This is a post I really didn't want to write. I've been engaged in a hearty inner debate as to whether I actually should write it, as it hits kind of close to home and involves someone I've known for a very long time. But given the severity of what actually went down and how badly this person is being demonized on Facebook and other places, I felt like I needed to speak up.
Certainly not to defend or excuse what may have allegedly gone down, but to try to understand it, since it acts as kind of an illustration of all the things I've been trying to talk about in the past couple of years. And concurrently with this came another horror show connected to topics I've been covering recently as well.
Let's start with what's actually being reported in a number of different outlets....
Ann Covalt Henry, 51, of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, was arraigned on 12 felony counts of aggravated assault and one count of child endangerment, authorities revealed Thursday.
The charges were the result of an investigation by Bethlehem police and a county grand jury into doctors finding fractures, bruising and head injuries to the triplets when they were eight weeks old.
Following the birth of her triplets in 2016, Henry allegedly told a caregiver that she was contemplating suicide and wanted to ‘throw a baby through a plate glass window’, according to The Morning Call.
Henry allegedly injured the triplets, then eight weeks old, in September 2016. One infant had a broken wrist, a second infant had fractured ribs and the third had subdural hemorrhage from abusive head trauma, prosecutors said.
Then, this past July, Henry allegedly assaulted the child who previously suffered head trauma.
The child, who was 23 months old at the time, had a fractured tibia and petechial bruising due to lack of oxygen or blood to the brain, prosecutors allege.
So basically, Annie had her children taken away from her last year when it was discovered that her newborns had been seriously injured. More:
The babies were placed in foster care and the family was supervised by Lehigh County Office of Children & Youth Services, the report states. Henry — who works as an acupuncturist, according to the report — was only permitted supervised visits with her children for more than a year, then weekend visits were approved last summer.
After one visit, foster parents observed one of the children had a cut lip and swollen face. Doctors found that the child had “bruising due to lack of oxygen or blood flow to the brain,” and “a fracture to the tibia.”
Henry blamed the child’s swelling on “spicy eggs” the family ate at a Bethlehem restaurant, the presentment states. Police interviewed the cook, who said no spices were used on the eggs, court records show.
Child abuse expert Dr. Debra Esernio-Jenssen told the grand jury that one child’s injuries were consistent with “abusive head trauma,” a term used to describe symptoms of what formerly was called shaken baby syndrome.
Apparently what happened is that the babies were taken away from Annie and Marcus and put into care. The parents were only allowed supervised visits for a full year and I'm being told that Annie had attended a number of parenting classes and counseling, after which she was allowed unsupervised visits.
And according to investigators, the children were assaulted again almost immediately. Apparently, one of the doulas alleged on Facebook that Annie tried to smother one of the infants.
My wife and I spent most of the day on Monday trying to get more information from our mutual friends and in turn passing that on to others. Everyone is stunned, particularly by this turn of events in July.
I haven't hung out with Annie in several years (since a barbecue 2009 or 2010) and I'd heard that she'd cut herself off from our very loose circle, but I did bounce messages back and forth with her on Facebook now and then (and I believe she was a member of the FB Secret Sun group).
I'm not just stunned, I'm heartsick. Especially when I see these pictures that have been circulating with the news articles. Those dead, cold eyes don't belong to the Annie I've known for the better part of four decades. Not to sweet, goofy, vivacious, outgoing Annie.
Something has gone terribly wrong.
This is the Annie that I know.
Someone whose eyes were always twinkling, who was always smiling and laughing and being silly. I'll never forget the night a huge group of us went to the world-famous Tic-Toc Diner after the Chiller Theatre con and Annie was cosplaying Daphne from Scooby-Doo and carrying around a Scooby-Doo lunchbox.
She was completely oblivious to all the other diners staring at her and wondering what Daphne from Scooby-Doo was doing there. It was adorable.
I usually only saw her at cons and parties, Chiller, Dragon*Con and the rest, but I first got to know her back in 1985 at the Drug House, back when I was doing Jersey like a champ. What do I mean by that?
