ANYTHING EXCITING EVER HAPPEN AT YOUR KINGDOM HALL?

by anewme 99 Replies latest jw friends

• 

  Frank75

  Wow! Scandalous! What happened with the wife and the son later on?

  Not sure what eventually became of the wife that was beaten or the son as I never knew them "personally" and was never in the congregation involved. I heard about the situation from 3 sources over time. How I first heard was a good friend of mine was very perturbed one day in service so he related the story of this wife beater whose name was Paul. I knew him to see him and peripherally from his reputation as well. Everyone knew his reputation as a tyrant PO. He was the guy who made visiting speakers put on a white shirt and there are even stories of him telling speakers they could not give the talk because their hair was too long.

  This friend used to be in that mans hall and even the same book-study. He felt guilty because they used to make jokes about the wife because of what seemed to be very strange things she did and said. She wore dark sun glasses (to hide the eyes) and would scurry around compulsively straightening shoes and boots as people came in for the study. If they went to the meeting early she was setting up chairs and making sure they were perfectly straight etc. He was perturbed this day because they found out that the husband had been DF'd (the one instance where I think DFing was ever justified) and was beating her all this time he and his wife were in the congregation. So that instance I heard it from an outside source.

  Second time I heard about it was when I was reactivating this older couple (he was Hungarian and she was Canadian). By the way these 2 instances were related to me many miles away from the congregation where it all happened. I am amazed at the coincidence of how I pieced the puzzle together although there wasn't much of a hardship adding 1 + 1 once the stories unfolded and started to jive. This couple was discouraged because of something that happened in their old hall and some situations when they moved into this new congregation. Being a good dub, I did not want to know their pain in detail but just wanted to be positive and get them publishing and coming to meetings again. As we got closer over time I was out in service with the husband, and he started talking about a run in he had with our current PO. I listened and naturally couldn't argue. Our PO was an absolute jerk. Even then I would have used the word wicked. But I believed "Jehovah" would eventually straighten things out.

  As he related the present situation of his discouragement he said it was similar in his old congregation. You see he and his wife lived in the basement apartment of the wife-beater PO before they were asked to leave so the son and daughter in law could move in. He was upset about being asked to move, but he also leaned over and whispered (we were alone in the car) that the PO "brother" used to hit his wife all the time. (this man telling me this may have smacked his wife around for all I know too) He was disillusioned that this man was an elder getting away with all of this. I asked him "the PO doesn't happen to be Paul P*** does it?". To which he replied "Yes, why do you know him?"

  Third one is a charm. I have been buying cars from this one JW (and still do as a matter of fact) for years. One day I am picking up a van for my business and we start talking. Now this guy had a gorgeous daughter who was about 15 when I was dating my wife. She had a great smile and quite a figure and a happy and outgoing personality. He always joked he would love her to marry a guy like me when she was older. Anyway this day years later I asked him how his son and this daughter are doing. He tells me that she got married and then divorced after about 6 months and left the TRUFE. I asked what happened and he related the story above from his daughters perspective. Guess who the daughter was? She was the DIL who blew the whistle. Small world!

  The dad (car salesman above) still goes to meetings and is loyal when I push buttons about JW BS when we get together. (he still will take me to lunch if it means he will sell another car even though he knows I was df'd as an apostate) He tells me his daughter will never come back to which I say good for her. She has remarried a nice Asian man and he treats her well and she is happy. This car salesman lost his wife a number of years ago to a long illness. She died JW faithful so he hangs on to the hope of seeing her in the "paradise". He loved her very much, which was an odity in my experience in the witnesses. I try to take jabs at the dubs when we talk, but I do not try very hard because of his desire to hang on to see his wife again. (even though the dubs say you can't remarry in the New World)

  I think I have prattled on enough about this, but it should give you some insight into where I came up with this story.

  Frank75
• 

  Stealth453

  There was an old ww2 vet in a hall I attended way back. One evening during the Mysery school, the wind blew a door shut and with quite a bang. The poor old guy hit the deck screaming "Incoming Incoming". I near pi$$ed myself laughing. Mind you, so did almost everyone else.
• 

  cognizant dissident

  Here's my bunch of most interesting incidents to break up the oh so booooring monotony of the meetings.

