Yet another helping from Satan: The Devil’s storytellers

Summary

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Podcast Summary:

The Devil You Know with Sarah Marshall (CBC)
Episode: Yet another helping from Satan: The Devil’s storytellers
Date: December 12, 2025
Guest: Bill Ellis, Professor Emeritus of English and American Studies, Penn State University

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Main Theme & Purpose

In this bonus episode, Sarah Marshall interviews Bill Ellis, an expert in folklore and the study of rumor panics, to examine the roots and mechanisms of the Satanic Panic. The conversation expands from the pop culture manifestations of Satanic Panic in the 1980s and 90s to the deeper, recurring elements of human psychology, storytelling, and community trauma that fuel such episodes. The discussion highlights how legends become embedded in society—not just as fictions, but as ongoing debates that shape, respond to, and reflect cultural anxieties.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Origins of Folklore Interest and Entry into the Field

• [02:33] Bill Ellis describes his early fascination with medieval literature and folklore, noting how the monsters and heroes of the past are "improvised and recreated in contemporary time" and how few were seriously studying modern folklore.
• Quote:

  "It was fascinating to see all of this being improvised and recreated in the contemporary time." — Bill Ellis [03:00]

2. The Nature and Function of Urban Legends

• [03:34] Ellis recalls being contacted by media about urban legends such as the "gang headlight ritual," and notes how these stories travel.
• Insight:
  Most people sharing these legends "doubt them," but there's a social value in debating credibility.
• Quote:

  "Statistically, the person who was most likely to pass on an urban legend was a person who doubted it." — Bill Ellis [04:00]

• [05:33] Folklore and legends serve therapeutic, normalizing functions, offering stories that help people process fears and make sense of their world.

3. Satanic Panic: Definition and Historical Parallels

• [06:27] Ellis affirms "Satanic Panic" as an accurate term, emphasizing its short-lived, self-consuming nature, likened to demonic possession or mass hysteria.
• Parallel: The Salem Witch Trials are given as a historic precedent, fading as quickly as they erupted.
• Quote:

  "It is, in the original sense of the word, almost a possession of the soul." — Bill Ellis [06:47]

4. Personal Experience During the Satanic Panic

• [08:09] Ellis recounts a rural Ohio murder interpreted through the lens of existing legends about witches and devil-worshippers.

• Law enforcement investigations often sought evidence for stories students recounted in folklore classes, blurring lines between legend and reality.

• Quote:

  "This event...was being seen through the filter of a whole range of adolescent legends...about devil worshipers and witches." — Bill Ellis [08:40]

• [10:52] He notes the shift in Christian charismatic groups during the 1970s, which began to externalize threats—uniting against perceived “enemies of God”—as a precursor to police action against supposed Satanists.

• Insight: This progression led law enforcement to use supernatural fears as grounds for secular criminal prosecution.

5. The Blending of Fantasy and Authority

• [14:18] The episode discusses the outlandish testimonies in cases like the Fran and Dan Keller daycare trial, highlighting the physical impossibility of events (e.g., children told a gorilla’s finger was cut off and its blood consumed).

• Question: How do impossible stories cross from marginal religious communities to the beliefs of police and mental health professionals?

• Quote:

  "Police officers, psychologists, people who are of the secular world, still believe stories that contain physical impossibilities." — Interviewer [15:20]

• [15:29] Ellis explains that the power of these stories doesn't lie in their literal truth but in the emotional and symbolic trauma they signify, allowing authorities to prosecute as if the acts were real offenses against individuals and the state, not just God.

6. Scapegoating and Social Dynamics

• [18:36] Sarah Marshall asks about the communal function of blaming "satanic cults" after traumatic events.
• [19:14] Ellis responds with a discussion of scapegoating, referencing the Old Testament ritual of the scapegoat and comparing these panics to cathartic, psychologically satisfying, but potentially damaging rituals within a society.
• Quote:

  "One of the inevitable events that takes place is that people try to find a scapegoat, try to find someone or some group to blame." — Bill Ellis [19:25]

7. Cycles and Recurrence of Panic

• [21:25] The Satanic Panic is characterized as not a one-time cultural aberration, but part of a recurring pattern in human society.
• [21:49] Ellis advocates for "ethnography, ethnography, ethnography"—the systematic, empathetic study of these patterns—as the only way to build resilience against future panics.
• Ultimately, panics are "self-consuming"; their intensity deflates as communities recognize the harm done to innocents and forget the details.
• Quote:

