LETTERS FROM HOME: THE SPIDER LADY AND OTHER MISSING PERSONS

Nov. 9, 1995

Dear Christy,

When I lived in Laguna Beach, another resident was a woman people called the Spider Lady. She dressed completely in black and sometimes wore fake braids that dragged the ground. Her most striking characteristic, though, was the large black mask she painted across her eyes raccoon-fashion. Her lips were blackened, too.

She literally haunted the town. You'd be walking downtown and see a dark movement in a doorway and she'd appear then skitter away. Very creepy but, as far as anyone knew, harmless.

My friend Leslie, who's a reporter, just wrote a story about the Spider Lady. The mental health system finally succeeded in getting her to take the drugs that control her paranoid schizophrenia and she was living somewhat normally in an apartment instead of on the streets. And, emerging from the haze, she had a story to tell.

Her name was Abbey Ettinger, and at one point she'd been a lovely model who went by the name of Vanessa. She worked at an advertising agency in Kansas City.

Leslie talked to Abbey's long-ago boss, who described her as "knockout gorgeous...She always looked like she stepped out of a Vogue magazine."

She had a marriage and two children and a 13-room house. Then one day she disappeared, began hitchhiking across the country and living on the streets.

Her brother didn't hear from her for 21 years. He imagined his beautiful sister must be living a beautiful life somewhere. "I got raped and robbed a lot," she told Leslie, "but a lot of people were very nice to me, too."

The Spider Lady didn't see herself as the rest of the world did. At one point, she came into a social service agency with cockroaches in her clothes. But Abbey thought of her basic-black get-up as street person chic. She was toothless but carried a travel iron in her shopping cart and thought of the black makeup as creative.

"It may not appear (so) to people but (street people) worry about their appearance a lot," she said. "I always tried to keep up a `model living at a resort' sort of appearance."

In Laguna Beach, she had lots of company in her fantasy world.

Now she has contacted her brother and at least one of her children. And last year, Abbey was asked to speak at a fund-raiser for a homeless shelter. She showed up at the Laguna Beach mansion in a green sheath and "just a touch of makeup," Leslie writes, and made small talk about the hors d'oeuvres.

No one would have known she was one of the people they'd come to help.

The differences between them and us disappear.

When I think of your mother, I think of how much her brothers and sister miss her. Not to mention her children, grandchildren, nephews and nieces, and her own mother.

It's as if all they have left of her are their memories, and those are kept locked away because it's too painful to think of her imprisoned by illness. She can't understand how to help herself, and we do nothing because we have been told we can't interfere.

Sometimes I drive down her street but I don't stop because this waste of life is so infuriating and sad.

She's safe and secure and being taken care of, but being alive is so much more than that. How tragic to think that if she were only homeless, maybe she could come back to us.

Love, Sam

~Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.