Episode 1: Did Swayze Start the Fire?

Hey, I'm Vanessa and I work on Q with Tom Power and one thing I can promise you, our podcast is made by huge nerds. We love art. We're genuinely curious about the artist we talk to. Take Laura Marlene. I've loved her music for more than a decade. So when she put out a surprise album of Rafi covers, I knew there was a bigger story there. A story about getting older, letting your guard down, and letting life make you more tender. You can hear that now on Q with Tom Power wherever you get your podcast. This is a CBC podcast. I didn't have any clue what that was all about, but the art teacher made it clear that I should get the hell out right away. This is Diane. She's a photographer. Diane is not her actual name, but what I've given her for her privacy and also an honor of one of my favorite women of the 80s. Diane on cheers. I'm an artist, photographer, designer, art educator, digital designer, and more. Diane was telling me about a project she was working on in the late 1980s. I planned and I arrived in the fall. It had her traveling around Kentucky. I wasn't staying permanently then, but I was there to kind of establish the program, find a place to live, and kind of get things going. She was photographing locals and also teaching them photography. The first time I went, we had this little after school club of girls who were really interested in photography and very enthusiastic. And they went home and told their families, and their families were really friendly. And they were inviting me over for dinners and stuff. So when I left there, the first time after a two-week residency, I left with a really warm place in my heart for the town and its people. She worked with people of all ages, including local high schoolers. That's what brought her to this particular small town. So it was a pretty old town. It was really seen at a beautiful kind of nestled in the hills or maybe they were mountains, I don't know. But before a Diane could really settle in and get to work, something happened that made her want to get the hell out of Dodge. And the art teacher turned to me, looked at me real seriously, and he said, "Leave right away." So I did. I mean, I arrived in the town, hopeful and optimistic, ready to work hard and do good work. Yeah, and when I left, I couldn't drive fast enough. It was just pedal to the metal. I just couldn't put the miles between me and that place fast enough. I didn't know if I'd end up in a jail or if I would end up, you know, throwing in a cave. Diane, a stranger in a small town, had unwittingly become the target of a conspiracy. You know, at the time, I remember hearing about, you know, pentagrams on the floor of barns and all kinds of stuff like that. I mean, I thought maybe it could happen, but I really didn't believe it. Where could all these, like, all of a sudden all these devil worshipers pop up? What happened to Diane was a microcosm of a larger conspiracy sweeping the nation throughout the 1980s. It was a conspiracy about a conspiracy. It was a story where rumour became panic and eventually that panic became legend. That legend has always fascinated me, but to see it only from the distance of the present is to not see it at all. The grand sweep of the narrative turns it into something that happened to a country or a culture. But that also means it happened to individuals. And each of them saw something a little different. I thought, could this have happened? You know, I mean, it questioned it because it's like we have such a strange childhood anyways. The first version of it was, this was somehow wrapped up in the mafia. And then the next iteration I heard was that there was some group of people at the school called the group, and especially some goth people I remember. Two days later, maybe even a day later, I received a call from Detective Majeka. You know, would you come in and come and talk to me or, oh, sure, you know, I'd have nothing to hide. Unfortunately, that was the worst thing I could have ever done. So, what did it look like to the individuals who got caught up in this panic? Often in ways that they could never have imagined. Today, we're going to see it through Diane's eyes. Come with me as I trace the development of one small, strange rumor, a rumor involving virgin sacrifice, grave robbing, and Patrick Swayze. I'm Sarah Marshall, and this is The Devil You Know. Welcome to the 80s. Here's what's in. Leg warmer and Madonna. Fones that look like SARS. Trilogy and government initiative. Michael J. Fox. The Dolorian. Michael J. Fox. The Choozy. The VCR. Cindy Lauper. Aquanad. Fish Nets. And also, apparently, Satanism. Good morning, everyone. I'm Richard Cher and welcome to People Are Talking on this Monday. We are live on television hill. And as you know, by watching previous programs on People Are Talking, that Satanism seems to be on the rise here in the United States. People, especially Americans, we're getting this information not from the fringes, but from mainstream sources, like local morning news shows and unnationally syndicated daytime talk shows, like The Upper Winfrey Show. In every state in the nation, authorities are investigating some form of what they called satanic activity, which is coven's are reportedly. People also heard these stories on primetime news, like in this investigation by ABC's 2020. Startling sobering results of a 2020 