Just a heads up, this episode does contain graphic descriptions of violence.

And though it's almost entirely made up, some listeners may still find it upsetting.

So just take care of yourself.

You got to be more conservative with your tortures because if you shred the insides of the mouths of all your novices, then who do you have left to throw babies in a pit?

Nobody. You got to preserve your workforce.

Way back in the 1830s, a supposed memoir by a runaway nun became the second best-selling book in America,

leaving a profound and dangerous impact on a nation already consumed by a moral panic about the new wave of Irish and German Catholic immigrants.

The awful disclosures of Maria Monk was a true crime tale of the horrors Maria claimed to have

suffered while living among debauchous and murderous Catholic clergy in a convent-turned torture chamber.

The book proved to large swaths of the public what they already believed, that this new

scourge of Catholic immigrants was as dangerous as prominent Protestants were claiming.

But was it really a truthful account of Maria Monk's life,

or was it all a hoax, a piece of propaganda meant to incite hatred

of the original immigrant folk devils of American culture?

In this two-part series, Sarah Marshall of Your Wrong About and You

Are Good joins me to descend into the dungeons of this allegedly despicable convent, to try to separate

fact from fiction, to talk about the similarities between this book and other hoax memoirs, and to

discuss the particular ways that anti-immigrant rhetoric has remained the same for two centuries.

I'm your host, Chelsea Weber-Smith, and this is American Hysteria.

Hello, dear listeners, do we have a bizarre journey for you over the next couple episodes?

I am here with dear Sarah Marshall of your wrong about, who I know all of you are always thrilled when I say that name.

So hello, Sarah Marshall.

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