Jean-Marc Hero/Wikimedia Commons
Natasha Lechner had applied the toxins of an Amazonian tree frog to burns on her skin on several previous occasions before the ritual which led to her death on March 8, 2019. But according to court testimony given by the last person to see her alive, Lechner’s reaction to the “medicine” in her final ceremony was alarming.
“She felt faint quite quickly and she lay herself down in a kind of semi-recovery position,” Victoria Sinclair, a self-described spiritual teacher, told an inquest into Lechner’s death on Tuesday morning. “Then she sat up and grabbed my arm and just looked at me and said: ‘It’s not good.’”
Lechner, 39, died during a shamanic “Kambo” ritual in Sinclair’s apartment in the town of Mullumbimby in the Australian state of New South Wales. Sinclair said Lechner was conducting the ceremony, which involves making small burns in the skin and applying poison to them to induce severe vomiting or “purging.”