investigation. Satanism. Devil Worship. It's being practiced all across the country. We have all types of perversion going on as affecting America. Perverse hideous acts that defy belief, suicides, murders, and the ritualistic slaughter of children and animals. Satan has been in North America for a long time, at least according to some. But he began to enjoy a new level of notoriety in the 1960s and 70s. Anton LeVay was freaking people out with his Church of Satan in San Francisco. A church that, if you read the literature, was about worshiping not Satan, but yourself and your ability to do whatever you wanted. The public reeled from news of the Manson family murders in the wake of their 1969 crime spree, a case in which teenage girls ran away from home and ended up in the thrall of a man who commanded them to kill. Surely just some guy couldn't be responsible for such horrific crimes. Surely it had to be Satan. And members of the growing Evangelical Christian movement began arguing that the Age of Aquarius was really a front for Satan. One day you're reading a horoscope, the next day you're sacrificing a goat. But it's hard to know if Satan would have become quite the American obsession he was if he hadn't also been such big business. Satan is his father, not guy. He came up from hell and begat us on a mortal woman. Hail Satan! Hail Satan is his father and his name is Adrienne. That was Rosemary's baby from 1968. It established a market for devil movies, and there was no devil movie bigger than the exorcist in 1973, which told the story of an adolescent girl possessed by a demon and the two noble Catholic priests who saved her from evil. But this pervasive fixation on Satan, both religious and secular, achieved a new level of urgency in the 1980s. Now stories of satanic activity were no longer just in the movies. They were happening in your very own town. Or at least that was what people were saying. And we have essentially in a moral panic, a somewhat regressive movement that it's trying to restore old moral lines or old cultural habits, you know, kind of like the good old days that the social change was really threatening to upend. That is Mary DeYoung, Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Grand Valley State University. And according to Mary, many of these fears tend to center around children and teenagers and the harms that might befall children both physical and moral. - I mean, there was a lot of anxiety about what was going on in the family during that period of time. That was one of the sources of social stress. There was a higher rate of divorce, a higher rate of what were referred to then as nontraditional families. We also were dealing with the consequences of a recession. We had more and more women going to work and you had a lot of social commentators who were talking with one degree of expertise or another about what the consequences were of so-called latch key children and unsupervised children and children, particularly boys who were not growing up with fathers. - And is there this idea that the nuclear family must stay together to ward off Satanists and therefore, you know, don't get divorced? - Right, well, you know historically, the family has always been the moral foundation of society. And when you begin changing that moral foundation then, consequently, other things are going to happen that are either going to, depending on your belief system, invite evil influences, however you define evil or somehow make it much more difficult to resist those. - This panic across the board was one whose proponents and alleged victims were largely white and middle class and part because it affected white America the way so many moral panics do by giving a monstrous face to the changes that the future might bring. Those accused of being in league with the devil were, as you might imagine, a more diverse group than their accusers. The weight of false accusations fell most heavily, as always, on those without the money or the power to crawl out from under them. It feels like so many structural problems can be ignored when we say, well, these things bad outcomes happen because people wake up in the morning and sort of stretch and do their affirmations and are like, I'm evil and I'm gonna do something evil today. - Right, right. I mean, throughout history, there's always been something, someone, some group of people, some ideology, whatever. That's been labeled as evil. And evil, the word itself is an extremely powerful word. Throwing it into a sentence really begins to change the whole narrative about the problem that you're taking a look at. - DeYoung tells a story where the Satanic panic emerged not just from the fears of everyday people, but from a whole class of professionals. - All of a sudden we had experts popping up on Satanism, on cults, on Satanic cults, even on ritual abuse, which was a brand new term. - Self-appointed experts who could tell you how to find evidence of Satanism in a patient or at a crime scene and who turned around and trained more experts, who trained more experts. Across North America, social workers and therapists were urged to look for the devil in their clients' memories. And teachers, parents and children were told that secret satanic messages were hidden in heavy metal songs, comic books and games. - Virtually every state that I've taken a look at has had its own version of the Satanic panic. For