House was suffering from the same Stockholm Syndrome
Apparently, House was suffering from the same Stockholm Syndrome that Miss Stone had – the American missionaries as a whole are recorded to have supportedbridesmaid dresses purple wholeheartedly the Bulgarian causes in the late 19th century and early 20th century.
Sandanski and House told the Turks they agreed to make the transfer in another town to the south but House delivered the money secretly in his pockets to other Protestants in Bansko, from where Sandanski picked it up. The two must have gone back and forth many times since the gold coins weighed a total of 105 kg.
House put bullets in the emptied chests and revealed the truth to the Turkish authorities only when they reached the supposed transfer site.
Miss Stone and Tsilka were released on February 23, 1902, near Strumitsa, after spending 173 days in captivity.
Aftermath of the First Modern Hostage Crisis in American (and Bulgarian) History
Even though the kidnapping had not been formally sanctioned by the VMORO leadership and was an initiative of Sandanski and Chernopeev, the men gave all the money to the leader of the organization Gotse Delchev who paid 2 Turkish lira to each of the members of the Sandanski group.
Another VMORO leader, Gyorche Petrov, later remarked that, unfortunately, most of the “Miss Stone money” was spent on the fratricidal war against the rival revolutionary organization, the Sofia-based Supreme Committee.
Other accounts, however, suggest that almost half of all the guns – or 7500 guns – used by VMORO’s Bulgarian rebels in Macedonia the follwoing year – in the so calledbridesmaid dresses Alfred Ilinden-Preobrazhenie Uprising of August 1903 (which was the largest Bulgarian uprising against the Ottoman Empire not just in Macedonia but also in general in terms of the number of the participants) – were purchased with money from the ransom.
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