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The Devil Made Us Do It: Inside the Satanic Panic
If you grew up in the 1980s, there’s a good chance somebody thought something you liked was dangerous.
If you grew up in the 1980s, there’s a good chance somebody thought something you liked was dangerous.
Heavy metal supposedly contained hidden Satanic messages. Dungeons & Dragons could pull kids into the occult. Horror movies were corrupting young minds. Daycare centers became the center of extraordinary allegations involving secret rituals and underground cults.
In this episode of the Gen X Archives Podcast, Pitfall Gary looks back at the Satanic Panic and the very real fears that helped create it.
We cover Michelle Remembers, the McMartin Preschool case, recovered-memory therapy, Geraldo Rivera’s Devil Worship: Exposing Satan’s Underground, backmasking, heavy metal, Judas Priest, Dungeons & Dragons, Mazes and Monsters, Patricia Pulling and BADD, and what the panic meant for the Gen X kids caught in the middle.
Because underneath the backward records and twenty-sided dice was a bigger story about fear, media, authority, and what happens when people become convinced they already know what the evidence means.
We also talk briefly about suicide in this episode, a subject that is personal to me. If you or someone you know is struggling, you can call or text 988 in the United States, anytime, day or night.
Have a Satanic Panic memory of your own? A banned album? A game you weren’t allowed to play? One of those church-basement presentations you never quite forgot?
- (00:00) - Opening
- (00:32) - Welcome to Gen X Archives
- (02:10) - The Beginning of the Panic
- (09:45) - McMartin Preschool Trials
- (13:21) - The Talk Shows
- (18:19) - Devil Music
- (22:23) - The Dungeon Masters
- (26:38) - The Legacy of the Satanic Panic
- (32:56) - Thank you for Listening!
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Thanks for Listening
Thanks to everyone who downloads, subscribes, listens and supports Gen X Archives. I appreciate you spending some of your time with the show.
🕹️To Greg, a friend since childhood. He always embodied the true spirit of Gen X. He may be gone, but the legend lives on! 🤘
Creators and Guests
What is Gen X Archives?
Gen X Archives is your pop culture time machine, rewinding the moments, music, movies, television, technology, and memories that shaped a generation.
From mixtapes and mall arcades to blockbuster summers, MTV, cult classics, and the early days of the internet, each episode explores the history, culture, trends, and events that defined Generation X.
This isn't just nostalgia. Gen X Archives looks at the stories behind the sounds, screens, fads, controversies, and everyday experiences of growing up in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.
Whether you lived it or just wish you did, join us as we revisit the iconic, strange, and sometimes forgotten stories of the analog era and the generation raised by pop culture.
It's 1985, give or take
You're in a church basement: folding chairs, wood paneling,
a plate of cookies, and a guest speaker standing beside a turntable.
He is about to play a rock record backward to prove that the devil is talking to you.
Some of you don't have to
picture. You were there. In the
80s, that same fear spread from
records and dungeons and dragons
to movies, and just about
anything adults didn't
understand. The scary part
wasn't that people thought that
devil might be hiding everywhere.
It was how many of them were
sure they had found him.
Welcome to the Gen X archives
podcast, the podcast for
Generation X history news and
pop culture. I'm your host
Pitfall Gary. If you were a kid
in the 80s, there's a pretty
good chance that something you
liked was deemed dangerous.
Heavy metal could lead you to
Satan. Dungeons and Dragons
could pull you into the occult.
Horror movies were corrupting
your brain. Hidden messages were
buried in records waiting to get
into your subconscious. And
somewhere out there, according
to the news reports, Satanic
cults were targeting children.
It sounds ridiculous now, but at
the time, a lot of people took
it seriously. What became known
as a Satanic panic grew out of a
real fear about child abuse,
missing children's drugs,
suicide, and a culture that
seemed to be changing faster
than a lot of adults could keep
up with. Those fears eventually
got wrapped together with rock
music, fantasy games, horror
movies, even daycare centers and
rumors of a vast underground
satanic conspiracy. And if you
were growing up in the middle of
it, you probably encountered
some version of the panic, even
if nobody around you ever called
it that. And if you have a story
about something you were banned
from, a game, music, a movie or
any of those church basement
warnings that never quite left
your brain, I want to hear about
it. Send your story over to
podcast at GENXARCHIVES.COM, or
leave us a message on the
Voicemail line 720-722-1066.
