On the 9th March 18th, 1993, the Gingrich and Shetler families were hoping for a break.

The two Amish families, along with the entire Brown Hill community of Crawford County,

Pennsylvania, were hoping that egg Gingrich's unexplained insanity might just go away.

Ed hadn't really fit in with this community since his family had moved from Norwich, Ontario

to Pennsylvania in the spring of 1983. The teenage Ed was,

surly, bit of a rebel. He liked to work with machines. He didn't seem to want to live a

life dictated by strict Amish codes. It didn't make any sense to him.

And then over the next several years, it became clear that Ed was suffering from more than just

a general frustration with the Amish way of life. We started out as disobedience and refusal

to stop associated with non-Amish friends soon progressed to something that the Amish were not

equipped to handle at all. First, Ed complained that he was always itchy, tired.

They felt like his brain was about to explode. And his Amish family and friends didn't know what to

do to help him. Then he started talking about God, a lot about salvation, about a war between good

and evil. He made a non-Amish friend named Dave Lindsay, a practicing evangelical who told Ed that

if he accepted Jesus Christ under his denominations faith, then he was bound to be saved.

But if he did not, he was bound for damnation. And that went for his family too. But his wife,

Katie had no interest in switching religions. So now Ed was worried about her soul and his own.

Over time, he'd be convinced that she was trying to damn him to hell. She was in league with the devil.

Then Ed started hallucinating. He was seeing all kinds of things that weren't there. Giant rabbits,

angels, he was behaving in the strangest of ways, trying to decipher messages out of his own

spits, barking like a dog while scooting around the house on all fours. He was seriously mentally ill.

And his mental illness was also making him paranoid. He accused his family of plotting to poison him

...