There’s something about the desert that seems to attract weirdness in a way nowhere else does. Things don’t decay like they should out here, and the past often remains far less buried than it ought to be. Rumors of strange happenings abound, and when whispers of an abandoned necromancy cult deep in the Utah desert reached my ears I knew I had to investigate.
But from the very beginning, it seemed like the universe was conspiring to make this exploration much harder than it had to be. A flash flood appeared out of nowhere and blocked off my approach from the west. This was particularly unusual because this region of Utah has always been notorious for its lack of rainfall, and yet the floodwaters rose in my path all the same. Hoping to reach the ruins from higher ground, I drove an extra hour around the mountains to approach from the east, only to find the road similarly blocked off by a second flash flood. After nearly two hours of waiting on the roadside, the floodwaters receded enough for me to floor the gas pedal and muscle my sedan through the remaining flow. But even that didn’t end my troubles- the road closures attracted the attention of the county sheriff, and frequent police patrols along the road leading to the ghost town meant I had to park along a side road and hike nearly half a mile in through muddy desert while ducking into wash outs every few minutes to avoid the eyes of the sheriff.
Figure 1: The flash flood that blocked my approach from the west. Though the floodwaters were only about five inches deep at most, I wasn’t sure my vehicle would be capable of maneuvering through without being swept off the road. 
Figure 2: An oddly shaped wind-powered water pump, about a mile away from the compound. Cryptocartography (pictured here) was with me for this portion of the exploration, but unfortunately he had to leave before I reached the compound due to scheduling conflicts. It’s not certain that this pump house was affiliated with the cult, but it seems likely. After nearly four hours of frustration I finally reached the edge of the cult compound. The desert is always bit strange, but something about this place seemed far stranger than usual. A mixture of animal pelts, severed hooves, and shattered bone was scattered in a loose circle around the perimeter, increasing in density as I drew closer to the center. Strange looking stones littered the ground, which I recognized as lithic artifacts from an ancient Native American site that the cult had built their compound on top of. Most of the buildings were blackened and charred, and the faint smell of smoke lingered in the air. An oppressive silence filled the compound, much like the dark clouds that hung low over the valley. If there was ever a place on earth I could be convinced was cursed, it was this one.
Our story starts back in 1929 during the rise of the New Age movement, a school of thought that originated in the late nineteenth century which focuses on mysticism and the occult. This philosophy has spawned a diverse collection of offshoots and cults, though they all tend to share common themes such as a belief in psychic powers, astrology, reincarnation, and “spiritual energy.” Though these ideas had been around in America since roughly the 1880s, it wasn’t until the early 1930s that they became mainstream. The economic devastation of the Great Depression left many Americans in spiritual turmoil, and the promises of the New Age movement attracted many disillusioned people who were looking for a way to make sense of it all.
Figure 3: Some of the lithic (stone) Native American artifacts scattered around the cult. The bottom three are flakes, which are waste from the crafting of stone tools. The upper one is a possibly incomplete projectile point (arrowhead or spear tip) or drill bit. 
Figure 4: An outhouse and a house inside the compound. Both are lightly charred but otherwise remarkably undamaged, given that they’ve been abandoned for 85 years. This brings us to the centerpiece of our tale, a woman by the name of Marie Ogden. Ogden was a New Jersey socialite who was very active in East Coast high society during the Roaring Twenties. Her life abruptly changed forever when her husband took ill and died after a long battle with cancer, during which time Ogden was his primary caretaker. This experience shook Ogden to her core and left her grappling with spiritual questions she hadn’t ever spent much time contemplating before. Her search for answers led her to one of the founders of the New Age movement, a man named William Pelley.
Pelley believed that he had an out of body experience late one stormy night, during which God and Jesus appeared to him and tasked him with bringing about the “spiritual restoration” of America. His account of this vision was published in the late 1920s, an account which also claimed that God granted him a variety of psychic powers such as mind reading and levitation. His tale propelled his meteoric rise in the New Age movement and he quickly became one if its foremost spiritual leaders. Pelley set out to build a series of Metaphysical Centers across the country to preach “social metaphysics” and “Christian economics,”. There was just one problem with that- to build those centers he needed money, and lots of it.
