Circle of Doors- Gateway to Arcadia?

Delaware: Two Coffin's Grove teens died last week and one more went to jail after one of the most bizarre crimes this community has ever been witness to.

     He tried turning them, but of course there was no mechanism that permitted their movement. Puzzled, he told his mother about them later at the dinner table. His mother, Sally Masters, says, "I was concerned that this might be some weird cult activity or something. I hear some years ago they found a cult of Satanists in Cedar Rapids, and I wondered if this was some part of their Black Mass."

     Samantha Ridenauer, 17, was one of the witnesses to the scene of violence that occurred a few short days later, on the 30th of January. A junior at Coffin's Grove High School, she says that what happened at the circle of trees was because of small-town ignorance, and, as she puts it, "...the inability of jocks to look before they leap."

     Samantha and her friends Corey Bremner, 16, and Heather Perkins, also 16, had formed a little club which was not Satanic in origin, as Sally Masters had feared. It was this group of friends that had put the doorknobs into the trees in Dover Park. But Samantha explains it was not as a prank.

     "The three of us met through the theatre department at our school. We all had an interest in the unusual, and Heather had even gone to Iowa City a couple of times to meet with the Wiccan group there. Corey always liked that Aleister Crowley stuff, and I guess I just soaked up any information on the bizarre that I could get my hands on."

     Explaining that she could not give us the name of her source for safety reasons, Samantha notes that the idea for the doorknobs and hemp ropes came from a book on occultism and the faerie world that was printed in the late 18th century. This book that she found contained the final piece she and the group needed to complete their files on Arcadia, or the realm of the faeries.

     "Arcadia always fascinated me as a myth," Samantha explains, scratching her quite obviously blonde-dyed hair. "Then I got to thinking, what is any of this is real? The whole queen of faeries thing, the Seelie and Unseelie court, all of it? Plus there were so many kinds of faeries that I read about, from gnomes to boggarts to pixies, that I wanted to find out which stories were based on fact. So I put together my information with what Heather and Corey had collected, and we decided to try to bring the faeries to us. That's what all the stuff in the park was for; the knobs and ropes tied on the trees symbolized doorways."

     Samantha says that the friends' last meeting took place in the high school cafeteria after school a few days before the crime that would shake this little community to its foundations. Samantha suspects that that's where Harvey Klempel and Zach Taylor, both 17 and on the school football team, overheard them. She says that "theatre nerds" were always somewhat ignored by the "in-crowd" of athletes at the school, and that these two were among the worst. "They wouldn't have understood what we were doing if they tried," she scowls. "Now they've ruined everything forever."

     On the 30th, when evening temperatures were in the upper 40s, Samantha, Heather and Corey made their trek to Dover Park. She says they arrived at about 9:30, a time they had arranged at the school. Corey was late, and on arriving explained that he had the weird feeling he was being followed. Knowing the police could always be around somewhere given the publicity of the door knobs, the group decided Corey was just nervous. They proceeded cautiously, anyway.

     They cleared the brush and fallen leaves and sticks from the center of the small clearing, and traced a double circle a few feet wide in the earth with a knife. Heather took a mixture of olive oil, basil, cat nail trimmings and ground acorns and drizzled it around the edge of the circle. Samantha claims that the mixture had to sit for several days after concocting it, and that there were some other ingredients, as well, but that she didn't want word of the liquid's recipe to get out.

     Corey was the elected musician that night. "He was in band, too," says Samantha. "He was the only guy that played the flute. Actually, that was a stroke of luck, because the ceremony we were performing needed a flute."

     Corey began playing a song, mostly lethargic scales, while Heather and Samantha began walking slowly, counter-clockwise, around the circle. Samantha describes the forest at that time beginning to grow very dark, even in the feeble moonlight, until all she could see where her two friends. Then she saw the hemp rope and doorknobs on the eight trees begin to shine in the blackness. They seemed phosphorescent, a very soft glow.

     Then came a drumming in the distance. Samantha felt a little nervous, then. "Here it was, something was actually happening, and I didn't know what. I told you that I didn't know what parts about the legend of Arcadia were true, and now I was almost too scared to find out. But this was what we were there for, so we went on. The drumming got louder, and I thought I could maybe pick out four or five distinct drums. Then a weird sort of wailing piping arose, and the hairs on the back of my neck shot straight up.

     "What happened next was really confusing. I saw stepping from the trees where we had put the doorknobs some little people. They were hard to see at first, but when they got closer to the circle, they lit up somehow, not like a light, but like they were coming into focus. They were about two feet tall, with wings that looked like they were made from cellophane that changed colors, pulsing to the beat of the drums. Their arms and legs were spindly, ending in very long fingers and toes. I noticed then that their faces were distorted, their eyes bugged out with huge pupils that seemed cold. They had wide slits for mouths, and I just knew that if they spoke I'd have a heart attack."

     Just then, Harvey and Zach appeared on the scene. They reported to the police and park security later that they had indeed overheard Samantha and her friends that day in the high school cafeteria, and that they just wanted to scare the little group. Following Corey to the clearing, they waited and watched as the ceremony went on. When the small humanoids appeared, Harvey bolted down to his truck and retrieved his father's double-barreled shotgun. Intending to shoot the little demons he thought that the faeries were, he barged his way with Zach into the clearing.

     Samantha says that the little beings all turned to look at the interlopers at once. Letting out a squeaky scream, Harvey raised the shotgun. "His eyes were blind with panic and fear," Samantha adds. "It was like he was looking through me and the others, and could only see the faeries."

     Harvey unloaded one barrel at a faerie nearby, but missed its lithe form and hit Corey instead. The blast took off Corey's right shoulder and much of his neck. He didn't have a chance to scream. Heather did, however, and yelled "Get away," at Harvey, and began making for the fallen Corey. Harvey, not understanding either Heather or what was going on, shot again, and this time threw Heather off her feet as the blast hit her square in the chest.

     Finally Zach wrestled the gun away from his panic-stricken friend. Samantha recalls that at this point the clearing had brightened up considerably, and that the small humanoids were gone. The drumming and eerie piping faded away rapidly. She and Zach ran to aid their fallen friends, while Harvey sat on the ground, sobbing. There was nothing they could do. Heather and Corey were already dead.

     As of this writing, Harvey Klempel is awaiting trial in Delaware County. Zach and Samantha stand by their story of what happened, at the expense of losing most of their friends. And somewhere in the Deleware County Courthouse, doorknobs and hemp rope are being held for evidence.