Explore the enigmatic strongholds of history's most infamous cults, from the Waco compound of David Koresh's Branch Davidians to the Helter Skelter ranch in LA, where Charles Manson and his Family hatched their gruesome Tate-LaBianca murder plans. First up, let's take a look at the huge Oregon ranch better known as the Wild Wild Country commune where thousands of people lived together under the shadowy umbrella of this controversial sect...
Indian mystic Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, aka Osho, started a movement in his home country in the late 1960s, pushing a bizarre mix of free love, Eastern spirituality, unbridled capitalism and pop psychology that drew thousands of followers. Osho's rejection of traditional morality put him at odds with the Indian authorities and in 1981, the cult leader left for America.
In the early 1980s, the movement snapped up the 64,200-acre Big Muddy Ranch, near the town of Antelope in Oregon for $5.75 million (£4.5m) – between $18 million and $20 million in today's money. The Encyclopedia Britannica states that Osho invited his orange and red pink-clad followers from all over the world to join him in a model community taking shape there. The Rajneeshees wasted no time constructing their desert utopia, working 24-7 to build homes, a shopping mall, hotel, restaurants and other impressive amenities, including a vast meditation hall.
Rajneeshpuram was a unique settlement, where most members or 'sannyasin' lived in interconnected prefab A-frames arranged in beehive formations. They began their day with a shared breakfast, before dispersing to their various work divisions. In the backdrop of commune activities, including farming, construction, sanitation, and legal affairs, the commune was a bustling community. Even their 'Peace Force' maintained order, and they boasted amenities like stores and a pizzeria called Zorba the Buddha. Lunchtime meant gathering in Magdalena Hall for a vegetarian diet, primarily consisting of salads, that received high praise from many. In fact, the settlement became known for its excellent catering.
The commune members didn't follow a monkish lifestyle but they did put in tireless effort at their various jobs, often working long hours. Chapman Way, co-director of the Netflix documentary, noted: "They weren't paid for their shift. Eight-hour days, 12-hour days... They created their own banking system, with its own banking cards. And a couple people told us that at the end of the month they would throw 50 to 75 bucks on everybody's banking card and you could drink in the beer garden that night." After the workday, the followers would congregate in Rajneesh Mandir, a grand structure that still stands on the site, to listen to recordings of Bagwhan's speeches.
The community, which had a population of 2,000 at its peak, even had its own police and fire department, public transport system, airport and airline. Money flowed in from donations and the movement's business activities, with Rajneeshpuram's annual World Festival raking in millions of dollars, much of which was spent on luxuries for Osho, who is said to have owned more than 90 Rolls-Royce cars, a private jet, jewel-studded designer watches and other blingy toys.
As the commune expanded, it came into conflict with the residents of nearby Antelope, as well as the local authorities. Tensions were further inflamed in the summer of 1983, when a hotel in Portland owned by the movement was bombed by Islamist terrorists. With feelings of persecution and fear pervading the community, a group of rogue Rajneeshees led by Osho's sidekick and movement spokesperson, Ma Anand Sheela, decided to fight back in the dirtiest ways possible.
As recounted in the award-winning 2018 Netflix documentary, Wild Wild Country, the group figured gaining political control of the local county was the solution to their woes. In 1984, they invited thousands of homeless people to live on the commune to sway the vote in Rajneeshpuram's favour. If that wasn't jaw-dropping enough, they also perpetrated America's largest-ever bioterrorist attack. In a bid to take out hostile local voters, the group contaminated 10 restaurants in Wasco County with salmonella, infecting 751 people, though luckily nobody died.
The group also engaged in smuggling and arson, and even attempted to assassinate Charles Turner, the then-United States Attorney for the District of Oregon. Their crimes came to light in 1985 and Sheela and her minions were imprisoned, while Osho, who is alleged to have sexual assaulted women and children, was deported for immigration violations, heralding the demise of the commune. Rajneeshpuram was eventually left bankrupt and sold in 1988 at a sheriff's auction. Fast forward to today and two Christian summer camps inhabit the site.
The Waco compound of David Koresh's Branch Davidians; the LA hippie Helter Skelter ranch where Charles Manson and his Family plotted the grisly Tate-LaBianca murders; guru Osho's Wild Wild Country commune in Oregon... Every cult needs a base of operations and the nerve centres of the most notorious sects of all time are totally synonymous with the shady groups that inhabited them. Click or scroll through to infiltrate these controversial cult compounds and discover their shocking stories...