example, in Kentucky, where rumors that were going around that a Satanic cult was going to kidnap, blonde-haired blue-eyed girls and sacrifice them meant that on one day in one community in Kentucky, 450 kids were kept out of school by their parents. That's a manifestation of a belief system. - By the time we get to the late 80s, the idea that Satan and his followers have infiltrated North America is thoroughly embedded in our culture. Satanists, you are told, are a threat to your children, your town, your country. And out of all this fear come people who are primed to look for Satanists whenever something a little bit out of the ordinary occurs. - I found training sessions where hundreds of Kentucky police officers were attending training sessions on satanic ritual abuse and what was generically referred to as a cult crime. So you begin to look at those kinds of relationships again and you see that you can have a community that really is primed for an allegation, primed to believe it, primed to proceed on it as if it were a credible allegation. - On Carter Roy, host of Murder True Crime Stories, if you listen to True Crime because you want more than just what happened, this show is for you. On Murder True Crime Stories, we take deep dives into history's most notorious murders, but we don't stop at the crime scene. Each episode explores the darkest corners of True Crime while keeping the focus where it belongs on the human cost. New episodes drop every Tuesday, Thursday and Friday. Follow Murder True Crime Stories on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you listen. Rumors of devil worship have spread like wildfire across a large section of eastern Kentucky, stumping police officers who have fielded thousands of telephone calls from terrified worshipers are looking for blonde, blue eyed children to kill and a sacrifice to the devil. Some versions implicate vacuum cleaner salesmen. Vandals painted six, six, six, Satan rules and occult symbols in the city park. Similar incidents were reported on the floor of a mobile home. The defendants are alleged to have used for satanic ceremonies. The words "Satan rules" were inscribed outside a circle around the mob fights. - Noble met with parents who were considering keeping their children home because of fears of devil worshipers. - Video tapes and books on the occult were confiscated along with some heavy metal rock tapes. - The rumor is just migrated into-- - Leslie, Clay, Lee and Ausley Counties to the Southwest and Wolf, Powell, and MacGoffin Counties to death. - All of the law enforcement officials surveyed last week said they believe the stories were false. Most agencies reported investigating the rumors and finding no supporting evidence. - The state journal, the messenger inquirer, Owen's Louisville Courier journal. - And Tucky New Arrow. - Electricton Harold Reader, September 12, 1988. - September 1988. That is the very same month a certain photographer travels to rural Kentucky. - Remember a friend Diane from earlier? - When we were at school, we had a lot of fun just running inside and outside because in the pinhole cameras they're called, you could only put one film in at a time. So you would load it up in the dark room, run outside, take a picture, and then run back into the dark room and develop it. - You know, it was this frantic, great release of energy as opposed to sitting in one of those little school desks for hours. - She was working in small towns across the state, teaching photography to kids and teenagers. - I was part of an artist grant program through the Kentucky Arts Council. So as one of those artists, I packed up my car with all kinds of photo gear. And I would travel around the state doing these residencies. I think most of them were about two weeks. The town would like find a place for you to stay. And you know, you were just kind of on your own with the students and the specific group of teachers or one teacher maybe. I would show up with dozens of cardboard boxes that the students would make into cameras and then photograph with them. And we made school newspapers where they would write and publish their photos. We made photo books and had exhibits. And we made videos where they would write the story and star in it and dance in it and they'd write original music. - What was it like to be working with teenagers artistically and specifically working with young adults in that part of the country in that time? - Once they were on board with it, they really got inspired by it, which I really enjoyed because it's so hard to sometimes get people interested or teenagers interested. But I think it was so different than regular school for them that they kind of latched onto it. It was a real, for them it was a real opportunity. I had for years after some of the teenagers writing me and sending me photos and you know, asking me questions because they just wanted to keep going with it. So that was pretty amazing. I think most people were happy to have a visitor that was good. is going to shed light on something brand new. - I'm curious about what this town was like, what it was like to drive into it and kind of what it, the experience of it. - It was pretty small, but when you drive in, you see hills and beautiful scenery. It's like one road through the town and some other little neighborhoods around. The woman who was the teacher that I stayed with initially, she was