Tag: cults

Former Mormon lifts the lid on church’s ‘creepy’ baptisms for the DEAD that sees children being put through ‘traumatizing’ ceremonies to ‘save’ those who have passed away

A former Mormon has lifted the lid on the church’s bizarre ‘baptisms for the dead’ – revealing the temple sent her to a cemetery to take pictures of gravestones as a kid and then forced her to participate in a ceremony for the deceased.

Alyssa Grenfell, 31, who now works as an assistant principle in Austin, Texas, was raised in a ‘devout Mormon family’ in Utah, but decided to leave the ‘controlling religion’ in 2017.

She has since dedicated her life to helping others ‘navigate their own way out of the LDS church’ – releasing her own ‘guide’ called How to Leave the Mormon Church, while also becoming a viral social media star for sharing her experiences online.

Most recently, Alyssa spoke out about a ‘creepy’ process that saw the group baptize people who have passed away – even if they weren’t members of the religion before their death.

In a video shared to her YouTube channel last week, where she has more than 85,000 subscribers, Alyssa announced: ‘The Mormon church is baptizing your dead relatives.’

She explained that members of the religion believe that ‘everyone must be baptized by the proper Mormon authority’ to move on to ‘Spirit Paradise’ when they pass away.

‘Essentially, when someone passes away, if they haven’t had the chance to receive a Mormon baptism, they’re not saved,’ she said.

‘So Mormons take the names of those who have not been baptized and take them to the LDS temple.

‘They also believe that it’s up to the person to accept or reject the baptism on the other side.

‘That’s why Mormons have no qualms about baptizing basically everybody against their will because they think everyone should have the chance to accept or reject it, and that the choice is left to them once the practice is complete.’ 

Alyssa explained that when someone living would get baptized, the priest would also baptize anywhere between five and 15 dead people at the same time.

And for each deceased person, the living person who is getting baptized must be dunked into the water, which meant they were sometimes going under ‘over and over again’ in quick succession.

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Life inside rural ‘secret society’ that claims to communicate with aliens and time travel

A small commune located in the foothills of the Alps claims to have found ways to talk to aliens and time travel.

Tucked away in the Piedmont region of northern Italy, the Federation of Damanhur is a spiritual ecovillage that has been around for nearly 50 years. It’s made up of more than a thousand members dotted across the world and around 600 of them live together in a rural commune.

Very little has been documented about the ‘secret society’ in the public eye – up until now. Travel enthusiast Warren Robie spent four days with the Damanhurians, who are named after animals and practise spirituality. Speaking to the Mirror about his experience, Warren said: “Damanhur is a true mystery.”

The Liverpudlian, 23, who is a full-time social media creator, visited the Damanhur earlier this month. He said: “I wanted to visit to explore a different way of life to the norm, and try and get in with the locals to see how they live and what their society is about.” The commune, located just north of Turin city, was founded in 1975 by their leader known as Falco Tarassaco.

Falco was a former insurance broker, born to the name Oberto Airaudi, who wanted to appreciate and share the simple existence of life. In the decades since he first formed the commune, it has become self-sufficient and hundreds of followers have packed up their previous modern-day lives and jobs and joined the society.

“It is a place of spiritual communities based in the Italian foothills of the Alps. The Damanhurians are named after animals and plants, live in houses of up to 25 people, perform rituals and believe to be in contact with aliens,” Warren explained. “I wanted to live like them for four days to grasp a real understanding of their way of life.”

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Man Shot by Mom’s Boyfriend in Viral Video Was in a Satanic Cult—and Now the Mom Is Dead

About two weeks ago, a video went viral of a Tennessee man shooting his girlfriend’s son at point-blank range. The son, Kyle Spitze, survived, while the boyfriend committed suicide after a standoff with police.

That bizarre story, which occurred in August but only went viral recently, just took a deeply disturbing twist.

On Sunday, Spitze’s mother, Melanie Spitze, was found dead in a hotel room—as first reported on Twitter by the online researcher “Bx.”