  When I was six or seven, my best friend and I begged my parents to sit by ourselves in the two seats right across the aisle from them. They said yes, and we felt so grownup for about one minute into the opening song, when my mother started gesticulating wildly at us to come back and sit beside her. We shook our heads, no, and refused to budge. Then an elder walks up to us and takes me firmly by the arm and my friend firmly by her arm and escorts us both at once back to the one seat by my mother and all the other witnesses in the row hastily move down to vacate another seat for my friend. After the prayer I am hounding my mother, "why did we have to move, why did we have to move?" She says she will tell me later. After the meeting she tells me that the older man who came down and sat next to my friend and I, as soon as the song started, was a "bad man" who always tried to sit next to young ladies and little girls and slide his hands up their skirts. This man came to the hall fairly regularly. So this was the elder's solution every week? Play musical chairs every meeting after the song started? Why didn't they come and take HIM firmly by the arm and throw his ass out of there! The whole congregation knew who he was and what he was doing and they just tolerated it! Crazy!

  Also, around the age of 6 or 7, I was sitting at one of those little circuit assemblies that were held in local schools (anybody remember those?) All of a sudden, the wooden chair in front of me flipped backwards and the woman on it was on the floor with her eyes bugged out and her mouth frothing and her tongue hanging out right at my feet! She was having a grand mal seizure. Scared the shit out of me! I kept asking my mom if the demons were attacking her! lol. Wonder where I would ever get a crazy idea like that from?

  Fast forward to teen years. New congregation. Beautiful, sexy young mother in her twenties with nice, handsome husband, and 3 little kids has sex with skinny, gawky, ugly, pimple faced little fifteen year old elder's son. Boy is in love and wants to marry her. Confesses all. Sexy young mom gets df'd and elder and family move far, far, away to hide in shame. Nobody could ever figure out what the hell sexy young mom was thinking?

  When I was in my twenties, there was this old annointed brother in the hall with a photographic memory and a penchant for telling "experiences" during his comments. For instance, "Did you hear the one about the Catholic priest and the housewife? Well, it seems that when the husband was at work the priest would come over to confess the wife. So while the husband was going out the front door, the priest was coming in through the back door. (I know, I know, don't say it!) One day the husband came back because he forgot his lunch and the priest had to dive under the bed! You just can't trust those Catholics!" Sister's would be stifling giggles. The brother conducting the watchtower would clear his throat uncomfortably and say, "Uh, thank you for that experience, brother annointed". Half the time it had nothing to do with the paragraph.

  Here's another classic experience from "brother annointed". One time he was relating the importance of asking the householder's name and he gives the example of how he introduced himself and asked a woman at the door what he could call her and she said, "I don't care as long as you don't call me a bitch! My husband calls me that and I don't like it!" Audible gasps from the sisters. More throat clearing from conductor. Brother annointed may have been very faithful but he was hardly discreet.

  Same congregation, another day, we get to the hall for the Sunday meeting and we can't go in. The police bomb squad is there complete with sniffer dogs. A woman had phoned the assembly hall and threatened to blow the local kingdom hall to smithereens if any witnesses ever called on her house again. No bomb was found, but the meeting was cancelled just in case the dog had missed it and a bomb might go off when the meeting was in session. This was only a couple of years after the incident in Australia where a bomb did go off in a Kingdom Hall and killed a couple of people, so it was not that paranoid to be cautious. So the police and the brothers are trying to figure out where this call came from (before caller ID). They asked everyone in the hall to rack their brains to think of any unusual incident that might have triggered this. Two pioneer sisters came forward and admitted they had accidentally called on a marked "DO NOT CALL" that very morning and the woman had been so irate she had screamed at them that if they ever came back she was going to blow them away! The police went to the address the sisters gave them and confronted the woman, pretending they had evidence and they knew the woman had made the threat. They actually had no evidence, but the woman was stupid and started to cry and confess. The police were going to arrest her but the elder's didn't want to press charges. They wanted to leave the woman with a favorable impression of Jehovah's Witnesses!

