Recently learned some crazy local history.

[DrWeird]

I currently reside in a small, somewhat conservative town. It's got the victorian houses with white picket fences, harvest festivals, a historic city hall/jail. Norman Rockwell's kind of turf. Although I've honestly thought of it more as Rod Serling's kind of place, the quaint little utopia from an old Twilight Zone episode with something nasty just under the surface.

Although I didn't find out about it until this last weekend when I was browseing at a used bookstore.

Seems Corvallis, Or. had a juicy scandal of national proportions. This town, around the turn of the century, was home to a psychotic Holy Roller cult. The whole kit and kaboodle included incest, orgies, child molestations, animal sacrifices, an attempted human sacrifice of an infant, tar and featherings, a large number of people committed to insane asylums, heroes, villians, two suicides, and two murders. The whole thing wrapped up in the tiny town of Waldport, where many of the descendants still live, and which later spawned the infamous Heaven's Gate UFO cult.

Pretty frickin' cool if you ask me.

[Rabrrrrrr]

1. What was it Sherlock Holmes said?

Something about the most heinous and dangerous crimes and evil happen outside the cities, Watson, not within.

[Scaramouche]

2. Wow, I camped there 2 summers ago...

I found this: http://editorialmatters.lee.net/articles/2004/01/12/stories/top_stories/9znews082.txt

Corvallis' cult
By KYLE ODEGARD/Corvallis Gazette-Times and Albany Democrat-Herald

CORVALLIS -- Franz Creffield stared through the camera and into the next century, a thin smile creeping across his thin face.

The 1904 photograph -- Creffield in prison stripes, his head newly shorn -- is the best existing image of the self-styled prophet, and, as such, the subject of considerable interpretation.

It's either further proof of arrogance or of a certain sad-eyed defiance, evidence of a deranged cult leader or a victim of religious intolerance, depending entirely on the viewer.

We'll never know for sure.

The puzzle of history sometimes loses a few pieces. There's the outline of the big picture, but some details vanish and people guess the best possible explanation.

One thing is certain, though: Creffield caused people to do bizarre things 100 years ago in Corvallis.

The small, charismatic man provoked a strange tale of a weird religious group, broken families, sex rumors, an angry town, vigilante justice, revenge killings and suicides.

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