Headline USA reviewed the graphic video described in Bx’s tweet, and it indeed shows a woman prone on the floor, hair covering her face, with blood-soaked sheets on the bed nearby.

“I just woke up and there’s blood everywhere, and mom won’t breath, and I’m fucking scared. Mom … Mom, please wake up, please,” Kyle can be heard saying in the video, which Headline USA isn’t sharing out of respect for Melanie. “This is so traumatizing.”

Later, Kyle can be heard giving his social security number to a law enforcement officer. That social security number matches the number for Kyle on a doxing website—which indicates that it’s really him in the video. The arm seen in the video also has the same bracelet Kyle wears in other photos.

That bizarre story, which occurred in August but only went viral recently, just took a deeply disturbing twist.

On Sunday, Spitze’s mother, Melanie Spitze, was found dead in a hotel room—as first reported on Twitter by the online researcher “Bx.”

Headline USA reviewed the graphic video described in Bx’s tweet, and it indeed shows a woman prone on the floor, hair covering her face, with blood-soaked sheets on the bed nearby.

“I just woke up and there’s blood everywhere, and mom won’t breath, and I’m fucking scared. Mom … Mom, please wake up, please,” Kyle can be heard saying in the video, which Headline USA isn’t sharing out of respect for Melanie. “This is so traumatizing.”

Later, Kyle can be heard giving his social security number to a law enforcement officer. That social security number matches the number for Kyle on a doxing website—which indicates that it’s really him in the video. The arm seen in the video also has the same bracelet Kyle wears in other photos.

Involvement in a Sadistic Satanic Cult

But now Kyle’s biological father has confirmed the online rumors that his son was in the Satanic cult “764,” which is an offshoot of the Order of the Nine Angles, or O9A—a neo-Nazi accelerationist group involved in multiple terrorist plots.

According to the Justice Department and others, O9A has a terroristic goal in mind: to corrupt the youth, which will accelerate the collapse of Western society.

The 764 cult “represents a radical shift in the group to specifically target children and use [child porn] and videos depicting animal cruelty, self-harm, and other acts of violence to accelerate chaos in society,” the DOJ said in recent court filings.

Spitze’s father, Michael Spitze, told Headline USA that his son spiraled into Satanic cults about six years ago, when he and the now-deceased Melanie were getting separated. Spitze said his son, who was 18 at the time, was groomed by a woman named “Tara,” who was nearly 20 years his senior.

“He was just turning 18, and that woman convinced him to move to Washington state. and she groomed him and taught him how to do all that stuff online,” the father said. “I hate her.”

Mr. Spitze stated emphatically that he believes his son Kyle’s involvement with Satanic cults is entirely unrelated to his mother’s death.

“My wife’s death has nothing to do with Kyle’s indiscretions over the past how many years in this 764 club shit,” he said.

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Daughter of ‘Mormon Manson’ Ervil LeBaron lifts the lid on what it was like to grow up under terrifying control of polygamous cult leader who ordered the MURDERS of multiple people as part of heinous ‘Blood Atonement’ killings to ‘cleanse their sins’

The daughter of polygamous cult leader Ervil LeBaron – who was dubbed the Mormon Manson for orchestrating more than two dozens murders both inside and outside of the sect – has revealed what her life was like growing up.

Celia LeBaron, now 57, was born into the Church of the Lamb of God – a fundamentalist Mormon breakaway group which continued to practice polygamy and even followed the ‘Blood Atonement’ teaching that stated the blood of sinners needed to be shed for them to ascend to heaven.

Her father was ultimately sentenced to life in prison but continued to create hit lists from behind bars for his followers to carry out.

Ervil, who died in a Utah state prison in 1981, is estimated to have had 25 people killed as a result of his orders – with deaths including that of his own pregnant daughter. 

Celia, who is now a mother of three, appeared on an episode of the Cults to Consciousness podcast to unravel her childhood memories.