  There was also another older brother, a long-time elder, starting to become senile. The congregation shared a double hall with a Korean congregation. One day during his public talk he started a rant, off topic, on what horrible drivers those Koreans were, almost crashing into everyone in the hall parking lot. They shouldn't be allowed to get licenses in this country! They can barely speak English! Many of "those Koreans" used to visit the other congregation and were highly offended. Brother "Closet Racist" was counseled afterwards. At his next talk, something about the witnesses persecuted in Germany under Hitler caused him to go off on a rant about how the Jews and the homosexuals got what they deserved. After that, Brother "Closet Racist" was never given any more speaking assignments but he was allowed to keep his title as honorary elder because of his long years of faithful service.

  Here's a cute one. Brother "Bumbling" was giving a public talk when his cell phone in his suit pocket started to ring. Everyone started giggling. Brother "Bumbling" got all flustered and embarassed and didn't know what to do, so he took it out and answered it! This made everyone laugh out loud. Brother "Bumbling" is bright red now, telling his caller, "Look I can't talk right now, I'll call you back after the meeting." People are just about falling out of their chairs at this point. They were still stifling giggles 10 minutes after he hung up. Next week, at the service meeting, Brother Bumbling is assigned the local needs talk. He choosed as his topic, "The importance of respecting our place of worship, and lectures the congregation on not causing distractions during the meetings, by chewing gum, eating, unnecessary washroom trips and leaving our beepers and cell phones on, etc. He did have the good grace to blush profusely throughout the entire talk.

  Ahh, the memories...

  Cog
• 

  Frank75

  Frank you DO have many stories to tell! How many years were you a slave? I have gone back to enjoy many of your old posts. You write very well. You have experienced a lot of dirt in the WTS.
  No wonder you left

  I know a ton of dirt. Pedophilia, rape, theft, fraud, wife swapping....you name it.

  Was a slave from about 2 up until about 40 although we had started to question the religion when I was 35/36. Although I never really fit in it (nor did my wife) was all I knew and the propaganda served to insulate me until I just got fed up. My wife and I just stopped going one day. Not out of weakness, but we were finished and wanted no part of the hypocrisy. I bought the C of C after resisting for almost 2 decades. We have been back to one funeral for my wife's grandmother and we will likely never step foot inside a KH again. Although I left the dubs many years ago, I was df'd not to long ago in absentia.

  The dubs are priceless. "You can't quit, we fire you!" I guess

  Frank75
• 

  anewme

  OMG!!!! The stories!!!!!!! Have to be true----no one could make up this stuff, as they say.
  My goodness, well again I love your stories Frank. One thing I made note of was along with your keen observation of the hypocrisy, you kept a love in your heart for the sweet witnesses, such as your used car salesman brother, who looks forward to the resurrection so much you would never dream of attacking his faith. I too have a dear witness friend who I would never hurt with the truth. I will not be the one to chink his faith. He is so near death himself I say let him go in peace with his dream.
  
  Cognizant Dissident------loved your gems about the "alzy" brothers and their racial slurs! That had to be
  very uncomfortable to sit through. But like I say, the congregation just sits there
  and their manners calm things down, but sometimes add to the comedy of it all!
  
  
  And the brother taking the call from the platform----PRICELESS!!!!!!!!!!
  
  
  
  
  away from my old hall after breaking up with a JW boyfriend. For some reason I and another young sister were chosen to be the detectives for the elders to find out WHO THE HECK WAS THROWING FECES UP ONTO THE CEILING OF THE WOMEN'S RESTROOM!!!! This problem was particularly distressing to the brothers since the old hall had a 13' ceiling in the restroom. It was very problematic for them after every Sunday meeting to clean the ceiling of the mess for the next incoming congregation's meeting. So I was on "poop patrol" every Sunday for a month until we caught our perpetrator, a young retarded girl, the daughter of witness.
  You can only imagine how I discovered the culprit. There I was sitting by the sink, listening to the piped in discussion when all of a sudden there it went flying up into the air and sticking to the ceiling!!!
  GOTTCHA!!!!
  
  I never shared this story before because I did not want to highlight the D-syndrome. I have met quite a few D-syndrome people and they were quite self disciplined, functional and sweet people. This girl's problems were quite severe and she has since passed away from her complications.
  
