- Back in the '80s and early '90s,
a wave of troubling accusations swept across North America.
- New and intense scrutiny on the activities
of Satanic cults.
- [Reporter] Stories of devil worship and Satanic cults
corrupting young minds-- - Unbelievable crime
at the hands of Satanic cults.
- There were terrifying tales of secret Satanic cults
bent on tormenting and corrupting the young.
Heavy metal music had hidden Satanic messages.
- Possibly Satanic messages on some rock music recordings.
- Games like Dungeons and Dragons
were luring kids to devil worship,
and it got even stranger.
- The allegations of physical and sexual abuse of children
at a babysitting service.
- The dark world of ritualistic child abuse.
- [Reporter] There's a widely held opinion
that what happened at the daycare was the devil's handiwork.
- Underground networks of Satanists
were infiltrating daycares and preschools
to physical and sexually abuse children in occult rituals.
Much of what fueled the panic was not real,
but these claims led to a wave
of high-profile criminal trials
in the US, Canada, and beyond.
(suspenseful drone music)
The cases often followed a similar pattern,
an initial report of physical or sexual abuse
at a daycare would snowball, taking on a life of its own.
Overzealous interveners, everyone from parents
to police to counselors would question children,
some as young as two years old,
in ways now known to produce false allegations.
Children began to talk about animal sacrifices,
blood rituals, secret tunnels, even cannibalism.
Police would lay charges,
prosecutors would take them to court,
and the media would report uncritically
on what seemed to be a growing threat.
- [Reporter] Authorities searched frantically for evidence
of an apparent ritual abuse epidemic across North America.
- Some cases would fall apart at trial or during appeal.
Others resulted in wrongful convictions.
Many of the accused spent years in prison,
while others faced financial ruin and damaged reputations.
As it turns out, the Satanic Panic
may have its origins in Canada.
When asked about the spark that set off the hellfire,
many experts point to this book, "Michelle Remembers",
published in 1980, written by Canadian Psychiatrist
Lawrence Pazder, and his former patient Michelle Smith.
The book provided a template for the allegations
of Satanic ritual abuse that followed.
Pazder claimed he helped Smith recover repressed memories
from her early childhood of a terrifying initiation
into a secret cabal of Satanists
operating near Victoria, British Columbia.
- They would put me in cages.
They would sacrifice animals.
They would have a lot of candles, and chanting,
and bizarre things I had never seen.
- Did people think this was a fantasy?
That you made this all up?
It was such hocus pocus that it couldn't
possibly have happened?
- Well, I was one of the first to stand up
and start to recount these kinds of things
to bring it publicly.
- There was no evidence or witnesses to Smith's account,
yet Pazder presented the book as a true story.
- The hard evidence is difficult to find,
because if a child is sacrificed,
that child's body isn't gonna be left.
If it's an Orthodox Satanic cult
they're going to burn the body
and they're going to eat it during ceremony
so they'll leave no evidence around.
- "Michelle Remembers" is also one of the first books
to suggest that underground Satanic networks
were not only real, but were infiltrating communities
in and organized effort.
Anyone could be a Satanist, your nextdoor neighbor,
your dentist, or your daycare provider.
It was an idea that stuck with many readers.
- The book is called "Michelle Remembers".
- The book became an overnight sensation,
and Pazder and Smith received a lucrative publishing deal,
about $1.2 million in today's dollars.
It also established Pazder as a sought-after expert
on the burgeoning phenomenon of ritual abuse,
a term he coined himself.
There was even talk of a movie deal
with Dustin Hoffman playing Pazder.
For the McMartin Pre-School trial
in Manhattan Beach, California
where seven daycare workers were accused
of ritually abusing children, Pazder was flown down
to be an expert consultant in Satanic cults
for the prosecution.
In another ritual abuse case in Bakersfield, California,
"Michelle Remembers" was used as training material
by social workers who believed they had uncovered
an extensive Satanic pedophile ring.
Specialists in Satanic ideology were suddenly in high demand
as more and more ritual abuse cases went to trial.
In Austin, Texas, another self-styled Satanic cult expert
was used to secure the convictions
of daycare owners Dan and Fran Keller,
who spent decades in prison before being exonerated.
It became increasingly common
to see ritual crime training seminars
led by psychologists, church groups, and even the police.
This is former FBI agent Ken Lanning,
who studied the spread of the panic in the '80s.
- [Ken] All the people network with each other,
and they'd all get together and goes to seminars
and discussions, and they'd be told,
"This is what Satanists do and this is how they do it."
And so all that is planted through the use
of these kinds of techniques, hypnosis and other ways,
that cause the spread of this kind of stuff.
So many people say, "Well, you can't identify these cases
"unless you've been trained to learn about them."
And some of that training becomes
a self-fulfilling prophecy.
- The commercial success of "Michelle Remembers"
inspired dozens of copy-cat memoirs,
which further amplified the perception
that Satanic ritual abuse was widespread,
but there was never any evidence of a Satanic conspiracy.
In 1994, a psychologist from the University of California
researched over 12,000 accusations of ritual abuse,
but found no substantiated reports
of organzied Satanic groups who sexually abused children.
In later years, as the panic died down,
Pazder tried to distance himself
from the claims he made in "Michelle Remembers".
- I'm not there to believe or not believe,
I'm there to try and understand
what they're trying to tell me of an experience.
Whether that has actually happened to them
or that is their way of trying to express
a profound pain that they've experienced.
- But neither he nor Smith ever publicly renounced
the book's allegations.
This strange period of moral hysteria serves as a reminder
of what can happen when we abandon the pursuit of facts
for a more sensational fiction.
The question is have we learned our lesson?
I'm Lisa Bryn Rundle, host of "Uncover Satanic Panic".
You can listen to the series now on the CBC Listen App
or wherever you get your podcasts.
- Is there a well-organized plot,
an insidious design right now to program
and influence the minds of our children
towards the occult and witchcraft?