WBUR Podcasts, Boston.

Hey, Ben.

Hey, Emery.

We got something a little different today.

I'm feeling a little different.

Do you feel bedeviled?

I feel possessed, positively possessed.

It's getting warm in here. It's getting hot. Thank goodness, because it's freaking freezing where we are.

I know, I know. It is as if hell hath frozen over.

Ooh, that's the spirit.

And we have an episode today for you that features a podcast comrade who you may be familiar with.

My name is Sarah Marshall, and I host a podcast called You're Wrong About, and I have been a long time person obsessed

with the satanic panic is the best way to put it. It's not a professional title. It's just,

it's just something I've thought about way too much for the past 15 years. The satanic panic

of the 1980s and 90s was basically a widespread panic-fueled conspiracy

theory that the devil and devilish influences were leading people to commit acts of violence,

from allegations of sexual abuse taking place at daycares to ritualistic human sacrifice.

And Sarah has now turned her obsession into a podcast, and she joined us to talk about the forces

that fueled the satanic panic and how it might have played out differently in the age of

the internet and social media. Sarah's series is called The Devil You Know.

And it's a show that tries to tell the story of the rise of the satanic panic,

both as a really massive phenomenon and also getting into the questions of what it was like for people who experienced it at a very unique level, both kind of watching that story being created, being in its path, being victimized by it, and also just kind of as bystanders trying to make sense of the whole thing.

...