Category: Crime and Punishment

Fear’s Veil: Decoding the Leadership Mystique

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“You’re getting a detention for that,” were the scariest words we could hear between fifth grade and eighth grade. To avoid hearing that from a teacher, the principle, or any of the other authority figures who stalked the halls of my school, I walked straight lines, stood as straight as I could, and I didn’t respond to neighbors who whispered something funny that required a rejoinder. We were not only scared, we were terrified to the point of anxiety attacks when the teacher would give us the pre-detention eyeball. 

A detention required us to spend one half-hour after school. Thirty minutes. You might think that serving a mere thirty minutes after school would lead an overwhelming majority of us to think, “Hey, that wasn’t so bad after all.” No, it was so terrifying that some of us had nightmares about being caught in the act, the teacher writing out the detention, and the din of silence that followed with everyone staring, looking away, and staring again. Thinking back, it’s almost funny to think how powerful the culture of fear was, but we all knew it, and we all participated in it in our own individual ways. 

The tradition of forcing a student to stay after school, as a punishment for bad behavior was not new, or unique, to us. This punishment has probably been handed out for hundreds of years, the world over. It was also not unusual for us to fear getting in trouble in grade school, nor was it unprecedented that the kids in my grade school were absolutely terrified. This article isn’t about the silly effort of trying to suggest that our experience in grade school was worse than yours, better, or any different. We’re far more interested in the culture of fear that some institutions, such as my grade school, instituted to modify behavior.    

As scary as our principal was, and Mary Jane Meyer (aka Mrs. Meyer) was as scary, and as angry, as any individual I’ve met in all the decades sense. You might suggest that she thought she had to be to keep the hundreds of grade-school-aged kids in line.

“And if you just happened to catch her tending to her garden on some sunny day, she was probably a sweet, elderly woman.”

I just can’t picture it. I can’t picture her being gracious, warm, or even smiling. I’m sure she was quite pleasant to certain people, but I can’t picture it, and I don’t think any of my fellow students who attended this grade school during her reign of terror could either.  

Mrs. Meyer provided us a more tangible fear of God, and she was the wizard behind the curtain who orchestrated the culture of fear we knew. If we messed around in class, our teacher might scold us. If that wasn’t enough, she could threaten and/or give us a detention. That was enough for an overwhelming majority of us, but there were a few, and aren’t there always a few, for whom that wasn’t enough. For them, there was the ever-present threat of being sent to Mrs. Meyer’s office. That was enough for just about everyone else.

As scary as she was, however, Mrs. Meyer couldn’t have created the level of fear we knew on her own. She delegated much of the responsibility to her teachers, but they couldn’t have terrified us to the degree that some of us had anxiety issues, and others had such horrible nightmares they couldn’t sleep at night. For that level of fear, the institution needed compliance, our compliance. It needed our participation, and our promulgation of the culture that suggested that getting a detention was the most awful thing that could ever happened to a human being. No matter what they did to establish this climate, it wouldn’t have been half as effective as it was if we didn’t participate and fortify it. We did that to ourselves.   

“Did you hear that Gretchen and Marla got detentions?” someone would say in conspiratorial whisper.

“No way! For what?” No matter what the conspiratorial whisperer said there, the gossip mill spun the threads out to ultimately characterize the alleged perpetrator as the most horrible person of the day, and they often had a difficult time recovering their reputation in the aftermath.

When we approached one of the pariahs to get their perspective on what happened, they usually broke down like a politician in the midst of a career-ending scandal. Some tried to maintain a strong façade, but most couldn’t. Their defense usually devolved to those scared, uncontrollable tears. We empathized, because we knew firsthand the idea that nothing this bad had ever happened to them before.

It was our fault that she felt that way, because when she’d walk down the aisle to receive her detention, she felt our eyes on her, and she heard our whispers. The minute she turned around, we’d turn away and go silent. When it came to defending herself against the mob, she’s lie, obfuscate, try to shift the blame, and try anything and everything she could to salvage her reputation. We empathized here too, because what else are you going to do? 

We did more damage to her than the teacher, the principal, or any of our other authority figures could to demonize her, the detention of the day. We did it to ourselves. We policed our own and promulgated the culture of fear that surrounded the detention.

