Why Are Druids Running A Small Iowa Town?

Monona: I first saw Albaton as a sleepy river town along the Missouri River where people go about their daily business. There is no police department here and, with the exception of a singular eddifice, no hint of anything mysterious. Yet that singular eddiffice, a stone tower 100 feet tall broods ominously over the town below.

     The town was settled in the mid 1850's by refugees from an isolated valley in southeastern Rumania. And though it has been over one hundred and fifty years, their unique language can still heard in coffee shops on Front Street. It is not Rumanian or Romanche or even Turkish, as one might expect but is Galatian---the language of ancient Celtic settlers in central Turkey. As Stephen Audrix, the town's mayor explain, the town's forefathers lived in near complete isolation for nearly 2200 years a few miles inland from the Black Sea until genocidal forays by the Ottoman Empire forced them to leave their homeland.

     Anthropologists studying the ethnicity of the State have previsously misrepresented them as Irish or Highland Scots from the Western Hebrides and because of their language and many cultural traditions, it is easy to understand why---except for one tradition.

     The town's stone tower is the site of that tradition. Upon the death of an Albaton resident, a long procession follows the black funeral wagon drawn by a team of 5 white horses to the foot of the tower. The shrouded body is then carried up a long flight of stairs to the top of the tower and dumped amongst the roosting crows (strangely, vultures are never seen in the area) to feed upon for the people of Albaton practise an ancient rite of excarnation of the dead.

     "When some folks think of it, they get the idea we're some kind of blood-thirsty pagans, but we're actually just Greek Orthodox Christians," says Mayor Audrix. This is just the tradition that was passed on to us from the old country. They did it because there was little land to set aside for a grave yard and that burying bones took up very little space. Now, here of course, we have lots of space at Brennus Gardens and if you didn't want excarnation, you can be buried there with a coffin and everything. But people here prefer the old way , I guess."

     When asked about the traditional right of a band of five white robed individuals to stop the hearse and demand that the corpse's head be struck-off and given to them, Audrix became clumsily evasive and ended the interview.

     According to other equally nervous but more forth-coming sources, the town is secretly run by a pentacle of white-robed druids who gather in an unknown oak grove and perform the ancient rites they feel have guarded their people for generations. Rumors of ritual torture and sacrifice abound, the victims being those whom the druids believe have broken the law, but no bodies have ever been discovered. Indeed, in a few instances, Nebreska State Troopers discovered those known trouble-makers in Albaton to be wandering shoe-less on a county road 100 miles from home in a persistant hynotic state. When brought out from this trance, they flattly refused to return home.

     During my stay in Albaton, I made it well known that I was interested in meeting the druids. Doing so gradually left me fewer and fewer people to talk to. Then one night a teenage boy tapped on my hotel window from the fire escape. He was tallk, thin, wearing a black denim jacket, an ankh ear ring. He said his name was "Ray" and that he knew where the druid's grove was. Did I want to come along? Yes, I told him and soon we were walking through a stubbled corn field on the outskirts of town to a low hill surrmounted by a thick, dark forest. At about 100 yards from the forest edge, he said he would go no further. When I asked why, he said had been warned already and then left me alone.

     I slowly crept into the grove, avoiding snapping twigs under my feet. My senses tingled on full alert. It took time, but I eventually made my way to a clearing ringed entirely in immense oak trees and covered with thick grass. Several circular dirt trails were worn through the sod. A trio of stone pillars, each twelve feet tall, and surrmounted with large stone cross piece stood at the center of the grove. In each of the stone pillars were twelve niches and in each niche was a severed human head, each head in various states of decay.

     That was the last I remember. I woke a few days later at the Georg von Podebrad Medical Center in Zoar. My nurse that night gave me a note she said had been handed to her by the old man who brought me to the hospital. It said: "The Doom of Toutatis is upon you! Stay away from Albaton!"