  "These kinds of crusades...are in the end, self-consuming. Because...people realize that they are punishing the innocent with the guilty." — Bill Ellis [22:35]

• He cites Ecclesiastes:

  "Do you say that this is new? No, it's been in the times before. It's happened before. It will happen again. Nobody will remember." — Bill Ellis [22:55]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the Nature of Legends:

  "It's not the story, it's the debate that takes place with the help of the story." — Bill Ellis [04:30]

• On Human Motivation:

  "Folklore, by and large, is therapeutic. It satisfies some kind of mental need." — Bill Ellis [05:35]

• On Recurrence:

  "It's difficult to remember. And that's one of the reasons why it needs to be looked at as an active dynamic." — Bill Ellis [22:57]

• On Scapegoating:

  "The immediate instinct is...this is part of the process of grief over this. One of the reactions is anger." — Bill Ellis [19:14]

• On Research Approach:

  "My feeling is ethnography. Ethnography, ethnography. The more you know about it, the more you can realistically make comments about it." — Bill Ellis [21:49]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [02:33] Bill Ellis’s entry into folklore studies
• [03:34] Urban legend transmission and function
• [06:27] The “Satanic Panic” as a term and cultural phenomenon
• [08:09] Real-life cases filtered through legend
• [10:52] Religious roots of the panic and its spread to law enforcement
• [14:18] The Keller case and physical impossibility in testimony
• [19:14] Scapegoating and emotional processing after trauma
• [21:49] Addressing panics through ethnography; cyclical nature

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Takeaway

This episode challenges listeners to consider how rumor panics like the Satanic Panic are born not of irrationality or fringe thinking, but from deeply ingrained human patterns—storytelling, grief, scapegoating, and a need for meaning during crisis. Bill Ellis offers a nuanced perspective that places such panics in a historical and psychological context, emphasizing the need for careful, empathetic study (ethnography) to equip society for future cycles. The conversation serves both as a cautionary tale about collective memory and as a guide for approaching future social anxieties with understanding instead of fear.

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Transcript

[Bill Ellis]

All right.

[El Amin Abdul Mahmoud]

I gotta tell you, I can't believe it's already end of year list season. Hi, friend. I'm El Amin Abdul Mahmoud, and on my show Commotion, we've been keeping track of all the trends that have come and gone in 2025. And this week, we're finally doing it. We're kicking off our year end review coverage with a look back at the year in music. I don't know what your top song was. I don't know what artists define your 2025, but some of my favorite music critics are going to join me at the Commotion table to get into this year in music. You can find that episode of Commotion and much more when you follow us on YouTube or wherever you get your PODC guests. This is a CBC podcast.

[Sarah Marshall]

Welcome to your bonus episode. I'm Sarah Marshall, and this is the devil you know. We're talking to Bill Ellis, professor emeritus of English and American Studies at Penn State University. We got to learn from Bill Ellis about folklore and how the Satanic panic emerged not just from pop culture and TV news, but from something much older. Bill Ellis is an ethnographer of folk tales and is widely published on rumor panics, contemporary legends and beliefs. He's also the author of many books, including Raising the Satanism, New Religions in the Media, and Lucifer the Occult and Folk and popular Culture. This was a conversation that allowed us to zoom back a little bit from the focus we're taking in our main episodes and learn about the more innate human behaviors that lead us to create rumors and rumor panics like the Satanic panic and so many others. And also a conversation about how to better understand the history of these panics in order to prevent them in the future.

[Interviewer]

Bill, I mean, let me just start by saying thank you so much for your work in this area.

[Bill Ellis]

Well, I appreciate that. I know for many years, my bosses at Penn State University had no idea why I was doing what I was doing. That folklore really changed so radically that it took a long time for people to see any real intellectual value in it.

[Interviewer]

And folklore and urban legends, that's an area I've also always been very interested in. And my first question for you is, how did you end up in this field? What sparked your interest?

