She Stole a Deceased Boy's Diary and Rewrote It as Satanic Panic Propaganda

[00:00:00]If you went to middle school or high school in America at any point between 1971 and today, there's a pretty good chance that either a teacher, someone from church, a family member handed you this book and said, "This is a true story. This is what happens when teenagers make bad decisions." And this book, this diary by an anonymous teenager called Go Ask Alice was not true. Not even one word of it was true.

[00:00:28]And honestly, that's the least disturbing part of the story because Beatatrice Sparks didn't just make up one dead teenager. She also took a real one, stole his actual diary, and rewrote his life and turned it into a completely different story.

[00:00:55]Now, if you're new here, I do mini deep dives on insane fake memoirs, delusional authors, and publishing controversies. I post a new video every Sunday. So, if you like this, I have a bunch of videos just like it. But to just be really serious with you and just give you a heads up before we get started, I need to give you some trigger warnings for this video. I actually cried multiple times while doing the research for this video as I have specific triggers which we'll be discussing. It wasn't easy for me to even do the research, but I feel like it was important for me to make this video. And also, I just feel like it's really important for people to continue to talk about this particular subject and this author so that something like this doesn't happen again. If you are someone that is not comfortable hearing about self harm, substance abuse, or suicide, you may want to skip this video. A lot of this is fiction that we we'll be discussing.

[00:01:52]But I will be discussing some real people who really experienced some of these situations. If today is not the day for you to face these types of things and you're not in a good place to watch this, I have other videos on my channel and I'm sending you a virtual hug and I'll see you in the next one.

[00:02:10]Now, let's get into it. So, Beatatric Ruby Matthews was born on January 15th, 1917 in Goldberg, Idaho, and she died in 2012. She was a Mormon and she grew up in Logan, Utah. And she left home around 17 years old. She spent decades as a failed writer. She was pitching columns, poems, and TV ideas with zero success.

[00:02:35]So, she became very desperate to find a good story. So, what did she do? She fabricated academic credentials. She claimed she studied psychology at the University of Utah. There is zero evidence that this is true. She was also a self-described youth counselor. A lot of people have characterized her as a serial con artist. Truly, to really understand this author, we have to talk about her first fraud, which is the book Go Ascalas. It all started in 1970 when Art Linkletter's daughter died in a tragic, really horrible way. Art was a radio and TV personality who hosted a show called House Party and then another called People Are Funny. He was on Hollywood Squares and all sorts of talk shows. He was huge on TV at the time.

[00:03:25]Beatatrice had been pitching stories to art for a while at this point, but he wasn't interested in any of it. So, when his daughter passed away, she swooped in. Now, see, this part is really upsetting, but Art's 20-year-old daughter, who appeared in some of the TV programs with her father, passed away.

[00:03:48]She made headlines because she passed away by leaping out of a six-story window to her death. He blamed the behavior on LSD, but it's important to note that there was no LSD found in her system. Regardless, for years, the lie about LSD stayed in the public sphere.

[00:04:09]Beatatrice would then swoop in and tell Linkletter that she had a diary of another deceased teen with a shockingly similar story. And of course, she made it up, all of it. So she wrote Gowascalis which was a cautionary tale cautionary diary about a teenage girl's descent into addiction. It was presented to the world as a real found manuscript diary by anonymous and this was all so that teens would trust it more than something written by an adult. She presented herself as the book's editor and that she was a therapist and she found these stories while talking to people on the job. She called herself a psychiatrist, a psychologist, a psychoanalyst. She would change her title depending on who she was talking to, and she would change her degrees, her number of degrees. She would say that she had a PhD, multiple PhDs. She put PhD after her name on the books.

[00:05:12]There is no evidence, just so everybody knows, there's no evidence that she has any degrees at all. There is also no evidence that she had any licenses or practices in her name or she worked at any practices or had done any work in the therapy realm whatsoever. There's zero evidence of any of that. But um this research was all done when she was officially outed as a fraud, which we'll talk about soon. The US copyright office listed Sparks as the sole author of the book too. In 1973, there was also a TV movie starring Jamie Smith Jackson and William Shatner. And in 1976, there was a stage play that was published. The book sold about 6 million copies. A lot of people know about the book Go Ask Alice and how it was a complete fraud, but I would say that the next thing she would do is even worse. In 1977, Marcella Barrett, a fellow Mormon, approached Sparks after a local paper out her as the Go Ask Alice editor.