  
  Personally Id be scraping the bottom of the barrel to describe any more incidents....personal ones like having a talk that night and going out to the car and it wont start, running to the bus stop, missing the bus by seconds, the next one comes only to have the handicap person having problems with the lift, delaying the bus, running for all Im worth down the back street to the kingdom hall, running into the already started meeting only to discover I left the talk by the door at home!!!!!
  
  
  Ok, someone else.................
• 

  confusa

  Frank 75,
  
  Tell us about the rape & pedophilia incident...when you have time.
• 

  KW13

  Nothing super exciting at our hall but then where i am is a very quiet and reserved place and so are a majority of the folks.

  A brother got disfellowshipped for stealing from his employer. His employer was a JW so instead of going to prison it was effectively swept under the carpet.
• 

  Frank75

  Tell us about the rape & pedophilia incident...when you have time.

  Jeesh! You guys like the dirt eh?

  Don't blame you. After a lifetime of being told how good we JW's were and how rotten "worldly" people are, getting into the inner circle was a less than reassuring jolt back into reality. When I was a teenager I would scoff at the idea the two faced dub teenagers being paraded on the platform as examples were any better than me and my witness friends or those at school. When I met a nice elder who took me under his wing I fell into the religion, got baptized and put my doubts aside until many years later.

  My wife's cousin all of a sudden left her husband, moved out on her own and stopped going to the meetings. My wife heard some gossip about it which included fornication with a man from work and asked me what I thought. By that time, (mid 90's) I told her not to believe anything the dubs said as our own experience showed them to highly unreliable relating stories truthfully. So she called her cousin up and asked if they could go to lunch. She was reserved and didn't want to burden her cousin with her issues and assured her she had done nothing to end her marriage, she just needed to work some things out before her and her husband could live under the same roof. A month or two later she was DF'd by announcement and we lost contact because of moving to the DR and she slipped into a whole.

  Upon returning and settling back in Canada my wife pined away for her cousin. They were very close as children before they both married. We did not live too far from them when they were still together and did quite a bit together with them socially. Sensing my wife wanted to reconnect, I went looking for her and got a message to her to call my wife. She reluctantly called at first and when she was sure she wasn't going to get a lecture about the Trufe, they finally reconnected. That is when we learned about what happened. This woman was molested by the PO in the congregation she grew up in and that her father was also an elder in. Although not really an uncle, this sicko who obviously liked kids, ingratiated himself into families and insisted the kids call him uncle Larry. My wife's cousins, 2 boys and 2 girls were all likely molested by this guy. The boys have all gone kinda loopy and refuse to talk about it.

  Anyway, she and her sister were molested from a very young age 6-8 and on up into the early teens. On her wedding day, this creep came into where she was putting on her gown, asked the bridesmaids to leave them alone, and said she looked beautiful and especially her nice big boobs and squeezed them through the gown and commented that the groom "was lucky to be getting those". Although it stunned her, we have to realize that victims rarely see the evil in the perpetrator but rather choose to blame themselves for the abuse. She went forward with her day and tried to put "uncle Larry" and her past well out of her mind.

  Years later she could not suppress the depressing feelings she had that were affecting her marriage, so she came forward and confronted the elders with what had happened. There was denial, family pressure to just forget about it etc. Even from her own husband. Imagine this woman's mother told her she was "overreacting to a little affection" from Larry. This "affection" included fondling her vagina and digital penetration on dozens of occasions, she was also forced to watch him jerk off. There are things I don't believe she ever told us, but one thing is for sure she was no stranger to mail genitalia on her wedding day. So think of how crushing it must have been to hear her mother (who may have been molested herself by same guy) speak about it as if it was nothing. Thankfully there was a few good guys (in a limited way) on the body (one of them was my accountant who confirmed the abuse) and a committee was convened and his response to her testimony was, "I don't recall doing any of that but if she says I did then it must have happened". (perhaps that made him feel he was being a gentleman about it) He was df'd and after 3 months applied for reinstatement and was back in after 5 months. It was confirmed to me that the congregation had received a few letters from African congregations with some allegations of inappropriate touching while "Uncle Larry" was there as a missionary many years prior. That of course was all swept under the carpet by the committee as unsubstantiated single witnesses. The same would have happened to the JC meeting above, but he admitted in a round about way to his guilt. What facilitated the above "admission" was the threat to bring her younger sister in for questioning.

