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 Weber-Smith, and this is American Hysteria.

Hi, I lost my little dog.

Can you help me find him?

Your mom's been hurt. She's in the hospital.

She sent me to come and get you.

What's the secret code word?

I don't know the code word.

I'm a professional photographer. Let's come on, hop in the car. I'll take your picture.

If you tell anybody about our little secret, I'll kill your dog.

Stranger Danger, a simple, perfect rhyme that holds inside it, a terror common to almost all parents

and children in this country, especially those in the extra safe American suburbs.

We were taught about evil strangers in school, saw the faces of missing little boys and girls

on milk cartons, in newspapers, on TV.

McGruff, the crime dog, glumly announced shocking statistics of missing

children during commercials between cartoons, and Teddy Ruxman sang his eerie song about keeping

children safe. But the stranger danger we know today was hardly the beginning. Of course, the fear

of kidnapping lives in our very DNA, a fear that has been with us since the beginning of time.

But how real is the threat that an evil person completely unknown to a child will do the unthinkable, take that child, forever?

Only 50 to 100 children are abducted each year by random strangers, a number that continues to stay about the same

year after year. Although one single child taken by a stranger is a devastating tragedy, the numbers

mean that a child in the U.S. only has a one in 1.5 million chance of being taken by a non-family

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