living in the old one room schoolhouse and she used to find like arrowheads in the front yard. - Was there like, was it like a dairy queen town? Was there like a, - Yes, there was this, there was this great dairy queen. And I was always just amazed. There was this, one of the kids had a baby and they would put the baby through the order window, you know, place their orders. They would like push the baby through. And they have to hold the baby upside down like a blizzard to make sure that he's thick enough. Yeah. - Yeah, maybe. - Yeah, it was like a one everything town. One doctor, one dairy queen, one movie theater. I was staying at a local motel. The doctor across the street, he offered a room in his building. I could use it as a studio/dark room. And I'd run around the town as I was doing all this, meeting people and when I did, I'd tell them about the project. And with their permission, I would photograph them. And I was using a Polaroid camera so I could give them the photo. The outcome was always really friendly. And in doing my reconnaissance, I scheduled a meeting with the high school principal and the high school art teacher. They came for our meeting and I met the principal. I thought it went fine. And then I went to meet with the art teacher and halfway through our meeting, the principal's voice booms out of the loudspeaker. And he said, if anyone sees the photo woman as courted to my office immediately and the art teacher turned to me, looked at me real seriously and he said, leave right away. So I did. - But do I hear drive through town? - I had spots a friend traveling in the opposite direction. - I was thinking of finding her anyway, but our paths crossed and our cars. And so we stopped, you know, people used to like in a small town that would stop in Middle Street and have a conversation. So we kind of stopped in the Middle Street and you know, going in two different directions and rolled down our windows. And I told her what had just happened. And she looked at me and she said, leave town right away. She said people have disappeared or are disappeared like abducted and often end up in nearby caves or mines never to be heard from again. So then I really freaked out. And she said it in such a way too that I knew it was no joke, you know, and it wasn't like a horror film where you might just stay anyway, you know? So I was really shocked and upset. I went back to the motel and I just grabbed all my stuff and threw it in the car and left. And for some reason, I remember like. For some reason I decided to change my shirt. And I wasn't hysterical, but I was definitely panicky 'cause I remember I had the hardest time trying to button the buttons. Later I found out that the sheriff was waiting for me in the principal's office. And later I found out that he had just missed me at the motel. - Wow. - So I was just so glad that I had left. - When, okay, and so you got out of town and so where did you head to from there? - I just drove back to Cincinnati the next day and nobody here really understood. And my phone started ringing off the hook. Just constant phone calls from all kinds of different media including like People Magazine and all these people just kept calling and calling and calling. I really didn't even know what to say. I was still trying to process what happened and why. But yeah, that's when I found out what I was being accused of or, you know. I've been fascinated by Diane's story ever since I stumbled across it. I first saw it in a book from the '80s about police officers who became experts in cult crimes. So when I finally got the chance to sit down and talk with her, I had to read her this passage. A Cincinnati photographer traveled through rural Kentucky taking photographs under a grant from the Kentucky Arts Council by coincidence, quote, "Rumors that devil worshippers were searching for blonde, blue-eyed victims for sacrifices reached the town from surrounding counties about the same time." The photographer, however, had taken photographs of children prompting the rumor, quote, "that a woman was taking pictures of blonde-haired, blue-eyed girls potential victims for devil worshippers." After receiving threats and after the local high school principal chaser from school yelling, "Get out, get out." The photographer fled. Yeah, I don't remember. I don't think that happened. I really, I don't think that happened. I think that was like some fiction that he made up to make it sound good. 'Cause I really, I just kind of left. You know, nobody was around. I just got in the car and left. I do want to tell you that right before I went to Kentucky, there were rumors reported in Lexington. I think they reported it in the newspaper about a theater group that was suspected of dealing in witchcraft because they ordered yards and yards of black material. You know, and anyone who's been to the theater knows that probably black material was used as backdrops and block out curtains and all kinds of stuff. Right, probably they had to put on private lives and they needed it for like the night sky. Yeah, I mean, there could be so many different things. So, you know, and there was another little silly incident like that reported to, but I can't remember what it is. I think that's the part of to me, the really compelling thing about this story and also the way it compares to sort of the QAnon logic of today is that, you know, it would be funny if it wasn't so dangerous and if it didn't affect so many people's lives because the sort of are sort of, again, it would be comical if there weren't real lives at stake. Yeah, I mean, it was not funny at all. You know, and as a matter of fact, it's gonna take me days to get over this now. I think, you know. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I'm sure. I think the kind of the nervous system response of remembering something like this, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I made some notes to kind of get it straight in my head and all of a sudden I started like getting upset, you know? It's like, no, I'm not the victim here, but I think also, I don't really know how much my experience had to do with Satan, satanic panic, but I do feel like it was part of the zeitgeist of that time and they needed some excuse. You know, they needed some label for it. Even if it was, you know, anti-Semitism, they weren't gonna say that. So they had to label it something and that whole satanic business was timely. I find it kind of very depressing that we find ourselves in a world view where people find it more believable that somebody is going to come from another town all the way to your town to according to the cover story at least, try and sacrifice aversion rather than just being interested in teaching them photography. - Yeah. Why would anyone go all that way good, all that trouble? You know? (laughs) Just to like try and infiltrate their lives for some other evil purpose, you know? Just doesn't make any sense. - Either way, this is the story that was left on the record and that we have now. Satan is in the news. It's just a matter of time until he shows up in your town. There's a detail of Diane's story that I haven't been able to get out of my head. The Black fabric and the theater group. How in the world did something so small, fuel a rumor that engulfed an entire state? To answer that, we have to go to another small town. Hazard Kentucky. (soft music) - People around here, we band together. You mess with us, we'll mess you up. - That is Patrick Balch. He's in his 40s now and he grew up in Hazard. - About four bars on Main Street and they had a store called Dollars and a dime store. Oh my God, that brings back so many memories. Hazard was just like a ghost town. and I was a kid. In 1988, when Patrick was about eight years old, Hollywood came to town. They had open casting call for locals to come in at the holiday in in Hazard. My mom just took me because she was interested. She wanted to meet Patrick's wifey, because she basically thought he was a god. But ironically, when we went to the casting call, he was sitting in the hotel bar. You've seen dirty dancing ass, and do you know the sleeveless shirt to be wore in it? He was wearing that shirt, and we go into the hotel bar, and I immediately look at him, she's like, that's not him. I was like, yes it is. And I walked up to him, I said, hey, Patrick, he turned around and started talking to me. And mom's jaw just like dropped. Liam Neeson, Helen Hunt, Patrick Swayze. All of them were there to film scenes for a movie called Next of Can. Patrick Swayze is Detective Truman Gates. He's a country boy. We are going to find Gerald's killer, but he's got some unfinished business in the city. Howdy. Brothers, who've been separated for a while, one of them gets murdered. The other one dresses up because he's a Chicago police officer, and he gets in trouble. And then his other brother comes to help to get revenge more or less. So they're kind of fighting with each other. End of it is the best part. If you haven't seen it, I'm not going to tell you, but the end of it is the cemetery scene is the best part of it. It shows you how family comes together and whoops as. He ended up with only one line in the theatrical cut. But he basically got to spend a couple of weeks hanging out with Patrick Swayze. Yeah, I was little Patrick. He was a big Patrick on the set. Patrick Swayze is the one that taught me how to shoot the bow and arrow. And he taught me in about 15 minutes. I was doing great. But at the time that I actually shot for the scene, I missed the haystack by probably a half a mile. I guess I was nervous, but I completely missed the target. It's a wonder I didn't shoot somebody on the background, but luckily no one was hit. In the end, it was one of the high points of his childhood. And looking back on it now, he says that it changed his life. Just kind of opened my eyes to the fact that the world was a lot bigger than what I thought it was at the time, because I didn't know there was anything beyond hazard. I mean, you know, I say eight years old, very naive. Here are all these big Hollywood actors come in. It just kind of woke me up and made me realize that there's more to life than just Prairie County. There's another way, next of Ken left a mark in Kentucky. Patrick talked to my producer, Mary. Do you remember a scene where a lot of people would have been wearing like black dresses? The funeral scene when I was doing the funeral and having the wake. It's in the deleted scenes. It's also the one where I got my hands slapped for stealing cookies or something out of a plate. Remember Diane mentioning the theater group buying the black fabric? Well, just like the story of her being chased through the school, this is a detail that suffered from some historical mistranslation