[Bill Ellis]

Well, I could go way back. I was a fan of JRR Tolkien. I was fascinated by medieval literature. I wanted to be a medieval studies professor. And when I got to graduate school, I took a course in folklore. And I began to realize that all the things that fascinate me about medieval literature were still around today. And oral narratives being told. There were monsters out in the. In the corners of the woods that you could go. There were people that were doing brave things to. To confront them. It was. It was fascinating to see all of this being improvised and recreated in the contemporary time. But nobody was looking at the folklore. I won't say nobody, but it was an open field and there were real questions that were being asked. And every now and then the New York Times would call me up and quote me about some kind of element of urban legends.

[Interviewer]

What types of things were you getting calls about in those days?

[Bill Ellis]

At the time, I got a lot of calls on the business of you should never flash your lights at a car that was coming towards you with the lights out because it would have gang members in and they'd follow you home and kill you. And it would be the usual kinds of media questions. Is it really true? No. No, no. Well, then why do people believe it? One of the things that I found was that statistically, the person who was most likely to pass on an urban legend was a person who doubted it. It doesn't make sense initially, but then when you think about the discourse that takes place. I heard this from a good friend of mine who said that it really happened to someone that his friend knows personally. But it just seems to me that it's outrageous and it would have been in the papers if it had happened. What do you think about this? And people would get into a discussion about what about the story was credible and what about it was incredible. And then that's when I finally realized that's what a legend is. It's not the story. It's the debate that takes place with the help of the story. And in that case, from that angle, then you start seeing that the story is all about urban crime. You can get into an interesting and deep discussion about what's going on with society today with the help of a story like that.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, and I've certainly told my share of stories because I, growing up, had a very vivid imagination. Certain urban legends scared the bejesus out of me. So that makes complete sense to me. There's stories I still tell today and that still, you know, and in order to debunk a story, you have to first tell it and feel the thrill of it, maybe.

[Bill Ellis]

So one of the points I always like to make is that these stories are told by normal people. They're not told by nutjobs. They're told by people like you and me for readily, positive, understandable purposes. And I've always tried to Say, whenever I could. That folklore, by and large, is therapeutic. It satisfies some kind of mental need. It makes people feel better to have a story like that that they can turn around and even if they don't believe it, that it can become a kind of a paradigm for the way that they're seeing the world today as something they can understand.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, but I wonder, getting into our main topic, and actually I have a phrasing question which is, do you use the term satanic panic and do you agree with that term?

[Bill Ellis]

I think it's an accurate term. I think this kind of short lived scare that takes place in many of these occasions is something that I like to say is self consuming. It is, in the original sense of the word, almost a possession of the soul. Pan was supposed to be the God that would, for whatever mysterious reason, just make you scared like crazy that something awful was just about to happen. But it was always short lived. And that's one of the elements that I've noticed about some of the specific instances of the satanic panic. Some of the earlier manifestations of this, for instance, the Salem witchcraft trials in 1692, that within a couple of months of that, which was likewise very short lived, people could not clearly say why they did what they did in Salem during that event. One of them said, it was like we were walking in clouds. It was like everybody was walking around in a thick fog and making it up as they went along as they felt like they needed to do. And then in retrospect, they realized that, well, mistakes had been made. It's self consuming, it is so important at the time and then so difficult to remember after it passes.

[Interviewer]

When did your awareness of the satanic panic begin?

[Bill Ellis]

It began when I was just finishing up my work at Ohio State University. There was a community in the rural area of Ohio. All of a sudden in the paper there were all sorts of reporting of a potentially satanic murder that had taken place there. And as I read the accounts of it, I realized that this event, this actual crime, was being seen through the filter of a whole range of adolescent legends that were told in that same area about devil worshipers and witches and the like that would go out into the countryside and hold who knows what kinds of ceremonies. And teenagers would go up into the Hocking Hills and they would hunt for the witches and they would try to sneak up on them and see what they were actually doing. Of course, with these legend trips, there was also a risk that was written into the ritual that if the witches were aware that you were Eavesdropping on them. They would, of course, grab you and you would become the human sacrifice. Well, you had the couple whose bodies were found dismembered, cut up in ways that suggested to the local police that they had been ritually sacrificed. And so they were actually going with that hypothesis, investigating in the area to see if they could find some of these real black magic cults that potentially had committed this unfortunately very real murder. There were other cases where trash heaps were dissembled in order to try to find evidence of a satanic sacrifice that had happened there. And by golly, they found a plate there that had a five pointed star on it. So it was true. It was really true. True that they were out there. You know, you had diagrams of what one of the local experts claimed was the actual form of ritual mutilation of one of the bodies with the. The center and the arcs and representing different deities of hell. The thing that intrigued me was that you. That as I was reading and I said, well, this is all the. The witches of Hocking Hills. These were stories that my students had brought into me as part of my folklore classes that lived in the Logan, Ohio area.