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‘Sect and the city’: Striking photo shows bosses of ‘orgasm cult’ OneTaste leave NYC courthouse with female entourage, after two of them were charged with forcing women into sex acts

It made for a glamorous change to the usual perp walk outside Brooklyn Federal Court.

The founder and the ex-sales boss at ‘orgasmic meditation cult’ OneTaste dressed to impress as they appeared with an entourage of supporters to face charges of forcing women into sex acts and keeping them in ‘residential warehouses‘.

But there were no grimy mugshots for Nicole Daedone and Rachel Cherwitz as they faced down photographers outside the New York courthouse for a procedural hearing on Thursday. 

Their San Francisco based company was making $12million a year from their sexual disfunction treatments for women which included being genitally massaged by a man with a latex glove.

It won praise from celebrities including Gwyneth Paltrow and Khloe Kardashian, and welcomed 35,000 people to its events in 2018.

But the FBI began investigating in November that year after ex-customers came forward saying they were left in debt after paying for expensive classes, and former employees said they were ordered to have sex with potential investors.

Former staffer Ayries Blanck filed a lawsuit against the company in August of 2015, claiming they subjected her to a ‘hostile work environment, sexual harassment, failure to pay minimum wage and intentional infliction of emotional distress’.

But she was counter-sued by the group for breaking a non-disclosure agreement when she contributed to the 2022 Netflix documentary Orgasm Inc: The Story of OneTaste in 2022.

Blanck’s sister Autymn repeated allegations that OneTaste ‘condoned violence’ and ‘found strangers to rape her’.

Prosecutors say that Daedone and former head of sales Rachel Cherwitz deployed a series of abusive and manipulative tactics against volunteers, contractors, and employees.

They also claim the duo rendered OneTaste members dependent on the group for their shelter and basic necessities and limited their independence and control.

The company operated in 39 cities including New York, San Francisco, Denver, Las Vegas, Boulder, Los Angeles, Austin and London, but some former customers alleged that they were ‘raped’ after becoming involved in the company, with one telling the BBC she was attacked by a man called ‘Jake’.

The company closed all of their US locations in 2018 halting all in-person classes, and Anjuli Ayer, who became CEO in 2017 is not facing charges.

But she told Dailymail.com last year the allegations are ‘totally false’, and that consent is the ‘first thing’ they teach.

‘I did not anticipate a five-year snowballed media campaign of negative allegations against us,’ she added.

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6 People Vanished from a Home Near St. Louis in August. Police Suspect They’re Involved in an Online Cult

Authorities are befuddled by the disappearance of six people — one man, three women and two young children — from a St. Louis-area home in August, which police believe to be related to the existence of a cult.

It’s been months since Naaman Williams, 29, Gerielle German, 26, her 3-year-old son Ashton Mitchell, Mikayla Thompson, 23, Ma’Kayla Wickerson, 25, and her 3-year daughter Malaiyah were last seen. The group had been living in a rented home in Berkeley, Mo., near St. Louis Lambert International airport.

Berkeley police Major Steve Runge tells PEOPLE that the four missing adults are believed to be part of a cult allegedly revolving around Rashad Jamal, who was convicted of child molestation charges in 2023 and is currently serving a prison sentence in Georgia.

Over the past few years, Jamal has amassed thousands of followers on social media with his spiritual teachings, operating what he calls the University of Cosmic Intelligence, which according to its website is “geared toward enlightening and illuminating minds” of Black and Latino people.

Speaking to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch from prison, Jamal denies being a cult leader and maintained his innocence in his child molestation case. 

Runge says some of Jamal’s followers, which he says includes three of the missing adults, have changed their names in honor of those they believe to be spiritual gods or goddesses. Williams is also known as Anubis Aramean, Thompson goes by Antu Anum Ahmat, while Wickerson is Intuahma Aquama Auntil, according to Berkeley police. 

According to police, the Berkeley quartet has now allegedly exhibited some of the other followers’ behaviors: total disconnection from family and loved ones, a desire to go off the grid, quitting their jobs and embracing sovereign citizenship, among other behaviors.

