TW: demise by suicide

Subsequent month (March 26) marks the twenty sixth anniversary of the Heaven’s Gate cult mass suicide—when 39 folks ingested poison in a Rancho Santa Fe Mansion, within the hopes of catching a journey on the Hale-Bopp comet. Impressed by cult leaders Bonnie Nettles and Marshall Applewhite, the group strived to succeed in what they known as the “Kingdom Stage Above Human,” and believed that by killing themselves they had been releasing themselves from their bodily vessels and would ascend to heaven aboard a UFO. It is a horrible story and method too paying homage to the Jim Jones Jonestown bloodbath.

Whether or not you are accustomed to the case or are simply listening to about it, if you wish to be taught extra, the podcast “Homicide in America” simply launched a terrific episode overlaying it. The podcast, hosted by Courtney Browen and Colin Browen, describes the episode:

On March twenty sixth, 1997, the most important suicide mass on US soil was unearthed in a prestigious neighborhood of San Diego, known as Rancho Santa Fe, California. To the skin, it gave the impression to be a mass suicide, a horrible and unlucky occasion. However to the 39 folks inside, it was a graduation—a commencement that their chief, Marshall Herff Applewhite, had been preaching to them for years. That is the story of The Heaven’s Gate Cult and you might be listening to Homicide in America. 

Although I am fairly accustomed to this case—I lived in New Mexico when it occurred, and had a buddy who was doing ethnographic analysis for his dissertation on New Age teams in Taos who had met the group and took copious fieldnotes at a few of their conferences, which he shared with me—I nonetheless realized new info from this episode, together with that no less than 4 former members of the cult died by suicide within the months and years following the 1997 mass suicide. What a horrible addendum to an already tragic occasion.