[Interviewer]

What was that like?

[Bill Ellis]

It was impossible to avoid. I started asking myself, well, where did all of this information on satanic cults come from? If it was something that had gotten to the point that it was seriously believed and was the basis for actual actions by law enforcement agents. And eventually I ground it out. In the 1970s, about two decades before, a lot of controversy and activity going on among charismatic Christian sects. Pentecostals never could be absolutely sure whether a faith healing or an incidental speaking in tongues or of giving prophecy, all of the various things that they were supposed to do in imitation of the early church, Whether they were true gifts of the spirit or whether they were satanic counterfeits. And there were arguments to and fro along the lines of, how many demons can dance on the head of a pin. Eventually, the solution was to say, well, we can argue this out among ourselves, but at least we can all say we're on the side of God. Now the problem is there are people out there that are on the side of the devil, and we need to band together to do everything we can to spiritually combat these people. And some of that was through the form of charismatic services, prayers, rituals, and the like. But little by little, since we were dealing with real people that were doing real things, committing real murders, selling real drugs, doing seriously bad stuff in the. In the government, you eventually got enough people Convinced that it was not enough to pray, you had to go out and fight these people. This then made it plausible when police forces began to listen to them and say, well, if this is true, there's somebody out there doing bad stuff, we need to go out and arrest them. What's scary is that again, these cases have a panic ridden run up and then when they're resolved one way or the other, they are completely forgotten about and you actually never hear from any of the witnesses again about what it was that actually did happen. There was one case in, in Texas, you probably have investigated that where a couple that ran a preschool did, I believe 20 years plus in jail for ritually abusing their children on the basis of practically no information whatsoever.

[El Amin Abdul Mahmoud]

Nicole Ernest Pate was 21 years old when a predator assaulted her in her own home.

[Bill Ellis]

Kind of the Boogeyman in the night.

[El Amin Abdul Mahmoud]

She went straight to the cops.

[Interviewer]

She said this sounds like some sort of movie plot.

[El Amin Abdul Mahmoud]

But no one believed her until Detective Paul Holz helped figure out this serial predator's pattern. This is a serious offender from Sony Music Entertainment and Perfect Cadence. This is Hunting the Boogeyman, available now on the binge Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

[Interviewer]

One of the things I was very struck by in the Fran and Dan Keller case was that the children's testimony involved they had kidnapped a gorilla from a park nearby and then cut off the finger of the gorilla and then drained the blood into a bucket and made all the children drink the blood, the gorilla blood from the bucket. And one of the things I was so struck by that gets to one of our folklore questions is if I'm a detective, I know how blood works, I hope, and I know how much blood isn't in a finger. And yet in so many of these cases, police officers, psychologists, people who are of the secular world, still believe stories that contain physical impossibilities. And I wonder about how does something spread from a sect of Christianity into our allegedly secular law enforcement and mental health communities.

[Bill Ellis]

I would have to do more research to be able to speak to the guerrilla finger. I suppose I would say if I were on the jury, I'd say it doesn't matter whether the blood was real, whether the gorilla was real. What was important was that these perpetrators were, were traumatizing these kids by telling them that. And I suppose that would be ultimately my answer to that, that these people are not being accused of actually talking to Satan and being able to use supernatural powers. They are being accused of doing mundane things that have damaging impact on in this Case, children, in the case of some of the satanic murders on teenagers. Whether you actually believe in Satan or whether you actually believe in demonic power or not, the idea is that it crossed a line. And police officers were convinced that there was a physical criminal act. And so it was no longer a second Amendment issue of somebody doing a really, really funky kind of religion. Lord knows I could imagine the police breaking into the Lutheran church I used to belong to because they did a very, very scary Good Friday service. And I'm sure that the kids that were taken to that remembered that for the rest of their lives. And this is something that the investigators of the early modern witchcraft trials point out, where something is being done that is no longer religious or supernatural, but is physical and has as its target other, other citizens, whether they're Christians or not, or institutions, whether they're Christian or not. And they are no longer offenses against God, they're offenses against the state. And I think that ultimately is the heart of some of the most influential long lived conspiracy theories. The Illuminati or the Elders of Zion are not just getting together and saying Hail Satan and expecting evil to triumph over the world. They're doing physical things of subverting institutions. And I think that's the real critical element of the Satanism scare, that it's founded in religion. But it was in the 80s and 90s, and it was also earlier, 1600s, 1700s, it was a secular phenomenon. Law enforcement agents using this threat of subversion, this image of being connected with Satan as an incentive to prosecute and ultimately execute people that had fallen afoul of the community for other reasons.

