Wendy C Allen
Dan Clarke
ENGL 100-15
Exploration #4
April 4, 2012
Stop the Hate
Bullies should be banned. Bullies. Bigots. Racists. Trolls. Self righteous arrogant bastards. Religious pomposity. For me those words are interchangeable. Bullies, vandalism, and hate crimes have been a part of my life for several years now. There are some who say to me: well, just avoid these people. Don’t go anywhere, where you’ll run into them. The problem with that theory is I had agoraphobia for 27 years, so, it’s not like I ever went anywhere outside of my house and garden. I had a bit more freedom than most folks with agoraphobia, because I could at least step outside of my room and even outside of my house, and I had a garden I could putter around in. I did not leave my yard, which being in a swamp, in a forest, on the coast of Maine, is somewhat difficult to get to, so the only way for me to have any contact with anyone, on any level, period, was if they trespassed onto my land, invaded my privacy, and intrusively initiated contact with me. You really had to be determined if you wanted to try to have face to face contact with me.
In spite of my never leaving my yard, I’ve had plenty of opportunity to talk with dozens of members of dozens of religions, on their reasons why they hate, loath, and protest against women ministers, witches, and Gypsies. It’s easy to have access to these people when they are protesting in your driveway, after all. One common rumor on the mouths of these protesters was that I started my own religion. I didn’t. It’s not like I ever went out and said “this is my new religion and I’m going to call it…” Nothing like that ever happened. The rumor of my starting a new religion was propagated in 1991 by Mormon Bishop Paul Morgan of Cape Elizabeth, Maine. He found out I was by race a Gypsy, and by career a psychic fortune teller. Federal law requires all legally operating, tax paying psychics to be ordained ministers, because psychic readings are classified by the IRS as a form of pastoral counselling or spiritual advising. Thus I had to become an ordained minister in order to legally do my job. My overreacting Bishop blew the whole thing out of proportion from there. He ran around jumping to conclusions, spreading false rumors and lies about me, and before I knew it I had reporters in my yard asking questions and snapping pictures, with me utterly clueless as to what the heck they were talking about. Me? Start a religion? I did? When? Where? How? What the heck are you talking about? By 2001 there were several local church groups marching around my lawn. *sigh* Well, at least I can say my life has been eventful.
It just seemed like there was always someone new joining the group, bringing with them, a whole new set of rumors. As the years progressed, so did the rumors, which eventually included such ludicrous things as casting death spells (and being accused of having caused nearly every death in the Saco Bay area), sacrificing animals, and sending demons out “to get” people. By 2007 people throughout quite a large section of York County had begun to call me “The Sea Witch of Old Orchard Beach”. Perhaps they had been calling me this earlier. I do not know, as it was the sudden lack of a house, in 2006, which inspired my wandering around the streets. No house to putter around in, I started puttering around in a progressively larger area, thus the non-protesting locals began to come into actual physical contact with me for the first time. In their words, “The crazy demon consorting, death-spell casting, animal sacrificing, hermit-witch had emerged from her lair.” I already knew the religion crazy protesters thought these things of me, but I thought they were just delusional fundamentalists; I was unaware that they had convinced others to believe their hateful delusions. I’d walk down the sidewalk and people would all cross the street. Mothers would grab their children while saying: “I don’t look at her. It’s that evil gypsy witch. She’ll curse you with a death spell. Give you the evil eye!” I found this both alarming and amusing. Was this the 21st century or the 16th century? I mean, I know we are only a few miles from Salem but still…
It was more than words and stares however. A few of the more radical Christians, egged on by Old Orchard Beach town manager and fundamentalist Mormon high priest, Jim Thomas, began to proclaim it was their “God given duty to punish” me for my “sins”, exorcise my demons, and “drive out this evil that lives among us”. The first drive by shooting occurred in 2001, it was one of the first act of physical violence, and it would be far from the last. The ensuing hate crimes and acts of vandalism would become a daily event for the next 9 years.
You remember that hysterical Mormon Bishop of 1991, the one who started all of this with his outlandish rumors of my founding a new and in his words “anti-Mormon apostate religion”? Over the years he riled up more Bishops, a total of 16 Bishops altogether, several high priests, and a few stake presidents. He went so far as to contact the Prophet in Salt Lake City and request my excommunication. During those 9 years, just under 400 separate individual Mormon church members have shown up in my yard to tell me they hated me and my “new religion”.
On October 18, 2006, just a few months after Hurricane Katrina took my house, a mob of crazed religious fanatics burned down its replacement. I was asleep inside. I used to have hair down to my knees. The firemen said I was lucky to be alive. I had no money to rebuild yet again, and have been homeless living in first a tent, than a car, and now a motorhome on the now empty lot these past 6 years.
