Cult following, p.3
Cult Following, page 3
And those interests led her directly to William Dudley Pelley, a man who seemed destined to be a cult leader, but who could never quite wrangle that kind of following—although he did eventually wrangle a following of a different sort. Pelley was a journalist and author, and relatively distinguished in those pursuits. He wrote for the Chicago Times, won two O. Henry awards, and penned a handful of novels and a dozen screenplays, including two Lon Chaney movies, The Light in the Dark (1922) and The Shock (1923).
What perhaps brought him the most attention were his writings on spiritualism. Specifically, an essay he wrote for The American magazine, “Seven Minutes in Eternity,” recounts his near-death experience after suffering “a combination of heart attack and apoplexy.” While dead-ish, he ended up in a white marbly place he termed the “hyper-dimension,” where vaguely familiar people wearing hats roamed around. This special knowledge of existence beyond death changed Pelley. He now believed he had a mission to transform the world spiritually and was gifted the supernatural powers to accomplish it—including levitation, X-ray vision, and astral projection.
Possibly “Seven Minutes in Eternity” was what nabbed Ogden’s attention, as it was published in March 1929, shortly after her husband’s death. Or maybe she encountered the story in book form later that year, as Pelley would expand and publish it as Seven Minutes in Eternity with the Aftermath. Pelley also wrote regularly about his ongoing spiritual discoveries (some communicated to him by a presence he called the “Oracle”) in the New Liberator, a magazine he edited.
However Ogden found Pelley, just as with her civic commitments, she dove headfirst into her new purpose: the opportunity to be one of the chosen who could help bring about a new age of spirituality. She met Pelley in early 1931 and learned about his plan to establish metaphysical centers throughout the country, as well as to unite Christians in one organization following his New Age spiritualistic teachings. Ogden gave Pelley $14,000 worth of bonds and worked to open one of his centers in Newark. She also planned to be part of the national office in Washington, DC, that Pelley wanted to establish.
But none of that happened, despite more and more of Ogden’s money being spent on Pelley’s cause. Disillusioned, Ogden split with Pelley in 1932. The split was well timed, because the next year Adolf Hitler would become chancellor of Germany, and Pelley really dug the guy. He dug the guy so much that he even created his own Nazi organization called the Silver Legion (also known as the Silver Shirts due to their Nazi-inspired uniforms) and dubbed himself the “American Hitler.” The numbers of his organization peaked at 15,000, but, in 1942, he was sentenced to fifteen years in jail for sedition. He served eight years of the sentence before being paroled, after which he spent his time trying to start a UFO cult.
Meanwhile, Ogden started her own group, the School of Truth, gathering followers and meeting in the building in Newark that she had arranged for Pelley. She was, after all, suddenly receiving communiques from beyond, communiques that a New World Order was coming. That the reincarnated souls of Biblical heroes would awaken. That apocalyptic global disasters were looming, and out of those ashes would rise an enlightened population. That immortality could be achieved just by dedicating yourself to the cause. She knew all this because her typewriter told her so. Ogden began to receive messages from otherworldly spirits as she typed, a technologically advanced twist on the automatic writing performed by mediums that was so common in previous decades.
When her Newark headquarters was foreclosed on, Ogden realized she needed a Promised Land, somewhere far from the natural and economic disasters she and her typewriter were predicting. That meant that coasts and major population centers were out. In the summer of 1933, she went on a tour of the country looking for suitable locations, gathering more followers as she went. The states she visited included Illinois, Idaho, Washington, and California, but none were quite right.
Then she received a letter from one of her followers in New York. The follower told Ogden that she had been given a vision for the future of Ogden’s School of Truth. She saw a desert valley, with the word Utah written in the sky above it. According to Ogden, this vision matched her own private vision for the future headquarters of the school. Ogden saw this as a sign and headed to Utah, where she found a suitable place called Dry Valley, about fifteen miles north of the town of Monticello, in San Juan County. The valley even had a two-hundred-foot-tall snowman-shaped sandstone formation at its entrance that apparently matched a vision Ogden had had. It would come to be called Church Rock.