[Interviewer]

Something that we have been thinking about in our research here is what shifting the blame to a theoretical satanic cult, for example, can do for a community trying to digest a trauma. And whether that can be something that feels good or feels less difficult than facing other realities in the moment, but maybe makes it harder for us in the long run to understand what has happened to us. And yeah, I'm curious about your thoughts on that.

[Bill Ellis]

I think a lot of times the reaction to any kind of really traumatic event, whether it's a murder, whether it's an accidental death, the immediate instinct is this is part of the process of grief over this. One of the reactions is anger. And one of the inevitable events that takes place is that people try to find a scapegoat, try to find someone or some group to blame. Indeed, in the Old Testament, a ritual that's based on this notion that once a year people would get together and bring out all of the bad things that happened, sinful things that people had done, bad things that had been done to them. And all of this would be ritually cast onto the back of. Of a goat. And interestingly enough, the goat would not be killed. That's what you'd expect. No, they'd simply drive the goat out into the desert. They were expelling you. And so the goat would of course, be given a chance to survive. And the other side of it is if you are engaged in this kind of ongoing definition of reality, it's an enjoyable activity, it's a joyous activity, and it's something that sweeps people up for that reason. It sweeps people up for understandable emotional and psychological reasons. Ordinary people like you and me. Nevertheless, it's something that can cause a certain amount of social harm, certainly with people who are in a situation like first generation immigrants, that they could be hurt permanently harmed in a vulnerable time by someone that comes and says, we know who you are. You're being brought into the country by the deep state to destroy America. And that's happened before too.

[Interviewer]

Yeah. The concept of this as not a singular event, but a timeless presence within culture, I don't know if it's fair to call. Call it that feels also like an important reframing. And then the question that leads me to ask is what we can do aside from waiting for it to run its course.

[Bill Ellis]

My feeling is ethnography. Ethnography, ethnography. The more you know about it, the more you can realistically make comments about it. I think again, the issue that I like to end on though, is that these kinds of panics, these kinds of crusades, they are in the end, self consuming. Because in the end, and this is something that analysts of the witch panics have pointed out, it oversteps itself. And people realize that they are punishing the innocent with the guilty. And when that becomes clear, then the real righteousness of the crusade begins to deflate. And that's why I used in my book Raising the Devil an epigraph that actually is from the Bible, the cynical old Ecclesiastes. Do you say that this is new? No, it's been in the times before. It's happened before. It will happen again. Nobody will remember. That's my paraphrase of the biblical text. But I think it's true to the spirit of it and that's, I think, true about these kinds of events. It's difficult to remember. And that's one of the reasons why it needs to be looked at as an active dynamic.

[Interviewer]

Oh yeah. And I believe that. And I think that's probably ultimately the takeaway that we want are one of the big ones.

[Sarah Marshall]

Thank you for listening to the W Know. Our producer is Mary Stephanhagen. Fact checking by Katherine Barner. Production assistants by Nicole Ortiz. I've been your host. Sarah Marshall, our sound designer is Evan Kelly. Roushni Nair is our coordinating producer. Our senior producer is Jeff Turner. Executive producers are Cecil Fernandez and Chris Oak. Tanya Springer is manager of growth for CBC Podcasts. Arif Nurani is director of CBC Podcasts.

[Bill Ellis]

Foreign.

[El Amin Abdul Mahmoud]

For more cbc podcasts, go to cbc ca podcasts.