Also, all the show notes and
sources for this episode are
going to be at JANXARCHIGES.
COM/3, number 3. So grab a
folding chair and let's see if
the devil made us do it. Before
we get into the daycare trials
and backmasking, it'll be good
to remember what the country
felt like at the time all of
this really got started. The
satanic panic didn't just appear
one morning because someone found a
Judas Priest album out under a kid's
bed. There was already a lot of
fear floating around. We were
coming out of the 70s, a time of
political upheaval and cultural
uncertainty. The academic term
for the satanic panic is
actually a moral panic.
Sociologist Stanley Cohen used
it back in the early 70s when he
was writing about the British
press freaking out over the mods
and the rockers fighting each
other. Basically a moral panic
happens when there's this real
concern and then the fear
surrounding will grow as much
bigger than the evidence
supports. The news repeats it,
experts explain it, politicians
talk about it and then your
neighbor tells you what happened
to someone they know. Pretty
soon, everybody has heard some
version of the story and they're
hearing it over and over again
until it starts to feel like the
truth. And in the late 70s and
early 80s were almost built for
that. For starters, America was
finally beginning to talk
seriously about child abuse. For
generations, kids have been hurt
and nobody wanted to talk about
it. Families kept it quiet.
Institutions protected
themselves. Adults didn't always
believe children. But by the 70s
and 80s, that was starting to
change. Once people started
understanding that terrible
things could happen to children
behind closed doors, sometimes
the hands of adults who look
completely normal, they changed
away parents looked at the world.
At the same time, the family
dynamic was changing. More
mothers were working. More
families needed two incomes.
Divorces were more common. So
daycare was becoming a normal
part of life for millions of
families. That meant more
parents were trusting people
outside the family with their
children all day. And for a lot
of families, that was still
relatively new and it created a
lot of anxiety. Now most daycare
workers were just doing their
jobs. But once stories of abuse
started appearing in the news,
those ordinary worries became
much easier to turn into
something darker. We were also
at a moment when the country
started becoming more aware of
things that could go wrong and
nothing drove that home more
missing children. Ethan Patz
disappeared in New York in 1979.
Adam Walsh was abducted from a
department store in Florida in
1981 and was later found
murdered. In my home state,
Johnny Gosch was kidnapped in
1982 while delivering newspapers.
And he was never seen again. The
stories were showing up
everywhere. Then the missing
kids started showing up on
milk-cartons. In 1983, NBC aired
Adam, the TV movie about Adam
Walsh and it ended with a
picture of real missing children.
Ronald Reagan declared a
National Missing Children's Day,
Congress passed new laws dealing
with missing children. Parents
were getting the message from
every direction. And people
heard enormous numbers thrown
around about children being
kidnapped by strangers. Tens of
thousands of children. But the
actual number was far less. It
was still terrifying, but it was
much rarer than the country and
the news led you to believe. most
missing children cases involved
runaways or custody disputes.
But that's not what we remember.
We remember the news stories in
the kid on the milk carton. And
once parents became convinced
that predators could be anywhere,
it wasn't a huge leap to believe
they might be organized. And
then add in religion and the
culture wars. The moral majority
was formed in 1979, and that
gave evangelical Christianity a
much bigger political and
cultural voice. There are fights
over school sex, music,
television, and what people saw
as the decline of traditional
values. And then MTV shows up.
Heavy metal gets louder and more
theatrical, horror gets bloodier,
kids are playing games full of
demons and magic, everything has
skulls on it. I mean, for a kid,
that was just a Tuesday. But for
some parents, it looked like
something had gone seriously
wrong. And for a lot of
Christians, Satan wasn't just a
figure of speech, he was real.
