Hours passed, and I found myself enthralled by the comment thread. The ones immediately following HeartbrokenMother372’s post were sympathetic to her plight. I continued reading, hoping that I’d learn if she’d ever gotten her daughter back. Unfortunately, I never saw anything else from HeartbrokenMother372, but the more I read, the more I wanted to know. With each comment I found myself questioning my belief and understanding of cults. There were more than a few posts that discounted their existence given modern technology, especially within the United States, stating the difficulty of being truly isolated in this day and age. I wondered if these people had ever heard of Waco.
With my bottle of wine about gone, I continued to read. Though none of the information I gleaned was referenced, I knew from experience that obscure sources often shed the most light. One man posted about his personal experience with living near what people in his community considered a cult. He called them a sect. He didn’t give the location of his town, city, or state, but he mentioned something about skiing. He also said that in all the years he’d lived there, he’d never seen any of the women or children who lived in the sect and had seen only a few of the men. Nevertheless he estimated that hundreds of people lived in the encampment. He claimed that the general consensus was that as long as the people in the sect didn’t bother the townspeople, the townspeople wouldn’t bother them.
As I scrolled I found posts referencing a group of people with whom I was familiar. After all, I’d lived in Michigan for many years and recognized the term Amish. It wasn’t uncommon in a rural area, especially south and east of where I lived now, down into Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, to drive over a hill and meet up with a horse and buggy. To me the Amish were always good, moral people who simply shunned technology. Though I couldn’t imagine not driving a car or having my cell phone with me at all times, I accepted them for who they were and had never considered them a cult, but the comments made me think.
The definition I’d seen earlier had said that a cult was a system of religious veneration and devotion directed toward a particular figure or object. I was relatively certain the Amish believed similarly to most Judeo-Christian groups.
Could that mean that cults didn’t need to have nonconventional beliefs? Could they truly exist in the open, where most outsiders turned a blind eye?
The comment that I hadn’t been able to shake was from a woman who claimed that for over a year she had been an unwilling member of a cult. The date on her post was from only one year earlier, and her online name was MistiLace92.
Everything else I’d read thus far had been from outsiders looking in. Even the original post was from a mother whose daughter had willingly gone to live with a group. This was different and made the hairs on the back of my neck stand at attention. I read the comment.
I don’t know what to do. I’m scared and need help. I just found this thread. I’m hoping someone will see this and know what to do. No one believes me, but I swear it’s true.
I lost over a year of my life to a cult. I’m afraid if I name them, they’ll hurt me. I just want people to know that this is real and it can happen to anyone.
During the year I was held captive, I watched people come willingly into this community. I wasn’t one of them, though I thought I was. Let me explain. One day I woke up and I was someone else, someone everyone knew, a follower of this group and of a man. I couldn’t remember anything prior to my waking. For some reason my mind played tricks on me. I was obviously the one with the issues. Everyone else knew me.
They told me I was married. I had no proof otherwise. My husband was abusive, yet I had no option but to be obedient. His behavior was accepted by everyone around me. It was the way the entire community lived. We all had jobs and requirements. I still don’t know exactly what I did; I helped to package things. I worked on an assembly line, and all I saw were plain boxes going into bigger plain boxes. Ten hours a day I did that. I wasn’t alone; everyone did something. The thing that’s hard to explain was that we all did it willingly. We weren’t paid, but we had food and shelter and friends. I accepted my life, until one day, when I was instructed to tell a new follower that she wasn’t new, that she belonged with us that I began to see. My husband told me it was our leader’s will and an honor to do his work. That was when my questions came back.
I wasn’t the woman they said I was. They’d done the same thing to me.
I know that if they find me, they’ll kill me. I just know it. Leaving wasn’t an option. There were select chosen members who decided the fate of others. I didn’t know them well, but if they considered me a threat, I’m sure I’d be eliminated—banished.
As soon as I got away, I told the police my story. They said I was crazy.
Before I disappeared, I had a drug problem. The police said that what I described was impossible. They said I’d hallucinated, and if I pursued my claims, they’d have me institutionalized.
Help! I want to tell my story. Someone please help me.