Song of the Week: “The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton,” by The Mountain Goats - “In script that made prominent use of a pentagram / They stenciled their drumheads and guitars with their names”1
[Content advisory: Today’s Syllabus includes discussion of the physical and sexual abuse of children, as well as pregnancy loss. Proceed with care.]
In the late 1970s, a young woman named Michelle Smith from Victoria, British Columbia was referred by her doctor back to her psychiatrist, Lawrence Pazder, who had previously treated her for depression and anxiety related to her emotionally neglected childhood. Michelle had just suffered a miscarriage, and was experiencing deep feelings of depression and dismay that she could not seem to shake.2
Pazder decided that clearly Michelle was suffering due to a traumatic event in her past that she had repressed, and so - using a now widely-condemned set of techniques including psychoanalysis and hypnosis collectively known as “recovered-memory therapy” - he took it upon himself to help her remember.
According to Michelle Remembers, the 1980 book that the two co-authored about Michelle’s treatments, in the first recovered memory session the young woman screamed for an astonishing twenty-five minutes straight. She then began to speak in the voice of a five year old, sharing memories of being mocked and tortured by Satanic priestesses, hearing unintelligible chanting, and being poked with sharp sticks.3
Over the next fourteen months, Pazder and Michelle spent over six hundred hours recovering Michelle’s “memories” of her horrific experience with the Satanists, which included being brought to an orgy by her mother where the young girl accidentally killed a man; being tortured sexually and physically by a variety of adults; witnessing the sacrifices of kittens and babies; and having horns and a tail sewn onto her body.
There was - and remains - no evidence that any of these events actually happened to Michelle.
Her father and siblings vehemently denied her accusations, producing a copy of her yearbook with a photo showing her healthy during the month that she claimed to have been locked in a cage by cultists. There is no public record of many events in the book, including car accidents and public rituals, having taken place in 1950s Victoria. And, most crucially, Michelle’s body was unmarked by scars from the tail, horns, or other torture she describes - a discrepancy that she explains away by claiming near the end of the book that she was healed by the Virgin Mary herself.
Despite immediate and credible criticisms of the book’s contents, Michelle Remembers was a best-seller, and Lawrence Pazder was firmly established as a worldwide expert on what he termed “satanic ritual abuse.” Over the next two decades, accusations of satanic ritual abuse suddenly began to pop up at daycares and other childcare centers across North America and around the world. In over a thousand cases in the following decades, Pazder was there as an expert witness.
Children were taken from their parents and put in foster care. People served jail time. Entire towns were whipped into hysteric rages.
All this, despite the fact that no material evidence of satanic ritual abuse was ever found.
Premonitions
Today, when we talk about the “Satanic Panic,” we’re usually referring to one of two things.
One is a specific set of high-profile court cases involving accusations of satanic ritual abuse at daycare centers, which I’ll talk about in greater detail soon. But the other is a general cultural anxiety around Satan, the demonic, and any media seen as vaguely threatening or outside of the norm, which gripped the United States and the world beginning in the 1960s. Without that wider anxiety, the specific accusations incited by Michelle Remembers never would have been successful.
The 1960s and 1970s were, famously, an era of enormous cultural upheaval: the Civil Rights movement, second-wave feminism, Vietnam War protests, gay rights activism, and the hippies all called into question the values and aesthetics of wholesome, 1950s American life.
A list of warning signs of Satanism from Prepare for War, a 1992 book by a doctor named Rebecca Brown, reads like a laundry list of cultural complaints about the 60s and 70s: parents should look out for youthful interest in fortune tellers, horoscopes, fraternity oaths, vegetarianism, yoga, self-hypnosis, relaxation tapes, acupuncture, fantasy roleplaying games, adultery, homosexuality, pornography, judo, karate, and rock music.
Beyond this potpourri of suspect hobbies and behavior, the 1960s and 70s also heralded a broader cultural fascination with explicit images of the satanic, supernatural, and the occult.
The modern Church of Satan was founded in 1966 in San Francisco by Anton LaVey, a former circus performer who did not believe in nor worship the Satan of the Bible, but rather described his religion as one dedicated to pride, adversity, and carnality.
Memoirs such as Mike Warnke’s The Satan Seller (1972) claimed, however, that behind these high-profile churches of Satan there were real networks of satanists all across the country trafficking in drugs, promiscuity, and devil worship.4
Numerous high-profile cults led by charismatic men like Jim Jones and Charles Manson stoked public panic about the destructive power of fringe belief.
And three controversial blockbuster movies (and their imitators) provided the public with the specific imagery they needed to complete their nightmares: Rosemary’s Baby (1968), The Exorcist (1973), and The Omen (1976).5
The Exorcist, in particular, was its own cultural phenomenon: after initially receiving only a limited release to 30 screens in 24 cities, it was so immediately popular that it was quickly expanded to 366 screens across the United States. As a February 2, 1974 Newsweek article described it, “On December 26 a movie called The Exorcist opened in theatres across the country and since then all Hell has broken loose.”
