5

They Walked All Night, Then Folks Just Started Screaming

A few hundred feet past the entrance road, "we reached the first village," Steve says. "The first house we came to on the left, we began pounding on its thick metal door, pleading for help in English and, her, the local language. No answer. After a few seconds, we ran across the road to another house, and repeated our cries for help. This time the door opened, but we were met not with help but shouting at us and me receiving the seemingly angry kicks and punches of some random fucker. So we kept running. We tried no more houses, but just ran."

They passed through several more villages that were of similar help until "we decided that once it was light out -- light meant safety -- we would walk into [the next] village and ask for help," he says. "Surely, we would find help there in the light of day from people who would see two terrified, bedraggled young adults walking out of the grass." That is not what they saw. "The villagers saw two white people, one naked, coming out of the bush at dawn asking for help, and assumed we were witches."

felixmizioznikov/iStock
In fairness, a lot of evil incantations begin with pleas for clothing and shelter.

4

They Were Pretty Sure They Were Going To Die

As is most people's instinct when strangers begin screaming at the mere sight of them, Steve and his girlfriend ran. But "as we passed another house, we saw a handful of men come running down the steps," he says. "At this point, we were sprinting, though a night of running barefoot down dirt paths had left our feet bloodied and bruised." As they ran, "more villagers began chasing us down the dirt road," and any hope that these were simply helpful Samaritans racing each other for the right to help the poor bedraggled couple was quickly dashed.

Robert Herhold/iStock
A lot of stuff was being shouted, but it's probably safe to say none of it was "Quick! Get them to an American embassy!"

3

There Are Whole Bands Of Anti-Witch-Hunters

Just as the couple was about to surrender to the gods of dramatic storytelling, "that's when we saw a man come out from one of the houses in front of us, the ones that bordered the dirt road we were limping down," Steve says. "We cried out to him for help, in both languages, as we had done to everyone else we had met that night. And he listened."

Out of nowhere, as if delivered by those very same gods, they were suddenly surrounded by a group of the man's friends, who seemed unsettlingly prepared for this sort of thing. "As the mob caught up to us, they formed a protective barrier between the screaming mass and us," Steve explains. Someone had even had the presence of mind to grab some goddamn clothes for Steve, and he was finally allowed to hide his shame. Still, the mob persisted. "At one point I looked up to see one man in particular, dressed nicely in a button-up shirt and slacks and wearing a bike helmet, taking pictures of our half-naked bodies with his camera phone as he smiled."

Georgijevic/iStock
"#NoFilter #WitchyWednesday"

2

The Police Treated It As Routine

After dropping Steve's girlfriend off at a camp site with other Peace Corps volunteers at her request and picking up one of them to act as an interpreter, "the men drove us to the police station," Steve says. Immediately you'll notice that was not, unfortunately, the final sentence of the article.

Al Jazeera English
Spoiler: "... And the perpetrators were arrested, ending witch hunts in Africa forever." isn't either.

"The chief came, sat behind his desk, and asked me to recount the events," Steve says. He did, and the chief asked questions ... but mostly about Steve's stolen smartphone. Remember the phone that the rapist burglar stole? Obviously you don't, because you just heard a guy tell you he got witch-hunted. But so did the police chief. Something wasn't adding up.

The chief "then told me we would go back to the resort," Steve says. "We drove back to the resort with the police chief, the volunteer, and an officer holding an automatic rifle. On the way, the truck was met with blank, staring faces." Again, he noticed that not even the crowd seemed to be taking his attempted stoning seriously. "As we passed that first village again, a woman pointed, screamed, and then laughed," he says. "I don't think I have ever, or will ever, want to kill another human being more than I wanted to kill that woman in that moment, even considering the crazed sociopath with the wig."

Channel 4/YouTube
In case you think that kind of mocking reaction couldn't possibly get worse ...it can.

1

It Could Have Been A Lot Worse

It wasn't until, "some point between being picked up by the couple in the car and finishing my story at the police station [that] I learned from someone the reason we had been attacked by those villagers," Steve says.

"The main reason for otherwise very sweet villagers to burn their neighbor to death for giving their cattle hoof rot is that they are scared, they are angry, and they don't know any better," he continues. "The problem is that so much of their lives is out of their control: The amount of rainfall that year determines whether their crops do well, while the market price of their crops determines whether they can feed their own family, while the money and actions of international aid organizations determines where and when their next health center gets built. The one thing they can control is who they murder as a result of not enough rain falling on their crops."

U.S. Embassy in Ghana
Though it seems like running the Peace Corps out of the country might be a step back.

Before you feel too bad for the murderous fuckheads, Steve also learned that many of those killed, "are women, children, the elderly, and people with disabilities." Children are particularly vulnerable: A shocking majority of the homeless youth in several countries have been abandoned due to suspected witchcraft, and for the most part, the local authorities don't do a thing about it, because they're fully on board with "kick out the witch bastards." In one of the most horrifying incidents, 1,000 suspected witches in Gambia were rounded up to be tortured and/or killed in 2009. Why didn't the government stop them? They were the ones who ordered it.

It turns out Steve and his girlfriend, in all their foreign whiteness, came factory-issued with several advantages. As far as these things go, the locals undoubtedly have it worse. "It's ... pretty awful," Steve says. "Sometimes it's not necessarily people being killed for being witches, but because their body parts can be used in witchcraft; albinos in East Africa are a huge target for machete-wielding witchcraft-doers. This reflects not just how awful humans can be in general, but how even at our most awful, we can still manage to pick on people who are different or already oppressed in society."

As for Steve and his girlfriend, they were eventually flown back to Washington for a whole mess of psychological and medical evaluations. There, Steve was discovered to have an (apparently unrelated) blood clot, effectively ending his service with the Peace Corps without even a souvenir "I Got Witch Hunted In Sunny Africa" T-shirt. It's probably just as well.

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For more people who took up their torches and pitchforks for good, check out 4 Surprising Ways Internet Mobs Were Used For Justice and 25 Times Internet Vigilantes Decided Not To Be Terrible.

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