The Branch Davidians came into being in 1955 after the end times-preaching splinter group broke away from the Davidians, itself an apocalyptic offshoot sect of Seventh Day Adventism. Rocked in the 1980s by a power struggle, the cult was taken over by sinister self-styled prophet Vernon Howell, who seduced the then-leader Lois Roden and ousted her son after launching what the New York Times has called a commando-style raid of the group's Mount Carmel HQ in Waco, Texas.
Howell and his 130 or so followers built a sprawling wood-framed compound on the site, and in 1990 he changed his name to the Biblical David Koresh. Anticipating the end of the world, the Branch Davidians began stockpiling supplies and weapons for "self-defence", while Koresh started taking multiple wives, some of whom were underage.
The cult made its money selling weapons such as Uzis, AK-47s, 'David Koresh Survival Wear' ammo vests and other 'survivalist' wares at various gun shows. Koresh and his followers used the proceeds to upgrade the compound, with the profits paying for an outdoor swimming pool, dirt bike and go-kart tracks and a 52-inch wide-screen TV for the chapel, as well as vast stocks of food and other essentials.
In addition to the pool, tracks and chapel, the two-storey compound featured separate living quarters for men, women and children, a large suite for Koresh and his wives, a kitchen and cafeteria, a gym, computer room and water tower. This photo taken on the set of the 1993 TV movie In the Line of Duty: Ambush in Waco gives you an idea of how the interior of the structure looked.
It wasn't long before Koresh's child abuse and illegal stockpiling of weapons caught the attention of the authorities. On the morning of 28 February 1993, government agents staged an armed raid on the compound and were met with fierce gunfire. Amid the chaos, four ATF agents were killed and 20 sustained injuries. With Koresh and 120 of his followers holed up in the compound, the FBI was called in and a tense standoff ensued that lasted 51 days.
The siege's explosive end came on 19 April 1993 when the FBI mounted a tear-gas assault and several fires broke out, consuming the entire complex. While 35 Branch Davidians had previously been released and nine managed to escape, David Koresh and 75 of his followers, including 25 children, were killed, with many found with fatal gunshot wounds, some self-inflicted and others not. Today, the site is marked by a small chapel and memorial to the Koresh's victims.
A crazed cult leader with a wild-eyed stare that would give the most fearless person serious chills, Charles Manson went from a small-time crook and one-time musician to one of history's most reviled criminals. The drifter started recruiting members to his 'Family' in 1967 following his release from prison for stealing cars and forging government cheques.
Chillingly charismatic, Manson espoused a hippie lifestyle that attracted a motley crew of drop-outs made up of mainly young, middle-class women. At its height, the Family counted 100 members and Manson had wormed his way into the social circles of some famous faces such as The Beach Boys' Dennis Wilson, musician Neil Young and actress Angela Lansbury's daughter Didi Shaw. In 1967 the group found their base, according to Life Magazine. Family member Sadie Atkins discovered Los Angeles County's remote 55-acre Spahn Ranch, a recreation of an old Western town that had served as a set for movies and TV shows such as The Lone Ranger and Bonanza.
Manson befriended the elderly owner George Spahn, who let the Family live on the rundown ranch in exchange for help looking after him and the property. The cult members moved in gradually, eventually setting up home in the ramshackle saloon and other rickety structures on the site. Isolated on the ranch taking copious amounts of LSD with little contact with the outside world, Manson and his brainwashed Family became increasingly delusional.
Manson had become obsessed with Helter Skelter, a deluded prophecy of a race war named after a song by The Beatles that the cult leader claimed was inciting the conflict. And after a drug deal in the spring of 1969 with a man Manson believed to be a member of the Black Panther Party went horribly wrong, the vibe at the ranch, which was recreated in Quentin Tarantino's 2019 movie Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood, turned even more paranoid.
Manson then hatched a plan that would horrify the world: to spark a race war by directing his followers to carry out a series of brutal killings of wealthy white people that would be blamed on the Black Panthers. Manson's plan was put into action in the most horrific and sadistic way possible between 8 and 10 August 1969, when four members of the Family murdered six people: pregnant actress Sharon Tate and four of her companions, and supermarket executive Leno LaBianca and his wife, Rosemary.
In the meantime, Manson and the Family had decamped to Barker Ranch in Death Valley, and it was here the cult leader was arrested in October 1969 for car theft. Manson was swiftly linked to the murders and he and the four Family members who carried out the killings were sentenced to death, later commuted to life in prison, where Manson died in 2017. As for Spahn Ranch, its buildings burnt to the ground in a forest fire in 1970, while Barker Ranch was destroyed by a blaze in 2009.