  She had never before told my wife what happened even when my wife went out to have lunch with her that time mentioned above. That was because she was threatened that if she talked about it she would likely find herself DF'd for slander. As mentioned earlier, slander is a word JW's and people in general throw around when trying to keep a lid on a scandal, however something is slander only if it is untrue.

  Although she did get some closure, what ultimately affected her marriage was how quickly everyone got back to normal. Even her husband could be seen at the meetings after Larry got reinstated, laughing and back slapping or talking about the hockey game. So even though she got some closure to what happened, the way everyone acted afterwards opened up the same issues plus a few more. Now talks about dressing immodestly and flaunting our "means of life" seemed to her as if it was directed at her, or that she was to blame for what Larry did or didn't do. Knowing the dubs the way I do, it is hard not to empathize that this is exactly what was being done and implied by the others.

  It so happens that my brother and his wife moved into that same congregation where Uncle Larry was. After years of shunning me, I got a call from my brother one day. He missed me and couldn't believe i was an apostate and half the things he was hearing about me. He had gone through a rough time himself in the Org, but was still hanging on. As we talked I mentioned the pedophile in his hall and he was floored. One of his friends was an elder and he asked him if it was true which he confirmed with a stern warning. 1 month later my brother and his whole family had left the witnesses and have never looked back.

  To illustrate how irresponsible and deceptive these elders can be in handling situations like this, my brothers wife had heard about Uncle Larry being df'd as she was in the hall when it happened. Due to the short time he was out and the buzz leaking through the elders wives the last thing they all thought was that Uncle Larry had been molesting this girl for years. The hubbub was that he did something inappropriate (like squeeze her breast through her gown on her wedding day) and dfing was only to teach him a lesson and serve as a warning to keep clean.

  You can see how the Watchtower trains people in their "employ" to be deceptive and tricky with their half truths and lies. It amazes me now when I see attacks against us Apostates for telling half truths and lies. They have it totally backwards.

  I have talked to my "cousin in law" many times about suing the WT as this man was an elder (PO in fact) who was appointed by the society. But she is reluctant to live through that or further distance herself from the family (who have nothing to do with her anyway). She is doing ok but has not got professional help which she desperately needs.

  What is truly sad is that this is not the only case I know of, but given the tight lipped secretive ways of dubs and especially JC's, the congregations are likely riddled with numerous stories like this of people living silently in pain, guilt and feelings of utter worthlessness. We don't know the half of what goes on behind the closed doors in private homes of the "brothers" and least of all the judicial records of the congregations.

  Frank75
• 

  ninja

  I have one that involved a bible study....not at the hall but pretty funny nonetheless...it was my father in law...Tam Hughes...he was having a bible study with a big guy called Eric....after an hour or so of the study my mother in law said she heard banging and thumping from the room...and a few minutes later Tam came stumbling into the room...his hair all messed up...my MIL asked what happened...my FIL said..."Eric wanted a dummy fight"!!....two forty somethings going at it after a study...mental
• 

  Frank75

  When I was a teenager a boy and his family moved into the congregation from up north. There was no mother, and rumor of a recent divorce and a business collapse.

  Over time I befriended the boy who was (and still is) very troubled and we still keep in touch even now. Little by little I learned that he came home from school one day with his sister. They came in the house and heard this creaking. When they got upstairs it was coming from the bedroom so they opened the door to find their mom and their dad's bible study doing the dirty. The study was tied to the bedposts and ....well you get the picture. Those kids were messed up from that sight and what ensued.

  The parents were Austrian/German immigrants (she was Austrian he was Bavarian....they will argue the distinction if know any) and a little strange. He used to come to the meetings, get a row of chairs for his family and wait until the song. During the song, his wife, dressed in a wedding gown would walk down the isle to his waiting arms. My friend told me she thought she was the "Bride of Christ".

  A short time after they moved into our hall, the father (who was about 65 at the time) announced to everyone that we were welcome to come to his wedding upcoming. Needless to say, we were all perplexed and curious to know who he was marrying. He told everyone that she was a sister from the states. He had met her through a personal add in a magazine.

  The day came when we met his lovely 18 year old bride to be from some backwater town in Georgia (sorry to any Georgians who take offense)

  Frank75