Wednesday, June 25, 2014

Imaginary Oranges



Daniel Ryder (pseud.), Breaking the Circle of Satanic Ritual Abuse (Minneapolis: CompCare Publishers, 1992), p. 223.

[Fourteen pages of Ryder’s book are taken up with “Gina’s” first-person account of her involuntary involvement in a satanic cult in Oklahoma. Like a lot of imaginary satanic ritual abuse narratives, it revels in its sadism. (Typical detail: her mother forces Gina to bite off her toddler’s penis and watch him bleed to death.) It also includes this scene, surely influenced by drug horror stories.]

I was sick of the killings. I was sick of all the screaming at night. I was sick of it all. Finally, another horrifying experience convinced me that I had no choice but to get out. After a ritual, the group was doing drugs and having sex with each other. A twenty-one-year-old man had been heavy into acid and heroin. He really tripped out, ran into the kitchen, grabbed a knife, and started shouting that he was an orange. He started “peeling” his left arm with the knife. As several of us tried to stop him, he slashed at us with his knife. We couldn’t get close enough to him to try to restrain him. There was skin and blood everywhere. On this particular night, no medical people were in the section home. We thought (briefly) about calling an ambulance, but there was no way we could quickly conceal all the drugs, the sacrificed cat, and the blood. Several people were passed out naked on the floor, and we wouldn’t be able to get them up, dressed, and coherent. So, he bled to death. His body was destroyed.

Three days later, on a Friday night in spring 1989, I left.

Mariamne H. Whatley & Elissa R. Henken, Did You Hear About the Girl Who…? (New York: New York University Press, 2000), p. 11.

[Informant:] There was this 17-year-old girl who lived in New York City, in this slummy, beat-up apartment building. She was a major druggie, and this was a true story, because the newspapers all had the story in them the next day. Anyway, she took some acid one day and started tripping out; nobody was in the apartment, and she started imagining all kinds of weird stuff. She was looking down at her arms and hands, and she thought she was an orange; her skin looked orange and bumpy and rippled, like an orange peel. Anyway, she went to get a butcher knife, and when they found her the next day, she was lying on the kitchen floor in a pool of blood, with the skin on her arms all peeled and sliced off!!