What I learned from being homeless in the Appalachian Mountains

by Richard L. Thornton, Architect & City Planner

For over eight years, most of my belongings were in rental storage bins or else stolen from one of those bins, I slept on the ground or on an inflated mattress. The air I breathed was neither made comfortable by a furnace nor an air conditioner. The famous cabin near Dahlonega did not have a working HVAC system. The first phase of that journey was in a tent in several national forests. Actually, I did not sleep on a bed until 2022.

In 1992, the Rev. Billy Graham published the book, “Storm Warning.” It was presented as a prophecy, based on dreams that he had experienced in 1990 and 1991. It described the coming rise of Neo-Fascists, pretending to be Christians. They eventually gained control or destroyed most of the Christian denominations. Graham predicted that a 9/11 would usher in the rise of the American Police State. Just at the time in the future, when this Beast seemed to triumph, it would suddenly collapse.

This was during the exact same time period that Susan Karlson, Vivi the French Courtesan and I were helping those battling an attempt by Satanic Neo-Fascists to take over the national government. We took the book very seriously. Rev. Graham seemed to know things that only a few of us knew. How little I realized that I personally would, in the 21st century experience, his prophecies.

* Don’t read the current version of Storm Warning. After Billy’s son, Franklin, gained control of the Billy Graham Foundation, he removed all original copies of the book from their warehouse, then drastically re-wrote the book . . . making the reader think that these were his father’s words. In new version, Marxist Libruls take over the churches then the national government, causing Americans to become an immoral, lazy people. This causes the economy to collapse, then patriotic, Evangelical Christians stage a coup d’etat and take over the national government.

Franklin Graham has also “fudged” representations of his father’s political attitudes to match the new book. Most people don’t know that Billy and Ruth Graham were Registered Democrats all their lives,. I never met Billy, while living in the Asheville Area, but his wife, Ruth, advised me behind the scenes and protected me, when Asheville’s Powers-That-Be announced plans to bulldoze the entire Downtown to build a shopping mall . . . to be owned by the Mafia. After National Geo archaeologist George Stuart urged me to move to Northern Virginia, Ruth prayed about it and told me that it was God’s Will.

I completed plans for this classy amateur baseball park in a booth at a video games parlor in Robbinsville, NC, while living in a tent on Lake Santeetlah, NC! My official architecture office address was a post office box in Blairsville, GA.

Not your typical homeless psychopath!

Don’t think of me as some starving, long haired monster, wandering through the Appalachian Wilderness . . . looking for hikers to devour. I shaved every day and regularly got a hair cut. I washed my clothes at laundry-mats. I hand-washed myself as well as possible and stayed at camps with showers every two weeks.

I could have paid the $2100 past due mortgage payments from during August 2009 onward, but illegally was not allowed to. I had several thousand dollars in the bank for a mitigation loan closing in mid-January, when evicted illegally on Christmas Eve, 2009. Much of the money went to pay a mover extortion prices to move my belongings to storage bins near Murphy, NC on Christmas Eve.

A miracle happened in April 2010, just when I had run out of money to pay my car note, car insurance and buy food. Somehow, former National Park Service Director, Roger Kennedy, tracked me down and began sending me checks to do field research for him. The original reason that Roger remembered me at all from the 1990 Smithsonian Christmas Party was because of his enchantment with Vivi the French Courtesan. For three years after that party, he remembered Vivi’s name, but only my face!

It was not all a bed of wild roses. After the first surprise attack by North Carolina Neo-Nazis in deep winter snow, I had a jagged hole through my cheek and several missing teeth. No dentist or doctor in North Carolina would treat me, because some federal law enforcement officer was calling them to tell the lie that I was gay and had AIDS. I had to sew up the hole with a needle and thread from my Navy Corpsman’s Kit. Later I had to pull two large, broken teeth that become severely infected, with alligator pliers.

I emailed my former Sumatran girl friend, Julie Soh, basically to say goodbye and give a picture of the view from my camp, so someone could find my body. The next time around, however, the personal instruction that I had received from two US Navy recipients of the Medal of Honor, while in Georgia Tech’s NROTC, came back to me . . . and the bad guys lost the battle.

View of Downtown Rome, GA

The path to becoming home-less

Between December 1998 and March 2000, when the FBI was spending over $24 million to search for terrorist Eric Rudolph in the North Carolina Mountains, Rudolph was living in a Georgia Bureau of Investigation Safe House on Lookout Circle, overlooking Downtown Rome, GA. Rudolf was the first self-proclaimed Christian Nationalist terrorist. By the way . . . Rome is the city, where Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Green now lives.

This astonishing fact will soon be revealed on a nationally-televised documentary. The producer of the TV documentary is worth about $7 billion. That buys the type of protection that I can’t afford, but could really use these days.

Lookout Circle aligns with the Cherokee Defense Line in the 1793 Battle of Etowah Cliffs. Most days, Rudolph would ride the yellow police mountain bike, loaned to him by the Rome Police Department, around the block. Even in the summer, he wore a jacket. A cable ran from underneath his jacket to a black, leatherette box, mounted to the handlebars. Periodically, officers from Fort Benning in US Army Intelligence would park their car to the back of my house and watch/film Rudolph, while he was biking.

How would I know about the forthcoming TV special? I was interviewed by the film company as a key witness. You see, during that period, I also lived on Lookout Circle. Rudolph’s bike was typically about 8-10 feet from the windows of my home office. I rented a house in Rome, while working on the plans for a multi-block Downtown Revitalization Project.

