Fear that a secret satanic cult was sacrificing children in Victoria dominated my childhood in the 1980s
The bestselling memoir Michelle Remembers sparked a worldwide panic over satanic abuse
A few years ago, I set up a Google Alert for the book Michelle Remembers, published in 1980. I was at the very beginning of a new idea for a film about a weird story from my childhood that became the CBC feature documentary called Satan Wants You. Surely no one would still be posting about an obscure, out-of-print memoir from more than 40 years ago that told the story of a secret satanic cult that sacrificed children on a small Canadian island in the North Pacific?
Except it turns out they were. Over the weeks and months that followed, I was surprised by the volume of Michelle Remembers think pieces, comment thread mentions and blog posts that appeared in my inbox. It was a favourite subject for podcasters, including a wildly popular five-part series by Sarah Marshall and Michael Hobbes for the history podcast You're Wrong About. During the pandemic, more people began digitizing their old archives: newspaper and magazine articles about the book, court filings from satanic ritual abuse cases, and old daytime TV talk shows ripped from VHS tapes about Satanism's growing influence in North America.
But I am jumping ahead of myself. I grew up in the city where Michelle Remembers takes place, but to understand the book — and the role it played in the worldwide panic over satanic ritual abuse that followed — I need to tell you a little about the story that started it all.
The bestselling book that sparked a worldwide panic over satanic abuse
Michelle Remembers is a well-known book — but for all the wrong reasons. It tells the story of Michelle Smith, a young housewife who seeks help from her psychiatrist, Dr. Lawrence Pazder, in 1976 while she is recovering from a miscarriage. What unfolds over 14 months of intensive therapy sounds straight out of a horror movie.
Michelle's memories come slowly at first and are so disturbing that Dr. Pazder records them on a reel-to-reel tape recorder. They reveal that as a child, she'd been forced to participate in strange rituals in the basement of her suburban home involving people in black robes, candles and chanting. Dr. Pazder, who had filmed and photographed tribal ceremonies while practising medicine in Africa, begins to suspect Michelle had been part of a cult.
As Michelle's memories grow in detail and intensity, it becomes clear that not only was Michelle's mother a cult member, but she had also willingly given Michelle to Satan himself. This was no ordinary cult either. Dr. Pazder and Michelle believed they were Satanists. They drank blood and ate feces. They stole and slaughtered newborn babies and young children. They held ceremonies in cemeteries in Victoria's Ross Bay Cemetery where they ripped apart white kittens with their bare hands. They pulled out Michelle's teeth and starved her and sewed a tail and horns on her body — along with countless other unspeakable horrors.
The story culminates with an 81-day satanic ceremony called 'The Feast of the Beast' where the Satanists in Victoria attempted to summon Satan to earth. Only the timely intervention of both Jesus and the Virgin Mary saved Michelle (and the rest of us) from the end of the world. Michelle's rememberings end with Satan being banished back to hell where he belongs and the Virgin Mary healing Michelle and taking her memories away.
It is quite the story and it has reverberated across my life — and the lives of millions of people — in ways that surprise me decades later.
Rampant fear in Victoria in the 1980s
My family moved from the Prairies to Victoria shortly after Michelle Remembers was published. As a child, I felt like it was all anyone could talk about. Michelle Smith and Lawrence Pazder and their theories about satanic ritual abuse were everywhere. They were on the radio and in the news. They spoke in churches. Even the local gossip columnist for the Victoria Times Colonist wrote about them regularly. Back then, they lived 10 minutes down the road from my family in a big house overlooking the ocean.
And then Michelle and Dr. Pazder married in 1986 — to the shock and disgust of their respective ex-spouses — six years after their book's publication.
Rumours of satanic activity in Victoria were rampant at that time. There were reports of pentagrams and satanic graffiti on buildings and bridges, and it was said that certain stores downtown had altars and secret rooms where animals and children were killed. At one point, there was talk that Satanists were planning to steal babies from the local hospital. The panic in our community was so high that police officers guarded the maternity ward.
Every shadow seemed to hold a lurking danger. Every stranger — especially if they were dressed in black — was viewed with suspicion. I have other memories from this period too. The faces of missing children on the milk cartons in the back of our fridge. A police officer photographing and taking the fingerprints of me and my three sisters for a child safety program. Watching "Stranger Danger" PSAs on the American TV stations on the old television set in our basement. That hot stab of terror any time a car slowed down to pass me and my younger sister when we were biking around our neighbourhood. That ever-present fear that we were going to be snatched off the street and murdered.
I've been writing about this part of my life on Substack. Looking back on it now, it's easy to see how ridiculous it all was. Michelle Remembers has since been debunked as a work of fiction, and the hysteria that it sparked has faded into history. But at the time, it felt very very frightening.
At the height of what became known as the Satanic Panic, in 1991, there was a real child abduction in Victoria that was never solved. Rumours spread quickly that it was the work of local Satanists, and it was seen by some as evidence that Michelle's claims were real. I still think of that family and what it must have been like to hear this whispered around the community — and then to read it again decades later in posts by comment forum conspiracy theorists and satanic ritual abuse believers.
How Michelle Remembers reverberates around the world today
All of this happened decades ago, and to be honest, I didn't think once about the book or its authors in the years in between. Life happened. I went to university. I loved and lost and wrote a book. I created and hosted a reality show. I met one of the great loves of my life and we've spent years making movies together. I had forgotten all about Michelle Remembers until one of my older sisters suggested it for a project I was working on in 2018 about books and authors.
Despite growing up in Victoria, there was a lot I didn't know about the book. That it was an instant bestseller. That it was published, translated, and sold in other countries. That it was blamed for sparking a wave of hysteria about satanic cults across North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand — resulting in copycat cases, criminal investigations and innocent people being sent to prison for crimes they hadn't committed. And that Michelle and Dr. Pazder's involvement in this societal mass delusion went well beyond their initial book tour in 1980.
What leaps out at me now rereading Michelle Remembers again as an adult isn't the Satanists and dead babies. It was what this wildly unethical doctor-patient romance must have been like for Dr. Pazder's first wife, Marylyn, and Michelle's first husband, Doug. Through this lens, it becomes a story about betrayal and our capacity to deceive. About how little we know the people who are closest to us, and how the familiarity and routine of a long-term relationship blind us to one another.
Once you strip away the Satanic window dressing, Michelle Remembers becomes a different kind of horror story. An older man in a position of authority abandons his faithful wife for a much younger lover he's met through work. Or maybe it's a story about a young woman falling in love with a man who appears to have everything: money, power, influence, and all privileges those entail. Whether it's the former or the latter, or both, we've all heard this story before. Homes are wrecked. Lives are ruined. It's such a predictable story, so obvious really, which is maybe why so many of us never see it coming — including me, because I've been the blindsided spouse in this scenario too.
Except in Michelle and Dr. Pazder's case, their lives collided in such a way that it changed the world forever, with far-reaching consequences that are still being felt today. Keep that in mind the next time you decide to have an affair or swipe right on Tinder. You might get way more than you bargained for.
Watch Satan Wants You now streaming on CBC Gem.
Sean Horlor is a filmmaker and author from Vancouver. He directed and executive produced Satan Wants You, a documentary about the origins of the Satanic Panic, with Steve J. Adams.
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