The idea that we cultivated their culture of fear wasn’t apparent to me in the moment, of course, because I was too young to grasp such complicated concepts, but it was crystallized in the form of a transfer student named Billy Kifferly. I knew Billy Kifferly before he transferred to our school, he was a friend of a friend, so when he got a detention I was the emissary sent to find out what happened, and how he entered into our dominion of the damned.

I asked him about it in the most empathetic manner a ten-year-old could. “… And it’s fine if you don’t want to tell me …” I added. I was fully prepared for his tears and/or the anguish that followed, and I had my shoulder all ready for him to cry on.

Not only did Billy not cry, or show any signs of fear of remorse, he told me all of the damning details of his detention, as if … as if they didn’t really matter. He didn’t try to wriggle out of it, or spread the blame. He said, “I did it. It was all my fault and all that, but it’s a half hour, so, big deal, right? I could do that standing on my head.”

That put me back a step. I couldn’t understand how he could be so blasé about it. As his only friend and confidant, I wanted to say, ‘Billy, you don’t understand,’ but Billy’s reaction to it informed me that there was something larger going on here that I didn’t understand. I didn’t get the fact that he was more accustomed to getting in trouble, or failing to meet the standards. He just got expelled from his prior school, so on that scale, a detention, or a half-hour after school, was nothing to him. I also didn’t understand that I was not only a part of the institutional culture of fear, but a promulgator of it

“It’s just a half-hour,” he said, and he was right, but ‘It’s so much more than that’ I wanted to say. I couldn’t back that up though, because I was too young to understand the nature of authority, rebellion, and Billy’s far too mature definition of the system-is-a-farce reaction. I knew Billy was the rebel, on some complicated level, I knew I’d become the standard bearer for the status quo if I said anything further.  

By not fearing the institutional hierarchy, and the elements that propped it up, Billy essentially informed me that the whole system was a farce. “Why should I fear spending a half-hour after school so much?” was essentially what he said. I thought of instructing him in our ways, but I was too young to understand the nature of our ways, and I was also far too immature to understand that we weren’t just ceding to authority, we were contributing to it.  

***

We can now all laugh at this kid, I call me, now. We’re sophisticated adults now with a more sophisticated understanding of authority, rebellion, and the balance of the two that forms a foundation that helps maintain a system, but when we look back at our naïve, immature understandings of an authoritarian world, we laugh. While we’re laughing, we should also take a look at how we sophisticated adults not only cede authority to authority figures in our lives now, we contribute to the underpinnings of their authority?

We call certain individuals in our culture authoritative experts, and we allow them to dictate their facts and opinions in a manner that changes the direction of our lives. “Why?” we ask rhetorically, “because they are more informed.” Are they? “Sure, they use the scientific method to arrive at dispassionate theories based on empirical data.” We learn from their research that there is “there is no conclusive evidence” for what we see and hear. How can that be? “After exhaustive research, the team at (fill in the blank) has determined that there is no conclusive evidence to suggest that’s true.” We learn to accept what they say, until we develop a level of faith in their point of view, their expertise, and their authority on the issue. We learn to accept their values through their lens. Are they right? “They’re experts, what are you asking here?”

Analysts call the dynamic of subjects contributing to expert analysis and authoritative dictates the leadership mystique. We now have unspoken requirements of our leaders to which they must adhere. We require them to exhibit, display, and provide some semblance of leadership qualities to fortify the facade. What are these requirements? They vary, but anyone who knows anything about icebergs knows that 90% of an iceberg is underwater. It could be argued that we create 90% of the foundation of leadership mystique for us, and we contribute to it in our interactions with other, fellow subjects.

We see this at play in the workplace when someone everyone considered an oaf yesterday, receives a prominent promotion today, and we agree to their leadership qualities tomorrow, characteristics that we never saw previously. Our authority figures obviously saw something special in them, and that’s enough for us, for some of us, and the onus is on us to help others see, accept, and promulgate their authority tomorrow.

Coupled with our concessions and contributions to authority figures and their rules and punishments, is the inherent recognition that even if we disagree with all of the above, we can’t choose our leaders. We are subjects who are subjected to those who make the rules, and we don’t even know who to blame when those rules prove silly. We blame our supervisor for imposing a rule passed down by a manager; we blame the policeman for carrying out a silly law passed down by a state legislator or federal official. We blame the person who is in our face, enforcing the rules, because most of us don’t dig through the layers to find the person who is to blame for drawing up the rules/laws, and those who pass them. 