[00:06:17]Marcela's son, Alden, had died by suicide in March 1971 at just 16 years old. He was a star debater in high school and a quiet, emotional kid who fell deeply in love and suffered a really bad breakup. His younger brother Scott found the body and he never recovered. Scott never recovered. He turned to alcohol and ended up at the now notorious Provo Canyon School. This is a private for-profit residential treatment center for children and young people in Utah.

[00:06:54]There have been horrible stories, nightmare stories told by individuals who attended that school. Stories have come out about systematic abuse by survivors. You may have heard of it because Paris Hilton was also sent there at one point and then she spoke out about her experience. It's considered to be one of the most notorious residential treatment facilities of its kind. There is a documentary called Teen Torture, Inc. which discusses some of these facilities, including the Provo Canyon School. It's just incredibly upsetting that poor Scott was sent there. It's just horrible. After he experienced what he did, after he suffered through the situation, he was sent there. So, I wanted to spend some time talking about that because that's a little part of the story that I think is important. But back to the story, though. So, Marcela gave Sparks Alden's real diary with no agenda for money or fame. She just wanted her son's death to mean something. They were struggling to understand what went wrong, what happened, why did it happen. I think they were desperate for answers and they had the diary and they looked at Sparks.

[00:08:11]Sparks said she would take a look at the diary and then she was silent for about 2 years. Then in 1979, Jay's journal then appeared in bookstores as a real teen's diary about a boy's descent into satanic cults, occult rituals, and suicide. The original diary only contains about 90ish entries. Jay's journal that Sparks published contained 212 entries. only about 21 actually came from Alden's original journal. So, the remaining 190 are just made up. They depict an unhinged teenage monster who was in a satanic cult and possessed by a demon called Raul. At one point, his cat became possessed by the devil and he would sacrifice animals in the book. And obviously, this wasn't true. Alden Barrett was never in a cult. He was a grieving teenager who was in love and had a terrible breakup. There was no possession. There was no cult. Just a kid who struggled deeply. The Barrett family, who was already broken by his death, now had to live in a world who believed their son had been a satanic cult member. They knew it wasn't true and they would fight for years. Now, it's important to say here, too, that the Barrett family was flawed. They were working with whatever mental health information they knew at the time. And so, the brother that was sent to the terrible, you know, school, um, they they were doing their best for him. And there was just a lot of tragic circumstances around everything. And that's my interpretation of everything that I researched and I found online. So when the book came out, they felt like they had truly and completely and totally failed their son. Their son was gone. And now the very memory of their son was destroyed. And also because Sparks didn't sufficiently hide the identity of Alden, the family faced severe backlash in their community. They were forced to move. The parents eventually divorced and Alden's grave was repeatedly vandalized by people who believed that the fictional book was true. And you know what? Sparks would never admit to anything. She would never say it was all fabricated. She let the family fall apart. For what? In my opinion, she got money from the book sales and she didn't care about anything else. She never talked to the family again and she never um you know answered when they reached out or anything like that. This is just all really awful circumstances. The family was just completely and totally destroyed by this book. And meanwhile, Spark said that the book was used in actual law enforcement training during the Satanic Panic and the FBI had materials that reference the book. There is no evidence of this at all, but the book was widely distributed in churches in schools. So, who knows what people were using it for, but we don't have any evidence that, you know, law enforcement and FBI used the book in their training. So, this is this book is one of the books that would essentially kick off the satanic panic. And one day we'll talk about the other huge book that also helped to to cause this pandemonium. Um, but this is a big one.

[00:11:51]Now, I'll briefly explain, you know, what the Satanic Panic was because there are so many great videos and documentaries about this that I suggest you dive into because it was a completely insane part of North American history that everyone should learn about because you need to know what happened to avoid repeating history. But if you're not familiar, the Satanic Panic was a weird situation where many people in the 80s and 90s were suddenly experiencing mass hysteria fueled by conspiracy theories that there was an infestation of satanic cults doing all sorts of terrible, awful, horrible things. While Jay's journal would influence this situation, there was also the book in 1980 called Michelle Remembers, which was completely fabricated. I'll have to cover that one day. That's that's wild. Maybe my next video.