Fear moved easily through
churches because it traveled
through people you already
trusted. A speaker would come
through town, there'd be a
seminar or a special Sunday
night program. Before long,
you'd hear the same story from
another church, another parent
or somebody on television. And
television was more than happy
to spread it. Local news, talk
shows, religious broadcasts, and
tabloid television, all have an
appetite for stories like this.
Your teenager likes loud music
isn't much of a headline. But
your teenager's music may be
recruiting him into a satanic
cult, is a lot more interesting.
Now you've got frightened
parents, endangered children,
secret rituals, hidden symbols,
and a villain nobody can see.
Television knows exactly what to
do with that. So by the
beginning of the 80s, the pieces
were in place. Child abuse was
finally being taken seriously.
Parents were anxious about the
people caring for their children.
Missing kids were dominating the
news. Churches and TV
evangelists were warning that
the culture was moving into
dangerous directions and the
media had learned that fear got
attention. People didn't wake up
one morning and randomly decide
Satan was hiding in the
neighborhood daycare. The
country had been building toward
that kind of fear for years.
What it needed was a story that
tied everything together. And in
1980, it got one. It first
arrived in the form of a book,
Michelle remembers, published in
1980. It was written by a
Canadian psychiatrist
Lawrence-Pasder and his patient
Michelle Smith. According to the
book, Michelle had recovered
memories and therapy of things
that supposedly happened to her
when she was five years old in
British Columbia, months of
ritual abuse, satanic ceremonies,
murder, and eventually an
appearance by Satan himself. The
book became a bestseller and
Pasner was invited to speak to
police officers, therapists, and
social workers. But when
journalists and researchers
started looking at all the
extraordinary claims, they
couldn't verify any of the story
as it had been written. The
problem wasn't simply that
people believed one's
sensational book, though. It was
the book that gave them a way to
explain almost anything that
came afterwards. Once it was
published in a bestseller, the
book had already done its damage.
It gave the panic a template. A
person, usually a child, had
buried memories. A trusted
expert helps unlock them. The
abuse expands from one person to
a ritual group, then to a hidden
network, and because the network
is secret and powerful, the
absence of evidence is explained
away. If you say, "I can't find
the evidence," the answer
becomes, "Of course you can't,
they're that good at hiding it."
If a child says nothing happened,
that can be interpreted as a
repressed trauma. The theory
starts to explain everything,
including the facts that should
challenge it. The story spread
because it gave therapists and
police officers, ministers, and
television producers a common
language to talk about. A
strange comment from a child. A
behavior change, a weird drawing
or an interest in dark imagery
could all be interpreted through
the same lens. This was also the
era when recovered memory
therapy was getting a lot of
attention. Some therapists used
hypnosis, guided imagery, and
repeated questioning to uncover
memories they believed have been
buried by trauma. The trouble is
memory doesn't work quite like
that. It's not a recording you
can rewind and play back. It can
be influenced by the way
questions are asked and by what
someone expects to find. That
becomes important when the
people being questioned are
children. Certainly there were
real crimes during that time.
Ricky Kasso's 1984 murder case
in New York was surrounded by
drugs and a cult talk. Richard
Ramirez, the night stocker
famously displayed a pentagram
on his hand in court. Every time
something like that appeared on
the news, you can hear somebody
saying, "See?" I told you. But a
murderer using a pentagram is
evidence of a nationwide satanic
conspiracy and with the template
ready and a country already on
edge, the story moved from a
book to a preschool. Manhattan
Beach, California, the beach
town south of Los Angeles. The
McMartin preschool had been
there for years. A family
business run by Virginia
McMartin, her daughter Peggy
McMartin Buckey, and Peggy's son
Ray Buckey and other teachers. In
August of 1983, a mother told
police that her two-year-old son
had been abused by Ray Buckey.
Police opened an investigation,
then they sent a letter to
roughly 200 families of current
and former students telling them
their child might have been
victims and asked them to
question their children. Think
about getting that letter as a
parent. The police aren't
warning you that something might
be happening somewhere and
they're telling you it may have
happened to your child. From
that point on, every strange
answer, every behavior change,
every half-understood thing your
kid says is going to sound
different. The children were
sent to Children's Institute
International for interviews and
experts later criticized how
some of those interviews were
conducted. Very young children
were questioned repeatedly.