On a few occasions, he stopped by the convenience store on South Broad Street, one block over. One time, he was coming out the door, while I was coming in. We were three feet apart. I could see the prominent scare on his chin. Otherwise, he stayed indoors. As a result, he was quite pale.

Lookout Circle is located in a neighborhood that was gentrifying. The better educated new residents realized that a terrorist-murderer was in their midst. We were afraid that he would in a panic, set off the bomb in the leatherette box, next to one of our houses.

My neighbors foolishly contacted the Rome Police Department or GBI. Those informants were murdered, seriously injured in murder attempts or else their homes were burned down. Per advice from Susan Karlson, I sent a FAX from a UPS store to the FBI Olympic Games Bombing Task Force, which included a photo. No one from the FBI responded.

However, black clad Neo-Nazi’s began driving back and forth in front of my house in a pickup with a seeing eye dog and a wheel chair in the back. Over $1,800 ($3,400 in 2024) of vandalism was done to my car. In June 2000, got the heck out of Northwest Georgia and moved 54 miles to the east in Jasper, GA. Susan and I immediately went on a one week vacation to Mexico.

Upon my return to Jasper, strangers began telling me that I would have no money, no architecture work, no friends, no girlfriend, no wife and no children, unless I joined the Republican Party. I thought these people were crazy. I was non-political and not a member of any party. Until the summer of 2000, Pickens County, GA was purple county, tending to the blue shades.

These strangers might have been crazy, but they had the power within state and local law enforcement to actualize their threats. Eventually, “have no home” would be added to the list.

Observations while in a tent or a hovel

(1) The primeval emotion driving the wide support of fascism among whites in the Southeast is the obsession to control and feel themselves superior to at least some other people. After experiencing repeatedly how much evil these Lilliputians were capable of doing, while always calling themselves “Good Conservative Christians,” it made me wonder if the South’s affection for slavery in the 1800s represented a existential, spiritual or genetic flaw amongst many . . . not just economics, as historians explain the Civil War.

In 2017, I had bought groceries at the local IGA in Dahlonega. I came outside to see about 30 people, clustered around my Explorer. All were strangers and the rabble rouser leaders couldn’t see me walking up. They were breaking my windows and beating on the hood and rear door! Some were filming the excitement on their smart phones, while others were shouting that they were going to be on the evening news.

At the same time, a sheriff’s deputy, patrol car lights flashing roared onto the scene. The leaders shouted that they were freeing three dogs that were dying inside the Explorer. The deputy pointed out that there were no dogs inside the car. Instead of arresting them, he turned his back on the mob and demanded to see my drivers license and proof of insurance. The mob quickly scattered. Nobody was arrested, since he stated that he could not determine, who was involved.

(2) Their inherent obsession to hurt somebody else for the fun of it has been passed down from parent to child for generations. In their brains, somehow, it has been equated to Christianity. This sense of personal powerlessness mandates itself into lynch mob behavior, attacking the National Capitol en masse or in the many church-based vigilante groups in the Southern Highlands.

While homeless . . .wherever I camped in western North Carolina and Tennessee, plus at one site in Georgia, I was attacked late at night by vigilantes. The most common time was between 12:30 AM and 1:30 AM. I eventually learned that local and state law enforcement officers were lying to rural Southern Baptist churches that I was a child molester.

So, if while traveling through the Southern Highlands, you encounter Baptists in their thirties now, with high pitched, squeaky voices . . . you can be certain that they were one of those vigilantes.

(3) Superficially, I did seem helpless and thus easy to control for many years. That revealed another flaw in the Neo-Nazi’s. They believe their own lies . . . which they spew forth constantly . . . and assume that their enemies . . . the LIBRULS!. . . lie just as much as they do. That recently got some Georgia district attorneys and law enforcement officers in trouble. Namely, they tried to prove that interesting stories that I have told about my past, were lies.

(1) The FBI called Susan Loewen, the widow of the famous author, James Loewen, to disprove my claim of friendship with them. Susan responded that they has traveled southward to spend a weekend with me in 2013 then Jim had been my mentor until his death in 2021. She then sent me a sweet thank you note for dedicating my 2023 videos to her husband.

(2) They contacted Jimmy Carter and Joe Biden to prove that I was not there as a guest of the Carters, when Joe invited Jimmy to run for president. Neither remembered my name, of course, but both remembered that I had just gotten back from working in Sweden.

(3) Because I have concealed her full identity, many people in law enforcement assumed that Vivi was imaginary. Somehow, someone at the 1990 Smithsonian Christmas Party remembered seeing us eating cheese, drinking wine and making out in the corner of the living room then disappearing to the guest room for the rest of the evening. An acquaintance of mine remembered seeing her and I on local television with Chef Julia Child.

(4) Among the 100+ people contacted, was an old email address for Susan . . . which I have long forgotten. She somehow received it. I thought she was dead. Susan was informed that during our 15 year relationship, I was actually a bisexual mass murderer. She started breathing fire and paid a two week visit my current stomping grounds. The situation started changing for the better here, after her visit.

Well, I could go on ad nauseum, but the point is that I believe now in 2024 that the Reverend Billy Graham DID receive visions from God that were warning and comfort to spiritual people about difficult times in the future. In particular, his descriptions of how churches would become corrupted by secular politics seem especially prophetic.