Rajneeshpuram: The Disturbing "Cult City" in the Middle of Oregon

Today, the small town of Antelope in Northern Oregon is one of many tiny settlements across the United States that may well disappear over the coming decades. With the city’s population dipping below 50 and precious little hope of further growth, Antelope is a fading light.

However, in the 1980s, this was the site of one of the most remarkable tales of gurus, cults, and feverish extremism the United States has ever seen. It is a story of astonishing devotion, a mini-city that rose from the desert, power struggles, electoral battles, attempted murder, and bioterrorism. The rapid rise and fall of Rajneeshpuram is a tale so outlandish and far-fetched it’s difficult to believe that it all happened. But happened; it certainly did.

The Indian Origins

This story begins with one man — born Chandra Mohan Jain, later known as Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, or Osho. He was born in 1931 in Madhya Pradesh State in India, one of 11 siblings, but lived with his grandparents from birth until he was 8.

Rajneesh was a gifted but often problematic student at school. A fine debater who, even at a young age, began railing against organised religion and instead took a keen interest in ways to expand consciousness, including breath control, yogic exercises, meditation, fasting, the occult, and hypnosis.

At 21, after studying philosophy at university, he experienced a spiritual epiphany. He began travelling throughout India, spreading his rather unique brand of thought that included greater openness to sex, a hybrid of capitalism and socialism that can only be described as having your cake and eating it too, and personal development. He became popular with many and deeply unpopular with even more. Calling Gandhi a masochist reactionary who worshipped poverty probably didn’t help.

In 1974, he and his followers purchased a property in Pune and established an ashram that would eventually draw people from all over the world. It held an array of teachings, seminars, and experimental therapy sessions that often included violence or sexual encounters between participants. It wasn’t long before the press began running negative stories about what the ‘sex guru’, as they called Rajneesh, was promoting in Pune.

By the early 1980s, the ashram was bursting at the seams, with around 30,000 visitors passing through its gates each year. This was coupled with an increasingly hostile India that saw Rajneesh’s practices as borderline heretic. In May 1980, a Hindu fundamentalist by the name of Vilas Tupe attempted to kill Rajneesh. Enough was enough.

Rajneesh ordered his secretary, a wiley young woman named Ma Anand Sheela, to find a property outside of India. A few months later, she returned and announced she had found the perfect spot — The Big Muddy Ranch just outside the small Oregon town of Antelope.

Emigration

At the time, Antelope was already a shadow of what it had been — but in truth, it had always been a dusty backwater settlement with very little going. Originally a station along the wagon road connecting The Dalles on the Columbia River with gold mines near Canyon City, the town’s population peaked at 1900 by the late 19th Century but went into freefall throughout the 20th Century. By 1981, less than a hundred people lived in Antelope.

Sheela had chosen a sprawling 64,281-acre site that was purchased for $5.75 million ($18.5 million in today’s dollars). There were no roads, no buildings — absolutely nothing — but that wasn’t the case for long.

Followers began arriving from India and other parts of the world in July 1981 and immediately set about constructing what quickly became a remarkably self-sufficient mini-city, then named Rancho Rajneesh. Now, imagine the grizzled ranchers who lived in and around Antelope as they witnessed this unfold. Oregon was well on its way to becoming one of the more liberal states in the Union, but the area around Antelope remained conservative — old-fashioned.

Suddenly, you find your small city inundated with strange hippy types dressed entirely in orange who seem to be floating through the world in a bubble of serenity. Were they high? Had they been brainwashed? What on earth was up with these people? Remember, this was just three years after 909 people died at the Jonestown commune in Guyana, through either suicide or what we’ll kindly describe as ‘assisted suicide’. There was a real fear in the air regarding cults, and suddenly, one was right on your doorstep.

A month later, Rajneesh himself arrived. Not in a simple automobile one might expect from a spiritual leader but in the back of a gleaming Rolls Royce. He was greeted by roughly 3,000 followers, who were then calling themselves Sannyasins, in a manner one might expect royalty to be met.

