How a Real-Life Druid Death Inspired Thriller Book, ‘A Mother Always Knows’
A cult of spiritual dowsers – where followers use pendulums and divining rods to tap into the “universal energy”– is the focal point of my upcoming thriller A Mother Always Knows. The fictional cult is set in the Vermont woods in an actual famed spooky area writer Joe Citro dubbed “The Bennington Triangle” due to strange happenings that’ve taken place within its mythological borders, including disappearing hikers (true), Big Foot sightings (maybe) and alien visits (I’ll let you decide).
But the inspiration for A Mother Always Knows didn’t come from Joe’s entertaining books or my own encounters with real cults in this state. In truth, the idea was sparked by a strange call I received when I was the elected town clerk in my community of Middlesex, Vermont, in 2016 from my counterpart in the bordering town of Worcester. She was searching for records concerning an Ivan McBeth, recently deceased.
In Vermont, if a funeral home is not involved, it’s up to the local town clerk to compile information for a death certificate and send that info to the State Health Department. This means gathering the deceased’s date of birth, age, location of death, time of death, etc. The medical examiner fills in the details about suspected causes. Otherwise, everything else is up to the clerk.
This can be a complicated undertaking, especially when there are challenging circumstances as there were, to put it mildly, in the case of Ivan McBeth’s demise. Ivan, it turns out, was not a small man. In fact, he was rather large. More importantly, he was famous for running a Druid center (complete with standing stones) called Dreamland deep in the woods at the top of the hill dividing our two municipalities.
According to my fellow town clerk, Ivan was preparing to receive visitors to Dreamland for the autumnal equinox when he died on September 23rd. Events might have proceeded per usual were it not for the visiting Druids who insisted on including Ivan’s earthly remains as part of the upcoming celebration. A wooden pyre was built. I’ll say no more.
To further complicate the situation, cell service was sketchy to non-existent and so my poor fellow town clerk was running up and down the mountain gathering info. The widow, grieving in an undisclosed healing mountain stream, was too distraught to be of much assistance.
To further, further complicate the situation, temperatures began to rise.
Ivan died on Friday before dawn and the celebration was to take place that weekend which meant his earthly remains were outside, rotting, in record-setting, seventy-degree, sunny September weather for more than thirty-six hours when things began to go, not to pun, downhill.
My hardworking counterpart was relaxing on her porch that Saturday evening when, at “half-past beer o’clock” she was summoned by a panicked acquaintance urging her to come to Dreamland ASAP because “it’s a freaking sh*t show!”
The Druids were at loggerheads. With Ivan’s corpse rapidly decomposing as nature intended, the time had arrived to make him part of the ceremony tout de suite. Some of the attendees simply wanted to light the fire, a proposition that was fervently opposed by those who knew better. Were his corpse to be kindled in this condition, it would literally explode. Others, who’d been to India, said the corpse must be stabbed first to release the gases and THEN they could ignite the pyre.
“Enough!” my fellow town clerk bellowed. “No one’s burning anyone.” Whereupon she proceeded to call every crematorium in the state until she found one with the means and willingness to transport Ivan’s body to a proper, er, incineration.
That story stuck with me for years. I loved everything about it – the idea of a secret sect of Druids in the woods, the name Ivan McBeth, and his passion for magic. I’d also had some experience with dowsers, the traditional kind who use apple twigs and willow branches to find underground water. (Fun fact: Danville, Vermont, is home to the American Society of Dowsers!)
Turn the Druids into a cult in which an innocent mother became involved and tried to flee before she was mysteriously murdered, throw in a narcissistic cult leader named Radcliffe MacBeath, delusional followers, a daughter determined to find her mother’s killer, and the fascinating practice of dowsing for the dead and, well, A Mother Always Knows was born!
Oddly, I have yet to visit Dreamland, though it’s fewer than three miles from my house. I’m sure it’s nothing like the setting for A Mother Always Knows. Then again, I’m a mother and contrary to the title, I rarely always know. I didn’t know about the Druids in my backyard, for example. Who’s to say, therefore, that Big Foot and aliens aren’t wandering around there, too?
Discover the Book
Stella O’Neill is just your average millennial, working at a public library and worrying about making rent. No one would suspect she’s been living under an assumed name or that she was raised in a Vermont commune of “diviners” where, and as a ten-year-old, she witnessed her mother’s brutal murder–a crime that has gone unsolved for years.
But her quiet, anonymous existence is upended when a true-crime obsessive posts her current name and location on the internet. Now, Stella has to get out of Boston before her mother’s killer can find her and finish the job he started all those years ago. Fed up with living in fear, she heads to the off-the-grid retreat of her childhood to confront her mother’s unhinged guru who controlled their lives for so long–the infamous Radcliffe MacBeath.Stella has two powerful assets: determination and a supernatural gift. Relying on her mother’s beloved rose quartz pendulum, Stella will have to outwit the charismatic leader who’s ruined so many lives and discover once and for all the true identity of her mother’s killer–before becoming his next victim.
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