The Next Call Introduces: The Devil You Know with Sarah Marshall

October 28, 2025·40 min·3 clips

In the 1980s, thousands of alleged Satanists were accused of horrific crimes, yet they were nowhere to be found.

A political promo clears its throat first. Then Sarah Marshall names the fixation: the Satanic Panic, a story about supposed worshippers that spread while the people accused in it stayed mostly invisible. The claims are severe. Children are said to be targeted, babies sacrificed, and North American society infiltrated, but the transcript keeps coming back to what is missing: proof. Kentucky becomes the case study. Newspaper fragments describe a large stretch of eastern Kentucky flooded with calls from frightened residents, law officers checking rumors, and most agencies finding nothing to support the reports. The place names matter. Leslie, Clay, Lee, Owsley, Wolf, Powell, and MacGuffin counties appear as fear moves along roads and across county lines. So does the language. The clip lists symbols, heavy metal tapes, occult books, and claims about vacuum cleaner salesmen in the plain tone of old records. Marshall places the reports in September 1988, the same month a photographer named Diane travels to rural Kentucky. Diane enters through memory. Her school story about pinhole cameras, running between the darkroom and outside, gives the tape a quieter human thread. One story is public panic moving through papers and police calls. The other is a photographer remembered in ordinary motion. The episode treats rumor less like spectacle and more like a thing people repeat until it starts to feel solid. The ending returns to CBC, with credits for Marshall, producer Mary Steffenhagen, fact-checker Katherine Barner, and the wider podcast team before pointing listeners to the next episode.

As heard by us

A careful look at how the Satanic Panic settled into cultural memory.

The episode treats the Satanic Panic as a lived historical episode, not a curiosity. Sarah Marshall lays out the 1980s and 90s accusations of brainwashing children, sacrificing babies, and infiltrating North American society, then keeps the focus on the people caught inside it.

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Why you'd press play

For when you want the Satanic Panic stripped down to eyewitness reality.

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