Establishing Rajneeshpuram

If you can say one thing about followers of cults or religious sects, they tend to work damn hard. There’s no grumbling about hours, overtime, or pay — they simply get on with it. What rose from the Oregon landscape at the Rancho Rajneesh was mightily impressive. Within three years, the Sannyasins had built housing to accommodate 7,000 people, a fire department, police, restaurants, malls, townhouses, a 4,200-foot (1,300 m) airstrip, a public transport system using buses, a sewage reclamation plant, a reservoir, and a post office with the ZIP code 97741.

They had, quite simply, built an entire city from scratch. Not exactly the small agricultural community they’d first claimed, but that was just the start of the tensions with the local people that eventually exploded — but we’ll come to that shortly.

From what we know from those who lived in the commune in the early 1980s, life was pretty good. The Sannyasins were filled with a sense of purpose that few had ever had. They believed they were building the hallowed utopia often promised but never delivered. As word spread, the population increased quickly.

We’re not entirely sure how many people lived there at its peak, and it’s long been suspected that the Sannyasins may have hidden beds when official inspectors were on the property. Likely, the figure reached close to 10,000 at its peak, but almost from the get-go, trouble was brewing.

Growing Tensions

It would be a stretch to say that the Sannyasins were welcomed into the area, but there was at least a begrudging acceptance in the early stages. That shred of goodwill began to evaporate as more and more Sannyasins poured into the town, and once the 1000 Friends of Oregon, a private, non-profit organisation that advocates for land-use planning, got involved, things started heating up.

The Sannyasins had purchased several properties in Antelope itself, a shop and a post office to begin with, but had plans to build a large distribution centre. However, business permits for this were quickly blocked. Unsurprisingly, this infuriated the Sannyasin leadership and intimidation and aggression soon followed with rumours of an impending take-over through legal means.

In April 1982, the inhabitants of Antelope made the astonishing decision to try to disincorporate itself, which would have effectively ended its life as a city. However, by that point, their numbers paled compared to the newly registered Sannyasins, who not only voted down the measure but also eventually won a vote to rename Antelope as Rajneesh. This may have seemed a glorious triumph to the Sannyasins, but in reality, it was the start of the downward spiral.

The Bombing of Hotel Rajneesh

The descent into mayhem and violence was not all down to the Sannyasins. Almost since their arrival, there had been a steadily growing nasty undercurrent of scare tactics rippling through Oregon and further afield. This was not simply negative press and published letters spouting all kinds of bitterness towards the newcomers. Pictures of Sannyasins, including Rajneesh, began appearing as targets at gun clubs and turkey shoots.

They were often referred to as Red Vermin or Red Rats — the atmosphere was turning toxic, and it was only a matter of time until something happened.

In the early hours of 29th July 1983, three pipe bombs exploded at the Hotel Rajneesh in Portland — a property owned by the Sannyasins — reportedly set by the Islamist militant group Jamaat ul-Fuqra. One of the two people injured at the scene was Stephen Paul Paster, a Jamaat member, who had blown off part of his hand while setting the explosives. He was later sentenced to 20 years imprisonment for his role in the attack, but the entire episode remains strangely murky. There’s never been any established motive for the attack, but if it was meant to kick the hornet’s nest, it certainly worked.

Almost overnight, the Sannyasins ramped up security in and around the commune. Visitors were now greeted by the Rajneeshpuram Peace Force along with semi-automatic weapons, and guards remained close to Rajneesh whenever he spoke in public. And then their spiritual leader stopped speaking in public entirely — engaging in one of his multi-year periods of silence — with followers only able to communicate with him through the increasingly erratic Sheela.

By late 1983, there was a growing sense of unease within Rajneeshpuram. Many doubted that Sheela was accurately relaying Rajneesh’s messages and resented her growing autocratic role in the commune. As the fear of AIDS swept the nation, their leader proclaimed that two-thirds of humanity would die of the disease in the coming years, and a proclamation was passed that anybody having sex must wear rubber gloves and a condom while doing so while also refraining from kissing — the free love of the early years was quickly disappearing.