Interviews used puppets and
anatomically correct dolls. Some
questions were leading. Children
who denied that something
happened would be questioned
again and again or told that
other children had already
talked. After repeated
questioning, some of the stories
became extraordinary. Secret
rooms, tunnels under the school,
teachers who could fly, animals
being killed, witches and
cemeteries, investigators were
unable to verify any of the
claims about hidden spaces or
ritual activity. But in 1983 and
'84, that wasn't the story. The
story was, believe the children.
For a long time, children who
tried to disclose abuse had been
ignored or dismissed. Nobody
wanted to make that mistake
again. The problem is that
believing children and
interviewing children properly
aren't the same thing. Young
children can be suggestible,
especially when they're
questioned repeatedly or given
signals about what answers an
adult expects. That's not the
kid's lying. It's exactly why the
adult asking the question needs
to be careful. And then local TV
picked up on the story and then
it went national. Seven people
were eventually ordered to stand
trial. Charges against five of
them were dropped, leaving Peggy
McMartin Buckey and Ray Buckey.
Ray spent years in jail while
the case moved through the court
system and the trial became one
of the longest and most
expensive criminal proceedings
in American history. In January
1990, Peggy McMartin Buckey was
acquitted on every charge
against her. Ray Buckey was
acquitted on most charges while
the jury was deadlocked on the
remaining charges. Prosecutors
tried him again and that jury
came back deadlocked. At that
point, the district attorney
decided there would not be a
third trial. After roughly seven
years of accusations,
investigations, arrests, and
trials, nobody in McMartin case
was ever convicted of a crime. I
don't think the takeaway from
McMartin is that children lie or
that abuse and daycare doesn't
happen. Those parents believe
they were protecting their
children, but fear can come from
a perfectly understandable place
and still lead people somewhere
terrible. The children were
questioned again and again.
Families were torn apart. The
accused lost years of their
lives, money, and reputations.
And the more sensational these
claims became, the harder it was
to separate real evidence from
everything that had grown up
around it. Protecting children
requires taking them seriously.
It also requires careful
interviewing, good evidence, and
the discipline not to turn fear
into proof. McMartin wasn't
alone, though. Similar cases
appeared around the country,
different towns, different names,
but often the same pattern. An
accusation repeated interviews
increasingly extraordinary
claims, enormous news coverage,
and years of legal battles. In
some cases, people spent years
in prison before being released
or having their convictions
overturned. So how does
something like this spread from
a handful of stories into a
national panic? A one-big reason
is the warnings weren't only
coming from tabloids and rumors.
They were coming from people who
sounded like authorities.
Therapists who had read the
books. Social workers who had
gone to workshops. Police
officers who attended training
seminars on occult crime.
Ministers running anti-cult
ministry self-styled cult
experts with warning lists and
impressive sounding titles.
Seminars taught people to look
for pentagrams, inverted crosses,
black clothing, heavy metal,
fantasy games, horror,
fascinations with death, and
interest in the occult. Now if
you hold that list up to your
average teenage boy in 1985,
black clothes check, listens to
heavy metal, check, plays D&D,
check, watches horror movies,
check. That isn't a cult. It's a
sophomore. And that was the
problem. If your warning signs
describe half the teenagers in
America, they aren't very useful
as warning signs. You've just
made normal teenage behavior
look suspicious. But fear also
became a business. Books by
supposedly former Satanist,
church seminars, pamphlets, and
speaking tours were running
across the country. In 1988,
Saintin's underground published
in their name Lauren Stratford
was marketed as a true account
of ritual abuse. Christian
journalists later investigated
claims and found serious
problems with the entire story.