Synanon was founded in 1958 in Santa Monica, California, by Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) member Chuck Dederich as a rehabilitation programme for drug addicts. Dederich started out in a small shopfront offering a two-year in-house course of rehab but came to the conclusion that addicts could never fully recover and should therefore never graduate from his programme.
By 1967, Dederich had amassed enough money to acquire Santa Monica's grand Club Casa Del Mar hotel, which became Synanon's HQ and main 'tough love' treatment facility. According to Los Angeles Magazine, the rules were strict and women were forced to shave their heads. As time went on, Dederich proclaimed Synanon as a religion and exerted more and more coercive control over Synanon members. At the core of his efforts to keep them in his grip was Synanon's unique form of group 'therapy' ominously called The Game.
The Game consisted of frequent hours-long sessions during which members would attack and chastise one another. Dederich used these gruelling sessions to manipulate his followers, pressuring married couples to split up, pregnant women into undergoing abortions, men into having vasectomies and individuals into committing acts of violence.
Members and even ex-members, who were known as 'splittees', were subjected to horrendous beatings, many of which were carried out by Dederich's shadowy paramilitary group called Imperial Marines. The cult is also linked to the disappearance of a woman called Rose Lena Cole, and is known to have committed a slew of other crimes.
In 1978, two Synanon members planted a rattlesnake in the mailbox of a lawyer representing 'splittees' that ended up putting him in hospital for six days. The LAPD launched an investigation and news of the audacious attack went viral, with veteran newscaster Walter Cronkite calling it "bizarre even by cult standards".
Dederich and two Synanon members, Joe Musico and Lance Kenton, were arrested and charged with assault and conspiracy to commit murder. While Musico and Kenton were jailed, Dederich was given probation on account of ill health and banned from associating with Synanon. The IRS revoked the cult's charitable status and ordered it to pay millions of dollars in back taxes. Drowning in debt with no leader, Synanon went bankrupt and was dissolved in 1991. The Club Casa Del Mar HQ was sold off and reverted to being a luxury hotel in the late 1990s.
Reverend Jim Jones set up the ministry that would go on to become the Peoples Temple in Indianapolis in 1955. After relocating the church to California in the mid-1960s, the preacher attracted thousands of followers drawn to his ethos of racial harmony and Christian socialism, as well as the messiah-like figure's purported ability to read minds and heal the sick. Jones also garnered the support of powerful politicians including Walter Mondale and Harvey Milk.
Membership of the Peoples Temple mushroomed. According to David Talbot, author of Season of the Witch and founder of Salon magazine, the cult's followers were enthralled by their leader. “He [Jim Jones] made us feel special, like something bigger than ourselves,” said one temple member. "Total equality, no rich or poor, no races,” said another. “We were alive in those services,” testified one more. “They had life, soul power." But as the cult expanded stories emerged of members being forced to hand over their assets, suffering brutal beatings and enduring other abuses. With the negative publicity mounting, Jones moved in 1977 with over 1,000 of his followers to Jonestown, the 3,000-acre 'socialist paradise' in Guyana the cult leader had established three years earlier.
Instead of the socialist paradise Jones promised, Jonestown turned into a living hell akin to a communist prison camp made up of spartan huts, storage warehouses, a central pavilion and not a lot else. Policed by Jones's heavily armed Red Brigade, members were worked to the bone, required to sit through hours of Marxist-Leninist propaganda and endless rants from Jones, as well as being subjected to cruel punishments if they fell out of line.
Jones, who resided in this basic hut, became convinced the CIA were out to destroy the settlement, and orchestrated several paranoia-fuelled 'White Nights' and a six-day mock siege during which members were made to simulate a mass 'revolutionary suicide'. On 17 November 1977, the situation escalated when a delegation led by US Congressman Leo Ryan paid Jonestown a visit to investigate allegations of abuse within the community.
The next day, Jones ordered his Red Brigade to attack the visitors as they were leaving. Congressman Ryan, together with two journalists and a Temple defector, was shot and killed on the settlement's airstrip and 11 delegates were injured. Convinced the Peoples Temple was doomed, Jones gathered all members to Jonestown's central pavilion and ordered everyone to commit 'revolutionary suicide'. Only this time it was for real.
Either willingly or by force, members drank or were injected with a punch laced with cyanide. A drink called Flavor-Aid was used, though early reports identified it as Kool-Aid, which led to the ironic phrase “drinking the Kool-Aid”. All in all, 909 members including 304 children died in Jonestown. Forever associated with the massacre, the settlement was subsequently looted by locals and eventually abandoned, left to be reclaimed by the jungle.
