Lester Coggins (d. 22 Oct 2012) was a minister at the Christ the Holy Redeemer Church in Chester's Mill, Maine. He engaged in self-flagellation with a knotted rope that has twelve knots representing the twelve apostles. On the night of Dome Day, he whipped himself bloody in atonement for his part in the methamphetamine laboratory and distribution business operating in a building behind his church, a transgression which he believed had brought the wrath of God down on Chester's Mill in the form of the mysterious barrier. He experienced auditory hallucinations which he believed to be the voice of God, leading him to read the Biblical passage: "The LORD shall smite thee with madness, and blindness, and astonishment of heart. / And thou shalt grope at noonday, as the blind gropeth in darkness,