Figure 5: One of the abandoned houses in the compound. It was pretty much an empty shell at this point.
Figure 6: The interior of the house pictured in Figure 5.
In 1929 their paths crossed and the pair discovered that each had what the other needed- Pelley had the answers and Ogden had the money. Ogden immediately donated $14,000 (nearly a quarter million when adjusted for inflation) to Pelley’s cause, and by 1932 she had become his single largest financial supporter. But the two soon found that they had irreconcilable differences. Pelley openly supported Adolf Hitler, who at the time had just seized power in Germany, and he professed a strong belief in white supremacy and antisemitism. Ogden strongly disagreed with Pelley’s unrelenting racism and these differences combined with financial disputes led the two to part ways in 1932. Pelley went on to found the openly fascist Christian party and make an unsuccessful bid for the presidency before later being convicted of eleven counts of sedition, high treason, and fomenting insurrection due his attempts to overthrow the US government as the leader of the Silver Legion, the American counterpart to the Nazi Brownshirts.
Meanwhile, Ogden planted the seeds that would become the Home of Truth. Though she no longer associated with Pelley, the four years they spent working together taught her just how far charisma and a lot of money could go. Using the lessons she had learned from Pelley, Ogden created her own religious group known as the School of Truth and began giving lectures across the country. Her traveling seminars quickly made her into a spiritual leader of the New Age movement in her own right as she rapidly gained followers and influence, in part because her teachings provided a more palatable alternative to the deeply racist and anti-Semitic philosophies preached by Pelley. It was during this time that she also came to believe that she was hearing the voice of God in her head. Ogden transcribed the words of this voice and wrote over sixty religious texts on a typewriter, which would become her main form of communication with God in the years to come.
Figure 7: These metal cutouts that were set up near the center of the compound appear to be life-sized, inaccurate representations of the Kokopelli figure. Kokopelli is a Native American trickster deity from the Four Corners region associated with fertility, trade, unity, and rain. Originating from the Ancestral Puebloans around 850 AD, in modern times Kokopelli has become a popular symbol of music, happiness, and luck and is still revered by many Native American tribes today. .
Figure 8: Some slightly more accurate Kokopelli representations. The one on the left with the flute and long hair is the most accurate. While cults come in many different flavors, perhaps one of the most popular are doomsday cults. During one of her typewriting sessions Ogden believed that God revealed the details of an imminent global apocalypse to her, and commanded her to gather the faithful and go west to rebuild the kingdom of Heaven on Earth in its wake. Ogden immediately began searching for a place to make a settlement where she and her followers could survive the rapidly approaching calamity.
After months of searching, Ogden settled on a location in rural Utah that appeared to one of her followers in a dream. Indian Creek was about 100 miles south of Moab, a beautiful desert valley with a steady supply of water and fertile soil. There was just one problem- it was owned by a rancher who wanted half a million dollars for the land, and Ogden didn’t quite have that much money. She made a counteroffer of membership in her cult, but she found that the rancher was unwilling to accept the promise of eternal life in lieu of cold hard cash.
Out of luck, Ogden and her cult settled on the nearby Dry Valley about 15 miles away. This aptly named piece of land was completely unsuitable for agriculture or habitation, but Ogden had a solution for that. She used astrology to calculate that if they simply prayed hard enough, the arid desert of Dry Valley would magically transform into a tropical paradise that would “look like Costa Rica” in a few short years. With this foolproof plan established, Ogden and about twenty of her followers moved in and began setting up the Home of Truth in late 1933.
Figure 9: An old wooden sign stored in one of the houses advertising a public outreach event, likely hosted by the remnants of the cult after its dissolution. 
