What You Don't Know About the World's Deadliest Cults

Added: 2026-05-13

[00:00:00]The scariest cults from around the world. Number one, the restoration of the Ten Commandments of God. On March 17th, 2000, a group of people in the countryside of Uganda were invited to a party. The leaders of their religious group had thrown it as a peace offering.

[00:00:14]Things have been tense recently. You see, a prophecy hadn't come true. A prophecy that January 1st, 2000 would ring in the end of the world, the apocalypse. And when it didn't happen, members started asking questions. Some were demanding their money back, and the whole organization was starting to fracture. So the leader said, "Come over. Let's eat. Let's drink. Let's smooth this over. All of this is part of God's plan. Trust us." And the members showed up, lots of them. Then the doors were locked from the outside, trapping everyone inside while the building was set on fire. 530 people died that day.

[00:00:45]And in the days that followed, investigators found additional mass graves on properties connected to the group. The final death toll reached 778 people, making this the deadliest cult event in recorded history. That's more than Jonestown. And that's more than Heaven's Gate, which we'll get to in a second. More than anything most people think of when they think of cults, and most people in the West have never heard of it. The group was called the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God. Rolls right off the tongue, right?

[00:01:10]It was founded in southwestern Uganda in the late 1980s by a collection of former Catholic Church officials who claimed to have received direct visions from the Virgin Mary. The message they built around those visions was, by cult standards, pretty familiar. The world was ending. Humanity has strayed too far from God's commandments, and only the people in this group were going to make it through what was coming. Very original. What was less familiar was how they ran the day-to-day. Members were forbidden from speaking unnecessarily.

[00:01:33]Silence was considered a form of holiness. They communicated through sign language and hand gestures. They ate at communal meals together twice a week, no more. And they surrendered their possessions, their land, and their property to the organization. All on the understanding that none of it was going to matter when the apocalypse arrived, which is a great deal if the apocalypse actually arrives. and a massive problem if it doesn't. The date they had circled was December 31st, 1999, the turn of the millennium. God would come, the faithful would be taken, and everything else would end. It didn't happen. So, New Year's Day 2000 arrived like it always does, quietly with a hangover, completely absent of divine intervention. And suddenly, the members of the restoration of the Ten Commandments of God were standing in the wreckage of a prophecy that hadn't come true, having handed over everything they owned to people who'd promised them the world was ending. So, some members started asking where the property was, where their money had gone. The leaders then announced a revised date, March 17th, 2000, a new timeline, and to build goodwill. They threw a party. You already know how that ended. The leaders were never prosecuted. Most of them died in the fire alongside their members.

[00:02:36]Although, investigators were never entirely sure which deaths were willing and which weren't, and the surviving members scattered. Because the group had operated deep in a rural area with almost no outside contact, piecing together the full picture took years.

[00:02:49]Heaven's Gate. Picture this. You're walking down the street, minding your own business, and a couple approaches you. Normal looking, friendly. They say they're spiritual guides, and they have some information that could change your life. They want to help you transcend humanity, become an immortal extraterrestrial being, actually ascend to the next level of existence. And you think, "Okay, these people are insane, so I'm going to keep walking." But let's say you didn't do that. Let's say something about them makes you take the flyer. You go to the meeting and instead of your suspicions being confirmed and you leaving after 10 minutes, something lands. You start to believe that these are maybe the most important people you have ever met in your life.

[00:03:24]Congratulations, you just joined Heaven's Gate. Heaven's Gate was founded in 1974 by two people, Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles. They met two years earlier and went on what they described as a shared spiritual journey, which they came out of believing they were the two witnesses described in the book of Revelation. not inspired by, not followers of the actual two witnesses.

[00:03:43]That claim alone delivered with enough conviction was enough to start pulling people in. By the mid70s, they were drawing crowds to meetings and within a few years they had members fully committing, giving up jobs, cutting off families, adopting what they called a monastic lifestyle. Everything was dedicated to Heaven's Gate. Nothing and no one else. Now, what made this cult unusual, even by cult standards, is a specific flavor of the belief system.

[00:04:05]This wasn't a straightforward religious group. Heaven's Gate was classified as a UFO religion. Wild, right? The central idea was that human beings could transform themselves into immortal extraterrestrial beings, but only by completely rejecting their human nature.