The United States citizen lives in a Representative Republic that permits us to choose those we deem our authority figures. Yet, how many of us choose a representative of what we want to be as opposed to who we are. An overwhelming majority of us live within our means, and we’re quiet, unassuming types. We’re more like the character actor who quietly assumes the characteristics necessary for a role, but we prefer to vote charismatic game show hosts types into office. That guy looks like someone who would be fun to hang around. If that’s our choice for a leader in a Representative Republic, who are we? Who do we deify and assign leadership qualities to satisfy our role in the leadership mystique? How many of us assign such qualities to the manager of our local Wendy’s? We don’t, we hold them accountable for producing an inferior product.

Most of us don’t condemn representatives we charge with voting the way we would or the manner in which they spend our money. We direct our ire at those who don’t pay enough in taxes instead. We police our own. The governments can levy fines, put liens on our property, and take away our freedom if they determine that we didn’t pay enough taxes, but they cannot convince us to condemn our neighbor as a pariah for not paying what we deem enough. That’s our job, and we relish it.    

This article is not about the rebels or the figures of authority in our lives, though those would be interesting pieces. It’s about us, and our amenable and compliant ways of helping authority figures establish and maintain a level of authority in our lives. It’s about ceding elements of our lives to authoritative experts who sit behind a type writer telling us how to live our lives, raise our children, and go silent when they need us to just be quiet. 

In grade school, we were little kids who were easy to manipulate and cajole into carrying out institutional planks, but how many adults aid in the culture of fear of government edicts on paying “enough” taxes? We’re not half as concerned when our government officials spend our money in foolish ways, as we are the CEO of a company not paying what we deem enough in taxes. We not only cede authority to government officials. We contribute to it by condemning our neighbor for not paying enough.

As someone who has been on both sides of the paradigm, on a very, very minor scale, one thing I recognized when given an relatively insignificant level of authority was that my level of authority was not recognized or appreciated by my fellow authoritative figures. As a huge Letterman fan in the 80s, I’ve always found some inspiration in his idea that he was a bit of a joke. You can be king of the world, and he was in his own little way, but you’re still that goofy kid from the Midwest who had some really stupid notions about the world. His influence led me to consider myself a bit of a joke, and I saw the joke in everyone around me too, especially those in leadership positions. Everyone enjoys hearing that what they’re doing is important and substantial, and they don’t mind laughing at themselves, but they do no enjoy hearing that they’re kind of a joke too. When I learned to control my comedic impulses, and I ceded to their authority, they began to appreciate and contribute to my comparatively meager mystique. 

“It’s called reciprocity,” a friend of mine said, “I scratch your back, you feed my need!”

The “Afflicted” Girls in the Salem Witch Trials

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In the months between February 1692 to May 1693, nineteen citizens of Salem, Massachusetts (14 women and 5 men) were executed for the charge of being a witch. One person was tortured to death for refusing to admit he was a witch, and five people died in jail after being accused. More than 200 people were accused in what we now call the Salem Witch Trials, and five dogs. As harrowing as it is to believe that a small American village executed twenty of its citizens, Europe executed up to 80,000 between 1500 and 1660. 

History.com writes that the hysteria swirling around Salem, Massachusetts began in “January 1692, [when a] 9-year-old Elizabeth (Betty) Parris and 11-year-old Abigail Williams (the daughter and niece of Samuel Parris, minister of Salem Village) began having fits, including violent contortions and uncontrollable outbursts of screaming.” Even though the medical community knew about ergotism, the residents did not know what afflicted these girls. The Parris family called in a doctor named William Griggs. Dr. Griggs could not diagnose the girls, and he declared their fits were “beyond epileptic or natural disease”. Dr. Griggs fell prey to the very human condition that applied to their day, as much as it does to today, of filling in the blanks he couldn’t by suggesting that the girls were victims of a supernatural bewitching. 

