Last Saturday, the missus and I got coffee at Joe Muggs and sat in their outside area, enjoying the nice weather. After a time, a manic gay twenty-something approached and asked if he could join us. He sat down and spilled his guts out, telling us he recently came back to town, that he was homeless and lived in the woods, blah blah blah.
He was an intelligent kid and I felt bad for him, but he was entertaining as hell. He mentioned that he'd grown up here (Gastonia, NC) but a combination of things drove him away: one, his folks didn't dig the queer stuff, so they disowned him; two, as he said, he'd encountered a local Satanic cult that, as he said, operates out of Spencer Mountain, and that bunch are supposedly responsible for annual sacrifices -- all ruled suicides -- by throwing people off nearby mountains (Crowder's, King's, ?) in the wee hours of the morning.
I have a decent bullshit detector, so if this guy was bullshitting, I'd wager that he at least believed what he told us. He didn't strike me as schizo, but he did talk a lot about smoking marijuana; maybe hapless homoboy was just high
. Thing is, I don't think he WAS high. He was clear-eyed and alert.
I.know, tl;dr. If you're that fucking stupidly illiterate, move on and !et the grown-ups talk. I think the whole Satan cult biz is a load of hooey, but I know there are some other semi-locals here (Adam, Daddywaddy) who might help shed some light on this.