But by then the book had sold
plenty of copies and the
interviews were already out
there. The scary story had
already done its work. The
correction came later. One of
the people pushing back from
inside law enforcement was FBI
agent Kenneth Lannin. He had
spent years working child sexual
abuse cases and took these
allegations serious enough to
investigate them. The problem
was the evidence wasn't matching
the size of the claims. In 1992
he published a guide for
investigators looking into
allegations of ritual abuse. His
point was simple, take the
allegations seriously,
investigate the crime, follow
the evidence, but don't start
with the assumption that a
satanic cult must be involved
and then make everything fit
that conclusion. By the early
90's investigators had spent
years looking for the vast
network people had been warning
us about and they hadn't found
anything. But in 1988, nobody
was ready to hear that yet. In
October of 1988, Geraldo Rivera
gave the panic one of the
biggest stages with the prime
time NBC special called devil
worship exposing Satan's
underground, and that's a great
title. It doesn't ask, is there
a satanic underground? It
doesn't say we have some
questions about satinism. Nope,
Geraldo is exposing it. The
special presented allegations of
ritual abuse, law enforcement
experts, occult symbols, claims
of organized satanic activity to
the national audience.
Whether a satanic exists is a
matter of belief, but we are
certain that satanism exists to
some it's a religion, to others
it's the practice of evil in the
devil's name. It exists and it's
flourishing. Members of our
studio audience tonight will
attest to that. They are friends
and foes of satanism. Devil
worshipers and law enforcers,
experts and victims. They'll
help us understand this force
that exalts evil and darkness.
We'll be asking, why? Why does
it exist? And why does it appeal
to so many vulnerable people,
especially the young? Now, the
very young and the
impressionable should definitely
not be watching this program
tonight. This is not a Halloween
fable. This is a real life
horror story and it will give
small children bad dreams. As
for teenagers and their parents,
we hope you are watching,
because it's teenagers who are
most likely to fall under the
spell of this jumble of dark
violent emotions called satanism.
And in some cases to be driven
into committing terrible deeds.
Geraldo on NBC looking concerned.
What else did you need? And you
can't miss the irony. The same
television industry warning
parents about Satan was also
selling us murderers, demons,
monsters, and slashes sometimes
on the same night. Fear was
entertainment and the panic made
fantastic television. Many of
the experts clearly believe what
they were saying. You don't have
to be dishonest to spread
something that isn't true.
Belief and proof are different
things. And for years, the
satanic panic blurred the line.
And then we get into one that
had a lot of teenagers in the
80s. The music. Because sooner
or later, every story about
terrified parents in the 80s
ends up in the record collection.
Heavy metal was practically
designed for this. We look at it
from a parent's point of view,
bands called Slayer, Venom Black
Sabbath, album covers with
demons, skulls, and fire,
concerts with leather, pyro,
techniques, and fake blood.
Lyrics about death, hell, sex,
and drugs. Then somebody started
telling the parents that even
the band names were hidden
messages. RUSH was short for
Raised Under Satan's House. ACDC
became Antichrist Devils
Children. WASP picked up to a
couple of meanings with we are
Satan's people fitting the bill
nicely. And probably the most
famous KISS supposedly meant
knights in Satan's service. None
of that was actually where those
names came from. But once the
rumors started, it didn't matter.
And a lot of what frightened
people about metal was theater.
Dark imagery was fun. It was
shocking. It sold records.
Scaring somebody's parents had
been a reliable teenage
marketing strategy, since Elvis
started shaking in his hips on
the Ed Sullivan show. A guy in
makeup breathing fire isn't
automatically in a secret cult.
He just figured out your mom
hating the album is the best
advertising he could ever get.
Then came the theory that
changed how a lot of parents
listened, backmasking. If you
spent any time in youth groups
in the '80s, there's a good
chance somebody played a record
backward for you. The claim was
that hidden messages praising
Satan could be buried in songs,
and slipping to your unconscious
mind, even if you couldn't
consciously hear them. Lawmakers
held hearings, warning labels
were proposed, preachers played
records backwards for
congregations, and some churches
held record burnings, which
probably did more for heavy
metal sales than anything the
bands themselves could have come
up with. My mom didn't burn
records but she did break every
kiss album my sisters owned and
threw them away. This wasn't
something distant happening on
the news. It made it into
households around America. The
problem with backmasking is the
power of suggestion. Play almost
any sound backward, tell someone
what words to listen for, and
there's a decent chance they'll
hear them. That's suggestion.
