None of the roughly 70 people attending the Clay County GOP caucus likely expected to be on the receiving end of a curse.
Seated around the Dilworth Elementary School Cafeteria, attendees listened as a volunteer read the results of the straw poll for the gubernatorial candidates.
Kendall Qualls led with 30 votes, the speaker announced, with Mike Lindell trailing by 23 votes.
As soon as Lindell’s vote tally was read, a cackle began to emerge from the far side of the room. It came from an unidentified person wearing a green cape with a cross dangling from a chain around their neck and carrying a red cane.
“Mike Lindell, 23, hahaha!” the bearded person crowed.
Two men walked over to the person ushering them away from the room. But then, as they walked just a few feet away from the door, the individual turned around to face the crowd and began to yell, accusing the group of killing Renee Macklin Good and Alex Pretti through their Republican vote. Macklin Good and Pretti were killed at the hands of immigration enforcement agents in Minneapolis last month.
“I’m a witch,” the person exclaimed. “I hex all of you!”
The crowd stirred after hearing the words. When the person ultimately left, a man in the crowd called on the group to take a minute to pray.
“We cancel that curse, that hex, in Jesus’s name,” the man said.
“Amen,” the crowd replied.
After proclaiming the curse null and void, the group blessed the person, asking for divine intervention in the heckler’s thinking. “Amen,” the group concluded.
Caucus organizers said that was the first time the event had even been interrupted by a heckler. They said the person didn’t leave behind their observer form to attend, which may leave the alleged witch’s identity a mystery.