker 12I mean, yeah, I mean, what do you think about that?
Speaker 8That's hazard.
If somebody goes and takes a ship their breast and knows what color it is by the time they get out of the bathroom, it's a rumor meal.
The second you walk out the door, they'll be talking about you behind your back if you do anything that alarms them.
There's so many Bible thumpers and hazard I mean, you know the ones that wear the golong denim skirts that goes down to their ankles.
If you came in and bought black eyeliner and a black dress, they'd say he is a satan worshiper.
You know, No, there weren't no Satanis around.
Patrick Swazy definitely was a Satanist, and Elimnson wasn't a Satanist.
And I see no evidence of any satan worshiper or anything like that.
I didn't see anybody naked dancing around a fire at night or anything like that.
No witches.
Speaker 12I mean, if you did see something like that, would you immediately think, oh, it's Satanists.
Speaker 8No, I would have joined them.
Speaker 3Really, So there we have it.
Women scared out of nearby town because Hollywood movie set bought twenty black dresses for an elited scene doesn't really have the same ring to it as the other headlines, does it.
But in any case, when the devil is hard to find.
You can always displame Patrick Swayze.
The activities of a Hollywood production crew being mistaken for Satanic ritual is just one of many very sketchy pieces of evidence that people pointed to as some kind of a smoking gun throughout the long decade of the Satanic Panic.
And I bring up all these details and I bring you the story of Diane in this our first episode, because I think the story of the Panic itself, the story of a many headed hydra that seem to reach into every part of North American life, can seem like too big of a concept to wrap your head around when you try to take it in in its totality.
I've been studying it for the past ten years or so, and every day I feel like I find some new detail that I've never encountered before.
The Patrick Swayze thing, for example.
In any case, the story of the dresses, the story of Diane, and so many of the other stories that we're going to talk about in this series are really about people encountering something just a little bit unusual and being stirred into such a state of anxiety that they assume not just the worst that they can imagine, but something even worse than that.
This is a scary story because it hasn't gone away.
Maybe it doesn't need to be out all the time.
Maybe sometimes it retreats underground, takes a nap, and then returns to feast again, like Pennywise and Stephen King's it.
And of course you can't really personify a panic and blame it for the way it recurs.
There's no panic without the people panicking.
Maybe with a phenomenon like this, it doesn't come down to us smarter as a people, but to us just getting tired of a certain story, craving novelty, moving on to something else for a while, until Satanists once again seem fresh and shocking, like, oh, say about now.
What I'm most interested in and what I want to share with you are the voices of the individuals who found themselves within this larger story.
Some of them are like Diane.
They never thought it could happen to them, and some of them thought they knew what to expect, but discovered that reality was even more bizarre.
And some of them had no idea they were even part of the story until they were already trapped inside it.
These are the people and the stories we want to look at to understand what happened, but also so we can understand together where we're going.
I hope you'll join me for this season on the Devil you know,
