Could It Be . . . Satan?

For a couple of years in the mid-’80s, my elementary school had Halloween parties to try to encourage the local kids not to trick-or-treat. It’s something that’s confusing to a lot of people, but for people of a specific age, the reason is instantly obvious. It wasn’t safe to trick-or-treat, you see. Everyone knew that. Because poisoned candy and Satanic rituals. There’s a certain dark irony to the fact that the only person I ever knew who was harmed on Halloween was killed when he was mistaken for a gang member—while on his way home from a party. Not trick-or-treating at all.

Gen-X childhoods are full of weird details that we can explain in the two words of “Satanic panic.” Despite, or perhaps because of, my mother’s Catholicism, she wasn’t hugely worried on the subject that I remember. But culture in general was terrified of it. Oprah Winfrey had two women on her show claiming to have been victims of Satanic cults—one woman allegedly had her finger cut off, then had her scars removed by Jesus personally. Oprah accepted the claims as true. The other most noteworthy real-life fallout was that of the McMartin Preschool Case, a seven-year-long molestation case that ended with no convictions and indeed apologies to the accused.

So what gives? Well, let’s start with one of those women. Specifically Michelle Smith. In 1973, she had a miscarriage and sought treatment for depression from psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder. Three years later, she allegedly had a session where she started screaming and didn’t stop for nearly half an hour. Pazder spent hundreds of hours talking to Smith while she was hypnotized and eventually wrote a book, Michelle Remembers. What Michelle allegedly remembered was a solid year of abuse by a cult of Satanists in Victoria, BC. This eventually ended with an eighty-one-day-long ritual that involved summoning actual Satan, with Jesus, the Virgin Mary, and the Archangel Michael appearing to fight him, remove Smith’s scars, and block her memories until it was time to remember.

Oh, and Smith and Pazder both divorced their respective spouses and remarried one another, which is not at all shady in any way. Meanwhile Laurel Rose Wilson, the other woman Oprah presented as reliable, wrote Satan’s Underground, which among other things said she’d had three children as a “baby breeder” for a cult. Two of her children had supposedly been killed for snuff films and a third sacrificed. There is no evidence that Wilson was ever pregnant, and she also later claimed to be a Holocaust survivor. The initial accuser in the McMartin case was schizophrenic and among other things claimed that one of the teachers could fly.

Now, before Michelle Remembers was Rosemary’s Baby, among others, so there was already a cultural weight behind the idea of Satanism. Various of the Manson women believed at the time they were under Charlie’s control that they were witches. The Church of Satan was starting to be a thing. And the Christian evangelical movement was rising in power and influence, and they were eager to blame pretty well everything on Satan. This coupled with an actual rise in reporting of child molestation, given the mandatory reporting laws that were starting to be passed. Heck, this was the era where Mr. Snuffleupagus was seen by the adults so children would know that adults would believe them.

The whole thing had surprisingly little pop culture weight for how much real-world weight it had. The only movie I can find about it is from 2015 and, yes, makes clear that the whole thing was nonsense. There were Very Special Episodes about molestation, but I don’t remember any about specifically Satanic ritual abuse. The focus was primarily on music and the fear of backwards masking and how Judas Priest and so forth were trying to drive all our children to suicide.

Mazes and Monsters? Well, sort of. Some of the anti-Dungeons and Dragons paranoia was indeed Satanic Panic-inspired. There is of course the notorious Chick tract “Dark Dungeons,” but Chick tracts aren’t exactly the height of media popularity. Mostly, though, you get modern works that play with the tropes, either seriously or as jokes depending on what kind of work it is. Almost without fail, the fear is baseless, unless everyone thinks it is and the Satanists really are performing ritual sacrifices and things.

It’s hard to understand. Over 12,000 cases of Satanic ritual abuse were reported, and literally none of them turned out to be substantiated. There were several murders blamed on it—three probably unrelated cases in Fall River, Massachusetts. Infamously, the murders of three boys in West Memphis, Arkansas. But there has never been evidence that children were being abused in droves. The alleged sacrifices cannot be proven. Most of the claims turn out to have been based on faulty questioning of children or discredited false memory recovery in adults.

Where the case lingers most is in the paranoia of the people who never quite learned it wasn’t true. The McMartin case involved, among other things, claims that the children were taken to secret rooms under the preschool; it’s not difficult to see the connection to the imaginary basement in Pizzagate. A lot of the weirder aspects of QAnon have clear origins in the Satanic Panic of the ‘80s. It seems likely that, if you asked the people who believe that celebrities are collecting adrenochrome from children, they’d tell you that it was the same sort of people who were ritually abusing children in the ‘80s. Who cares that neither are real?