Troubled music teacher Marshall Applewhite founded the Heaven's Gate cult in Texas in the early 1970s with Bonnie Nettles, a nurse and astrologer. Calling themselves Ti and Do, the deranged duo came to believe God was an alien, Applewhite was the second coming of Jesus and that they and their devotees would one day be transported to heaven in a spaceship. The cult had over 200 members in the 1970s, but by the early 1980s, the total had fallen to 80.
Nettles died of cancer in 1985. To get around the awkward fact the UFO was a no-show, Applewhite tweaked the sect's belief system. Instead of being physically transported in a spaceship to heaven, he said that members' souls would make the trip, meaning they'd have to die. The cult went off the radar until the early 1990s, when the membership had dwindled further and Applewhite began recruiting again. After a stint in New Mexico, the cult leader and 38 core followers ended up in a mansion in the affluent San Diego suburb of Rancho Santa Fe.
The Heaven's Gate members moved into the 9,200-square-foot Mediterranean-style mansion in October 1996. Featuring nine bedrooms, seven bathrooms, a swimming pool, sauna, tennis courts and putting green, this was one luxurious cult compound. The group made much of its money from designing websites, some of which were used to recruit members and are still online and operated by two former members.
The lifestyle of the world's first internet cult was far from opulent, however. Members called the mansion The Monastery and did indeed live like monks. Strictly sworn off sex, the Crew sported androgynous looks and several of the men, including Applewhite, were castrated. Members were also required to cut ties with their families and friends, and relinquish all their worldly belongings.
Applewhite became convinced that a spaceship orbiting the Hale-Bopp Comet would whisk his soul and those of the Heaven's Gate members to paradise. And the only way they could get on the flying saucer was to shed their bodies at the comet's closest approach to Earth in late March 1997. Tragically, the members agreed and all 39, who were each dressed in a black tracksuit and Nike sneakers, died after eating barbiturate-spiked apple sauce downed with shots of vodka.
The bodies were discovered by police on 26 April 1997 following a tip-off, not long after the last of the members took their own lives. The call was revealed by ABC News to have been made by a former member, Rio DiAngelo. After the mass suicide, the property's owner, businessman Sam Koutchesfahani, was jailed for conspiracy and tax evasion. The mansion went into foreclosure and was sold in 1999 at a heavily discounted $668,000 (£540k). Tainted by the horrors that took place within its walls, the property was eventually demolished.
Quack doctor and alchemist Cyrus Teed formed his own religion in 1869 after he blacked out during a Frankenstein-esque alchemy experiment and had a vision of a divine spirit who told him he was the messiah. Cyrus called the religion Koreshanity after the Hebrew version of his name (coincidentally, Vernon Howell would take the same name decades later) and eventually attracted around 200 adherents, who, together with their leader, moved to the tiny Florida town of Estero in 1894 to create a communal utopia.
Teed had high hopes for the site by the alligator-infested Estero River. Ultimately, the cult leader hoped to create a 'New Jerusalem', which he envisioned would grow to become a sprawling metropolis of 10 million people, featuring boulevards 400 feet wide. The industrious community certainly didn't waste any time when it came to erecting structures.
Within a decade of its founding, the town had over 60 robust buildings, including the owner's house, numerous cottages, a general store, printing house, 'Art Hall', power plant and more. A hub of cultural activity, the community strongly fostered creativity and was all about the cultivation of the fine arts, music and theatre. Koreshanity placed a big emphasis on equality of the sexes, too, with women having prominent roles in the cult's hierarchy. The elite seven 'Planetary Sisters' lived in the Planetary Court (pictured), the community's finest building.
Koreshanity's other core beliefs were downright bonkers. For starters, the Koreshans thought the Earth was inside out and contained the entire universe, with the sun at its centre. Then there’s their belief that staying celibate would guarantee immortality for the higher-level members of the cult.
In 1906, Teed reportedly got involved in a fight between Koreshans and locals, who had become increasingly hostile to the sect. He died two years later, allegedly from injuries sustained in the altercation. But his followers refused to accept their supposedly immortal leader had passed. They kept a constant vigil over his body, but were eventually forced by the county health officer to inter the corpse. Gruesomely, Teed's tomb was destroyed by a hurricane in 1921 and his coffin washed out to sea. The aftermath of the storm is shown here.
Unsurprisingly, Teed's death dealt a huge blow to the community. The sect went downhill, and in 1961, the last president of the Koreshan Unity, Hedwig Michel, along with the three remaining members, deeded 305 acres of the settlement to the State of Florida. It became the Koreshan Unity State Park, with 11 structures saved for posterity. Michel is pictured here at the park's dedication ceremony. As part of the deal, the holdouts were permitted to stay in their homes until their dying day.
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