Play the gibberish first and
then ask ten people what they
hear, and you'll probably get
ten different answers. Tell them
Satan says something specific,
play it again and suddenly the
room starts hearing Satan. I
mean give me a record of turn
table and a decent imagination,
and I'll get Mötley Crüe to
order you a pizza. The funny
part is that Christian metal was
growing at the same time.
Stryper had the hair, the loud
guitars, the spandex, the bigger
Reena show, except they were
throwing bibles into the crowd.
But if you couldn't hear the
lyrics, good luck figuring out
which side of the spiritual war
you were looking at. But some of
the arguments about Heavy Metal
were tied to real tragedy. In
December of 1985, two young men
in Nevada listened to a Judas
Priest album before attempting
suicide. One of them died that
night, the other survived but
had catastrophic injuries and
died a few years later. Their
families eventually sued Judas
Priest in CBS Records arguing
that the subliminal message
hidden in the music had
contributed to the boy's death.
Now the case went to trial in
1990 and the judge ultimately
ruled that the sound being
interpreted as a hidden command
had not been shown to cause the
young man's actions. Their
families were looking for an
explanation for something
unbearable and Heavy Metal and
the larger panic offered one
that seemed simple, the music
did it. The trial also brought
out problems involving substance
use, family conflict and other
struggles. A record gives you
something you can hold in your
hand and blame, but human pain
isn't that convenient. There is
a much bigger fight about music
in the 80s involving the PMRC,
Senate hearings, Dee Snyder,
Frank Zappa and a warning
sticker. It deserves its own
episode and it's going to get
one later in our lineup. But for
today the point is simple. Metal
didn't have to be literally
Satanism to frighten people, it
only had to look and sound like
a world parents didn't recognize.
And for a 13 year old kid having
your parents absolutely hate
your music was practically a
five star review. When parents
weren't blaming music they were
blaming games, specifically
Dungeons and Dragons. By the
early 80s it was everywhere
basements, bedrooms, cafeterias,
college dorms, kids huddled over
graph paper with funny shaped
dice. If you've never played the D&D
it's really a storytelling game.
One person the dungeon master
describes a world, everyone else
plays a character. You decide
what your character does and the
dice help you decide what
happens. It's all set in the
fantasy world filled with places
like the Isle of Dread, The Tomb
of Horrors and The Temple of
Elemental Evil. And if you're
already worried about Satanism
some of the vocabulary doesn't
help. Demons, spells,
necromancers, gods, magic. There
were monsters called demons and
devils right in their books
complete with illustrations. So
imagine you spent Sunday morning
listening to a seminar about
satanism. You walk downstairs
and your kid and his friends are
talking about summoning a demon
lord. To you that's a confession.
To your kid he just needs a roll
of 14 or better. The panic over
D&D got one of its early faces
in 1979 when a young man, James
Egbert, the third disappeared
from Michigan State University.
He was highly intelligent and
deeply troubled. Earlier reports
connect his disappearance to D&D
and suggest he might have gotten
lost in campus steam tunnels
while playing some kind of live
action version of the game. And
the press ran with it. A
brilliant teenager, a fantasy
game, secret tunnels, you
couldn't write a better made for
TV setup. Egbert was found alive
weeks later and later accounts
made clear that D&D was not the
explanation for what he'd been
going through. He died by the
following year, by then though
the association with D&D had
stuck. This D&D was a game that
made kids disappear. Then it
literally became a TV movie.
That Tom Hanks. Before splash or
big or forest gump, America got
Tom Hanks losing his mind over a
role-playing game in a cave.
Hanks played Robbie, a troubled
college student whose friends
play a role-playing game called
Maze's and Monsters. Now Robbie
gradually loses his ability to
separate fantasy from reality
and his friends have to help him.
