The real history behind Stranger Things 4’s Satanic Panic plot

polygon.com:

In the first episode of Stranger Things season 4, Eddie, the leader of Hawkins High’s “Hellfire Club” of Dungeons & Dragons players, gleefully reads from a Newsweek article about how the game is for Satan-worshippers. “The devil has come to America,” he reads out. “Studies have linked violent behavior to the game, saying it promotes satanic worship, ritual sacrifice, sodomy, suicide, and even murder.” It seems impossible to think there were really mainstream news pieces like that in the 1980s. But there were — and there were also kids who thought that was cool. They had to deal with adults who wanted groups like the Hellfire Club to be exorcized.

D&D became famous after the 1979 disappearance of James Dallas Egbert III, a 16-year-old Michigan State University student who was briefly (and mistakenly) believed to have gotten lost in the steam tunnels below campus while playing a game of D&D. Supposedly, the game had become all too real in his head. That turned out not to be true — he had run away to Louisiana — but the reality didn’t get nearly as much press as the baseless suspicion that D&D drove him crazy.

All of the surrounding publicity turned D&D from an obscure pastime into the subject of a nationwide conversation. The steam tunnel story quickly became an urban legend. It was the basis for Rona Jaffe’s novel Mazes and Monsters, which was adapted into a notorious after-school special starring a young Tom Hanks. The idea that D&D could warp young minds soon became a pet cause of fundamentalist Christians in particular — especially when they looked at the covers of D&D books and saw horned demonic faces staring back at them.

But anyone familiar with the game would know this was all make-believe fantasy fiction stuff,