Well, I mean we were living in a downscale neighborhood in a town that was every single Bruce Springsteen song come to life and I was working for the real-life Tony Soprano. It was like a crash-course in New Jersey.
Well, I mean we were living in a downscale neighborhood in a town that was every single Bruce Springsteen song come to life and I was working for the real-life Tony Soprano. It was like a crash-course in New Jersey.
I've talked about that experience a number of times over the years, including last year. I'm not certain if I first met Annie at the time I wrote this excerpt here, but if it wasn't that exact night, it certainly was close to it:
I actually remember the night Gloria made landfall. Why? Because that night my rocket-scientist roommates decided it would be a good idea to desecrate a grave. A child's grave. And then they thought to themselves, "You know would be even more excellent? If we brought the headstone back to the house and kept it under the stairs."
I think they spent the rest of the evening sticking their schwangs in light sockets. I don't know, I'll have to check my diary.
No one knew anything about magic or the Spirit world. But they might as well have burned down the place anyway, because everything got really weird, really dark and really ugly immediately and stayed that way until the landlord showed up one fine day with some goon and a Rottweiler and chased everyone home at the time out.
We had a chat with the woman next door as we left for good. She said she had the FBI up on the second floor since they were allegedly running surveillance on the house down the street. Which not only couldn't they actually see from that location, but the entire time we lived there I never saw a single soul go in or out of that house.
However we did have a guy in and out of our house who had some loose affiliation with the Grateful Dead organization and at one point (1984?) had spent a week up at Hunter S. Thompson's place in Woody Creek. (He said Thompson didn't sleep the entire week and spent most of the time screaming and hollering at everyone and shooting at trees).
I think you get my meaning.If you don't, this was a guy who'd come over and use my phone to call a bunch of people and tell him he had something that "smelled good" for them.
Yeah, dark times and bad mojo. Very bad.
Bonus factoid: one of my roommates at the time went on to be a big kahuna on The Simpsons, in fact he still is.
Bonus bonus factoid: One of my friends who worked there swears to this day that Laura Dern was very briefly the hostess for the Tony Soprano restaurant. I've never been able to confirm that, though I do remember a tall blonde girl working the front door.
The thing that boggles my mind is that Annie used to au pair for Fred Greenberg, who ran the old Great Eastern Cons out of the Hotel Pennsylvania. Since I briefly did some business with Fred and had been over to his house, I got the feeling Fred's kids adored Annie and I've been told they saw her as their punk-rock Mary Poppins. She was always sweet and kind to my own kids as well.
But there was a night out with Annie back in 2008 that did raise some alarm bells. She and I and a mutual friend did the town after a Wizard World con in Philly. I had hung with her at her booth and thought, "Wow, Annie really seems to have gotten her shit together. She's not the ditzy New Age fangirl I once knew."
I mean, she was studying acupuncture and Qi Gong and herbalism and later opened a practice in Lower Manhattan. She was also working for a cosplay clothier and traveling the country doing shows and RenFaires. She really seemed to finally have gotten her head on straight.
So the three of us hit South Street and had dinner and hit the shops. But then Annie started saying some very, very strange things in an unsettlingly matter-of-fact kind of tone. She was talking about how she was being stalked and harassed by alien Greys, saying shit like, "Man, I hate those little fuckers."
Our mutual friend was agog, since he hadn't known the weird, druggy, witchy vibe that pervaded the house my wife and I renting, the house that Annie was over at all the time.
That was nothing to how the Pakistani cab driver who took us back to the hotel reacted. Annie was just letting it rip about those motherfucking Greys getting all up in her grill and the flying saucers parked over her house all night and all the rest. I could tell by his expression that the driver was debating whether or not to just chuck our asses out on the street the whole time. I guess you had to be there.
So when I heard that she undergoing major fertility treatment at age 49 so she could get pregnant, well, let's just say I did not expect good things to arise. But I never expected anything like this. Not in a million years. It was inconceivable to me. The Annie I knew loved kids-- hell, she was just an overgrown kid herself.
