Hunting Warhead Introduces: The Devil You Know with Sarah Marshall

October 28, 2025·40 min·3 clips

The 'evidence' that convinced eastern Kentucky police to investigate Satanic activity was 20 black dresses purchased for a deleted scene in a Patrick Swayze movie — a fact that didn't emerge until reporters tracked it down.

1. The Devil You Know is an eight-part CBC investigative series hosted by journalist Sarah Marshall, who also hosts the podcast You're Wrong About, exploring the Satanic Panic of the 1980s and 1990s through eyewitness accounts. 2. Marshall introduces herself as a journalist 'obsessed with the past' and frames the series as an exploration of the believers, skeptics, bystanders, and wrongfully convicted who experienced the panic in real time. 3. The episode's opening subject is Diane (a pseudonym used to protect her privacy), a Cincinnati artist and photographer working on a Kentucky Arts Council grant in fall 1988. 4. In a small, scenic eastern Kentucky town, Diane had spent two weeks earning community trust — photographing locals, giving away Polaroids, running photography clubs with teenagers — before an abrupt confrontation forced her to flee. 5. The principal's voice came over the school PA system mid-meeting commanding staff to escort 'the photo woman' to his office; the art teacher told Diane to leave immediately. 6. On her way out of town, a friend warned Diane that people who disappeared in that area were often found 'in nearby caves or mines never to be heard from again'; a sheriff had been waiting for Diane in the principal's office and nearly caught her at the motel. 7. Diane later learned the reason: she was believed to be photographing blonde, blue-eyed girls as potential victims for a satanic sacrifice — a rumor that had swept eastern Kentucky at the same time she arrived. 8. Marshall traces the cultural roots of the Satanic Panic to the 1960s and 70s: Anton LaVey's Church of Satan in San Francisco, the 1969 Manson family murders, and the cultural impact of films like Rosemary's Baby (1968) and The Exorcist (1973). 9. By the 1980s, Satan was no longer just in movies: mainstream outlets including the Oprah Winfrey Show and ABC's 20/20 ran stories presenting Satanic activity as real and spreading. 10. Grand Valley State University sociology professor Mary DeYoung argues the panic emerged from genuine social anxiety — rising divorce rates, recession, women entering the workforce, 'latchkey children' — and was a regressive attempt to restore old moral order. 11. DeYoung notes the panic's accusers were largely white and middle class while the accused were more diverse, and that the weight of false accusations fell hardest on those without resources to defend themselves. 12. A self-perpetuating expert class amplified the panic: self-appointed authorities on Satanism trained social workers, therapists, and law enforcement officers who trained more experts, until communities across North America were institutionally 'primed' to believe satanic allegations. 13. In Kentucky alone, hundreds of police officers attended training sessions on 'satanic ritual abuse,' and in one community, 450 children were kept home from school on a single day due to rumors that a satanic cult was targeting blonde, blue-eyed girls. 14. The Louisville Courier-Journal of September 12, 1988 documents the panic as having 'stumped police officials fielding thousands of telephone calls from fearful residents' across eastern Kentucky. 15. A key piece of 'evidence' cited in police reports — the purchase of 20 black dresses by a Hazard department store customer — turned out to be a transaction by the crew of Next of Kin, a Patrick Swayze film shooting in Jackson and Perry counties. 16. Patrick Balch, an eight-year-old Hazard local who had a cameo in Next of Kin and briefly befriended Patrick Swayze (who taught him to shoot a bow and arrow), confirms he witnessed no Satanic activity of any kind. 17. Diane's own story was distorted in a published book about cult crime investigations: the account included fictional details about the principal 'chasing her through the school yelling get out,' which Diane disputes. 18. Marshall draws an explicit parallel between the Satanic Panic and contemporary QAnon logic, noting that both follow a pattern of treating mundane evidence as proof of an elaborate conspiracy. 19. The episode is hosted with a wry, precise narration style; Marshall uses archival audio, interview clips, newspaper readings, and sociological analysis to layer the historical context around individual human stories. 20. Listeners interested in social history, moral panics, media studies, or the origins of contemporary conspiracy thinking will find the episode substantive; those expecting a conventional true-crime format will find it more essayistic.

As heard by us

A careful look at how a moral panic spread and stuck.

The Devil You Know opens on the Satanic Panic as a social fear story rather than a lurid mystery. Newspaper reports, Sarah Marshall's reporting, and eyewitness accounts trace how accusations of devil worship spread through eastern Kentucky and settled into local culture, even as…

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If you want the roots of the Satanic Panic, start here.

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