They called it the Satanic Panic, but to us, it was just a Tuesday. One day you're in your bedroom, taping up posters of Iron Maiden or playing Dungeons and Dragons with your friends. The next, your grandma's pulling you aside, eyes wide, voice trembling, asking if you've been dabbling in the dark arts.

You'd watch the evening news—televangelists in thousand-dollar suits warning America that rock albums were recruiting for Lucifer. They told us cartoons were poisoned sugar. That Skeletor was priming us for necromancy. That Care Bears taught witchcraft. That the Smurfs were blue because they were already dead and belonged to Satan. Try explaining that at recess without laughing so hard milk shoots from your nose.

We watched it all unfold on talk shows. Phil Donahue, Geraldo Rivera—warning suburban parents about ritual sites hidden in the backwoods. The same backwoods where we played tag and hid dirty magazines. They found melted candles and beer cans and called it the devil's altar. We called it evidence of teenagers with a case of Milwaukee's Best and no sense of fire safety.

The woman down the street who once complimented you on your manners? Now she clutches her purse tighter when you walk by. Your friend's mom burned his KISS tapes in the backyard while he cried into his denim jacket. The neighbor kid swore if you played Another One Bites the Dust backwards, it whispered, "smoke marijuana." He tried it; it just sounded like Freddie Mercury having a seizure.

We watched all of this in a kind of quiet disbelief. Because to us, metal was just music with bigger solos. Cartoons were just cartoons. Dungeons and Dragons was just dice and math. No one was summoning anything. We were just summoning each other, trying to find ourselves in a world terrified of shadows.

Then one day, overnight almost, it was gone. The panic that once threatened to consume every suburban living room just evaporated. The news moved on to violent video games or stranger danger. Parents went back to worrying about report cards. The VHS tapes by Bob Larson gathered dust in the church library. No one apologized for the hysteria. They never do.

We grew up mostly unscathed, except for a lingering sense that adults could lose their minds over nothing. That truth bends under fear. And we learned early that whenever someone screams, "Won't someone think of the children?" what they really mean is, "How dare you think for yourselves?"

This has been a love letter to a forgotten thing. And to think, the only thing I ever sacrificed was my allowance for another D&D module or a Megadeth tape.