Devotion
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What are the three unsettling stories about devotion and madness?
Today's podcast will feature three stories about acts so strange and unsettling, they blur the line between devotion and madness. The audio from all three of these stories has been pulled from our main YouTube channel and has been remastered for today's episode. The links to the original YouTube videos are in the description. The first story you'll hear is called Exit Interviews, and it's about one of the most infamous cult cases in history. The second story you'll hear is called A Family Ritual, and it's about a sickening act a family performs together. Keep in mind, for this story, listener discretion is advised. And the third and final story you'll hear is called The Helping Hand. And in this story, a literal hand washes up on a beach in Florida, after which a very mysterious case begins to unravel.
But before we get into today's stories, if you're a fan of the Strange, Dark, and Mysterious delivered in story format, then you've come to the right podcast because that's all we do and we upload four times a week, Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Fridays. So if that's of interest to you, please offer to make the like button a nice peanut butter and jelly sandwich. But make sure you employ a six to one peanut butter to jelly ratio. Okay, let's get into our first story called Exit Interviews.
In the early 1970s, a man named Marshall Applewhite was fired from his music teaching job for having an inappropriate relationship with a male student. Shortly after, he admitted himself into a psychiatric institution where he met a nurse who worked there named Bonnie Nettles. Both had a deep interest in biblical prophecy, and Applewhite, after meeting Nettles, was convinced they had met in a previous life. Nettles agreed and took it a step further, saying extraterrestrials had come to her and preordained that she would someday meet Applewhite. The two did not have a romantic relationship at all. It was strictly platonic. They bonded over a desire to ascend to a higher level of existence and ultimately reach the kingdom of heaven.
Applewhite began calling himself Bo, and Nettles became Peep, and together, they would start an infamous cult known as Heaven's Gate. The premise of Heaven's Gate was that an alien spacecraft that they simply called the UFO was going to come to Earth and whisk away Heaven's Gate cult members, elevating them to a new world and a better life that they referred to as Tela, or the evolutionary level above human. There was a catch, though. Anybody on Earth who did not get on the UFO whenever it got here would be recycled, i.e. destroyed, along with everybody else on Earth. And then at some point, a new human population would grow and another UFO would come and whoever got on that would be saved over and over and over again.
That was just how it worked. And Bo and Peep were telling everyone they talked to about Heaven's Gate that we're already in end times. Apparently there were signs that this UFO is going to be here any day. And so now is the time to join the cult. And so by 1975, Bo and Peep had recruited 20 people to be a part of their cult, which meant they gave up their families, they gave up their possessions. They basically gave up everything in their life and moved to Colorado to live in total poverty as they waited for this UFO to arrive. For 10 years, cult members waited and waited for this UFO that never showed up. And Bo and Peep are aggressively reminding people that this is the path, you just gotta stay the path.
And then Peep unexpectedly died of cancer in 1985, which really screwed things up for the cult. In their doctrine, it was destiny that Bo and Peep would get on that UFO and make their way to Tela, the evolutionary level above human. That was their destiny. And now Peep has died on planet Earth. She did not get on the UFO. She did not ascend to Tella. She will not get to Heaven's Gate. Bo was devastated and horribly depressed, and it wasn't really clear what was going to happen to Heaven's Gate. But he composed himself, and he began to tweak his messaging a little bit.
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