From dungeon to headline - the Satanic Panic

In the summer of 1979, a private detective stands in an empty dorm room at Michigan State University. His name is William Dear. In front of him hangs a corkboard studded with pushpins. He sees a pattern in it. The points seem to form a map, as if they trace the buildings of the campus, the power plant included.

Dear does not know the game Dungeons & Dragons. But he has heard that the missing boy played it. And so a theory takes shape. The boy went into the steam tunnels beneath the university, in the middle of a live-action role-playing game, and lost his way down there.

The theory was wrong. But the papers ran with it as though it were fact. And with that, something began that would shadow the young hobby for years.

The boy in the tunnels

James Dallas Egbert III was sixteen. A prodigy, too young for the campus, and under heavy pressure from his parents. He was struggling with depression, with addiction, and with the knowledge that he was gay in a place that left little room for it.

On 15 August 1979 he went into the steam tunnels. He survived, went into hiding with friends, and eventually traveled to the south of the country. A month later, Dear found him. The boy asked the detective to keep the truth quiet, and Dear honored that. A year later, Egbert took his own life, seventeen years old.

His disappearance had nothing to do with the game. Dear set that down honestly himself, later, in his 1984 book The Dungeon Master. But by then the story had long since taken on a life of its own.

From headline to crusade

The image stuck: a game that pulls children in so deep they lose hold of the real world. In 1981, Rona Jaffe wrote a novel about it. A year later it became the television film Mazes and Monsters, with a young Tom Hanks as a student who can no longer tell the game apart from his own life.

But the panic only turned truly fierce when a person with a story stepped forward. In June 1982, Patricia Pulling of Virginia lost her teenage son Irving, known as Bink, to suicide. She became convinced that a curse placed on his character during a game of D&D had been the cause.

She filed suit against his school principal, and later against TSR, the game's publisher. Both cases were dismissed. Not long after, she founded Bothered About Dungeons & Dragons, BADD for short. In 1985 she appeared on an episode of 60 Minutes, across from Gary Gygax. On that same program, another guest laid a list of twenty-eight deaths at the door of the game.

In 1984 came Dark Dungeons, a religious comic by Jack Chick. In it, the game leads straight to witchcraft, devil worship and death. It was handed out in schools to frighten children. That, quite literally, was the point.

Honest about the messy parts

An honest word belongs here. None of the big claims held up. Egbert's own parents never blamed the game. Bink's death was, like every suicide, more complicated and more painful than any single cause can hold. The lawsuits collapsed. Reporters disproved most of the numbers.

In 1990, the writer Michael Stackpole took the case apart in The Pulling Report. His conclusion was blunt: the figures were inflated, the method was shoddy, the link did not exist.

And yet. Beneath the headlines were two real families who had lost a child. It is easy to find the panic ridiculous now, and on the facts it earns that. But the grief underneath it was real. Good history holds both of those things at once.

What it changed

The strange part is what the panic did to the game itself. It made it big.

Before the disappearance in the tunnels, the Basic Set sold an estimated few thousand copies a month. By the end of 1979 it was clearing more than thirty thousand. Every headline, every sermon, every worried parents' evening was advertising. It was the best advertising the hobby ever got, and no one had paid for it.

Today D&D turns up on streaming services and in cinema films, and millions of people play it without raising a single eyebrow. The devil is gone. The game stayed.

In the first two chapters of this series we saw where the hobby came from: out of the sand tables of wargamers, and out of dice that once sat in classrooms. This chapter is about the cost of growing up. A game that began as an arithmetic problem with soldiers had to learn to survive after being branded the work of the devil.

It started with a man looking at a corkboard and seeing something that was not there. Sometimes that is enough to frighten a country. And sometimes, once the fright wears off, the game turns out to be stronger than the story that was told about it.