The movie does make clear that
Robbie already had serious
problems, but the image that
stuck was much simpler. Kid
plays fantasy game, Kid loses
touch with reality. Then came
Patricia Pulling. In 1982, she
lost her 16-year-old son Irving
to suicide. Again, this was
apparent dealing with
unimaginable grief. She became
convinced D&D had contributed to
his death. She filed lawsuits
that were unsuccessful and
founded bad, bothered about
dungeons and dragons. She became
one of the most visible anti-D&D
activists in the country. She
spoke publicly, appeared in the
media and warned that the game
exposed children to Satanism and
the occult. Claims are on the
game expanded. Real spells,
occult practices, murder,
satanic recruitment. The claims
were extraordinary, but the
research didn't support any link
between D&D and any of those
outcomes. The controversy even
affected the game itself. When
the second edition came out in
1989 some of the more
controversial demons and devils
in related material were renamed
or even removed. And here's the
part I love. In 1983, right in
the middle of all the warnings
about D&D, CBS started airing
the dungeons and dragons
Saturday morning cartoons. Six
kids pulled from reality into a
fantasy world, magic weapons,
dungeon master, vanguard, the
whole thing. So CBS warned
America about a role playing
game with Tom Hanks in 1982.
Then they put dungeons and
dragons in front of America's
children on Saturday mornings in
1983. That pretty much sums up
the 80s. Adults saw D&D as
isolating, but it was actually
pretty social. D&D required you
to sit around the table with a
group of people. You had a talk,
cooperate, solve problems, read,
do math, improvise and use your
imagination. If you were the
awkward kid who didn't quite fit
in anywhere else, suddenly you
had a party of people who needed
you because someone had to be
the cleric. The thing Adults
feared was cutting kids off from
the world was for a lot of kids
how they found each other.
There's a bigger question
underneath of all of this. What
did the satanic panic actually
do to the kids living through it?
What did it do to us? And kids
is kind of generic. A six year
old, a 16 year old, and a 19
year old lived through different
versions of the same panic. If
you were little, you may have
absorbed a cloud of fear. You
didn't really understand,
stranger danger. Don't talk to
anyone. Don't take candy, except
for Halloween, I guess. Adults
whispering about something too
awful to explain. Now some of
the safety education that came
out of the era was useful. Kids
learned more about boundaries
and what they should tell
someone if an adult hurt them or
made them uncomfortable. Those
are lessons children need. But
the panic layered something else
over them, the sense that danger
wasn't merely possible. It was
everywhere. If you were a
teenager, the message was a
little different. We don't trust
what you're into. Wear the wrong
t-shirt and a teacher gives you
a look. Listen to the wrong band
and your parents search through
your room. Play the wrong game
and someone starts wondering,
what are you getting involved
with? And a lot of us learned to
hide it, not because we were
doing anything dangerous but
because explaining ourselves was
more trouble than it was worth.
And that was me. I wasn't
allowed to play D&D, wasn't
allowed to listen to heavy metal
music. I wasn't allowed to watch
horror movies, so naturally, I
played D&D, listen to heavy
metal and watch horror movies. I
just did it all behind my
parents back. And that creates
its own problem. The more we
hide things, the less our
parents trust us and the less
they trust us, the more we're
going to keep hiding things.
It's a vicious cycle. And a lot
of us loved our parents. We
loved our churches. But we also
knew that the music, the movies,
and the games we were being
warned about didn't feel evil or
satanic at all. At some point,
we started realizing the world
doesn't get divided neatly into
good and bad as neatly as the
adults told us it was. And for
some people, the consequences
went far beyond hiding an album
from mom. People were accused of
crimes. Families were destroyed.
Children went through terrifying
interviews. Real abuse cases
became tangled up in sensational
claims. There was real damage
underneath the goofy stories
about backwards records and
20-sided dice. But there's
another piece of the Gen X
experience here. We built
communities around the things
adults told us were dangerous.
If someone called you a devil
worshipper because you listened
to metal, you found other
metalheads. If someone told you
that D&D was dangerous, you went
downstairs with your friends and
built worlds. If horror movies
were supposedly rotting in our
brain, we found people who knew
Tom Savini's name. Some started
bands, made Zines, some became
artists, writers, filmmakers,
and game designers. That wasn't
the benefit of the panic. It was
what young people did in
response to it. The stigma
became part of the identity and
communities got stronger because
the people inside them had been
told over and over that they
were the outsiders. And maybe
the biggest lesson was even
simpler. Adults could be wrong.