The protests reached their height in 2010, when in April, two of my cats were killed and their heads left in the driveway, and the following May my car was cut in half. And they were calling me crazy? A broken hip followed shortly after, not long followed by a broken wrist. The fear and hysteria of my being by race “a gypsy” and by career a “psychic” clearly had gone beyond the point of lunacy. Police were called in to assist.
The question remained however: what the heck were these people getting so upset about? Why were they here? And where the hell were they coming up with their wild accusations? Demons? Animal sacrifice? Founding new religions? What the hell? Clearly these people knew nothing about me, for everything they said about me was wrong, wrong, wrong. I was a mystery to them. My cultural dress marked me as outlandish in their eyes. My never setting foot in public, made them suspect I was doing foul deeds. My Autism and desperately slurred speech made my ability to communicate difficult, and easy to misinterpret. Over the years, it became clear to me that everything these people did and said was based on one thing and one thing only: fear of the unknown. Though my family had lived on this land since 1548, and were even the founders of this town, I myself, because of my agoraphobia, was unseen and unknown, and therefore, a thing to be feared.
It had become clear to me that there was only one way this madness of hate and fear was going to end. In 2010, I did something I had never done before: I let them in, invited them to see for themselves the “church” they claimed I ran. The protesting died down after 2010, when for the first time, people were allowed to see for themselves, just exactly what it was they were protesting against. What they saw, stunned and baffled them. I don’t know what they expected to see, but clearly a 3 foot wide by 5 foot long by 6 foot high garden shed, painted white, with a 10 foot wooden cross standing in front of it, was not what they expected. Nor did they expect to see that my “animal sacrificing alter” (as they called it) was nothing more than a moss covered rotted tree stump, which I used for a chair. The animals they claimed had been sacrificed, were alive and well, and as baffled to see the strangers, as these trespassers were to see them. These home invading intruders, likewise did not expect to see “the tent”, an 8×6 tarp under which I had lived for 6 years though 5 hurricanes and 3 blizzards, with nothing more than a sleeping bag for protection. They were flabbergasted.
“This is it?” asked one.
“You call this a church?” asked another.
“No. I don’t.” I said. “I never did. You’re the only ones saying I’ve got a church out here. You are the ones saying I started a religion. Not me. You are the ones saying all of it. I have Autism. I don’t talk. I never said a word.”
“Where’s your congregation?”
“What congregation?”
“Where’s do you hold your meetings?”
“What meetings?”
“What do you do here?”
“I grow roses. I feed the birds. I pray for people. I’ll pray for you. I light candles and hang their prayer requests on the wall in the shed. I read cards for people, I lay them out on that tree stump. This is where I do my writing. It’s a meditation garden. In 31 years I have written 30+ books, 200+ short stories, 2,000+ articles, 5,000+ sermons, a few comic books, and a few dozen plays. This is where I do all of that. I’m a full time professional writer. I’m a Scottish Traveler Spiritual Advisor, what you would call a Gypsy Fortune Teller. This is where I do everything. This is my home. This is where I live. This is where I do my readings for folks, this is where I get my writing done. That there, that is the tent I have lived in for the past 6 years, since you people burned down the house I was rebuilding after the flood took the first one. There is no church, there is no religion, there is no congregation, it’s just me and my cats, in a tent, in a rose garden in the swamp, doing a heck of a lot of writing. Do you have any idea what you have done? You burned down my house, you killed my cats, you chopped up my car, you broke my hip, and for what? Because you listened to some fantasy prone jackass Bishop who didn’t have his head screwed on straight, and had nothing better to do than run around flapping his mouth off and making up nasty rumors about me some 20 odd years ago! You never stopped to think the man was insane and lying to you. No. Of course not. He was a man of God. You hung on his every word. I’ve never bothered any of you, heck I don’t even know most of you. I’ve spent my entire life struggling with agoraphobia, I haven’t even set foot outside of this garden in 27 years! I only started wandering around in public in 2006, after the fire, which you started. Who the hell do you think you are? How dare you judge me. How dare you call me evil. You want to see evil? Take a good long look in the mirror.”