In September 1933, Ogden moved to Dry Valley with some thirty followers. They pooled their resources and mined and farmed that desert, eventually rebranding the School of Truth as the Home of Truth. Another name for it was the Ogden Center. The settlement was far from civilization and, just as important to Ogden, the land had no history of humans mucking it up metaphysically with materialist pursuits. Just some Mormon neighbors here and there.
The desert valley was a hard place, with extreme temperature fluctuations and arid, dusty soil, a place that even Odgen admitted was rough. However, she said that once the cataclysms hit, the area would be transformed into a bountiful Garden of Eden. In 1934, she bought the local paper, the San Juan Record, and used it to further promulgate her gospel of vague truths around end times, reincarnation, spiritual evolution, and immortality.
At its height, between seventy and a hundred adherents called the Home of Truth home for themselves. The settlement had three main sections: the Outer Portal, where most of the members lived and communed; the Middle Portal, which was the site of a chapel that was never completed; and the Inner Portal, where Ogden lived with her daughter and her supernatural typewriter, a bit like a spider in the middle of a web. Like a spider, she soon found herself living with a desiccated body, a desiccated body that would bring about the end times…for the Home of Truth.
Edith Peshak and her husband, Elmer, joined the Home of Truth in 1934. The farmers from Idaho had two adult children, Helen and Frank, but only Frank accompanied them. Edith had terminal cancer, which was the big motivator for the couple to give up their successful farm and head south to the desert. They had heard that Ogden could heal Edith—and healing was indeed one of the superpowers that she was attempting to develop out in that desert. The hope that we can conquer death and never fully lose a loved one is a powerful appeal of the Home of Truth and other spiritualist groups. That hope was what motivated Ogden to start the group when her husband died, and what motivated many, like the Peshaks, to join her.
Ogden meditated every morning to recharge her spiritual batteries and then communed with Edith every other day, holding her hands, trying to absorb the impurities in Edith’s body, and asking for intercession from what Ogden called Invisible Helpers—spirits of healing. None of it worked. On February 11, 1935, Edith died.
Once again, death created a major crossroads for Marie Ogden. The death of one of her followers meant that everything she had promised about spiritual evolution and immortality and her own powers were false. So she did the reasonable thing: she pretended that Edith wasn’t dead. She told her followers that Edith was going through a phase of purification and would resurrect imminently. To prepare for that awakening, she instructed her followers to wash Edith every day with a saline solution and keep her body fed with milk enemas.
However, a few months later, Edith’s daughter put pressure on local officials to investigate what had happened to her mother. The sheriff and a local attorney both ventured to the settlement to inquire, but were barred by Ogden from seeing the body. Finally, she allowed a doctor entrance to prove that the body wasn’t a public health hazard. The doctor concluded that it wasn’t. It had mummified.
Meanwhile, word got out that the cult was trying to resurrect a dead woman. On November 23 of that year, gleefully aghast headlines appeared in papers across the nation. In the Los Angeles Times, it was “Cultists Guard Body Awaiting Second Life.” The Milwaukee Journal wrote, “Cult Holds Daily Rites to Restore Woman to Life.” The Idaho Statesman proclaimed, “Utah Cult Refuses to Bury Dead Woman in Belief She Will Be Resurrected.”
It took about two years, but Ogden finally allowed the issuance of a death certificate, which was a hard admission for her. However, what happened to the body of Edith Peshak is a mystery.
In April 1937, an ex-member named Thomas Robertson, who had fallen out with the group, signed an affidavit stating that he had cremated the body on a pyre per Ogden’s direction, and that it had been done in secret. Robertson said that Ogden later told the members that the body had been hidden to keep it away from all the unwanted attention.