Not casually wrong. confidently,
publicly, and sincerely wrong.
The expert on television could
be wrong. The guy giving the
seminar could be wrong. The
newspaper could be wrong. Fear
can sound a lot like certainty
when you're a kid. Learning the
difference was a pretty useful
Gen X survival skill. So how did
it all end? Not with some big
televised correction. Nobody
came on the news one night and
said, "Okay, everybody, turns
out there wasn't a giant satanic
conspiracy. My bad." It just
started falling apart slowly a
little bit at a time. Cases
collapsed. Convictions were
overturned. Researchers
challenged some recovered memory
practices. Investigators like
Kenneth Laning kept asking for
evidence of the vast networks
being described and the evidence
never showed up. By the early
90s, the cultural tide was
turning and the wildest
allegations gradually faded from
mainstream coverage.
Unfortunately, the damage didn't
fade with them. Some useful
lessons did survive. Child abuse
and investigation became more
careful about their interviewing.
A lot of us got immediate
literacy less in the hard way.
Who is telling you this? How do
they know? What is the evidence?
And the question that probably
should have been asked a lot
more in the 80s? Are we sure?
Meanwhile, the supposedly
dangerous culture won. Metal
survived, whore survived.
Dungeon and Dragons more than
survived. It's mainstream now.
Celebrities play it. People
stream campaigns to enormous
audiences. Stranger Things built
one of the biggest television
shows in the last decade around
kids playing D&D and the
Demogorgon became a pop culture
monster all over again. There
are probably parents buying
Demogorgon toys for their kids
who had been told 35 years ago
that the game was satanic. But
the satanic panic wasn't
interesting only because people
believed some wild things in the
80s. It's interesting because
you can see how the machinery
works. Starting with something
real, child abuse, missing
childrens, teenagers, struggling,
parents scared by culture
changing faster than they can
understand. Then offer one
explanation that connects
everything. Give that threat a
face. Find experts who confirm
it. Put it on television and
repeat it until everyone has
heard the same story. And
eventually the story everybody
has heard starts getting
mistaken for the truth. Today, a
rumor doesn't need Geraldo
Rivera and two hours of NBC
primetime. It doesn't even need
a church basement. It just needs
social media. The machinery is
faster now but the human part
hasn't changed. Fear,
uncertainty, the desire for a
simple explanation and the need
for somebody to blame. America
had a legitimate reason to worry
about kids. The mistake wasn't
caring too much about them. The
mistake was letting the fear
decide what the evidence meant.
And in the middle of it all were
the kids. Us sitting in the
folding chairs, rolling 20 sided
dice, listening to records we
weren't supposed to own, keeping
it cassette hidden somewhere our
parents would never find it. And
wondering how something that
seemed perfectly normal to us
could look so terrifying to them.
Now we're all adults, which is a
little disturbing all by itself.
We're the ones looking at
whatever our kids are watching,
listening to, playing or doing
online wondering what the heck
it is. So maybe the thing to
remember is what it felt like
when someone looked at our music
and our games and decided they
understood us without ever
really asking. Every generation
finds something about the next
one it doesn't understand. That
doesn't mean there isn't
anything worth worrying about.
It means being afraid of
something doesn't make it true.
And after all, we turned out
okay. Mostly. That's going to
end our at the satanic panic.
One of the strangest, saddest
and most revealing stretches of
our childhood. And we talked a
little bit about suicide in this
episode and that subject is
personal for me. So if you or
someone you know is struggling,
you can call or text 988 in
the United States anytime day or
night and get help. If you have
a story about a banned album,
the game you weren't allowed to
play or one of those church
basement warnings, you still
remember I'd love to hear it.
Send it over to
podcast@genxarchives.com. Or
call the voicemail line 720 722
1066. Especially the church
basement stories. I know you
have some of them and those are
always the good ones. Now the
full source list for this
episode is in the show notes at
genxarchives.com/3. If
you're enjoying the podcast, the
easiest way to support it is to
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thanks for listening and thanks
for continued support of the
Gen X Archives podcast,
preserving analog memories in
the digital world.