[00:04:20]The body was essentially a vehicle, a temporary container, and the goal was to leave it behind and ascend to what they called the next level. They believed that Jesus was an alien. That's not a paraphrase, by the way. That was the doctrine. To grow this totally sane movement, Apple White and Nettles, who by this point had renamed themselves Doo and T, that's duty if you say it together fast, took out ads and distributed flyers at public meetings where they'd recruit what they called the crew. They weren't subtle about it either. There was no easing anyone in.

[00:04:46]First meeting, they were already talking about being representatives of another planet, looking for people willing to participate in an experiment that would bring them to a higher evolutionary level. And people stayed. In 1975, they preached at a motel in Oregon. After that single session, over 20 people sold everything they owned and essentially vanished. No contact with family, no contact with friends, just gone underground with Heaven's Gate, following duty across the country. At its peak, the group had well over a 100 members living this way, fully committed and completely isolated. Fast forward to 1996, and the group rents a mansion in Rancho Santa Fe, California. This thing is 10,000 square ft. Cost them $7,000 a month, almost $15,000 in today's money.

[00:05:27]They called it the monastery. They also around this time took out alien abduction insurance on each of their members. In early 1997, Hailbop, one of the brightest comets of the 20th century, was visible in the night sky.

[00:05:39]Apple White, that's the D of duty, became convinced that there was a spacecraft following in the comet's wake and that this was a sign that they had been waiting for. He recorded a video called D's final exit. And in it, he explained that mass death was the only way to evacuate Earth and reach the next level. The timing would align with the comet's closest pass to Earth so their souls could make the journey. Over the following days, 39 people, including Apple White, consumed a mixture of phenobarbadol and vodka, then lay down in their bunks wearing identical black tracksuits and Nike sneakers and a purple shroud placed over them. They were found on March 26th, 1997. You know, the thing that stays with you about Heaven's Gate beyond the obvious is how deliberate all was. These weren't people who were panicked or coerced in the final moments. I mean, they had packed bags. Literally, each person had a packed overnight bag next to their bunk as if they were catching a flight.

[00:06:23]They had a $5 bill and some quarters in their pockets, and they left farewell videos. They were all calm, and that's the part that's pretty hard to explain away. Heaven's Gate website, by the way, is still live, run by two surviving members who chose not to participate in 1997 and have maintained it ever since.

[00:06:37]It truly is a time capsule. The content hasn't changed at all. And if you go there today, it reads exactly as it did before the deaths. Children of God, founded in 1968 by a man named David Berg. The Children of God initially pulled in young people with a pretty simple pitch. Love, communal living, devotion to God. This was the late60s and that message had real traction. And for a while, the group operated more or less as advertised. Believe it or not, they were really conservative. Actually, early on, they didn't even believe in holding hands before marriage, which, okay, I guess different approach. But then, Berg had an affair with his personal assistant. And here's where you start to see the pattern that shows up in almost every cult. Eventually, the beliefs start bending to fit what the leader wants. Berg began introducing the concept of what he called sharing. Yeah, it was that kind of cult. It started as polygamy and escalated over time into something far darker, but we'll get to that. The group's core doctrine was built around an apocalyptic prophecy.

[00:07:29]Berg claimed the world was ending in 1993. Notice another pattern. The whole point of the children of God was to prepare for that, to dedicate every waking hour to God before the end times arrived. Children in the group weren't educated. Berg considered it a waste of time given the deadline. So members, adults and kids alike, just waited, sang songs, prayed. A former member named F Edwards described the mindset at the time as euphoric, the feeling of being chosen, of having already secured a place in what came next, which helps explain how Berg kept people in line, even as the doctrine got progressively harder to justify. At its peak, the group had over 10,000 members worldwide, just an absolutely mind-blowing number.

[00:08:06]Berg himself wasn't visible to most of them. The group was too large for that.

[00:08:10]Instead, he communicated through what he called mole letters, which is, ironically enough an anagram for molesters, which were daily written dispatches where he'd take Bible verses and weave in his own doctrine. He wrote over 3,000 of these. The imagery in many of them was, to put it generously, graphic. The group also produced a children's television program, and I know exactly where your head went when I said that, and the answer is yes. It was called Life with Grandpa, and Grandpa being Berg himself, of course. Jesus Christ. The show was used to teach children the values of the group. One episode featured a woman depicted as a robot and grandpa explaining at length how much he loved her. And other episodes had young girls singing about their purpose being to cook, clean, and serve the men in their lives. And that's the tame end of it. Berg's concept of quote unquote sharing eventually became the group's most documented horror. He taught that Jesus had created love and sex for people to enjoy freely with anyone at any time without limits.