Based on that diagnosis the Parris family were distraught, and they decided to accuse three women of bewitching their girls, including a woman named Tituba. After weighing the evidence against her, and the cultural climate surrounding Salem at the time, Tituba unknowingly set a precedent for those who would be accused in the future by confessing to “the crime” of bewitching. She confessed, we can only surmise, because she knew the deck was stacked against her, and she would be convicted regardless. In her confession, Tituba implicated others by saying that they worked alongside her in the service of the devil against the Puritans. Seeing how Tituba beat the system by providing states evidence, as it were, future accused witches confessed to similar charges to avoid execution and/or imprisonment, and they, too, began assisting the state by informing on other witches. Hysteria spread throughout the Salem community, and the local justice system was soon overwhelmed.

There were a number of factors surrounding Salem at the time to add to the culture of fear, including the fear of neighboring communities, fear of attacks from Native American tribes, and what historians call “The Little Ice Age” that destroyed their economy and many elements of their daily life. To explain what they considered inexplicable, the residents of Salem turned, in fear, to the supernatural, witches, and the devil to explain why their lives were destroyed.

Amid this culture of fear, four other young girls, all between ages nine to twenty, began accusing their neighbors of witchcraft. The six girls were commonly referred to as the afflicted girls. The afflicted girls would accuse, testify in court, and drop to the floor in convulsions during the witch trials. There are a number of theories regarding why these six girls did what they did to lead to public executions, but the one thing we now know with absolute certainty, with no facts to bolster that certainty, is that they were not lying or faking the convulsions.

One of the most wide-spread modern theories to explain the ailment the Parris and Williams girls suffered from is ergotism. Ergotism, or ergot poisoning is a result of a long-term ingestion of ergot alkaloids, or mold, that can be found on rye, wheat, and other cereals, which were all primary components of the diet of Salem residents. In the list of symptoms of Ergotism is delusions, hallucinations, vomiting and muscle spasms that could lead to convulsions, which many say lines up with the symptoms the Parris and Williams girls experienced.

As with any theory of matters that have occurred nearly three hundred years ago, historians have debunked this theory. Historians Nicholas Spanos and Jack Gottlieb argue if the young girls were victims of ergot poisoning why weren’t there more cases in Salem, and why wasn’t the rest of their family in their homes afflicted? The two historians admit that ergotism only takes place in hosts suffering from a vitamin A deficiency, but they state that Salem was rich with cows and their milk, so they conclude that it isn’t possible for a resident of Salem to suffer a vitamin A deficiency. They do not include the possibility that these two girls did not enjoy the taste of milk, so they didn’t drink it. They also do not include the possibility that the girls suffered from underlying conditions, such as bleeding stomach ulcers or some form of malnourishment that could’ve led to a greater susceptibility to ergotism via the ergot alkaloids. Nor do they consider the general idea that funguses and mold can affect individuals in the same house, with the same genes, different, based on varying underlying conditions.

Another theory is that the four girls who followed the Parris girls may have suffered from a psychogenic illness called mass hysteria in which one exhibits symptoms and another, unconsciously, begins exhibiting the same symptoms.

“We’ll probably never know the truth of what happened to these girls,” one person, with alleged authority on the subject suggests, “but the one thing we know is they weren’t faking it.”

One quick read through the history of the Salem Witch Trials can lead the reader to some impulsive reactions and cynical, knee-jerk assumptions. Those of us who want to know the truth, try very hard not to fall prey to our own biases, so we keep reading and researching. We do find out we’re wrong, on occasion, but more often than not, we read through all the thoughts and theories on the matter, and we find a whole lot of overthinking, until we fall back on our all-too-simplistic assumption that the afflicted girls made false accusations and they faked their convulsions.

All of the theories about what caused the girls to go into convulsions are not just possible, they’re probable, but the certainty some display in the face of what happened is what draws us back to our impulsive and cynical guesses. If we can rule out ergotism and mass hysteria, with no proof, how can we rule out the idea that they were lying and faking? Especially when one of them, Mary Warren, admitted that “afflicted persons did but dissemble,” or fake their symptoms. Now we know that Ms. Warren later recanted and accused those who might have pressured her into making the admission, but she provided the only evidence for any of the primary theories.

Another crucial element that leads me to believe that the afflicted girls were faking it, was the timing of their convulsions. We weren’t there for the proceedings, of course, and we don’t have the minutes of the trial, but the historical recreations lead us to assume that the convulsions the afflicted girls experienced in the courtroom were conveniently timed to convince the judges of the accused’s guilt. When Mary Warren was asked, in court, to clarify her statement that “afflicted persons did but dissemble,” or fake their symptoms, the afflicted girls in the courtroom went into convulsions. Mary Warren responded, on the stand, by going into her own convulsions. This fits the definition of mass hysteria, provided above, but it doesn’t explain the case for ergotism, and it could be argued that it only bolsters the cynical argument that they were all faking it.    