too. OK, I'm going to read you something from this newspaper. And this was in the Louisville Courier Journal on September 12, 1988. It was also reprinted in a lot of other places, like papers across the state, because it was originally from the Associated Press. An article is called Devil Worship Rumors Keep Officials Busy in Eastern Kentucky. And it says, rumors of Devil Worship have spread like wildfire across a large section of Eastern Kentucky, stumping police officials who are fielding thousands of telephone calls from fearful residents. Police in Hazard said employees of a department store were frantic after someone bought 20 black dresses. Authorities later learned the dresses were sewn together for use in movie lighting during the filming of Next of Kin Last Month in Jackson and Perry Counties. A dispatcher said people believed Satan worshipers were looking for virgin girls and blonde blue-eyed children to sacrifice to the devil. Pardon my French, but what the fuck? I don't know about that. Nothing like that occurred that I'm aware of. I mean-- Yeah, I mean, what do you think about that? That's Hazard for you. I mean, if somebody goes and takes a shit or breath, then that's what color it is. By the time they get out of the bathroom, it's a rumor mill. The second you walk out the door, they'll be talking about you behind your back. If you do anything that alarms them, there's so many Bible plumperers in Hazard. I mean, you know, the ones that wear the long denim skirts that goes down to their ankles. If you came in and bought black eyeliner and a black dress, they'd say he's a Satan worshipper, you know? No, there wasn't no Satan strand. Patrick Swayze, he definitely was a Satanist and Lim Nason wasn't a Satanist. I see no evidence of any Satan worshipper or anything like that. I didn't see anybody naked dancing around a fire at night or anything like that. No witches. I mean, if you did see something like that, would you immediately think, oh, it's Satanists? No, I would have joined them. Really? [MUSIC PLAYING] So there we have it. Woman scared out of nearby town because Hollywood movie set bought 20 black dresses for a deleted scene. Doesn't really have the same ring to it as the other headlines, does it? But in any case, when the devil is hard to find, you can always display in Patrick Swayze. The activities of a Hollywood production crew being mistaken for a Satanic ritual is just one of many very sketchy pieces of evidence that people pointed to as some kind of a smoking gun throughout the long decade of the Satanic panic. And I bring up all these details, and I bring you the story of Diane in this, our first episode, because I think the story of the panic itself, the story of a many headed hydra that seemed to reach into every part of North American life, can seem like too big of a concept to wrap your head around when you try to take it in in its totality. I've been studying it for the past 10 years or so, and every day I feel like I find some new detail that I've never encountered before. The Patrick Swayze thing, for example, in any case. The story of the dresses, the story of Diane, and so many of the other stories that we're going to talk about in this series, are really about people encountering something just a little bit unusual, and being stirred into such a state of anxiety that they assume not just the worst that they can imagine, but something even worse than that. This is a scary story because it hasn't gone away. Maybe it doesn't need to be out all the time. Maybe sometimes it retreats underground, takes a nap, and then returns to feast again, like Pennywise and Stephen King's it. And of course, you can't really personify a panic and blame it for the way it recurs. There's no panic without the people panicking. Maybe with a phenomenon like this, it doesn't come down to us getting smarter as a people, but to us just getting tired of a certain story, craving novelty, moving on to something else for a while until Satanists, once again, seem fresh and shocking. Like, oh say, about now. What I'm most interested in and what I want to share with you are the voices of the individuals who found themselves within this larger story. Some of them are like Diane. They never thought it could happen to them. And some of them thought they knew what to expect, but discovered that reality was even more bizarre. And some of them had no idea they were even part of the story until they were already trapped inside it. These are the people and the stories we want to look at to understand what happened, but also so we can understand together where we're going. I hope you'll join me for this season on The Devil You Know. Thank you for listening to The Devil You Know. Our producer is Mary Stefan Hagen, fact-checking by Catherine Barner, production assistants, Bennical Ortiz. Thanks to Jay Cawitt for voice coaching. I've been your host, Sarah Marshall. Our sound designer is Evan Kelly. Rooshney Nyer is our coordinating producer. Our senior producer is Jeff Turner. Executive producers are Cecil Fernandez and Chris Oak. Tonya Springer is manager of growth for CBC Podcasts. RF Nyerani is director of CBC Podcasts. Listen to every episode early on the CBC True Crime YouTube channel. For early and ad-free listening, subscribe to the CBC True Crime Premium channel on Apple Podcasts. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca/podcasts.