Paranoia Can Annoy Ya

One evening over thirty years ago I received a call from my next door neighbor, who was a middle-aged woman. She asked me, “Why did you put poison snakes in my house?” At first I thought I’d misunderstood her question, so I said, “Sorry, what was that again?” She repeated the same question. Well, Ole Randy, who wasn’t so “ole” back then, just figured that my neighbor had partaken of too many rum and Cokes, easy on the Coke. If only that had been the case! After a bit of chit chat, all very pleasant, she seemed satisfied that I hadn’t been delivering any of the slithering reptiles into her house, and she seemed to settle down and be less “rattled” (Hey, can you think of a better word to go with snakes?).

Nothing else happened for more than a year, but one day upon my return from an out-of-town trip, my dad told me that the police had come by when he was there to check the mail for me. They said the woman next door had called them saying that I was firing shots (ah, the kind from guns, not the rum ones) at her house. I’m still not sure whether I was right or wrong to do this, but I marched right to her front door and knocked. She came to the door waving a sizeable butcher knife at me. She said that I was stealing her mail, that I had tunnels dug from my basement over to her basement so that I could tap into her utilities, and that I had been dropping poison down her chimney (hey, when poison snakes don’t work, what else can you do?). She proceeded to lambaste the mailman and the family in the house on the other side of her. She said the mailman showed her mail all over the neighborhood and that everyone knew her bills before she even got them. After hearing all of this nonsense, I went back into my house thinking, “Hmm, poison snakes might not be such a bad idea.”

After that, things would quiet down for a few weeks and then she’d call the police again. I had a package missing from my mail area, and the mailman said that he had delivered it. I can’t prove it, and someone else may have taken it, but with her obsession with the mail, I still believe to this day that she took the package. She eventually took out after the mailman with that butcher knife!

I happened to see one of the desk sergeants for the police one day, and he told me he had taken several of her calls about me and other neighbors. He told me that she’d had “issues” for years, and that apparently it was not age-related in any way. He said that one night she called the police to report people stopping in front of her house and looking in at her (she lived further up the street at that time). When the policemen arrived, they found that traffic had been stopped for a train at the railway crossing (right by her house), and that’s why the cars were stopped there. He and other policemen told me that I’d need to go to court and have her taken in for treatment, since her husband and family couldn’t bring themselves to act. I believe the Post Office took some kind of action, too, but they dropped it when she got treatment due to my case. At the hearing, which was conducted at a hospital and in front of a lady from the mental health community, not a judge, she proceeded to tell how the neighbors would enter her home and take her vacuum cleaner, passing the vacuum from neighbor to neighbor until the last one took it back to her house, entered and left it, and “they didn’t even clean it out,” she assured the presiding official.

Now, all of this may sound funny, and most folks get a chuckle out of this kind of behavior, BUT to those who suffer with such afflictions, the “claims” are real. People are really trying to get them and get into their personal possessions and such. To me, this is taking place on something of a much more major level nationally. Groups of Americans are holding rallies and saying how the “government is out to get them,” how “the government is coming to take our guns away,” how “the government is going to lock us up in concentration camps,” how “the government is going to implement a police state,” etc. For some reason, I’m not laughing. When such nonsense gets into the minds of so many people, and it is reinforced further by irresponsible talk from radio, television, and politicians, the obsession and paranoia can take a nasty turn, just as it did with my neighbor who toted and flashed around her butcher knife, even going after the mailman. In her feverish mind, she was only defending herself from the rest of us. Think about it.

WORD HISTORY:
Paranoia-This word, now meaning "delusions of persecution, unsubstantiated distrust or fear of someone or something," seems to date back to the early 1800s in English. It goes back to Greek "paranoos," which literally meant "beyond the mind;" thus, "madness." In more modern times, Latin picked up the word, too, and in Greek it simply meant "madness," not a specific kind of madness. The "para" part goes back to the Indo European root "per/pr," generally meaning, "off, away;" thus also, "contrary, beyond." This gave Greek "para," with the "contrary, beyond" idea coming to mean "irregular, abnormal;" that is, "contrary to normal, beyond normal." The "noos" part in Greek meant "mind," and I could not trace this to another source or origin. Greek paranoos," then became "paranoia."