One of those doctors finally tore it off, publishing an article linking the MPD epidemic to child abuse committed by devil-worshipping cults. He hosted conferences to spread the word. Satanic cults were everywhere, he revealed, internationally organized, with councils and hierarchies. The general public ate it up. No one could explain exactly why organizations were slitting babies’ throats, drinking their blood, and worshipping the devil, but they also couldn’t get enough of it. Individuals were outed and prosecuted, though most cases were eventually dismissed for lack of evidence.

I paused the podcast to take a bathroom break at a rest stop and buy a soda from the vending machine. My head hurt, and my skin crawled. Partly because yesterday’s sickness lingered, and partly because this podcast was getting under my skin. How did people buy into these conspiracies? Pulling back onto the highway, I pressed play on my podcast and continued listening.

The expert psychiatrists revealed that satanic ritual abuse was often part of transgenerational family traditions, like quilting and tree-trimming. Some families had been holding meetings, committing child abuse, and sacrificing animals and babies for hundreds of years.

A terrifying and irresistible story, the media rolled with it. Skeptics looked down at their shoes, half-worried they hadn’t realized Satan’s followers had been here all along, brushing past them in the grocery store, and half-worried to speak up for fear of being labeled and witch-hunted by the crazed mob.

A half dozen years later, the FBI Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico put in their two cents. They’d done a multi-year study and found no evidence of the existence of satanic cults engaged in criminal activity or the sacrificing of thousands of American babies.

It was like the emperor parading about in his new robes. At the parade’s start, everyone assumed his robes could only be seen by the intelligent and the good Christians. Once the child had called him out as naked, people couldn’t believe they’d gone along with it.

Psychiatrists distanced themselves from MPD and Satanic Ritual Abuse. They doubted the existence of MPD, claiming most cases were faked or therapist-induced, a by-product of manipulative psychiatrists. They cited MPD patients’ excitement to share their stories, claiming real mental health issues don’t typically seek attention and celebrity.

The Satanic Panic skeptics who’d stayed silent through the ’80s felt safe to come out of the woodwork in the mid-1990s and vilify the psychiatric rock stars of the previous decade. The False Memory Syndrome Foundation sprung up as the legal clearinghouse, countering false claims of “recovered memories” of child abuse, satanic or not.