Jared Loughner Has Skull, Creepy Shrine in Backyard

As though Jared Lee Loughner didn’t already seem crazy enough, a strange shrine complete with a replica of a human skull has been found in his backyard. Inside a camouflage tent, Loughner has a small altar, atop which sits a pot filled with shriveled oranges, the skull replica, a row of candles, and a bag of potting soil, the New York Daily News reports. Experts tell the paper that the objects are common to many occult ceremonies.

Loughner was obsessed with lucid dreaming, the process of attempting to consciously control one’s dreams, one friend tells Mother Jones. “I saw his dream journal once. That’s the golden piece of evidence,” he says. “You want to know what goes on in Jared Loughner’s mind, there’s a dream journal that will tell you everything.” He also says that Loughner had been obsessed with Giffords ever since she failed to answer his question at a campaign event. “The question was, ‘What is government if words have no meaning?’ … I told him, ‘Dude, no one’s going to answer that.’” (More Jared Lee Loughner stories.)