“It’s confusing, the internet is [the cult’s] home,” Runge says. “It’s not like ‘OK, we’re going to go to St. Louis.’ No, the internet is its home. [Jamal] has 90,000 followers.”

On Aug. 12, Runge says Wickerson’s mother, Cartisha Morgan, called police and said she was worried about her daughter, who she hadn’t heard from. Days later, detectives began investigating and searched the Berkeley home and found no signs of foul play. Runge says they discovered the group’s Facebook profiles, which contained references to Jamal and were once extremely active and public before the activity abruptly stopped.

Through further investigation, Runge says the group was last seen at a hotel on Aug. 13, in Florissant, Mo. No one has heard from them since. 

While Wickerson, who according to her LinkedIn profile once worked for JP Morgan & Chase, and Thompson are both from St. Louis, Williams is from Washington D.C., while German is originally from Lake Horn, Miss., near Memphis.

Thompson, like the other two women, is also the mother of a young child whom she left behind with her mother, according to Runge.

Runge believes the missing group will resurface eventually, most likely when they run out of money.

“I know we’re going to find them,” Runge says. “It’s just a matter of going through the motions … we are going to put in the work.”

Morgan spoke to PEOPLE and says she is worried about both her daughter and granddaughter, whom she hasn’t seen in months. She believes Wickerson had been suffering from depression following the birth of her daughter, and that she was preyed upon as a result.

“I’m not doing so well, but I’m just holding on by my faith,” Morgan tells PEOPLE. “I just wish that people are made aware of this.”

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Chilling moment cops find missing girls on Doomsday cult compound where kids as young as four were ‘married’ to their fathers and sexually abused

New video has been released of the moment police found missing girls on a remote compound in Utah. 

The incredible footage shows how police rescued two young Utah sisters on a dark December evening in the wilderness of a polygamist compound after being kidnapped by their father.

Dinah Coltharp, who was eight, and Hattie Coltharp, four at the time, were rescued by police in Lund, southwest of Salt Lake City in December 2017 after a highly publicized amber alert search.

The girls were taken by their father, John Coltharp, and had been handed over to his friend Samuel Shaffer who hid them on the compound when the amber alert was issued. It is believed they were to be married off to cult leader Shaffer.

When police raided the site, they also discovered Shaffer’s two young daughters, Lily, seven, and Samantha, then five, who had not been reported missing. 

Samantha and Hattie, the two youngest, were being kept in a 50-gallon blue water barrels to hide them from authorities, where they had been for more than 24 hours in below-freezing temperatures. 

Dramatic images shows two of the girls being rescued. They were barefoot and wearing what looked like thin leggings. 

The two older girls were found in an abandoned trailer. All were dehydrated.

When questioned, Shaffer said the girls were being hidden from police. 

Police fear the men planned to marry Coltharp’s daughters off to Shaffer who was described as the ‘prophet’ of the cult. 

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Archaeologists Keep Finding Evidence of a Mysterious Ancient Cult In Europe

Gilded belt buckles discovered across Europe have revealed a previously-unknown ancient fertility cult with ties across the continent, researchers believe.

Four bronze belt ends depicting a snake devouring a frog—thought to be a symbol of creation and/or fertility—were recently discovered in Moravia, Bohemia, Bavaria, and Hungary. Because of their near-identical shape and make, archaeologists now believe that these belt ends are evidence of an unknown pagan cult with far-reaching and diverse populations across Europe in the early Middle Ages.

“When the belt with the motif of a snake devouring a frog was discovered with the help of metal detectors at the site near Břeclav in southern Moravia, we thought it was a rare find with a unique decoration,” said lead researcher Jiří Macháček in a news release. 

“However, we later found that other nearly identical artifacts were also unearthed in Germany, Hungary and Bohemia. I realized that we were looking at a previously unknown pagan cult that linked different regions of central Europe,” the head of the Department of Archaeology and Museology at the Masaryk University Faculty of Arts said.