One of the reasons, I think, that we seek to nullify the claim that they were lying and faking, is that it’s almost too horrific to imagine that anyone would purposely, and maliciously make a claim that leads to the executions of those they accuse. Cynical types, who impulsively believe the worst of humanity, often have no proof for their assertions, but those who impulsively believe everything is more complicated than all that don’t either.  

One of the causes historians list as a cause for the Salem Witch Trials is the fear of the powerful women. To say full-grown women were second class citizens in 1692-93 Salem, Massachusetts, is being generous, and whatever power women had in Salem, young women had even less. Is it possible that these young women enjoyed their brief moment in the Sun? Not possible? Too cynical?

The next point that most historians consider to bolster their claim that the patriarchy feared and loathed strong women, is that they wanted to keep them in a state of fear. This is plausible, because while the Puritans of Salem considered women equal before God, they considered them more susceptible to the wickedness of the Devil. They suggested the later based on the story of Eve falling prey to the temptation of eating the apple in the garden of Eden. These characterizations are all unfortunately true, but while the thrust of the campaign might have been engineered by men, for men, it may not have gained a foothold in the culture were it not for the accusations made by the young girls. It’s also worth noting that five men were executed, and there is a list of men who were named, accused, imprisoned, and otherwise had their names sullied.  

We’ll never know the truth, and I’m not saying I know better than anyone else, but when someone tells me that one theory is categorically false, without any evidence to back that claim up, my mind immediately invites those possibilities in.

“Think about it,” we say when someone else is so muddled in their thoughts that they can’t see straight. We might say that when someone is so blinded by simple truths that they can’t see the evidence that complicates the matter. We also say it when someone’s conclusion is so clouded by evidence that they sift and sort through it to develop speculation that complicates the matter so much they can’t see a simple truth. The simple truth of the matter is supernatural witches with supernatural powers do not exist. They might exist in a realm we don’t understand, but how often do we use otherworldly spirits to explain the gaps in our understanding of the human mind? We wonder, how can one man kill another with no feeling, he must be a monster, a vampire, a werewolf, or something else supernatural, because no normal man would kill another without reason. We can also use them to explain how a seemingly normal person can somehow fail to generate a sympathetic response to the aftermath of blind rage. It was the nature of residents of Salem, Massachusetts to blame supernatural spirits and monsters to explain what they could not explain then, it’s human nature now, and it probably always will be, because “We’ve seen things that no one can explain.”

We make fun of the people who lived over three hundred years ago for believing in such things, but my bet is that for the next three hundred years we’ll continue to believe someone, somewhere exhibits such powers. The only problem is that over the course of the last couple thousand years, we have yet to find substantial proof of it. Supernatural witches, and their Specters, a fancy term they used for spirits, ghosts, or demonic forces that the accused would allegedly sic on the victim don’t exist in the same manner that vampires, Frankenstein’s monster and Spongebob Squarepants don’t exist.   

The Exorcising

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Rachael Noye added a joke to the tail end one of Tyler Drummond’s, while they walked through a Wichita, Kansas mall, hand in hand. He thought her joke was so funny that he held his stomach. He continued walking and holding his stomach, until his face turned laughter to a grimace. “I don’t feel so good!” Tyler said moments before collapsing in agony. He didn’t fall flat initially. Initially, he went to a knee, but when that didn’t gain him any relief, he slowly lowered himself to the ground. When that didn’t offer him any relief, he tried to sit up, but he couldn’t. Tyler had no idea, at this point, how much pain he would experience over the course of the next eight minutes. 

“It happened so fast,” Rachael would later say. “One minute he was laughing his tail off. The next, he’s groaning on the floor. I thought he was playing. ‘Get up,’ I said. ‘People are watching Tyler, get up’. He did things like this before, and I didn’t want to fall for it again.” 

Tyler was in such excruciating pain that he could not respond. 

After a couple seconds, Rachael knelt down next to him and placed a hand on his shoulder. She still wasn’t sure if she was the product of one of his jokes, until he let out his first unintelligible yells. “Tyler was not one to bring attention to himself, and he yelled loud,” Rachael added. “That’s when I knew something was really wrong.”