[00:09:03]Former members who were children in the group have described being pressured into situations they didn't understand and manipulated in compliance through the threat of divine punishment. The idea that saying no meant not making it to heaven. What the [ __ ] The children of God faced legal investigations in multiple countries throughout the 70s and 80s. Bergwood died from natural causes in 1994 and his former assistant, the one he had the affair with, took over and tried to distance the organization from its history. It didn't really work and the group went from 10,000 members to a small scattered internet community. Also, the world didn't end in 1993. I'm sure you figured that part out, but that probably didn't help with retention either. Angel's Landing. A man showed up in Witchah, Kansas, calling himself Lou Castro. He said he was a thousand years old, a combination of three angels, that he died and came back to life. And because of that, he could predict when other people were going to die, and if you were close to him, potentially bring you back if it happened to you. From the outside, the compound he ran looked like a genuinely good time. 10 acres, ATVs, luxury vehicles, community barbecues in the backyard. He donated to the local police department and even opened his ATV track to the neighborhood. No one who showed up to the parties could square this open, generous, flashy guy with someone who had something to hide, which as it turns out was kind of the point. Around 10 people lived with them full-time, and they had everything provided. Food, housing, technology, entertainment, all covered by Lou.

[00:10:22]Pretty sweet deal, huh? The only strange thing was that nobody could figure out where the money came from. Lou said that he had stocks and bonds, a cattle ranch in Texas, and nobody really pushed it because they were directly benefiting from it. But the narcotics division of local law enforcement had actually been quietly watching the compound before anything went visibly wrong. The unexplained wealth looked to them like a drug operation. What they didn't know yet was that Lou's business model was considerably more direct. In 2003, a woman named Patricia, Lou's right-hand person in the group, died on the property. She fell, hit her head, and ended up in a pool. It was ruled accidental. Tragic, but not obviously suspicious. Well, wouldn't you know it, the group waited for Lou to bring her back. He promised he could do that, remember? Yeah. After some time passed, Lou changed his position. He said that Patricia was somewhere better now, and that the goal should be to meet her there, not bring her back here.

[00:11:12]Convenient. 3 years later, Patricia's husband, who was also a member, was working under his car when the jack failed. He was crushed and killed and also ruled accidental. But the FBI, who had been circling for a while, found this pretty odd. They started looking at the insurance policies, and well, both Patricia and her husband happen to have large life insurance policies. Both paid out to Angel's Landing, which was entirely controlled by Lou Castro. Each policy was worth over a million dollars, and the FBI's curiosity peaked even further. 2 years after that, a third death. The real estate agent who had originally sold Lou the property had, shortly after meeting him, been told by Lou that he was an angel. And what'd she do after hearing that? She packed up her and her two young daughters from Missouri to move into the compound, leaving her husband behind. Lou would call her daughters in one day and told them that their mother was going to die soon. They even told her, but she just brushed it off and reassured everyone that she'd be fine. 2 days later, she died in a car accident and another insurance payout due to hit lose account. At this point, detectives needed to get a look inside the house.

[00:12:10]Something was up, and they knew it. They knocked on the door and under the pretense of asking Glue to help identify local criminals from photographs. They got into the living room and started handing him pictures, hoping to lift fingerprints. And you know what Lou did?

[00:12:20]Lou handled every photograph with only his fingernails. They got him on bank fraud while they built the larger case against him. And what finally broke it wide open was that the older of the two daughters, who was now an adult, telling her boyfriend everything one night. He waited until she was asleep, went to the FBI website, and reported everything he'd heard. And the young daughter cooperated with investigators shortly after. The investigation revealed that Luke Castro's real name was Daniel Perez. No birth certificate, no driver's license, no documented existence under the name he'd been using at all. Only an obituary connected him to a previous commune in Texas where a woman he'd lived with had died in a small plane crash along with her new boyfriend and her daughter. Remember what I said earlier about patterns? Turns out that Lou had previously worked as a plane mechanic and their deaths were ruled accidental. In 2015, Daniel Perez was sentenced to 80 years in prison.