[00:12:49]But there was a lot of accusations that were thrown around like how heavy metal was a gateway to the occult and how, you know, Dungeons and Dragons was too.

[00:13:00]There were criminal trials and unjust convictions that would ruin lives left and right. This was a really big deal and people totally had their lives changed forever because of this in a terrible way. And it was a it's a it's an instance of true mass hysteria in North America. So, in part, the hysteria of the Titanic panic situation was fueled by the works of Sparks, which led to wrongful accusations of ritual abuse.

[00:13:32]It destroyed families. Like I said, it led to many, many wrongful incarcerations. So, I just think this is wild. But one woman's fabrications, one woman's lies about one grieving boy helped ignite a decade of national hysteria. So, we won't get, you know, too much deeper into the satanic panic here, but I find this whole thing to be so fascinating, but also awful. This is what misinformation does when it's laundered through the credibility of a published book. It can fester in our literal culture for decades. If people believe something is true and they aren't willing to find, you know, or understand facts if it's not true, things fall apart very quickly. It's just like understanding that misinformation is something that we'll always have to deal with in our culture. And there's a book by Carl Sean called The Demon Haunted World. And it's really, you should definitely read it. It should be required reading for everybody. It's about understanding misinformation and being able to read something and find sources and understand what's real and what's not. But yeah, I'll get off my tangent. I just really love that book.

[00:14:50]So, it's also important to note that Sparks didn't just publish two books.

[00:14:55]She published 11 books. Here are just some of them. Now, again, trigger warning. There's a lot of really upsetting things that we're going to talk about real quick here. So, just real quick here, we're going to get into more upsetting topics. So, all of these fake diaries are full of upsetting topics. Uh, so just you're just so you're aware. In 1994, we had It Happened to Nancy, which was a fake teen diary about date and AIDS. Then we had Annie's Baby in 1998, which was a fake teen pregnancy diary. Then in the year 2000, we had something called Treacherous Love, which was a fake diary about a student teacher relationship.

[00:15:37]Yeah, what is wrong with this lady? She made all this up and she wrote these are just a sampling of what she wrote. There are many other books out there and I highly highly highly recommend that you don't look them up. Just just know that they exist and if you see anything by this author, walk away. Don't read it.

[00:15:58]It's complete [ __ ] She gave interviews presenting herself as a compassionate editor who was preserving real teen stories and she kept this ruse right up until her death in 2012 at age 95. She never ever admitted to fabricating anything. She never admitted to anything ever. Fast forward into the future. It wouldn't be until 2022 when Rick Emerson's book came out called Unmask Alice, LSD, Satanic Panic, and The Impostor Behind the World's Most Notorious Diaries. The book took about six years of research and he went through about nine boxes of Sparks's correspondence at Bringham Young University and he traced a direct line from Jay's journal to the satanic panic of the 1980s as we talked about earlier.

[00:16:53]So he was the one to really make that correlation that it was one of the books that created the hysteria. The book outed all of Spark's books as fraudulent published under the guise of being authentic diaries. And he has a ton of evidence in this book, damning evidence about every single book she ever wrote and how fake everything is and how fake she is. Unmask Alice would receive positive reviews and Rolling Stone and The New Yorker would publish articles about it. Yet, Go Ask Alice is still in print.

[00:17:30]It's still in print and a lot of you have read it. I read it. Scared the [ __ ] out of me when I was young. Like I was like, "Is this real?

[00:17:39]What the hell?" But it's still in print and it's still sometimes assigned in schools for kids to read and believe that all of this is true. It's traumatizing kids with a fake story.

[00:17:50]Don't let your kids read that book. It's not real. The Barrett family. Scott Barrett, who found his brother's body, spent decades dealing with the fallout of the Sparks fabrications. Marcela Barrett just wanted her son's death to mean something. Beatatrice Sparks made sure it meant something, just completely fabricated, wrong, twisted, and ugly.

[00:18:14]Scott would eventually publish a book called A Place in the Sun to provide a factual account of his brother's life and refute the satanic claims. these diaries are still presented as true.

[00:18:27]What does it do to a young person who reads these stories and believes them?

[00:18:33]Like I'm sure many of you have read Gowascalis. When I read the book as a kid, I remember I kind of read it like like I felt weird reading it like it was something I shouldn't have been reading.