Her husband is a programmer and I hear he makes bank. Apparently they met on the Steampunk cosplay scene and had a fancy Steampunk wedding. I've never met him but I'm told by everyone who has that he's a very sweet and softspoken guy. But I just can't wrap my head around either one of their behavior at all.
A lot of people have been saying that she's suffering from severe post-partum depression and that may be true. I'm being told she was acting very strange at her arraignment, like none of this was any big deal and she had more important shit to worry about.
So anyway, I've thought since that night in Philly that Annie had popped a cork, just hours after thinking she really seemed like she had all her shit together. But now I'm starting to wonder.
Maybe those Greys she was complaining about beamed her up and scrambled her circuits. I mean, the shit she was saying sounded crazy but she herself did not. She complained about aliens like they were neighbors she was feuding with.
And then a weird thought crossed my mind this afternoon. I thought to myself, "What if these beings she claimed she was getting hassled by weren't aliens at all, but were in fact demons?"
Yeah, yeah, I know. Crazy talk.
But the weird thing was if they were demons, it would sure go a long way to explaining what the actual fuck happened here.
With that in mind, let's go to Horror Show #2...
Erich Stelzer was a 6'7" bodybuilder who stripped naked, screamed he was God and his girlfriend was the Devil, and started hacking away at her with a knife, apparently out of absolutely nowhere. Hollywood would be hard-pressed to top this scenario.
I have to say the police showed remarkable restraint in tasing Stelzer, if what we are hearing is true.
But true to form, we're hearing that this was not the cops' first visit to 13 Church Street.
COHASSET — The family of a man accused of stabbing his date at his home in Cohasset said they had sought medical help for him recently, saying he had exhibited “erratic behavior and extreme paranoia.” The man died Thursday after police tased him during the alleged attack.
And just like every other horror show in the last several decades, Erich Stelzer seemed to fall through those persnickety "cracks in the system."
Stelzer’s family had noticed a decline in his mental health in the week before the stabbing and said he was experiencing “delusions, erratic behavior and extreme paranoia,” according to a statement released by the family’s lawyer, Phil Cormier.
The statement said Stelzer had been in the care of mental health professionals over the last month and that the family called Cohasset police and EMTs about a possible “psychotic break” on Christmas night.
“The assessment by the EMTs was that he did not need assistance due to the fact that he was lucid enough to know his own name and the date,” the statement said. “The family was surprised and unsure how to proceed.”
The family said that before the stabbing they had scheduled an intervention for Stelzer to take him to an inpatient facility for treatment.
The story has taken on an ominous tone, since Cohasset is filled with rich guys who don't much cotton to having their Viking berserker sons offed by cops. I have to say, I'm getting a whiff of something deeper and more troubling at work here. I've seen enough of these kind of things to sense when there's much more to a story here, and maybe the father knows things the rest of us don't and never will.
SHOOT 'EM UP
Now what's the connection to these two cases, besides me? Hormones.
From what I'm told, the kind of treatment Annie was receiving involved massive courses of estrogen and progesterone and fuck knows what else. It was a very complicated and exacting protocol and required all kinds of HRT after the delivery. I'm told that these kinds of chemicals can do a number a woman half Annie's age. If given to an older woman who has some major mental health issues already? Who the hell knows?
Erich Stelzer was almost certainly juicing and "'roid rage" is well-documented. If he was juicing and smoking meth or some such hell-drug, then a freak-out isn't just unsurprising, it's practically de rigeur.
Consider all this when seeing how aggressive and extreme Big Pharma is getting about shooting everyone and everything up with as many hormones as their insurance plan can afford. These are the same people who brought you the Opioidocide, so consider that when the media is pumping your head full of HRT "miracle cure" stories.
There's another connection...
