The Profane Order of the Black Squirrels was founded in the fall of 1849 by Finnish immigrant Elias Lönnrot, who moved to Ohio to escape the plague of Finnish folk singing and kantele playing that had overtaken the countryside in the area of Uusima, and his native village of Sammatti the previous Spring. After Lönnrot arrived and established himself, his intention was to found a church along the Olentangy River on the north side of Clintonville. He chose this location because he found that the land there was extraordinarily cheap. After making his purchase, however, he got wind of why. Though by that time native Americans had long since been extirpated from Ohio, people saw lights in the forest late at night, and heard disturbing sounds of unknown origin. Ohioans at that time were not yet stupid enough to attribute these strange sights and sounds to ghosts or bigfoot, so the lights remained unexplained – but the people were afraid. No one would build on the land; therefore no one wanted to buy it – except Lönnrot.

After hearing these weird tales, Lönnrot found himself searching for alternate uses for the land. Knowing that no one would visit a church in Clintonville, he thought he might persuade the government to build a prison there, or he might keep it himself and turn it into a hunting preserve. Believing the latter idea to be the more profitable of the two, he decided that would be his course of action. In January of 1850, he walked through the parcel himself, to scout the best locations for various game animals, and to decide where to build the lodge, but he was disappointed once again when he found that no game animals will live on the north side of Clintonville. He talked with local hunters, who told him that deer took a circuitous route around his rotten soil, pheasants and turkeys were never found there, and any bears that strayed onto his land were found dead, either starved or mutilated, within days. The only things that lived there were maggots, snakes, and the nameless animal the hunters refused to talk about.

It is said that in his despair, Lönnrot visited the land one last time, intending to shoot himself in order to get out of his financial bind, but that was the day when first he saw the nameless horror – the black squirrel. Men from a logging crew across the river heard his screams and rescued him, but Lönnrot was delirious for the next three weeks, due to a life-threatening fever. When he finally recovered, people said he was a different man. It was almost like there was something inside him, something looking out of his eye-holes that wasn’t him. What was inside him? No one knows, but people said it was a black squirrel.

After this, Lönnrot abandoned all plans to sell his land, and moved his residence there. His wife, Annikki Koskinen-Lönnrot, was too scared to move to the new place, so she lingered in their old house in what is now the Victorian village neighborhood of Columbus, until he sold it out from under her. The rest of her life was almost cursed. She returned to Finland destitute, and was twice arrested for bigamy, once after marrying a Norwegian named Aslaug Wartooth, and again after marrying a Swede named Lars Mikael Åkerfeld. She died shortly after her second arrest, and is buried in an unmarked grave, near the dry lakebed in Blackwater Park.

Lönnrot, meanwhile, built himself a house on his new land, and withdrew from society altogether. He stopped attending church, quit his job as editor of The Worthington Intelligencer, and only rarely showed his face in Clintonville, usually to buy coffee, tobacco, and beer. The noises and lights at night continued, but Lönnrot refused to explain. “The land of the black squirrel holds many secrets, and the secrets of He Who Walks Upon the Trees I shall never reveal.” He commissioned a local mason to make four obsidian statues of squirrels, which he placed at the northern, southern, eastern, and western borders of his land, and people came to refer to them as the four squirrels. Things went on this way for almost two years before Lönnrot started recruiting people. The locals noticed that people were disappearing in May of 1852. When a search party was put together for Peter Tägtgren, the first of the missing, who was last seen in the area of the southern border of Lönnrot’s land, the first place they went was the Black Squirrel Lodge. Lönnrot simply brought Tägtgren to the door, where he assured his friends that he had not been harmed, and that he was happy to be where he was. They were greatly relieved until he informed them that he had been inducted into what he called The Profane Order of the Black Squirrel, and that he would never leave it. Tägtgren and Lönnrot then started making forays to local pubs, recruiting drunks and outcasts, as well as the Worthington village idiot, Richard W. Perry. Shortly after this began, the order began requiring members to wear black suits, and they started worshipping the squirrels openly.

At this point, representatives from several local churches went to Lönnrot, urged him to come back to a church – any church – of the one and only true god, and tried to persuade him that the black squirrels were nothing special. All around the world, they said, there were populations of animals that were black instead of their usual color – that was part of the Lord’s plan. But Lönnrot disagreed. “The black squirrels,” he said, “are pure evil. They have been made black by the great master, He Who Walks Upon the Trees. The black squirrels are death, the black squirrels are night, the black squirrels are plague, pestilence, and the end of all things you hold dear. The end will come, and your pain will please the master, He Who Walks Upon the Trees. He will destroy your God, burn all of his houses, and torment you all forever!”

The churchmen were alarmed by this and alerted the local population of what Lönnrot had been saying. There were murmurs, but no one took action yet. Most people didn’t take the Order seriously until the night of June 6th, 1852, when they set fire to Fantoft Stave Church. After this, the people had had enough of Elias Lönnrot. They formed a mob in the middle of the night, burned the lodge, and chased the Order out of Clintonville forever. The Order of the Black Squirrel moved north to Dublin, Ohio, which was not yet the thriving metropolis it is now – at that time it was a backwater with less than fifty permanent residents. They bought another parcel of land there, and released several black squirrels they had captured for ceremonial purposes.

The Order of the Black Squirrel still exists in Dublin today. They live a quiet, almost sequestered existence in the houses and buildings in the area of their shrine, which is known as Cornhenge. It is said that the order built Cornhenge as a tribute to their squirrel masters who, having been moved to a different environment, were not able to survive without being sheltered, and fed corn by their Satanic worshippers. This is the order to which Decanus defected when Danu ditched him.

It is said that The Order of the Black Squirrel is explicitly anti-Christian, and they anticipate that He Who Walks Upon the Trees will rule the world for 10,000 years after the battle of the second coming of Christ, during which all Satanists will rise up and fight on the side of Satan, and his demonic minions will defeat their Christian enemies. In the meantime, they serve their squirrel masters, which they refer to collectively as He Who Walks Upon the Trees, believing that Satan himself has been fragmented by God, and that each profane black squirrel contains part of the soul of Satan himself. When all of his parts are reunited into a single (presumably real big) squirrel, Jesus will return, and the battle will begin. Until then, the Order pass the time listening to black metal, feeding the black squirrels, perfecting their corpse paint (which they claim will give them an advantage in battle if their metal faces are scary enough), drinking cold Coors sixteen-ouncers, and watching a little Mork & Mindy on channel 57.

To this day members of The Profane Order of the Black Squirrel believe that their squirrels are a part of Satan, and that they will one day take part in this predicted battle of light and dark. Further, they refuse to listen to reason regarding the black squirrels. We know that black animals that aren’t normally black have a certain heritable genetic mutation that causes a condition called melanism, which increases production of the pigment melanin. In some areas, conditions are such that black animals are fit for survival, as that coloration provides enough camouflage for the animal to avoid predators. In Columbus, there are two populations of black squirrel – the original population continues to survive on its own at the extreme north end of Whetstone Park, and the other population exists in Dublin, however, it is artificially maintained as the dark squirrels are not able to escape the notice of predators in that treeless landscape. Members of the Order, however, insist that Satan himself made them black to mark them as his own, and to attract followers that will one day fight for him in the battle at the end of days. And this is apparently what Picto believes.

Next week, I will attempt to interview Decanus Picto regarding his induction into the order, and his position on the end of days, Shadu, Quetzalcoatl, and other. . . things. But check back before that in case I write a Wednesday article. Also come back and re-read this article. And tell your friends – Fear the Squirrel!