Figure 10: Another one of the abandoned houses. This one, like the others, is pretty much a shell of its former self. Several of her followers, known as Truth Seekers, had been scouting ahead of the main group for a couple of years at that point and secured several mining claims around Dry Valley. The local newspaper made no mention of their religious beliefs during this time and appear to have assumed that the Truth Seekers were simply yet another mining venture. It wasn’t until Ogden bought said newspaper in 1934 to preach her doctrine that her cult really took off. The Home of Truth consisted of three sections separated by large tracts of desert. There is some disagreement over what they called these sections, but most sources name them as the Outer, Middle, and Inner Portals.
The Outer Portal was mostly communal housing and the Middle Portal contained several houses and an incomplete chapel. The Inner Portal was supposedly the only place in the world that would be spared in the oncoming apocalypse, and it was there that Ogden and her closest followers built their houses. It was also only a few short miles away from the geological formation known as Church Rock, where Odgen believed Jesus would descend from Heaven to initiate Armageddon.
Figure 11: Church Rock, where Odgen prophesized Jesus would return. Credit and thanks to Cryptocartography and the Bureau of Exploration for providing this photo. 
Figure 12: Church Rock at sunset. Credit and thanks to Cryptocartography and the Bureau of Exploration for providing this photo. Ogden quickly laid down an extensive set of rules governing her cult. Hard work, abstinence from earthly vices, and prayer were mandated. Members were expected to surrender all their financial assets and worldly possessions to the cult upon joining, and were prohibited from mortally sinful activities such as sex, alcohol consumption, and putting more than one spoonful of sugar in their morning oatmeal. Cult members lived in poorly constructed wooden cabins without running water or electricity, and just about the only things they had in abundance were scorpions and dust.
Despite these spartan conditions, the lessons Ogden learned about charisma at Pelley’s side paid off and the cult rapidly grew to about a hundred members in just a year. But Ogden soon found that with more people came more problems. It’s significantly easier to manage a group of twenty than it is to manage a group of a hundred- ensuring the basic needs of her followers were met and making sure everyone was obeying the rules became exponentially more difficult as the cult grew, and this destabilized her entire settlement. But the worst of her problems started when a woman by the name of Edith Peshak joined the Home of Truth in January of 1935.
Figure 13: A view of the Inner Portal from atop the rock outcropping that towers over the compound. I watched from the hilltop as a Bureau of Land Management and a sheriff’s deputy stopped by my car in the distance before they moved on, which had me pretty on edge. 
Figure 14: The interior of another one of the houses. Peshak was stricken with terminal cancer no medicine could fix. Desperate for a cure, she joined the Home of Truth in the hopes that the divine healing powers Ogden claimed to possess would save her. Unfortunately for her, Ogden possessed no such powers and a month later Peshak was dead. Her death shook the faith of her fellow Truth Seekers, but Ogden had a solution to that too. She proclaimed that God had granted her the power to raise the dead, just as Jesus raised Lazarus- and anyway, she claimed, Peshak wasn’t really dead. She was merely “visiting the spirit realm” and would return to her body at any moment.
Ogden had several members of the Home of Truth give Peshak’s corpse daily salt baths, as well as administering a mixture of eggs and milk via force feeding and enemas in an attempt to resurrect her while she tried to commune with Peshak’s spirit. When the Monticello sheriff heard about this he went to investigate, but was repeatedly turned away by Ogden before finally managing to gain access to Peshak’s corpse with a doctor in tow. The doctor wasn’t fooled by the “she’s not dead, she’s just sleeping” defense, but he found that the salt, egg, and milk treatments had mummified her corpse such that it posed no hazard to public health. Utah had no laws on the books at the time that mandated the burial of corpses so long as they didn’t endanger public health, so the sheriff had no choice but to let the Home of Truth keep Peshak’s corpse to do with as they please. There may have also been broader political motivations at play, as robbing Native American graves was a popular Sunday afternoon activity for white townsfolk in Monticello during this time period. If the Sheriff prosecuted the Truth Seekers for their mishandling of a corpse then he could no longer turn a blind eye to the looting the rest of the townsfolk were participating in. Either way, his hands were tied and Peshak’s corpse remained with the cult.