Macháček’s team conducted a thorough series of analyses to learn more about the buckles and their provenance, which they reported in the Journal of Archaeological Science. 

Their work involved making high-tech scans and conducting a lead isotope analysis of the buckles to determine their composition, as well as three-dimensional scans to see how closely-related the four buckles really were to one another.

According to the analysis, not only were most of the buckles made from the same wax cast, but the copper used to make them came from the same metal ore in the Slovak Ore Mountains—one of the main suppliers for this material in Europe during the seventh and eighth centuries. The 3D models suggest that the buckles came from the same workshop. 

Because of how widespread and similar the fittings are, the authors believe the belts were a way to communicate between classes and peoples. This theory upends a previously-held idea that this style of belt was only used by elites  within the Avar ethnic group—a powerful group of people who conquered southeast central Europe in the sixth century and whose empire lasted some 200 years. 

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Granddaughter of pedophile who founded Children of God SEX CULT opens up about what it was like to be raised inside twisted ‘religious’ sect – from being forced to be intimate with adult males as a CHILD to facing heinous physical and sexual abuse

A woman has candidly revealed how her grandfather founded the Children of God cult to promote his liberal views on sexuality – practicing polygamy and free love even with underage members.

Faith Jones appeared on a recent episode of the Cults To Consciousness podcast to discuss her harrowing experience as part of the sect, which was later known as The Family International.

The now 47-year-old was born into ‘The Family’ in 1977 in Hong Kong and was considered cult royalty as the granddaughter of psychosexual leader David Berg.

Berg founded the organization in 1968 out of Huntington Beach, California, before it evolved to have a following of more than 15,000 members worldwide, including Joaquin Phoenix and Rose McGowan.

Faith has said that her grandfather, who died in 1994, encouraged sexual and physical abuse against children as part of the sect’s principles. 

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Inside the cult top model joined after visiting Jeffrey Epstein’s ‘pedo island’: Ruslana Korshunova was lured into Moscow’s ‘Rose of the World’ that humiliates members and tells rape victims it was THEIR fault

The last person Kazakh-Russian model Ruslana Korshunova called before she leaped to her death from her Manhattan apartment wasn’t her family, best friend, or even her boyfriend.

Minutes before her suicide on June 28, 2008, the 20-year-old called her ‘life coach’ who months earlier introduced her to shadowy cult Rose of the World.

Vladimir Vorobeyv, who was 22 at the time, met Korshunova at a party in Moscow in December 2007 and began a three-month romance.

Korshunova was at a crossroads, worn out by her frenetic life as a top model that had her at a shoot one day, and partying with billionaires the next.

One of those rich men was convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, who flew her on his ‘Lolita Express’ to his private Caribbean island in June 2006, newly released documents revealed on Thursday.

Knowing she was despondent, Vorobeyv introduced her to Rose of the World just weeks after they met, initially signing up for a three-day $900 course.

Rose of the World is run by flashy Russian millionaire Vladislav Novgorodtsev, who shows off his wealth and exotic holidays online. 

Korshunova kept going for three months, along with her friend, fellow model Anastasia Drozdova, who also jumped to her death in 2009.

By the end of March she returned to New York in search of new modelling work but was making increasingly concerning posts on a Russian social media site.

The last day of her life began with a 10am walk next door to buy fruit, then she talked to her boyfriend Mark Kaminsky, then 32, about 12pm.

They made plans to got to a friend’s birthday party that night, before logging back in to the social media site at 12.19pm.

Soon after she called Vorobeyv, telling him: ‘I’m going to go out. I have friends coming by’.

‘She said she was feeling unwell, that she did not want to talk to anybody,’ he said.

‘She was not in a right mood. Before this, she often complained about her bad mood.’

Vorobeyv said just two days earlier she told him: ‘Even if I am not here any more, the whole world will talk about me’.

Minutes before she jumped to her death, Korshunova tried calling Vorobeyv a second time, but he was drinking at a bar and told her to call back later.

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