“Help!” Rachael cried out when she realized how serious this was. When no one responded, she said, “Help me! Help us!” When a few people broke ranks to help, she shouted, “Someone, someone call an ambulance!” over them.  

Two different patrons did just that. Others rushed forward to help in any way they could. Two of them attempted to help Tyler sit up, but he refused their requests. He continued rolling back and forth, holding his gut. Tyler’s face was one of complete agony. 

Rather than say, “Is there a doctor in the house?” One of the onlookers, seeing Tyler Drummond writhe around on the floor in pain, making unusual, guttural sounds of anguish, said, “Is there a priest in the house?” 

A priest happened to be in the mall that day, dining in the food court. “I’m a priest,” Father Danielson said running to the man. “What’s going on?” When the throng parted to allow his entrance, the Father Danielson went to a knee before the man, “What’s wrong with you sir?” the priest said, taking one of Tyler’s hands. Tyler attempted to answer, but his voice was so strained that Father Danielson couldn’t understand him. Tyler continued holding his stomach with the other hand, sweating profusely, and shouting at the top of his lungs. Some say he was probably swearing, but no one could understand a word he was saying.

“What happened?” Father Danielson asked Rachael when Tyler proved unable to answer.

“I don’t know,” Rachael said. “One minute he was fine, laughing, all that, then he said, ‘I don’t feel so good,’ and he just collapsed.”

“What’s his name?”

“Tyler,” she said. “Tyler Drummond.”

Not knowing what else to do, Father Danielson continued to hold Tyler’s open hand and said. “You have to tell us what’s wrong, Tyler. You have to tell us how we can help you.” Father Danielson began asking Tyler more pointed questions, and Tyler either couldn’t or wouldn’t answer. The priest began silently praying for the man.

“No,” Rachael. “He needs more than prayers.”

“All right,” the priest said. He then began administering Last Rites on the man. 

“No,” Rachael said, in the throes of panic. “He doesn’t need Last Rites either. He needs an exorcism. I’m Catholic. I know the difference.”

“I don’t think-” the priest said, but Rachael cut Father Danielson off with more pleas for something more.  “I think he needs a doctor-” the priest tried to say, but the growing throng of shoppers around them cut him off this time, imploring him to follow Rachael’s instructions and do something more. At the two minute mark, some proceeded to call the priest out for not doing everything in his power to end this man’s pain, others shouted him down, and some even began screaming:

“Do something! He could die!”

Tyler quieted a little when the priest began praying over him quietly. Tyler listened to the prayers, but members of the throng later said they only made Tyler more agitated and fearful.

The ever-growing crowd around them grew as fearful and agitated as Rachael and Tyler, “What are you doing?” they shouted. “Do the exorcism, like the woman said!” Father Danielson wasn’t sure what they wanted, but they were growing so unruly that he began to fear for his own safety. He wasn’t sure if they wanted him to begin speaking Latin, which would be a problem because he didn’t know any, or what they wanted, but they appeared on the cusp of violence.

“If he dies it’s on your hands!” a man in an Ivy League hoodie shouted, three minutes into Tyler’s agony. Three minutes might not seem a long period of time, but anyone who has experienced acute pain knows three minutes can feel like an eternity.

Tyler then began screaming louder than before, as the priest made up some prayers, he thought might calm the crowd. “Do it again!” one of the women in the crowd shouted at the priest. “It’s working.” The priest continued holding Tyler’s hand throughout, but he began mumbling the prayers, so the crowd around them might think he was speaking Latin. 

“Get it out of me!” were the first words Tyler said that anyone could understand. He rolled to and fro, while retaining a tight hold on Father Danielson’s hand. “GET IT OUT Of ME!”

Tyler’s screaming, and the crowd’s urging that the priest do something more, compelled the priest to mumble faster at the five minute mark. These sounds went back and forth in dramatic waves, until Tyler’s screams began building in intensity. Sensing that, the crowd that had been pushing forward to see more of Tyler’s incident, began backing away in unison. They didn’t know what was going to happen, of course, but they all, in various ways, described how they thought this might progress into something unexpected and something unprecedented.  