Figure 15: One of several stone root cellars constructed around the Inner Portal to store food, particularly vegetables. Though modern refrigeration had started to replace ice boxes around this time, the technology took a while to become commonplace in rural areas. 
Figure 16: Yet another abandoned house. Though they might have dodged initial legal trouble, the Home of Truth faced bigger problems from Peshak’s death. Utah tends to be relatively tolerant of weird religious groups, mostly owing to its deeply Mormon history. But this desecration of a corpse was a step too far for the residents of neighboring towns, and the Home of Truth soon found itself to be the subject of ridicule and disgust throughout all of Utah. Truth Seekers couldn’t even show their faces in Monticello or Moab without facing open hostility, which was a significant problem for them considering that many of the cultists worked in town to make money for the cult or even rented rooms with townsfolk once the Home of Truth’s population outgrew its infrastructure. As the tale of their necromancy attempts soon spread to the national stage, newspapers across the country began running headlines in late 1935 that painted the Home of Truth as a bunch of deranged, lunatic cultists who were doing unspeakable things to corpses in the desert. They didn’t even need to exaggerate because the truth was damning enough.
As the cultists found themselves unwelcome across Utah they began to abandon the Home of Truth in droves. Ogden struggled to maintain her hold over her rapidly dwindling cult for two years afterwards as she faced increasing difficulties from the national media circus and from an arson attack, likely by a disgruntled former cultist. But the killing blow came from none other than Peshak’s son, a former believer who deserted the cult when his mother died. Furious over the desecration of his mother’s corpse, he pressed the Utah Board of Health to prosecute Ogden for failing to cooperate with attempts to obtain a death certificate. State authorities once again showed up to try and seize Peshak’s corpse, but Ogden could not produce it. It was then that one Truth Seeker confessed to secretly stealing and cremating her corpse on Ogden’s orders two years prior, and with that confession Ogden was reluctantly forced to sign the death certificate in 1937.
Figure 17: Unlike most of the houses, this was one of three houses that appeared to be still in use for storage. Supposedly a local family bought the land after Odgen’s death and use some of the houses for storage. Given the new locks on the doors and the mountains of stuff I could see through the windows, that rumor seems pretty accurate. 
Figure 18: The entrance to the Inner Portal. The heavily faded sign on the right hand side of the picture reads “Marie’s Place” and used to hang over the gate until it fell at an unknown point in time. With Ogden’s supposed psychic resurrection powers firmly debunked, the Home of Truth imploded. All but seven members left and Ogden went from a religious leader to a laughingstock of the New Age world overnight. She lived out the rest of her days at her house in the Inner Portal with her seven remaining followers and taught piano lessons to local children to make ends meet until her death in 1975. Ogden wrote a full manuscript detailing her teachings and beliefs that she intended to be her masterwork, but it never reached publication. Upon her death the seven remaining Truth Seekers abandoned the compound and burned her manuscript to prevent it from falling into the hands of her enemies.
But here’s where it gets interesting. Though this is the official version of events, local rumor in Monticello holds that there’s more to the story. Supposedly, the seven remaining cultists didn’t abandon it in 1975 because Ogden died- if the rumors are true, they were forced to abandon it because they tried to continue with their necromantic traditions, but a lot had changed in forty years. It’s said that they tried to mummify her body like they did Peshak’s, only to find that the local Sheriff’s office did not have the same tolerance for corpse desecration it once did, and they were forced to leave or face prosecution. Some rumors go even further and claim that they tried to carry out multiple Sky Burials (leaving a corpse out in the open for natural forces to dispose of) in the middle of the Inner Portal but attracted carrion eaters and were declared a public health hazard. The Home of Truth is an open secret to this day among the townsfolk of Moab and Monticello and everybody seems to know something, though nobody wants to talk too much about it. The truth may remain a small town secret forever, as these things tend to do.
