Sacrificing Sense, Exorcising Grief

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Feminist Proper Gander
@dappergander
New public post from me today, the culmination of a 16-month investigation: Sacrificing Sense, Exorcising Grief

(please feel free to retweet at any outlet you see covering the arrest, and my DMs of course remain open)

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Sacrificing Sense, Exorcising Grief | dappergander on Patreon
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1:26 PM · Mar 6, 2021

https://www.patreon.com/posts/sacrificing-48402396

Sometime over the final weekend of September 2019, a New England roadside attraction known as “America’s Stonehenge” was vandalized. The damage was first spotted on the morning of September 29th, when someone walking the property found a jumble of letters carved into a stone slab and a crucifix nestled in the crook of a nearby tree. The crucifix was adorned with photos of an unknown man and an unknown child, as well as a drawing of the Statue of Liberty. The police were called to investigate.

On October 2nd the vandalism was reported on WMUR, and the following day the incident earned a write-up in the local New Hampshire Union Leader before eventually being picked up by the New York Daily News and the AP. It was a minor story. The articles shared the same details: a person or persons unknown used a power tool to carve the letters. They may have been recreating a scene from a novel that featured the site. The subjects of the photographs hadn’t been identified. The letters carved into the stone might be an anti-Masonic message. Police were seeking any information.

There were no leads. More than a week passed. The case was cold.

And perhaps that’s where the story would have ended, but for a remarkable coincidence.

Two weeks after the vandalism was first discovered, Dr Kenneth Feder gave a talk at Tufts University on the subject of pseudoarcheology. For Dr Feder, “America’s Stonehenge” was a source of frustration: while the owners of the site maintain the unlikely story that the ruins are thousands of years old, archaeologists recognize the site as being no older than colonial America, and likely to be much more recent. One of the attraction’s main features, which the owners call a “sacrificial table,” was more likely the granite baseplate of a cider press. Since this was the stone slab that had been defaced, Dr Feder ended his talk by showing slides of it. By falsely touting the cider press as a place where humans were once sacrificed, Dr Feder argued, they unintentionally invited the vandalism at the hands of frightened or angry people who believed it: the same sorts of people who believe playing Dungeons & Dragons leads children to worship demons, or that Harry Potter novels secretly teach ungodly witchcraft. Though he did not know the exact meaning of the letters, he recognized it as a hashtag he often saw on Twitter, used by accounts that were overtly militant Christian fundamentalists.

*snip*