Despite freezing cold weather, people lined up around the block to buy tickets to see the movie. Audience members screamed, vomited, and ran out of the theater in terror. At least one movie theater claimed to have an ambulance on speed dial because of the upheaval. Religious groups, unsurprisingly, were particularly upset about the movie. Catholics were divided over whether the film was blasphemous or an affirmation of Catholicism’s power, since it features a heroic and effective priest. Protestants were more united in their condemnation, with evangelist Billy Graham declaring, “the Devil is in every frame of that film.”
Believe the Children
So how do we get from hippies, The Exorcist, and a Canadian woman’s therapy session to a worldwide moral panic involving parents, clergy members, police officers, therapists, social works, lawyers, and journalists?
The answer is found in another 1960s movement - once concerned with the emergence of a very real, and well-documented, evil.
Despite the fact that children have unfortunately been hurt by their parents and guardians throughout history, the specific abuse of children was not widely recognized until the mid-twentieth century. As X-rays became more common, radiologists began finding healed fractures in children’s bones, which they realized - to their horror - were often the result of violence at home.
As a 1955 journal article by Paul V. Woolley and William A. Evans euphemistically concludes, “It is difficult to avoid the over-all conclusion that skeletal lesions having the appearance of fractures - regardless of history for injury or the presence or absence of intracranial bleeding - are due to undesirable vectors of force.” Over the next six years, more than ten other distinct reports appeared in medical journals documenting similar widespread cases of children with evidence of physical trauma.
In 1962, doctor C. Henry Kempe and his colleagues published an article coining the term “battered child syndrome,” and finally brought the phenomenon of child abuse to the public eye. They called for the introduction of mandatory reporting laws, the training of teachers and doctors to look for signs of abuse, and the diverting of state and federal funding. By 1976, a new field of specialists had emerged dedicated to detecting, treating, and preventing child abuse.
Their rallying cry - in a culture that didn’t want to believe that such terrible things were possible in the quiet homes and cul-de-sacs of Middle America - was “believe the children.”
“A Highly Organized, Secretive Network”
In 1983, a local Manhattan Beach, California woman named Judy Johnson became convinced that her son was being sexually abused, both by her ex-husband and by Buckey McMartin, the son of the administrator at her son’s preschool. After repeatedly questioning her son, she went to the police, claiming that multiple workers at the McMartin preschool were sexually abusing children and animals, torturing children, and flying through the air.
The police then sent a letter to the more than 200 parents of children currently attending the preschool, telling them that their children might have been abused. In the letter, parents were instructed to question their children about whether they had been victims or witnesses to crimes including multiple kinds of abuse and torture. Soon, parents were reporting testimonies against multiple members of the daycare staff, and the “Children’s Institute International” clinic was brought in to interview past and present children from the daycare. Both the parental and clinical interview of the children used tactics that are no longer considered ethical, including asking leading questions, offering children rewards if they confessed, and taking children’s denial of abuse as evidence of abuse.
Ultimately, more than 360 children claimed to have been the victims of satanic ritual abuse, though fewer than a dozen eventually testified in the court cases against the McMartin family. Their descriptions of the abuse were both graphic and outlandish, including claims that they had ridden in hot air balloons, levitated in the air, been flushed down the toilet, and led through secret underground tunnels underneath the preschool (no tunnels were found). They also described horrific torture that should have resulted in injuries and scars - but of course, no physical evidence was found.
Despite the absurd nature of the accusations, members of the McMartin family were charged with hundreds of charges of sexual abuse, and their criminal trials ran for seven years (1984-1990): the longest and most expensive series of criminal trials in American history up to that point. One of the expert witnesses on the case was Dr. Lawrence Pazder - who, by the way, had since divorced his wife and married Michelle, his patient zero in this supposed epidemic of satanic abuse.
The press also dramatically failed to evaluate the legitimacy of the claims, in part because of major conflicts of interest: for example, Wayne Satz, a KABC reporter who covered the case, later entered into a romantic relationship with one of the social workers who was interviewing the children. David Rosenzweig, an editor at the LA Times, became engaged to marry Lael Rubin, the prosecutor on the case.
After seven grueling years, the McMartin day care case was finally dismissed with no convictions due to the unreliability of the children’s testimonies and complete lack of corroborating evidence. In 2005, one of the children who had testified rescinded their allegations, stating:
Never did anyone do anything to me, and I never saw them doing anything. I said a lot of things that didn’t happen. I lied…Anytime I would give them an answer they didn’t like, they would ask again and encourage me to give them the answer they were looking for… I felt uncomfortable and a little ashamed that I was being dishonest. But at the same time, being the type of person I was, whatever my parents wanted me to do, I would do.
