The Cult of Anna Grace

It was the summer of 1982 when I got my big break as a writer. The summer of Anna Grace. I was a young journalist, eager to get a big story that would finally push me into journalistic fame. I had just dropped out of college, thinking that maybe I was a good enough writer that I didn’t need a degree. After all, this is Harrisville Iowa, a small farming town with a population of 1657. Who really needs a degree to write about that? I had landed an internship at the local paper, the Harrisville Herald, but none of the editors there were willing to give me any of the good stories. I mostly did local interviews. The paper would pick random people in town to talk about. I’d go to their houses, interview them and write some story about their bottle cap collection, or how their cow had given birth to twin calves last spring; the kind of stories that no one truly cared to read. The interviews were right next to the crosswords, most people just skipped them as a whole. I was beginning to feel doomed to a life of meaningless stories and interviewing farmers. That was until Anna Grace. Anna Grace was, as dubbed during her trial, a cult leader. The leader of a women’s cult, accused of brutally killing 6 men. She had set up camp about 5 miles outside of Harrisville in 1960/ We all knew she was there, but she left us alone, so we left her alone. There were all kinds of rumors about the crazy things that happened on her commune, blood rituals, human sacrifice, cannibalism. There were whispers that she bathed in the blood of the kids that wandered onto her land. That she could hypnotize and lure men to willingly walk into the lake to drown. Billy Johnson told everyone in the 8th grade that he saw her and her followers lead a satanic ritual during a full moon, all of them wearing long red robes and covering their faces with demonic looking masks. Some of us kids would dare each other to sneak onto the commune, but not many of us were ever brave enough to go see if all of those rumors were true. Our parents had made it very clear that we were to stay far away from Miss Anna Grace and her crazy followers. I still remember my dad looking me in the eye at the breakfast table, raising his voice and telling me, “Don’t you ever go near that place Iris. Nothing good comes from Hippies and druggies. Do you understand me?” And I did. I was a shy kid, I hated causing my dad any trouble and facing his wrath. Although my dad knew well enough that he wouldn’t have to worry about me being too curious. The reality was that the people of Harrisville liked their peace and quiet, why stir things up if they didn’t need to be stirred in the first place. We didn’t want media or police attention on us, so we left Anna Grace, and her cult, alone.