However, Robertson’s story is contradicted by another account. In May 1937, a journalist named Jack DeWitt interviewed Ogden and learned the location of Edith’s body: a cave in a nearby cliff, blocked by a small boulder. DeWitt snuck out there one night and claims he found the mummified body of Edith Peshak in that cave. So Edith was either cremated or entombed—but probably not resurrected. And while what happened to Edith Peshak’s body is a mystery, what happened to the Home of Truth isn’t as much of one.
By the end of the dead-body fiasco, less than a dozen members called the Home of Truth home, as many had left the commune disillusioned by the Edith Peshak affair or uncomfortable with the hard settlement life. But the members who stayed did include Elmer Peshak, who would leave an open chair at the communal Thanksgiving dinner for his dead wife. The group continued to shrink, though, and in 1949, Ogden sold the San Juan Record. She spent her last years in a rest home in Blanding, fifty miles south of Dry Valley. She died in 1975.
Before her death, she had written a book summing up everything about the Home of Truth and its beliefs, called The Age of Faith Versus the Promise of Life. It was never published, though, and might have even been burned when one of her last followers destroyed all of Ogden’s papers to protect her legacy from ridicule.
Today, the Home of Truth site itself is her legacy, and it has outlived Marie Ogden…as a ghost town. Rotten wooden buildings dot the overgrown desert landscape. The sign on the Inner Portal still brands it as “Marie’s Place.”
As of the writing of this book, the current owners of the property are restoring it into a tourist attraction. While Ogden wasn’t able to resurrect her follower, her Home of Truth might just have a second life.
John Frum Movement
Star-Spangled Tanna
Imagine a dirt runway on an island in the South Pacific. Except that runway seems a little too short to land an airplane on. But there is a plane there. And a tower. And a satellite dish. However, on closer inspection, you realize that the plane and the tower and the dish are all made out of bamboo and wood and straw. It’s a fake airfield. But this isn’t a trap, nor a trick: it’s more like a temple to the gods. And those gods are American.
The country of Vanuatu encompasses more than eighty islands in Melanesia and is situated between Fiji and New Guinea. The first European explorers arrived in 1606 from Spain, but in the 1700s, after Captain James Cook wended his way through the islands, they were colonized by both the French and the British and called the New Hebrides, a name that stuck until the country’s independence in 1980. The colonial history of Vanuatu is one of indentured servitude and enforced conversion by Presbyterian missionaries. The former removed the native peoples from their islands. The latter removed its culture (referred to as “kastom” by the locals). The missionaries outlawed various practices such as penis wrapping, dancing, and—perhaps the largest loss—kava drinking. Kava is a drug made from a pepper plant root that the locals drink out of coconut shells in sacred settings. It numbs their throats and acts as a sedative, helping them to both relax and achieve spiritual enlightenment.
In the hazy lore of the John Frum movement, it all began in 1940, when the entity that would come to be named John Frum appeared to a group of elders on Vanuatu’s island of Tanna. The island is twenty-five miles long and about twelve miles wide. Today it has about 30,000 inhabitants. It is dominated by the Yasur volcano that has lent an ominous rumbling soundtrack to the lives of the Tannese for thousands of years.
John Frum was a tall white man who spoke the native language and may have been a spirit. Or an advance army scout from America. Or the hallucinatory by-product of a heavy night of kava consumption (the people of Tanna make the strongest kava in the country). According to Chief Issak Wan Nikiau, the son of one of those elders and later a witness to John Frum himself, the being was “more powerful than Jesus Christ.”
The origin of John Frum’s name could be a corruption of “John from America” or a variation on “John Broom,” the latter of which is evocative of the message that John Frum brought with him: sweep out the Christian and colonial influences from the island and get back to kastom. Frum also claimed that America was going to be a friend to the Tannese and bring them lots of material goods in the future. John Frum had brought the Tannese the truth, and they just needed to pray to him for it to happen. They did, and two years later, the prophesied Americans arrived.