By the time the McMartin case concluded, however, it was already too late. Pandora’s box had been opened.
In the decade following the initial allegations against the McMartin daycare, more than 12,000 cases appeared and were brought to trial around the world, from New Zealand to Norway. Unsurprisingly, these cases often appeared immediately after parents, therapists, and police officers were introduced to the concept and “symptoms” of satanic ritual abuse. For example, in 1989, therapists toured the UK giving talks on satanic ritual abuse, and soon accusations of satanic ritual abuse appeared in Orkney, Rochdale, London, and Nottingham.
The accusations weren’t entirely limited to daycares, either. For example, in 1991, Texas’s Melvin Quinney was accused of satanic ritual abuse by his mentally-ill ex-wife, and his young son testified against him. Despite no material evidence, he was registered as a sex offender, spent eight years in prison, and his four kids were placed into foster care because his ex-wife was unfit to care for them. Years later, Quinney’s son went on the record recanting his testimony and apologizing, saying that his mother had coached him to make the accusations. His father was finally exonerated of all charges in 2023 at the age of 75.
This hysteria was able to spread so easily not only because of the existing cultural anxieties about satanism and child abuse, but also because the 1980s had seen the largest number of women in the workforce since World War II. More families than ever were turning to day cares and other forms of child care to allow mothers to work, leading to cultural anxieties and guilt around the conditions these children might be experiencing.
Furthermore, worldwide governments including those in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom were experiencing a conservative backlash against the activism and left-leaning politics of the 1960s and 1970s. In the United States, for example, the Religious Right began amassing mainstream power and influence, making room for accusations about Satan to be seen as credible and acceptable in courtrooms, newsrooms, and police stations.
The media was also responsible for whipping up and spreading the panic: in addition to covering specific cases like the McMartin trials, major talk show hosts and networks also produced specials highlighting the threat of satanism. A 1988 Geraldo Rivera special, for example, warned, “Estimates are that there are over one million satanists in the United States and they are linked in a highly organized, secretive network.” And in 1989, almost a decade after the publication of Michelle Remembers, Oprah Winfrey featured Michelle on her show alongside Laurel Rose Willson, a repeat grifter and author of Satan’s Underground. Neither of the women’s claims were subject to any fact-checking.
This training video produced for the Louisiana State Police Department is not only wildly entertaining as a modern viewer, but also gives you a sense of how widespread and institutionally supported claims of satanic ritual abuse were.
The video claims that 26% of all murder investigations in 1988 were of “bizarre or ritualistic murders,” that 50% of all missing children cases can be linked to Satanic organizations, and that “there may be as many as 60,000 human sacrifices in this country every year.”
No evidence? No problem. The satanists have infiltrated the police and government, and cover up all incriminating evidence. Or, when necessary, they simply destroy the evidence using magic.
The Hellfire Club
John Darnielle, the lead singer of The Mountain Goats, was a young psychiatric nurse working in California during the McMartin case. “And we on the hospital floor were told in no uncertain terms that satanic ritual abuse was actually pretty common, you know, when this was actually a moral panic,” he explains in an interview with Crime Reads. His first-hand experience with the Satanic Panic inspired him, decades later, to write Devil House (2022).
Devil House begins by following Gage Chandler, a true crime writer, as he investigates a pair of bizarre, seemingly ritualistic murders in a small California town during the 1980s. What unfolds, however, is an experimental, multi-layered novel about true crime, memory, and the ways we culturally mythologize or ignore violence, that includes the perspectives of the accused killers, a mythic segment about Arthurian knights written in mock Medieval style, and a cameo appearance from the author himself.
Darnielle uses Devil House to deconstruct not only the kind of cultural narratives that allowed the Satanic Panic and its lurid accusations to flourish in the 1980s and 90s, but also the impulses that continue to drive a bustling industry of true crime podcasts, documentaries, and books today. It is, as The Chicago Review of Books’s Jake Casella Brookins describes, “a meditation on how true crime is an act of metaphorizing real events, of making comprehensible, consumable, and thus unrealistic narratives out of tragedies that will always be too personal for a few, and too impersonal for everyone else.”
If Devil House aims to demystify the Satanic Panic, Netflix’s wildly popular Stranger Things takes the opposite approach in its deconstruction.
Stranger Things, at this point, needs little introduction: its combination of 1980s nostalgia and Spielberg-ian small town heroes with similarly retro sci-fi and horror aesthetics has earned it four seasons so far, with a fifth promised in 2025. Stranger Things’s nerdy child protagonists are obsessed with Dungeons & Dragons, the tabletop role-playing game that today is celebrated as fun and almost mainstream, but in the 1980s was viewed with equal parts derision of suspicion.