WHERE MY WITCHES AT
Annie's into witchcraft and all the rest of it and has some involvement with an online Witch shoppe. This isn't remarkable in and of itself, she's been into that stuff as long as I've known her and has never seemed to be a problem.
But witchcraft, massive hormone dumps, history of complaints of demonic harassment and the overall Apocalyptic aura out there?
Well, that's another story.
And judging from her Instagram, the reported victim of this horrific knife attack in Cohasset seems to be no stranger to the Craft herself, at least in a fashion-statement kind of way.
It looks as if she has a pet black cat (as do I, and I love him to pieces) and a pet tarantula. She has a number of tattoos, including one of a raven, an owl and some other more troubling designs as well.
Such as a dagger.
And slash marks.
...and an All-Seeing Eye.
Note the 13 and remember the address where this brutal assault was reported to have happened.
Weirder still, given the fact that the police have reported that the young woman was stabbed several times in the face and may lose an eye, we have a history of gruesome Halloween costumes with weird designs around the eye or eyes, such as this...
...and these.
However, like I keep trying to tell everyone, potent symbols have minds, wills and agendas of their own.
See, I don't worry about any of the new generation of young witches doing anything of any significance magically. However, I do worry about them being unwittingly used as signal boosters.
And more troublingly, food.
Especially in a town like Cohasset. Why?
Because in case you didn't know, the Devil lives in Cohasset.
Well, at least he did; The Witches of Eastwick was filmed there.
Because in case you didn't know, the Devil lives in Cohasset.
Well, at least he did; The Witches of Eastwick was filmed there.
I'll tell you, it was quite a trip seeing that movie, filmed in those streets I knew so intimately.
Cher's house was literally around the corner from my Dad's house, which he bought after leaving the Ghost House. He since sold it to a former Boston Bruin (exactly 20 years ago, in fact). Michelle Pfeffer's house was close by too. The church where that scene was filmed was my grandmother's chosen parish.
Weirdly enough, the knife-attack nightmare went down as my wife and I were doing our Haunting of Hill House watch, which in turn inspired me to write about my own Hill House experience in Cohasset.
Bonus Factoid: The story seems to have been Mandela-Effected, but I do know that Cher was involved in a major accident on Route 3 during the filming.
Let me just end all this with excerpts from "It's No Game," which turns out to have been all-too-prophetic.
Cher's house was literally around the corner from my Dad's house, which he bought after leaving the Ghost House. He since sold it to a former Boston Bruin (exactly 20 years ago, in fact). Michelle Pfeffer's house was close by too. The church where that scene was filmed was my grandmother's chosen parish.
Weirdly enough, the knife-attack nightmare went down as my wife and I were doing our Haunting of Hill House watch, which in turn inspired me to write about my own Hill House experience in Cohasset.
Bonus Factoid: The story seems to have been Mandela-Effected, but I do know that Cher was involved in a major accident on Route 3 during the filming.
(The) constant barrage of occultic symbolism out there-- overt or covert-- isn't being shoved down everyone's throats for shits and giggles. These symbols have also been around for a long time and have been pretty well road-tested. They do stuff, however you choose to explain how or why.Terence McKenna once said that a healthy society could only afford to have some minuscule proportion of the population seriously involved with psychedelics. I forget the exact figure but it was something like .025% or something. Double that number to .05% and things got kind of shaky, or so the Bard seemed to think.
For my dollar the exact same can be said about the occult.
Which may be exactly why so many people out there seem to have become demon-possessed and/or ragingly psychopathic. You can only bend a paperclip so much before it breaks, if you get my meaning.
So, Tarot cards, Ouija boards, ritual magick, astrology? I say leave them to the adepts, the ones willing to accept the consequences if it all goes tits up. Same way climbing skyscrapers and diving off cliffs can be quite thrilling to watch but in my opinion they're not really something you can dabble in.
Think upon it.
Need more Knowledge?
Come enroll at the Secret Sun Institute of Advanced Synchromysticism.
Don't forget: the legendary Secret Sun Facebook group is back in action, after a three year hiatus.