[00:18:46]I thought it was real. I thought it was an anonymous diary, you know? And so I think that reading something like that and truly believing that it is true, it was like a horror story and it was really scary and it was awful and I just felt empathy for, you know, the lead the lead character. I didn't necessarily think that I would end up in a situation like that um because it felt so it didn't feel real. It feels so insanely bad that I was like there's no way this could be real. Now, I'm sure people have similar stories to Go Ask Alice, but I feel like everything bad that could happen in that book did happen. And I remember thinking, is this really from a real teenager? I remember holding the book as a kid and wondering, who is this story really about? Like, who is anonymous? Why is it anonymous?

[00:19:39]And who found the diary? And why is it published? And I had a lot of questions about that. And I felt like it was an invasion into privacy, too. And all of those things came together. And I was very young when I read this. What is really wild to me is that publishers, school boards, churches, all accepted these stories without verification. The more I make these videos, you know, the more I learn that people are just like willing to accept and believe almost anything if it's packaged as a sensational story. People love the drama of it all. And I would say that if someone had a specific motive where they wanted someone to believe a particular thing, they could put out a book. And in that case, this was the situation with Go Ask Alice. People wanted that to be true because they wanted to give that to their kid and scare the living [ __ ] out of them so they wouldn't, you know, ever touch a substance. And a lot of people said that they didn't ever touch any substances because they read that book and it scared them. So, in my opinion, the real horror in all of this isn't that she lied. Lots of people lie. We talk about it on my channel all the time. People lie. People make up stuff.

[00:20:52]In my opinion, the worst part of this is that society as a whole was just so eager to be fooled. I think no one questioned her because no one wanted to question her. schools and publishers and churches wanted this stuff to be real because they had a motive behind all of that. They wanted it to be real because they wanted people to act a certain way.

[00:21:16]And I think that led to, you know, no one questioning this author's stories.

[00:21:23]But anyways, this was a pretty heavy one. So, if you feel up to it, give that subscribe button a little hug. It needs it. We all do. and give that like button just a little high five. I post a new video every Sunday where we talk about everything from crazy madeup memoirs to delusional authors. There's a lot of crazy stuff being talked about on this channel in my mini deep dives. If you're into that kind of stuff like I am, check out the playlist that will pop up at the end of this video. And thank you so much for my chatty segment today. This video is being posted the day after Pittsburgh Bookfest. So, I'll be posting some pictures and maybe some videos from that. But I didn't post a video last Sunday for the first time in months. And honestly, it was very very weird for me not to. And so I I put a community post.

[00:22:08]So if you're interested in staying updated with stuff like that, um there's a big reason behind all of that. But I'll just let you know that everything's going much much much better than it was last week. But yeah, thank you so much for all of the nice words and well wishes and all of that. It's really um nice to hear. So it's a tough time, but yeah. But I enjoy making these videos, so that's why I had this particular one scripted out for some time. And I did the research on this a couple weeks ago.

[00:22:36]And for me, it was a really hard one to script. So, it was kind of like this really heavy video coming out during just a really heavy week. It was a lot kind of all at once. But I I really enjoy it. I really really do. And I find the satanic panic to be just very interesting because of this mass hysteria that happened. And it's just like I I don't understand. And I feel like something like this could happen again. And I don't know in what context or what it could be, but I feel like we've seen it, you know, too since then.

[00:23:07]But anyways, the next thing I'm doing is Stoker Con. So if you're going to Stoker Con, let me know. I will be there. I will also be going to something called Confluence, which is happening in Pittsburgh here soon. I'm really excited about that one, too. So, if you're going to anything, let me know. I might see you. If you go to anything bookreated in Pittsburgh, there's a chance that I'll be there. So, say hi. We can be friends.

[00:23:32]Um, if you're a writer, if you're not a writer, that's okay, too, if you're a reader. I am a reader and I'm trying to be a writer. So, we'll see how that goes one day. Also, I wanted to mention I have another channel where I stream horror games and I play horror games. I stream on Sundays and Wednesdays if that is something that you like. I'm going to be playing the game Control. I just played Alan Wake for the first time and then I played Directive 8020 and now we're getting into Control and the rest of the Allen Wake universe which is really cool. So, if you're into that, you're in the right spot, too. But anyways, thank you so much for sticking around and I'll see you soon. Bye.