Gentle Readers,
I do not speak for everyone who identifies with the vampire community or participates in the vampire lifestyle. But I can speak for my swath of the community--the Order of Maidenfear, Vampgeist Creative Media, Tacrostica, Vampire Evolution, and Vampire Entente. In that capacity I would like to address the case of Shelby Ellis. I'm glad I didn't post what I'd originally written, as the matter appears to have been resolved...more or less.
First I give you the original story to which I was directed early November 2 (or thereabouts).
Missing 16-Year-Old's Parents Fear Girl In Vampire Cult
Only on CBS Atlanta News
(November 1-November 2)
In an unusual story about three missing kids, CBS Atlanta has learned three Cobb County students all disappeared within a few days of each other.
The three McEachern High School teens were said to be involved a Goth lifestyle, had an obsession with vampires, and then they disappeared each within a week of each other.
Two of the teens turned up over the weekend. But Shelby Elllis, a 16 year old sophomore, is still missing and her parents fear the worst.
The question now is what has happened to Shelby Ellis, the remaining missing teen? And does her involvement on an eerie website hold the key.
Rich and Wendy Ellis spoke exclusively with CBS Atlanta's Wendy Saltzman.
"What flashes through my head every day is a girl lying in a ditch on the side of the road," Rich Ellis said.
"No one heard from Shelby. I'm truly afraid she is not alive. What are we supposed to think?" her step-mother, Wendy, said.
Shelby has been missing for three weeks. On Oct. 11, she took the bus to school and never came home. Her last known activity on the Internet was logging onto the website "Vampire Freaks," where her parents say she lived a double life.
"You have the obvious thoughts of pentagrams and candles and the crazy things that you see on TV that are associated with the darker cult lifestyle," Rich Ellis said.
The week after Shelby vanished, one of her friends, a 15-year-old freshman, went missing. A week later, a third girl disappeared.
"The way that they have come up missing one after the other makes us believe-- a lot of things point to that they are in some kind of pact," private investigator Phillip Hambrick told CBS Atlanta News.
The family hired Hambrick to help find their daughter.
"We don't know if she has been coerced to go out somewhere, if she has been kidnapped," Hambrick said.
The common link, the family warns, may be an underground cult.
"A lot of them are in this dark, 'let's be gothic, let's be different, let's suck blood.' All kinds of dark stuff," Wendy Ellis said.
She said the three girls were fascinated with vampires and the dark side of life. They were all students at McEachern High School in Cobb County, although one of the girls was not enrolled this year.
"I know nothing about it," Principal Regina Montgomery told CBS Atlanta News.
When Saltzman went to ask Montgomery about the mysterious connection between her students, the principal had her escorted off the property.
"Do you think it is suspicious that all these girls have disappeared?" Reporter Wendy Saltzman asked.
"Ma'am, can I ask you to leave?" Montgomery said as she walked away.
The other two teens, who were found this weekend, have refused to tell investigators where Shelby might be.
"There are kids that go missing that you never hear from again. I don't want to be here in eight, 10 months still not knowing where our daughter is," Wendy Ellis said.
The Cobb County Sheriff's Office would not provide the details of their investigation because all three girls are under age.
If you have any additional information about Shelby Ellis' whereabouts, please contact the Cobb County Sheriff's Office, or her family at 770-825-2865.
That Shelby apparently has an account at Vampire Freaks, where user groups are (tongue in cheek) called Cults, was enough to establish some kind of nefarious activities involving the vampire community as it exists as a philosophy/practice/society/etc. This in turn led to various group leaders of the online vampire community to issue statements of their own.
The following is the most recent turn of events.
Missing Cobb County Girl Found Safe
POSTED: 10:44 am EDT November 3 2010
UPDATED: 12:52 pm EDT November 3, 2010
ATLANTA -- A 16-year-old girl who has been missing for over three weeks has been found.
Shelby Ellis, a sophomore at McEachern High School, was found safely in Lakewood, Wash.
According to Ellis' grandmother, she took a bus there and was in a person's home by choice. Her grandmother did not know whose home she was in or how she was found.
She is now in a juvenile detention center awaiting extradition to Atlanta.
Ellis' parents had feared she was involved in some sort of dark cult.
"A lot of them are in this dark, 'Let's be Gothic. Let's be different. Let's suck blood.' All kinds of dark stuff," the girl's mother, Wendy Ellis, said.
Ellis' grandmother thanked CBS Atlanta for getting her story out there so she could be found.
CBS Atlanta News will have more information on this story as it becomes available.
Now I don't want to belabor the obvious here. I would prefer to take this as an opportunity to remind everyone about symbolism, semantics, and the struggle we have every day in keeping salacious stereotyping apart from beliefs and activities that can be explored and explained if just given the chance.
Walk with me back in time to 1985, when Jesse Helms was a very real threat to alternative communities in the United States. Along with Robert Walker, a Representative from Pennsylvania, Senator Helms of North Carolina introduced a measure to deny tax-exempt status to certain religious groups--namely Witchcraft and Paganism. One of Walker's assistants said by way of explanation, "If a person is praying for horrible things and sticking pins into voodoo dolls, that is not the kind of religion that should be supported by a tax exemption."
The two bills were opposed by the American Civil Liberties Union and numerous Witchcraft and Pagan organizations. The ACLU called the two bills "the crudest example of First Amendment infringement." The issue became known as the Helms Amendment.
Maybe you remember the eighties. Maybe you don't. But I can remember very clearly an era of witchcraft fear and relating witchcraft to the crudest forms of Satanic worship. Specifically, I can remember the pentagram being absolutely understood as a symbol of Satanism. The pentagram was no more the mark of the beast then than it is now, but it was a symbol people could latch onto and cry infernal fuss over. The poor kids who were tossed out of school (or wherever) because the band shirt they were wearing happened to feature a pentagram!
Anyway. I have a point, though I'm getting to it slowly. There was an ignorant mindset in the 1980's involving things most people never bothered to explore, and that same mindset exists in 2010. "Oh, this poor teenager must have been the brainwashed puppet of some dark dank gothic vampire cult." But it turns out Shelby Ellis may not have been the lily white innocent she was when said dark vampire cult was under suspicion.
Let's not turn on the fringes of society the second the Shelby Ellis types of the world go missing. This sounds far too much like the great witch hunts of Western Europe. Being different is difficult enough without being scapegoats as well. Instead, let's extend a hand in common interest and our voices/letters to better educate our society. This is the charge we have in return to the chance to incorporate different aspects into our lives in peace.
And lest I be misunderstood, I am very glad that Shelby Ellis seems to have been found. No family should ever know that turmoil, whether it is from kidnapping or running away.
