Please be aware that this episode talks about child sexual abuse.

Also, you'll get a better picture of this panic as a whole if you listen to part 1 first.

And I'd also recommend listening to our first episode on Stranger Danger 2.

On this season, we'll be exploring the moral panics, urban legends, and conspiracy theories

that shape our psychology and culture and why we end up believing them.

I'm your host, Chelsea Over Smith, and this is American hysteria.

The children were made to chew pieces of these children's hearts.

We dig up the caskets from the graveyard and a children were made to lay in the remains of whatever was in the casket.

Everything is attempted to be destroyed and killed in that child and in society, everything is goodness.

Oh my Satan, destroy those who love God.

If we could do a deep dive into the subconscious of America, if we could lie America down on an overpriced psychotherapist's chase lounge,

I'd really want to ask America about the 1980s about what exactly America remembers.

In a Satan-obsessed nation where, according to OnePole, 68% of people said they believed in the devil and 60% believed the devil worship was a serious problem.

Two new characters, Stranger Danger's murderous pedophile and the Satanist started to blur into a force literally hell-bent on the gravity that reached unimaginable levels.

Or more accurately, levels of depravity that could only come from the imagination.

America created its own modern psychological archetype of evil, combining an ancient religious villain with a brand new social boogie man and voila.

The Satanic pedophile, not to mention his or her network of cults, materialized from the ether.

In part one of Satanic panic, we touched on the cultural anxieties that were growing through the 1970s as women began careers and left children for the first time in the hands of relative strangers.

As the moral majority movement pushed fundamentalism into politics, we saw how the seeds of Satanic hysteria were sown through pop culture, sensational media, and religious hucksters, directing parents' attention to the possibility that the devil and his cults might be influencing their kids.

For part two, all cover what's been known as Satanic ritual abuse. The belief that this network of cults were also using daycare centers as fronts to physically, sexually, and emotionally abused children in grotesque religious rituals.

All attempt to understand how this could have happened, how for a time, forces on the political left and right re-united in what has been called time and time again, the Salem witch hunt of our modern era, including the longest and most expensive trial in history.

If you haven't heard of this bewildering and relatively recent time in our culture's history, you're not alone. It almost seems as if we've collectively repressed this terrible event. But now, as these stories start to return in new forms, it's time to lie America down on that couch. It's time to close our eyes and remember.

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