World War II was drawing red lines all around the globe, and the islands of the South Pacific were strategic to the efforts of the Allied Forces, especially to the United States after the bombing of Pearl Harbor by the Japanese in 1941. The Americans set up a base on the islands, including on Tanna, and hired locals to help in the war effort. The Tannese noticed two things about these Americans. First, unlike the French and the British during colonial rule, the Americans treated the native peoples like equals, calling them by their names and paying them for their services. In addition, the American occupation marked the first time the Tannese had ever seen Black men and white men working together, shoulder to shoulder, under the same banner—in this case, a red, white, and blue one.
And by working, they didn’t mean the things that the Tannese usually called working: hunting, foraging, gardening, weaving, and fishing. The Americans just marched and drilled and played with radio knobs all day. Nevertheless, they didn’t want for food or drink or clothes or anything. Everything they needed to live, work, and play was delivered to them by airplane or boat.
Those deliveries brought wonders of industrial-age manufactured technology, the likes of which the Tannese had never seen: jeeps and shoes and refrigerators and chewing gum and ink pens and button-down shirts and all manner of items so many Americans take for granted. And not only had the Tannese never seen such mass-manufactured products, they also could not fathom how these items could have been made by humans. After all, how do you weave a jeep or carve a refrigerator? And what are those materials they’re made from? The Tannese had never seen metal and plastic before. Since they believed no person could have possibly made these marvels, the Tannese figured that the items must have been made by the gods, their ancestors. Which means these Americans had unlocked the secret to receiving gifts from heaven. And those gifts were called cargo.
And that’s how cargo cults are formed. It didn’t just happen on Tanna; it happened all over the islands of the South Pacific in the twentieth century. Local islanders watched uniformed men call planes down from the sky or boats from across the water, laden with impossible-to-make wonders, and came up with their own explanations. However, the John Frum movement is unique both for having such an enigmatic figure as John Frum at its center and for its longevity. The aforementioned Chief Isaak Wan Nikiau, who led the cult for decades, only just died in 2021 at age seventy.
But the John Frum movement wasn’t just about material possessions. It was about reclaiming Tannese culture from centuries of colonialism and white religion. The locals treated these marvels of manufacturing as gifts from their own ancestors, and then used those gifts as motivation to reject the invading culture and revitalize their own. Many John Frum adherents turned their back on the invading white infrastructure—getting rid of their money and withdrawing from their schools and churches—to focus on rejuvenating their own traditions.
After the war ended, the Americans packed up their manufactured miracles and left. So the Tannese began copying what they thought of as the Americans’ rituals—the marching and the gun drills—hoping that the gods would also give them this cargo from the skies.
The villages are decorated with wooden crosses painted red, in mimicry of the crosses on the military medical vehicles. Symbolic airfields and piers are cobbled together from local materials, in the hopes that Americans will use them to return. Every morning, the people go out to flagpoles and raise the American flag high above their villages. Every Friday they attend a worship service, complete with hymns to John Frum. One example of their lyrics, as reported by Paul Raffaele in 2006 for Smithsonian magazine after a visit to the island, is as follows: “We’ve come from America to cut down all the trees so we can build factories.” Raffaele said the singers punctuated the words of the song by miming chainsaws with their hands.
And every February 15 is John Frum Day. On that holiday, people gather from all over Tanna to celebrate John Frum in the area of Sulphur Bay. The men wear matching jeans and paint “USA” in red on their bare backs and chests. They shoulder bamboo poles sharpened at the top and dipped in red, like the guns they had witnessed during the war. The chief wears an oversized hat and coat with gold epaulettes that roughly approximate an officer’s uniform. They look to the glowing Yasur volcano, secure in the knowledge that John Frum lives there and every so often leaves his fiery throne to meet with elders in private in the dark jungle, to make sure they are still faithful and awaiting his official return. And then they march and they drill and they salute and they hope that John Frum returns with his American cargo.