When Father Danielson was unable to do anything as immediate as the man in the Ivy League hoodie instructed, the man panicked. He was one of the first spectators on the scene, and he proved one of the mot agitated throughout. His agitation with either the priest, or the situation, progressed until he couldn’t take it anymore. He had been making a sign of the cross on himself throughout the situation, but when the situation appeared to only be growing in intensity, he made one final sign of the cross, kissed his fingers and impulsively and violently pushed and shoved his way out of the throng, screaming, “It’s coming! Get out! Get out while you still can! It’s coming!” If the throng gathering around Tyler, hadn’t been so large, the hysterical man would’ve probably knocked the woman standing behind him flat, but the man behind her caught her before she could go down. The shouting man continued making the sign of the cross, some spectators later said, and he continued shouting, “It’s coming!” until he was safely in his car, peeling out of the parking lot, and driving away as fast as he could. 

Seconds after that hysterical man fled, and three others followed him, one with a small child, it began. It began six minutes after Tyler Drummond collapsed to the floor in the middle of a Wichita, Kansas mall. Some spectators described it as a hiss, a hiss more similar to the sound one might hear from air slightly escaping a balloon, as opposed to the snake’s hiss. This was followed by further evidence of Tyler’s agony, as he began to wail loud and long wails. Two more spectators exited, and the rest backed up more. 

“Anyone who tells you they weren’t scared,” one of the spectators said, “is lying. Straight up lying.”

“Oh, absolutely terrified,” a middle-aged woman said, “I’m a little embarrassed to admit it now, but I got into a screaming match with a woman who had her seven-year-old child with her. ‘Get her out of here!’ I shouted at the woman. I thought it was irresponsible that she kept her daughter there. I mean, we didn’t know what was going to happen.”

“It reminded me of the screams a woman will make while in the final stages of childbirth,” another said.

When the hissing sounds “Progressed from hissing sounds to flapping sounds” at the seven minute mark, four more people left the crowd that gathered around Tyler Drummond. Their departure wasn’t as violent as the man in the hoodie, but they were described as bug eyed in their departure. They ducked and weaved their way through the throng and out of the mall. Those who departed would never hear the sounds progress from the unusual flapping sounds to the more familiar sounds of flatulence, and we can only guess the stories they tell of their day at the mall that afternoon, if they didn’t seek out the news stories on what ended up happening.

Some spectators say that the flatulence lasted minutes, others say it might’ve lasted thirty seconds, but the priest said, “It might’ve lasted maybe seven seconds, but it was long and loud, very long and very loud.” It was also, according to all of the spectators there, quite foul. One of the primary reasons for its regrettable, and some say unforgettable, smell was that when Tyler began to feel some relief from his initial push, eight minutes into “the most painful gastro intestinal pain I’ve ever experienced,” he pushed harder. He pushed so hard that some diarrhea followed the flatulence.

When it was finally over, and everyone realized what happened, Tyler smiled an embarrassed smile. His smile emanated through the sweat that drenched his hair and left his face beaming with sweat. The priest also noted that the alarming redness of his face, slowly dissipated, until his normal color returned. While sitting up, Tyler actually managed a laugh. This caused others to others to laugh, until just about everyone was laughing.  

“It was a laugh of relief,” Father Danielson said later. “Euphoric laughter.” Tyler didn’t even mind that the laughter was directed at him. He took it in stride, and apologized a number of times to the crowd if he upset them in anyway, and he thanked them for their concern.

“I’ve never been so relieved to hear another man fart,” a senior citizen said before shaking Tyler’s hand.

“Oh, I know it,” Tyler said. He was laughing while shaking that man’s hand, and his face colored again, in embarrassment. “Thank you, for your concern.”

“Thank you most of all, father,” Tyler said, standing up to shake Father Danielson’s hand. “I really thought that was something far more serious. Thank you for staying with me.”

“Well you’re welcome,” the priest said. “What do you think it was?” he asked. “What caused it?”   

“I don’t know,” Tyler said still holding the priest’s hand. “I just know that I’m glad you were there for me, with me, thought all that. That was a bad one.” When Father Danielson gently pressed a little further, Tyler said. “I honestly don’t know, father, it might have had something to do with the 2-for-1 sale at Arby’s. I took advantage of the sale and downed two steakhouse garlic ribeye sandwiches. I heard someone joke one time about gastrointestinal issues, saying, some of the times food fights back. Maybe that was it.”