In the beginning, the family had no idea that they weren’t the only ones being attacked, and so they kept it to themselves. Then Sara started telling her sisters. When rumours spread, “no one believed her,” said Peter Fehr, Sara’s neighbour at the time of the incidents. “We thought she was making it up to hide an affair.” The family’s pleas for help to the council of church ministers, the group of men who govern the 2,500-member colony, were fruitless – even as the tales multiplied. Throughout the community, people were waking to the same telltale morning signs: ripped pyjamas, blood and semen on the bed, head-thumping stupor. Some women remembered brief moments of terror: for an instant they would wake to a man or men on top of them but couldn’t summon the strength to yell or fight back. Then, fade to black. Some called it “wild female imagination”. Others said it was a plague from God. “We only knew that something strange was happening in the night,” Abraham Wall Enns, Manitoba Colony’s civic leader at the time, said. “But we didn’t know who was doing it, so how could we stop it?”
Posted on: Sun, 11 Aug 2013 00:40:13 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015