One hilarious example of this attitude, by the way, is the 1982 TV movie Mazes and Monsters, about a university student who goes insane while playing a thinly-veiled version of D&D. It would, no doubt, be lost to the garbage bin of history, except for the fact that the movie stars Tom Hanks in his first lead role.
Anyway, in season four of Stranger Things, we meet Eddie Munson, a high school senior who loves heavy metal music, sells weed, and leads a Dungeons & Dragons club nicknamed “The Hellfire Club.”6
After a classmate is murdered by mysterious forces, Eddie is suspect number one, with a mob of townspeople attempting to track him down - even as they ignore the growing evidence that something much more dangerous, and more sinister, is threatening their town.
I love Stranger Things’s season four storyline, of course, primarily for its thrills and heartwarming moments, and because Eddie is such a lovable weirdo.7
But I also love the way it contrasts the townspeople’s panic over Eddie’s Metallica posters and D&D games with the actual evils that wreak havoc in their town. Sometimes, Stranger Things suggests, people refuse to acknowledge the real monsters among them.
Conspiracy
In 1992, the Satanic Panic came to the small town of Martensville, Saskatchewan, just outside of Saskatoon. What began as an isolated, likely credible complaint that a home daycare owner’s teenage son had molested a little girl in the daycare’s charge soon expanded into a hysteria that took over the entire town. Police officers and therapists interviewed children throughout the town, leading to over 100 charges against nine people, including several local police officers. One of those police officers, John Popowich, was suspected in part because of his skepticism regarding the credibility of the children’s testimonies of being burned, tortured, and sexually abused in an off-site “Devil Church.” No physical evidence of this torture was ever found.
In 2020, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s (CBC) true crime podcast Uncover released a seven-part series covering the Martensville case in depth. It’s one of the best pieces of media I’ve found dealing with the Satanic Panic, and I’d highly recommend it. What set the CBC podcast apart for me is that it highlights a great irony of the Satanic Panic: at the same time that it was unfolding in Martensville, Canada’s last residential school was still operating only a few hours away.
“Residential schools were government-sponsored, church-run, and for decades, mandatory,” host Lisa Bryn Rundle explains. “Indigenous children from all over this country were forcibly removed from their communities and placed in these institutions….As this country - the continent - was agonizing over cabals of powerful people systematically abusing children, making such a show of the importance of believing them, the now well-documented physical, sexual, and spiritual abuse of children had been underway for a hundred years.”8
The unfortunate truth is that while the Satanic Panic - with its widespread acceptance across all public institutions - may have left us, the psychology that made it possible is still very real. From the Salem Witch Trials to Q-Anon to contemporary panic about drag queens and litter boxes in schools, moral panics occur again and again. And when they do, well-meaning people ruin the lives of their innocent neighbors - often while the real monsters are operating in plain sight.
When it comes to the Satanic Panic, what should I add to my Syllabus?
I want to hear from you, whether it’s in the comments on this post or in emails to me directly at roschmansyllabus@substack.com!
In the first episode of the podcast “I Only Listen to the Mountain Goats,” author John Green and Mountain Goats creator and songwriter John Darnielle discuss “The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton,” a song about two small town dreamers whose aspirations are condemned by their small town, including why the song notoriously includes a rollicking final chorus of “Hail Satan!” Darnielle and Green are both practicing Christians, and I love their discussion of why the song has endured - and has very little to do with the Satan found in the Bible or Paradise Lost.
In the You’re Wrong About series, the hosts note that many of Michelle’s visions could easily be interpreted as traumatic experiences she might have had at the hospital during her miscarriage, as well as dramatizations of her feelings of guilt, loss, and horror after losing her pregnancy.
Warnke claimed to have been recruited by Satanists in university and risen through their ranks before becoming a born again Christian evangelist and stand-up comedian. A punishingly thorough 1990 investigation by Christian magazine Crosswalk found that nearly every claim made in The Satan Seller was made up, including, hilariously, Warnke’s claim that in university he had shoulder-length hair.
Many victims’ testimonies of their abuse bore a striking similarity to scenes from these movies.
Eddie’s character is based in part on the real life “West Memphis Three,” three teenage boys who were accused in 1993 of murdering three 8-year-olds in a satanic sacrifice. They each served eighteen years in prison before being released on plea deals in 2011 due to a lack of evidence.
He’s a fan of Lord of the Rings in 1986! Fifteen years before the movies came out!
Around a decade later, the Boston Globe also published a series of investigative articles revealing that the Catholic Church had systemically enabled and covered up the sexual abuse of children for decades. One of the many features of Michelle Remembers that makes it unintentionally comical is the scene where Michelle and her psychotherapist visit a local priest, who shares in their horror at systemic sexual abuse being perpetrated in their community.
This is not a major point but, man, Oprah has really platformed a huge amount of wildly problematic people.