When Betsy told them, when she was five, of her first premonitions, of someone getting hurt or drowning or, twice, ministers being arrested, and when those premonitions came true, her father had many consequences for her after he overcame his shocked anger. First, he called her a liar. Then, when the premonitions came through, he hit her with a Bible, he made her memorize long passages, he performed a séance on her, and he taped her mouth shut “so the devil inside of you will die.”

He then told people at their small church, a church that did not like outsiders, to pray for his daughter, as she was “possessed” by demons and they had to “pull the demons out.”

She was then, as a little girl, ostracized by the parents and the children of that church because no one wanted their children near a demonic little girl.

Betsy was scared of her premonitions but more scared of her father, who was a menacing, yelling figure who called her, a young child, “evil” and “possessed by the devil.” That the devil possessed her made her wet her pants every time she thought of it.

Soon she knew not to tell her parents what she saw in the future, but when she was older she also knew she had to take action to save the people she loved. She let the air out of a tire on Miss Jane’s car next door when she was seven. She knew how to do that because her mother’s uncle showed her how to change a tire. “Your father is clueless and lazy, Betsy, so you’re going to have to know how to do it,” Uncle Jacko told her.

Betsy knew that Miss Jane was going to help her friend Dixon on his farm that day, based on the clothes she was wearing, the same clothes as in the premonition, and her arm was going to be ripped off by some sort of farm equipment. She could not have Miss Jane losing an arm. Miss Jane was only twenty-five and baked the best chocolate chip cookies, and she snuck them to Betsy through a hole in their fence. By letting out the air in Jane’s tire, Betsy ensured that Jane couldn’t go to the farm, and she avoided having her arm ripped off.

Miss Jane did not like her father. She sprayed him with her hose when he was yelling at Betsy one day in the front yard after church. Her father was telling Betsy that she was not “a good Christian. Not prayerful, not obedient, an embarrassment to the family!” He was soaked through from Miss Jane’s hose. When Hansen charged her, his face mottled and red, Miss Jane sprayed him right in the head, then told him, “If you take one step onto my property, Hillbilly Hansen, I will shoot you.”