Stone the Witch!

Esther Horton looks absolutely nothing like this

What is it with the state of Florida? Some of the weirdest stories ever come from there, like this one. A St. Augustine woman named Esther Horton was putting her son in a car seat when she was attacked by her neighbor with a rock. When police arrested the neighbor, she claimed that Horton was a witch and was casting spells against her. It's not clear why the neighbor believed this, or what Horton did that looked "witchy."

A Florida woman who was six months pregnant was attacked by a neighbor with a large rock because she thought she was performing witchcraft. Esther Horton was in her driveway, putting her four-year-old son in a car seat when Annie Olomua came running towards her, screamed an obscenity and threw the rock at her head. Luckily, Horton ducked and it only hit her in the arm.

Horton’s husband was able to restrain Olomua until police arrived, who then arrested the woman for aggravated battery. According to ActionNewsJax, Olomua claimed her neighbors were using witchcraft against her and her family over recent months, but there’s no mention of why exactly Olomua had these suspicions. Was the neighborhood overrun by goths? Did she spy on someone’s extensive crystal collection?

Or maybe Horton wore a lot of black, or a lot of eyeliner. After all, eyeliner abuse is a sure sign of trafficking with the Devil, right? It gets debated back and forth on the Internet how common magical attacks really are, and personally I believe they are relatively rare. Mental illness, on the other hand, afflicts something like one person in four, and I strongly suspect that's what's going on here. According to the local news report, police are evaluating the neighbor to determine whether some sort of mental health evaluation is in order. I expect that it will be.

The other takeaway from this story is that if you believe yourself to be under magical attack, it's much smarter to do something like a good uncrossing ritual than it is to attack random neighbors with rocks. You'd think that would be self-evident, but as this story shows, that may not be the case for everyone.