A student forwarded this letter to the editor of the Pope County Tribune (sorry, small town newspaper, and they don't seem to have an online archive of letters) to me, and I asked my kids about it—they said they already knew the story of the crazy lady, and their friends at the Morris High School thought it was darned funny.

To back up a bit and explain, it's about the Senior Prom. The Prom is a very big deal out here—the day of the event, it's a bit of a shock, since all the high-schoolers are duded up and swished to the nines, and just going to the grocery store means you're going to run into guys in tuxes and top hats and girls in the most elaborate gowns. Another custom of the Prom is the lockdown: all the attendees are going to be locked in to the high school for the entire night, and party games and music and entertainment will be provided, along with chaperonage. Which is, of course, the entire point.

(As an aside, I remember my senior prom. The post-prom party was held in an out-of-the-way cow pasture at Smith Brothers' Dairy Farm, and the entertainment consisted of a keg of beer and fringing, obscuring tall, tall grass and trees. It's very easy to entertain adolescents.)

Anyway, one of the highlights of the lockdown last year was a hypnotist. It's all the kids wanted to talk about afterwards, and I guess he had an entertaining patter and it's always fun to see your peers do crazy stuff. That was at our Morris Area High School. The Minnewaska High School down the road doesn't get a hypnotist. Because of the infamous crazy lady.

She wrote a hysterical letter to the local paper in which she compared the threat of a hypnotist to drunk driving or bomb threats. She has managed to squelch the appearance of the hypnotist for some time:

When my middle daughter was a junior, she came home and informed me very excitedly that a hypnotist was going to be at the Post Prom. Know [sic] the potential dangers that a hypnotist can present, especially to vulnerable, emotional, young people in the middle of the night, I sprang into action and was able to rid our Post Prom of the hypnotist for a number of years.

What are these dangers?

In order for a hypnotist to be able to hypnotize, they have to be able to have complete control over a person's will. That in itself is bad because as God's children, we should not be giving over our wills to anyone but God alone. There also is another danger to this aspect and that is that in the process of giving over one's will to the hypnotist, one also opens oneself to any demons who may want to enter one's mind. Then when we look at the purpose for which a hypnotist is doing this at this occasion, it is merely for the sake of making that person do ridiculous things which others can laugh at.

I have more information and examples of bad things that have happened because of hypnotist action at these events and it is a negative spiritual world involvement which cannot be dealt with easily because we cannot even see all of the harm that it may be doing even for the observers and so it would be best if we would just stop exposing our precious youth to this harmful negative spiritual threat.

I don't intend to make fun of the poor deluded superstitious lady in Pope county—these people are everywhere. The scary part, though, is that the Minnewaska schools take her lunatic pleas seriously enough that they've cancelled something harmless that the kids look forward to, and she seems to think nothing of disappointing her own daughter, who found the prospect exciting.

That's the real risk of the lack of solid critical thinking skills: that the people in charge, while maybe not succumbing to the insanity to a strong degree themselves, will be willing to surrender to the shrill kooks. When this woman complains about the choice of entertainment at a high school event, they should listen respectfully; but when she starts babbling about "demons" infesting the schoolkids, they should shoo her out the door. Decisions should be made on the basis of solid, practical explanations, not this kind of deranged rationale.

I hope they didn't decide to disallow the private parties at the local cow pasture because they were afraid a chupacabra might eat them. I can think of some more realistic reasons for not wanting frisky teenagers to hang out in the weeds with beer.