Hey, I'm Sarah Marshall, and there's one story from the past that I've been circling around for years now.

This eight-part series traces the hidden history of the Satanic panic in North America.

We'll connect the dots from Victoria, BC, to the backroads of Kentucky.

Satan was having a moment, the sensationalist heartthrob of our time.

The Devil You Know, available now wherever you get your podcasts.

This is a CBC podcast.

In the 1980s and 90s, 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, warping everything it touched,

including the lives of innocent people. And it never quite died out. I'm Sarah Marshall,

and I'm a journalist obsessed with the past. You might know me as the host of Your Wrong About, a podcast about

misremembered history. In my new eight-part series, The Devil You Know, I explore the

tangled web of the satanic panic and a journey that will take us 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.

The stories of these eyewitnesses point us toward the real underlying problems,

individual and societal, that the satanic panic was a response to. The fault, as ever, was not in our Satanists, but in ourselves.

Now here's the first episode of The Devil you know.

I didn't have any clue what that was all about,

but our teacher made it clear that I should get the hell out right away.

...