As Rajneesh became increasingly withdrawn, rumours emerged that he wasn’t well. At the time, Sheela claimed he was taking 60 milligrams of valium each day, alongside copious amounts of nitrous oxide each day.

The Bioterror Attack

Rajneesh ended his period of silence in early 1984, but it immediately became clear that gaps were appearing between the group’s leader and the leadership group just under him, in particular, with Sheela. In one report, he may have even called her a fascist and likened her to Hitler in the way she had been running Rajneeshpuram.

If he was shocked by that, what came next would have blown his mind. With the November 1984 county election looming, the Sannyasins set out an ambitious plan. Their goal was to win two of three seats on the Wasco County Commission, as well as the sheriff’s office, but to do this, they needed two things: more votes for their candidates and dramatically fewer votes for their opponents.

The first part of this plan involved bussing homeless people from around the country to Rajneeshpuram, smartening them up, and getting them registered to vote. Now, this sounds callous to the highest degree, but many ex-Sannyasins have continued to extol the virtues of this plan because it allowed many to start new lives. On the other hand, you suddenly hand hundreds of previously homeless inhabitants in Rajneeshpuram, many of whom suffered from mental health issues and addictions. It may have, in theory, boosted the voter turnout but did little to restore harmony.

The second part of the plan was horrifying to the extreme. The commune leadership planned to sicken and incapacitate voters in The Dalles, the largest city in Wasco County, by spreading salmonella in restaurants. After purchasing the bacteria from a medical supply company in Seattle, staff cultured it in labs within the commune. In September and October 1984, the Sannyasins contaminated the salad bars of ten local restaurants, infecting 751 people.

While nobody died in the attack, forty-five people received hospital treatment.

It later emerged that a second attack had been planned on election day but was shelved. Residents of Wasco County immediately suspected the group of the attack and turned out in droves to beat the Sannyasin candidate. Ultimately, it didn’t matter. All the homeless people brought to Rajneeshpuram were barred from voting anyway, leading to the group withdrawing their candidate.

Initially, investigators blamed poor hygiene at the restaurants as the cause of the outbreak, and the Sannyasin link fully didn’t emerge until the commune had imploded, but it remains the first confirmed chemical or biological terrorist attack in U.S. history.

The Collapse

On 14th September 1985, Sheela and 15 to 20 other top officials abruptly left Rajneeshpuram. The following week, at a press conference, Rajneesh formally accused Sheela of a litany of crimes, including the salmonella attack, the attempted murder of his personal physician, wiretapping, bugging, arson, and the poisoning of two public officials who had visited Rajneeshpuram. The most extensive criminal investigation soon got underway.

The group that had fled the commune splintered, and Sheela hightailed to Europe later that month but was arrested in West Germany in October and eventually extradited back to the United States. She was sentenced to three 20-year terms in federal prison — later reduced to 4 and a half years — which she served concurrently.

A slightly shorter sentence was handed down to Diane Yvonne Onang — also known as Ma Anand Puja — nurse practitioner and secretary-treasurer of the Rajneesh Medical Corporation.

On 23 October 1985, a federal grand jury indicted Rajneesh and several other disciples with conspiracy to evade immigration laws. Four days later, he was arrested at Charlotte Airport while attempting to flee the country aboard two jets with a group of his followers. Despite the catalogue of crimes committed by the Sannyasin leadership, Rajneesh was never implicated in any of them. Instead, he was charged with 35 counts of deliberate violations of immigration laws.

As part of an agreement, he pleaded guilty to two counts of making false statements to immigration officials. Rajneesh received a ten-year suspended sentence, a fine of US$400,000 and was deported and barred from reentering the U.S. for five years. He died back in India on 19th January 1990 of heart failure, but his teachings and mantras continue to be read around the world, and his books are available in more than 60 languages.

This was also when the commune effectively collapsed. By the end of October 1985, the small city of Rajneeshpuram, which had risen at a breathtaking speed out of the Oregon desert, was completely deserted. The Sannyasins left in all directions. Some found other communes to join; others chose to reintegrate into a more traditional society.

