So.... years later.... Elfreeda stories still pop up every now and then! While working on the basement, I found a big box of their old AAA trip tiks, hopelessly outdated 20 year old tour books, etc. I pitched all of those but noticed 2 steno pads buried in the mess.

I pulled them out & started looking thru them earlier this evening. Elfreeda had "sort of" journaled their trips to Alaska. Mostly of the "we ate at xxx, camped at Walmart in yyy, and had ham & eggs for breakfast" variety of notations but there were several pages about a "Christian center" they'd seen signs for along the road. They followed the signs & had camped there for several days.

According to her, the people were so nice & such good Christians that they even had church services for hours every single day and 8-10 hours on Sunday!! And everyone lived at the center and worked together gardening and raising cattle & raising families. And they loved them so much that they BEGGED her & FIL to move to Alaska and stay with them!

My "b.s. alarms" were going off by that point so I made use of my good friend Google to look up this "Christian center"....

OH MY GOD, Y'ALL!!!!! IT WAS A CULT!!!!! A LEGIT, NO FRICKIN JOKE CULT!!! Complete with allegations of child labor, neglect, beatings, and even sexual molestation. There are books written by survivors who escaped from it. It apparently started in Mississippi and then spread throughout rural areas with multiple compounds (including a particularly heinous "demon deliverance" compound in Massachusetts).

And it gets even better (worse????): When they returned to Alaska 2 years later, they went out of their way to stay there again! Over a week the 2nd time. And once again, she just went on & on about what a wonderful place it was, how "godly" and "wholesome" & if it wasn't for the severity of the winters, they'd have stayed there...

You cant make this stuff up!!!!!

(I continued looking up this particular compound and apparently at some point it was abandoned. The property has now been redeveloped as a resort area and the individual homes into airbnbs... Overall the cult has declined - from over 40,000 members in the 1970's to just a few small groups today.)