Either way, though the Home of Truth was short lived it still has an impact to this day. The New Age ideas that Ogden and Pelley pioneered inspired famous cults such as the Branch Davidans at Waco, as well as the Jonestown and Heaven’s Gate suicide cults. Just last year the leader of the New Age cult known as Love Has Won was found dead, her body mummified and wrapped in Christmas lights and glitter by her followers in an attempt to resurrect her just as the Truth Seekers had attempted nearly 85 years prior. Though Ogden and the Home of Truth are long gone, their teachings laid the groundwork for dozens if not hundreds of modern doomsday and necromantic cults that still occasionally make the news in modern times.
Figure 19: The remnants of the never-completed chapel in the Middle Portal. These ruins and a few small wooden cabins are all that remain of the Middle Portal. The Outer Portal was demolished many years ago, leaving the Inner Portal as the most intact section of the compound. 
Figure 20: One of the few remaining houses in the Middle Portal. Unfortunately it appears to have several modern trailers set up nearby for local cowboys so I couldn’t get too close, but it looked pretty empty anyway. Though I was able to explore the Inner Portal without too much trouble, I began running into problems the longer I spent in the compound. As I attempted to reach the Middle Portal I discovered that the flooding had waterlogged the ground to such an extent that the desert had turned to quicksand. Fortunately it wasn’t very deep, but I quickly found myself stuck and sinking in the mire. Even as I was struggling to free myself from the knee deep quicksand I was noticed by another passing Bureau of Land Management worker in the distance. He simply stood on the side of the road and watched me struggle for a few minutes before driving away without a word. I thought I’d been caught and in this hobby, knowing when to cut your losses is key- so I decided to bail and get out of town before he sent the sheriff my way again, but that ended up being more difficult than expected.
As it turned out, the reason I was being watched so frequently wasn’t because the sheriff and BLM workers cared that I was trespassing- they were seeing if I was stranded. I discovered that the entire left half of the highway had collapsed for nearly a quarter mile, right where I needed to go to get out. If the universe made it difficult to get into the Home of Truth, it made getting out even more so. My hands were clenched tightly on my steering wheel as I slowly tried to navigate the collapsing highway without crashing into a sinkhole, and somehow I made it through- only to find that the Sheriff had set up roadblocks at both ends of the road, forcing me to bluff my way past a deputy with a vague excuse about "doing some landscape photography" that wasn't even really a lie from a certain point of view. Once I got out I floored the gas to try and make it home before the storm could cause even more problems for me. I didn't succeed, but that's a story for another day.
Figure 21: The Bureau of Land Management worker watching me from across the pasture as I was trying to reach the Middle Portal. 
Figure 22: The collapsed section of highway I had to navigate to make my escape from the compound. I’ve never seen a road deteriorate so fast before- three hours prior, this was the same stretch of highway pictured in Figure 1. So there you have it. I’m not a superstitious man and I’m not saying my misfortunes were due to angering a commune of necromantic cult ghosts, but I’m not
not saying that either. And as for the Home of Truth? It still stands to this day, and neither fire nor flood alike have been able purge the land of what was done there.
After all, in the desert the dead tend to linger.
Sources: Wikipedia: Home of Truth, UtahWikipedia: William Dudley PelleyAtlas Obscura: Home of TruthOnly In Your State: Most People Don't Know This Weird Utah Ghost Town Even ExistedThayne, Stanley: The Home of Truth; The Metaphysical World of Marie OdgenMedium.com: Where Roses Never Fade; The Bizarre Story of Marie Ogden and Home of Truth, Utah’s First New Age CultWikipedia: Love Has WonRush.com: A New Age of Enlightenment; Cult DynamicsBustle: Six Famous Doomsday Cults (Who Were Obviously Wrong)Mythologian.net: Kokopelli Trickster God of Fertility, the Symbol and Its Meaning 
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Glad that you made it out without incident. 
