The QAnon Queen of Canada has left her compound in rural Saskatchewan…. For now, at least.
Romana Didulo, a cult leader who has convinced hundreds of people across the world she’s the true queen of Canada (among other eccentric things), has been living in an abandoned school in the small Saskatchewan town of Richmound for over a month.
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But a video sent to VICE News by a local shows Didulo’s team unloading belongings including surveillance gear from the school into several motorhomes and vehicles. One local told VICE that the school, which once almost always had cult members outside filming anyone who came close, is now a ghost town.
“A flag was taken down and the lights and cameras are off the school,” Shauna Sehn, a resident in the town, told VICE News.
Brad Miller, Richmound’s mayor, told VICE News that earlier in the day bylaw and building inspectors went to the school for an inspection but were denied.
“Shortly after that Romano’s RV left town as well as a few vehicles,” said Miller. “The remaining people are scurrying around packing.”
Miller added that believes Didulo and her followers are camped out at a farm not too far out of town. For now the town holds its breath hoping the cult is truly gone.
For weeks Didulo faced fierce resistance from the townsfolk, who held several large protests to get the cult out of the school, but it seemed their honking and shouting had little effect. At the time Miller told VICE News that he was working multiple angles to have the cult removed, several including working bylaws.
In the livestream that Didulo hosts—primarily a way for her to ask her followers for money—her spokesperson said the group was invited to a follower’s farm and promised they would be returning to the school shortly.
The school was initially purchased by Rick Manz, a local who believes in Didulo’s eccentric teachings and hoped to turn it into a cannabis grow-op. Instead, he gifted it to the cult, and as a reward for his service, Didulo declared that her followers now must call Manz “his excellency.” In mid-September, the cult moved over ten people into the property and even held an odd ritual where believers from across western Canada came to the tiny town to pledge their loyalty to Didulo and receive some of the fraudulent currency she invented.
Now though, for the first time in weeks, the school is sitting empty again.
“The entire compound is vacant and they scurried off in different directions,” local Hugh Everding, who lives just across from the school, told VICE News. “There isn’t a soul there.”
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