Believers

I attended a small Appalachian college for a year after finishing high school and was required to take a class in speech. I liked the class a lot, as it mostly involved giving or listening to short presentations and a lot of solo and group improvisation. The professor had been in a few small roles on Broadway, many years earlier, and had been good friends with the famous actor Lee J. Cobb. He would occasionally drop a comment about "how Lee might have done it."

I made friends with some very interesting people in the class. One guy had been in a cult, a local offshoot of the Hare Krishnas. This mystical Hindu sect had already established small groups on remote, inexpensive land in West Virginia, and eventually would erect a huge mansion in the north-central part of the state, with hundreds of members.

There were several types of Krishnas. One group shaved their heads and sold flowers in public places. Others dealt drugs or begged on street corners or stole credit cards to raise money. A third group dressed and acted like typical, if very friendly, young people, with casual dress and impeccable manners. The job of the latter group was to recruit new members, and my friend had fallen in with them.

He described how he met this very nice group of students at a nearby college and they invited him to go hiking with them along the beautiful Appalachian Trail that ran close to the campus.

He was having such a great time that when they decided to stay another night, he did the same.

They invited him back to their cabin for breakfast, then a hike, and since it was late in the day when they got back, they offered him a room for the night. They started the evening with dinner and wine and singing familiar songs, and he joined in. A cute girl got him up to dance.

He liked them all so much, and felt such love from them, he didn't want to disappoint them by leaving. A day turned into two, then a week. He stayed in the cult for two years, until his parents had him kidnapped and deprogrammed.

It was quite a tale.

There were (and are) numerous cults in West Virginia, drawn to the cheap land. Some are only marginally cults as such, just back-to-the-landers with a charismatic leader who’d found a place to live in the middle of nowhere, beyond the reach of most law enforcement.

Some truly religious cults sprang up from a combination of devout biblical fundamentalism and the gullibility that too often comes from cultural and geographic isolation. Much as land holding companies saw West Virginia as a vast pool of minerals, with unsophisticated and pliable locals, cults saw in its rugged beauty and cheap real estate the possibility of new Edens.

And then there was Charles Manson, who lived for a while in Charleston. His mother served time in prison near Morgantown, in the north central part of the state. Several of his followers served decades in prison in the women's facility in the southern part of the state. In 1983 Manson wrote a letter to the West Virginia Penitentiary in Moundsville, asking to be transferred to West Virginia from a California prison. His request was denied.

One of the largest Hare Krishna branches in the world sought, beginning in 1968, to turn the entire state into its own small country of believers. Having the Beatles, especially George Harrison, become involved with Krishna Consciousness caused millions of young people to experiment with it.

Its first American outpost, New Vrindaban--"the Taj Mahal of Appalachia"-- is also near Moundsville and seems to be thriving, despite charges of murder, abuse, and kidnapping brought against its charismatic leaders over the years. (See the podcast The Hare Krishna Murders for an account of the crimes and trials.)

Today about 350 adherents worship regularly at the enormous temple, and tens of thousands of Hindu pilgrims and tourists visit it each year, bringing an ironic new meaning to the state motto Almost Heaven, which is drawn from John Denver’s ubiquitous hit Take Me Home, Country Roads.

For what it's worth, pay attention to the lyrics of the song. Neither the Blue Ridge mountains nor the Shenandoah River are in West Virginia.

But once an idea takes hold it doesn’t really matter whether it’s true or not. As time has gone by, I’ve gotten less and less surprised at how tightly people cling to their beliefs no matter the evidence against them.

Photo courtesy New Vrindaban