While it’s easy to characterise this whole episode as theocratic lunacy that went well too far, it is worth pointing out that the vast majority of those who lived in Rajneeshpuram still speak about it in glowing terms. There’s no question that the leadership descended into manic absurdity, but for the everyday man, woman, and child who resided there, it was a peaceful utopia that many claim changed their lives dramatically for the better. Cults and communes rarely work, but their core often begins as something good and proper — before usually unravelling thanks to the various complex oddities humans share.

Today, Antelope is once again a sleepy town; its population was 37 at the last census in 2020. Walking through the peaceful streets, you would have absolutely no idea this had been the scene of one of the most extraordinary tales in U.S. history. It was a titanic struggle between a small conservative town, populated mainly by ranchers and those with a long history in the area, and a religious commune that originated in India.

The only mention of the incident you’ll find in Antelope is one with a plaque attached to the post office.

It reads:

Dedicated to those of this community who, throughout the Rajneesh invasion and occupation of 1981-1985, remained, resisted and remembered…..

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” (Edmund Burke)

Key Takeaways

• Antelope, Oregon, was the site of Rajneeshpuram, a commune built by followers of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh in the 1980s.
• The commune rapidly constructed a self-sufficient city, but tensions with locals escalated due to cultural differences and legal battles.
• Rajneeshpuram’s leadership attempted a bioterror attack using salmonella to influence a local election, infecting 751 people.
• The commune’s collapse followed revelations of crimes by its leaders, including Sheela, who was sentenced to prison.
• Today, Antelope is a fading town with a population below 50, with minimal signs of its past as a cult city.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh?

Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, born Chandra Mohan Jain, was an Indian spiritual leader who founded the Rajneeshpuram commune in Oregon. He was known for his unique blend of spiritual teachings, which included openness to sex, a hybrid of capitalism and socialism, and personal development.

What was Rajneeshpuram?

Rajneeshpuram was a commune established in Oregon by Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and his followers, known as Sannyasins. It was built from scratch and included housing, a fire department, police, restaurants, malls, an airstrip, and more, accommodating up to 10,000 people at its peak.

Why did Rajneesh and his followers move to Oregon?

Rajneesh and his followers moved to Oregon in 1981 after facing hostility in India and negative press in Pune. They purchased a property near the small town of Antelope and established the commune, initially named Rancho Rajneesh.

What were some of the tensions between the Sannyasins and the local community?

Tensions arose due to the rapid influx of Sannyasins, their plans to build a large distribution center, and the eventual renaming of Antelope to Rajneesh. The local community felt threatened and intimidated, leading to legal battles and acts of violence.

What was the bioterror attack planned by the Sannyasins?

In 1984, the Sannyasins planned to influence a county election by spreading salmonella in restaurants in The Dalles, infecting 751 people. This was the first confirmed chemical or biological terrorist attack in U.S. history.

What led to the collapse of Rajneeshpuram?

The collapse of Rajneeshpuram began with the departure of Sheela and other top officials in September 1985. Rajneesh accused Sheela of various crimes, leading to a federal investigation. Rajneesh was later deported, and the commune was deserted by the end of October 1985.

What happened to Rajneesh after the collapse of the commune?

Rajneesh was arrested in 1985 while attempting to flee the country. He pleaded guilty to two counts of making false statements to immigration officials, received a suspended sentence, and was deported. He died in India in 1990.

How did the local community in Antelope react to the Rajneeshpuram commune?

The local community in Antelope initially had a begrudging acceptance of the Sannyasins but grew increasingly hostile as more followers arrived and tensions escalated. They attempted to disincorporate the town and fought legal battles against the commune.

What is the current status of Antelope, Oregon?

Antelope, Oregon, is now a small, sleepy town with a population of 37 as of the 2020 census. There is little visible evidence of the Rajneeshpuram commune, except for a plaque on the post office.

Sources

• Original Into the Shadows video: Rajneeshpuram: The Disturbing “Cult City” in the Middle of Oregon
• Hero image source by Unknown authorUnknown author / openverse, by-sa.

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