Freemason and Templar prison takeover!

A prison where Freemason and Templar guards had seized control and were torturing the prisoners until they agreed to join their secret organisations. Sounds fantastic? Well, in 1890, a newspaper – The Cleveland Leader – published a letter from an inmate at the Minnesota state prison in the town of Stillwater claiming he and fellow prisoners were living in terror of their Masonic and Templar prison guards, who were now in charge!

Not only were all the guards Masons and Templars, but some were members of another secret society, the Odd Fellows. Two and a half years before they had succeeded in their takeover and were now out to make very prisoner a Masonic Templar. Those who resisted were subjected to the following:

“To do so they had to cut away the gutturals from a man’s gullet, thereby enabling them to throw the cord of affinity into a man’s mind, and to convey into his mind their own evil thoughts, and extracting every thought conceived of by you.”

Were these the ravings of a mad man? The Cleveland Leader certainly thought so, but felt their readers should see the letter in full, even if the headline was a little insulting. More details of this strange communication below.

DISCOVER: Alleged links between Freemasons and Templars

“The continual blab-blab of their nonsensical thoughts are so distinctly enunciated that they annoy the ablest of them. They hate the Church of Rome as the devil hates holy water. Their bad thoughts and blasphemies are unmentionable; they cause me a great deal of pain and suffering.”

In the 18th and 19th centuries, the Roman Catholic church took a very harsh line towards Freemasonry and the animosity was reciprocated. Hence the reference here to the “Church of Rome”. The prisoner, who I assume might have been a Catholic, contacted a certain Bishop Ireland to warn him of what was going on in this correctional facility, but his letter was ignored.

The prisoner, whose name was James Ambrose, went on to declare that these Templars and Freemasons had violated the Constitution and the government should be protecting the incarcerated men from these fiends. It then emerged, in his letter to The Cleveland Leader, that Ambrose had recently been transferred from the prison to the City Hospital in Minneapolis, “to claim the protection of the United States”.

It’s clear to me he had been diagnosed as insane and put in a secure medical unit. From the 1960s to the 1990s, my mother worked on the medical staff of a mental asylum, Claybury Hospital, in north east London in the United Kingdom. She explained to me how patients suffering from paranoid delusions imagined themselves being manipulated by great powers. Tragically, Ambrose seems to have been suffering from something along these lines.

Mentally ill patients often tap into popular culture – stuff they have seen on TV or read in books. And from the mid-18th century, there were sensationalist publications claiming that Templars, Freemasons, the Illuminati, and Jews were working together to cause revolutions, wars, etc. A lot of this material was generated by Roman Catholic clerics, like the notorious Augustin Barruel. And these kind of theories are still current today of course. So, poor Ambrose had come into contact with these conspiracy theories, which fed his paranoid mental state.

Even being transferred to a hospital outside the prison offered no respite. He continue in his letter to claim that the Freemasons and Templars were now able to read the minds of everybody in the state of Minnesota, and even the whole United States. To understand what was going to happen next, look what they had already done to the prisoners:

“The prisoners do not know who it is that is giving him orders, but they say to him: ‘One equals all, and all equals one. They say in this enigmatical style of talking that it is the way they distribute secrets of the lodge.”

Even when a prisoner was freed, they were still in bondage.

“But the worst of it is, when a man’s time is up, and he leaves the prison, they do not let him go in spirit; they keep his mind in bondage, constantly threatening his life if he does not keep the secrets of Masonry as they were forced on him in prison.”

One man called Frisby was mind controlled to commit an ill-advised burglary that led him to be fatally shot in the neck. And similarly a man called Marsh was directed to burgle a house but arrested immediately and put on trial. While in the courtroom, the Masonic-Templar spirit inside his head made him bolt for an open window and attempt an escape. Not realising how high up he was, Marsh “was dashed on the flags below”.

All of this demanded an investigation of the deaths of three men: the aforementioned Frisby, and two others, Anderson and Kirk:

“We, the prisoners of the state of Minnesota as citizens and subjects of the United States do hereby demand of said United States an investigation as to the manner of our treatment, mentally, by the Knights Templar, Freemasons, and Odd Fellows of Minnesota. We assert that the Constitution has been violated in our case, and that liberty of conscience is a myth.”

Worth noting that Ambrose may also have been influenced by the activity of the Anti-Mason movement in the United States, which even ran for the presidency in 1832. The key thing is that this unfortunate had absorbed various conspiracy theories about the Templars and Freemasons and, in typical paranoid form, put himself at the centre of their activity.

So – stay sane everybody!