HEAVEN’S GATE | Purple Shrouds, Matching Shirts, Black and White Nikes, And $5.75 Each

When the Hale-Bopp comet swung past Earth in 1997, thirty-nine people put on matching black shirts and brand-new Nikes, swallowed a lethal mix of barbiturates and vodka, and lay down beneath purple shrouds to die — certain their souls were about to board the alien ship they believed was hiding in the comet's tail.

EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/heavensgate

READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/343j2ju2

FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: Following an anonymous tip, police enter a mansion in Rancho Santa Fe, an exclusive suburb of San Diego, California, and discover 39 victims of a mass suicide. The deceased–21 women and 18 men of varying ages–were all found lying peaceably in matching dark clothes and Nike sneakers and had no noticeable signs of blood or trauma. It was later revealed that the men and women were members of the “Heaven’s Gate” religious cult, whose leaders preached that suicide would allow them to leave their bodily “containers” and enter an alien spacecraft hidden behind the Hale-Bopp comet. *** PLUS, the creepy true-crime story of two men who were caught trying to steal the body of the 16th President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln. But that is by no means the end of this story full of twists, turns, myths, and conspiracies.

CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = Heaven’s Gate, Part 1
00:00:53.808 = Show Open
00:02:37.373 = Heaven’s Gate, Part 2
00:04:59.269 = Heaven’s Gate, Part 3
00:09:37.695 = Heaven’s Gate, Part 4 ***
00:23:22.776 = Stealing Lincoln’s Bones, Part 1 ***
00:44:45.437 = Stealing Lincoln’s Bones, Part 2 ***
00:57:58.687 = Show Close
*** = Begins immediately after inserted ad break

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*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*

SOURCES and RESOURCES:
“Heavens Gate” by Rolling Stone: http://bit.ly/WeirdDarkness2D7tbeZ, Ranker: http://bit.ly/weirddarkness2UIsK4O, and History.com: http://bit.ly/WeirdDarkness2G3uqfN
“Stealing Lincoln’s Bones” by Troy Taylor: https://www.americanhauntingsink.com/stealing-lincolns-bones
(Over time links may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for the material I use whenever possible. If I somehow overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it in these show notes immediately. Some links included above may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)

WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.
Originally aired: November 28, 2021
Weird Darkness runs from the 1997 mass suicide of the Heaven's Gate UFO cult outside San Diego to an 1876 counterfeiting gang's attempt to steal Abraham Lincoln's corpse from his tomb in Springfield, Illinois.It opens with the discovery, on March 26, 1997, of thirty-nine members of Heaven's Gate inside a rented mansion in the San Diego suburb of Rancho Santa Fe — twenty-one women and eighteen men lying beneath purple shrouds in matching black shirts and new black-and-white Nike sneakers, plastic bags over their heads, after swallowing phenobarbital and vodka. They believed the deaths would free their souls to board an alien spacecraft trailing the Hale-Bopp comet, which was making its closest approach to Earth that month. Former music professor Marshall Applewhite had started the group in 1975 with his nurse Bonnie Lu Nettles, the two of them renaming themselves Bo and Peep and later Do and Ti before persuading about twenty people in Oregon to leave their families and wait in eastern Colorado for a ship that never arrived. Applewhite preached that human bodies were disposable containers, that he was the second coming of Jesus, and that God was an alien. Nettles died in 1985, but he held the group together, and by the 1990s it had become the first well-known internet-era cult, paying its bills by building web pages under the business name Higher Source. The members watched Star Trek: The Next Generation, sewed Heaven's Gate Away Team patches onto their uniforms, severed contact with relatives through a practice Applewhite called breaking away, and submitted to a ban on sex that several of the men, Applewhite among them, enforced on themselves through castration.The episode closes with the 1876 plot to steal Abraham Lincoln's body from his tomb at Oak Ridge Cemetery in Springfield, Illinois. A Chicago counterfeiting ring run by James "Big Jim" Kneally had lost its master engraver, Benjamin Boyd, to a ten-year term in Joliet Penitentiary, so the gang resolved to seize the president's corpse and ransom it for Boyd's freedom. On election night, November 7, 1876, gang members Terence Mullen and Jack Hughes filed through the lock and split the marble sarcophagus with an ax, unaware that the grave robber they knew as Jim Morrissey was Secret Service operative Lewis Swegles, and that Captain Patrick Tyrell's agents and Pinkerton detectives hired by Robert Lincoln were hidden elsewhere in the monument. The trap fell apart when the lawmen fired on one another in the dark and the two robbers wandered off and escaped, though both were captured on November 18 and, with grave robbery barely a crime in Illinois at the time, served only a year in Joliet. What the public would not learn for years was that custodian John C. Power and a secret brotherhood calling itself the Lincoln Guard of Honor had already dragged the five-hundred-pound coffin into a damp labyrinth beneath the monument and buried it under loose boards and dirt, leaving visitors to grieve over an empty sarcophagus. The body was shifted from hiding place to hiding place until 1901, when Robert Lincoln ordered his father's casket lowered ten feet, locked inside a steel cage, and sealed under two tons of concrete, following one last viewing in which Leon P. Hopkins, the plumber who had closed the coffin back in 1865, studied a chalk-whitened but recognizable face and soldered the lead shut for good.