They still go out of their way to cross paths with me, so that they can remind me how much they hate me, hate my books, hate my life, hate my race, hate my culture, hate everything about me, but at least, they have stopped accusing me of running a church or having founded a new religion, which seems to have ended the violence. But still, it begs the question: What is their friggin problem? Why did they do this? I did find out, when some people, now realizing the error of their huge misjudgements about who I am and what I do, have come to me with the sheepish question: “I’ve got to ask you, if you didn’t start a new religion and you are not running a church, why the heck did you become an ordained minister. It makes no sense to me. You don’t use it? Why?” Really? Seriously? Is that what this was about? All of this because I am a female and an ordained minister? Is there really that much hatred for female ministers? Why become a legally ordained minister? The keyword here is legal, something I noted was not in the question asked. It is illegal to be a life coach, a reiki master, practitioner of the magic arts, a lightworker, a spirit channeler, a medium, a spirit healer, a witch doctor, a spell caster, a practicing witch, a shaman, or a psychic reader, without a legal ordination as a minister. Silly, and probably unlikely to be enforced, but the law does exist. These are federal IRS laws used to regulate income taxes, and some states have additional laws, which states that no pastor, preacher, bishop, priest, psychic, life coach, witch, etc can provide family, couples, or marriage counseling (this includes prayers and card readings) unless he holds a Masters Degree in Psychology. In short, the law sucks, but it is what it is, and one must obey. I am a Hoodoo Hedgewalker. Fourteenth century Scottish/Welsh Hoodoo, a career, is not to be confused with the 18th century religion African Hoodoo (now known as New Orleans Voodoo). While one was based on the other, they are not the same thing. Hoodoo is a Scottish word meaning “spirit” or “ghost”. Hoodooed, means “haunted”. “The Hedge of Life” refers to the misty plains of twilight which separates the spirit world from the physical world. A Hedgewalker, is a person who communicates with the spirit world on behalf of someone from the physical world. In other words a Hoodoo Hedgewalker is a psychic medium or shaman, who communicates with angels, faeries, and the spirit of dead loved ones. By race I am a Scottish Traveller, aka a Gypsy. While I am correctly called a Scottish Hoodoo Hedgewalker, most people refer to me by the more common slang term of Gypsy Fortune Teller. For us, this is not a religion, it is, quite simply, a way of life. But in today’s world there exist laws regarding what is and is not religious practice, and who can and can not lead such practices. The law considers me to be the leader of a religious movement, and a spiritual advisor, and as such, requires me to become a legally ordained minister, with a legally recognized church, even though by religion, I am a Mormon and am not running a church of any sort at all.
I suppose in a way, them burning down my house was a good thing, because it got my off my land and out into the world, and I am now a college student. If I still had a house, I’d probably still be agoraphobic. It’s been 6 years and, today you’d never know I had agoraphobia; but this doesn’t change the fact that what these people did was wrong, mean, hateful, bigoted, and completely uncalled for. Interestingly enough, as a result of all of this, the FBI got involved, town manager Jim Thomas was found to have embezzled $3million in town funds, had placed his close buddies as law enforcement so as to keep hidden what he was doing, and had used Bishop Morgan’s hysterical rumors as a way to draw the town’s attention away from the fact that funds were fast disappearing. Old Orchard Beach, recently saw a huge overthrow in leadership as the entire town counsel and police force were fired and replaced. Bishop Morgan, has since been removed from the church and sent to a mental hospital; it seems I was not the only person he had started rumors about, and that he was getting his information “from demons”. And so, in the end I lost my home, my pets, my car, my privacy, and my health, because one man was clinically insane and another was criminally greedy, and both were in positions of church leadership and able to use their charismatic personalities to stir their congregations into a frenzy.
What possessed people to listen to these two men, and act violently on their orders, I do not know. I remain to this day clueless and confused as to what set these people off or how they felt justified in their actions. In any case, these two men were bullies and they instigated what can only be described as “an angry mob”, and thus I come to the conclusion that bullies must be banned. Racism must be stopped. Bigotry must be ended. These sorts of things must cease before anyone else gets hurt.
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This post was written by Wendy C Allen aka EelKat, is copyrighted by The Twighlight Manor Press and was posted on Houseless Living @ http://houselessliving.blogspot.com and reposted at EK’s Star Log @ http://eelkat.wordpress.com and parts of it may also be seen on http://www.squidoo.com/EelKat and http://laughinggnomehollow.proboards.com If you are reading this from a different location than those listed above, please contact me Wendy C. Allen aka EelKat @ http://laughinggnomehollow.proboards.com/index.cgi?action=viewprofile and let me know where it is you found this post. Plagiarism is illegal and I DO actively pursue offenders. Unless copying a Blog Meme, you do not have permission to copy anything appearing on this blog, including words, art, or photos. This will be your only warning. Thank you and have a glorious day! ~ EelKat
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