A missing 16 year old girl from Cobb County, Georgia, Shelby Ellis, has been found alive and safe after going missing for three weeks.  Her parents have pointed the finger at her interest in the Gothic lifestyle and a specific interest in vampires that she apparently had taken up.  She was found in Washington state and is being held at a detention center until she can be brought back to Georgia and so far there aren’t a lot of answers coming out about the reasons for her disappearance other than the blind and somewhat ignorant finger pointing at a “vampire cult”.

Quite honestly I can’t blame the parents for this overblown vampire connection, but I do blame the media.  The second the word “vampire” got thrown into the mix “cult” got attached to it pretty quickly and since then it’s all been a big speculation as to whether or not she ran away or was taken away into a “vampire cult”.  The girl’s mother said on Nancy Grace’s show several nights ago that she knew her daughter had an account on VampireFreaks.com and that, while banned from using the site at home she assumed Shelby was getting access to the site at school and at friends houses.  Apparently Shelby left for school on the bus on day with about $160 and never came back.  The mother claimed that Shelby had a boyfriend presumably from the VampireFreaks website who she had talked to the day she disappeared.  While she continued to say that she thought that Shelby’s activity on the VampireFreaks site was likely connected to her disappearance she did say several times that she didn’t know anything about a vampire cult and she didn’t seem to be the one generating that connection.

Things just seemed to spiral a bit out of control and things got weirder when a week after Shelby went missing a 15 year old friend of hers, also assumed to be involved in some “Gothic double life”, as this is being billed, also went missing, and then shortly after a third girl disappeared.  Those two girls were found and all was well but Shelby was still missing until today when she was found in Lakewood, Washington.  Shelby had apparently, of her own volition, taken a bus to the town to stay with someone who she may have met online.  Since the last website she apparently visited on her computer was VampireFreaks according to one article, this is part of why the assumption of a “vampire cult” may have come more strongly into play.

The thing that makes me a little annoyed about this whole story is that even news outlets like CNN/CNN HLN are quick to jump the gun on why this girl ran away when she hasn’t made a single contact with her family since the say she left and she hasn’t talked to anyone (at least that the media has reported) but yet these frantic assumptions about vampires and cults because of her interest in “the dark side of life”, as they’re all calling it, is getting a heap of attention.  There’s certainly nothing saying that this isn’t a possibility but I would have to say that it’s probably more likely than not that she met a boy on the website and decided to take off and meet him.  For all we know she got stranded there and couldn’t afford to get back home or, who knows, she might have just liked it there and wanted to stay.

Why does it have to be able vampires, drinking blood, and being Goth?  She could have just as easily met some clean cut football playing kid from Washington and decided to take off just the same.  Would a football cult have been to blame?  Probably not.  And what if that nice boy had been a Christian and she met him on a Christian social networking site?  Would it have been a Christian cult to blame?  Maybe but most likely no.  Had these been the case then it would have just been a crazy teenager “acting out” and it wouldn’t have become such a huge issue making headlines with the every lovely Nancy Grace.

I’ll be very interested to hear what she has to say about why she left.  Instead of blaming their daughter’s interest in an alternative lifestyle that is constantly getting the shaft from an uneducated media community and her involvement in what is nothing more than a social networking site for Goth kids, how about the parents take a little of the blame here and let’s hear what it is that they did or didn’t do that would make their 16 year old child think it was a good and safe idea to take off to the other side of the country.  Someone was kind enough to post a clip from HLN today after she’d been found where Michelle Belanger made the attempt to quell some of these fears about Goths and vampires but, no surprise, she got about 30 seconds of speaking in and that was about it.  The newscaster covering the story was more interested in making the connection with the fact that the Twilight stories, which are about vampires, take place in Washington state and Shelby ran away to Washington state and therefore there’s a possible Twilight connection.  Really??!!  That’s just sad.

Not sure what to think about the Goth thing?  Check out these links:
What is Goth?
The Goth Culture on ReligiousTolerance.org
GothicSubculture.com