The Quiet Zone Read online

  “That gave me the idea, ‘What amount would be enough?’” she said.

  At one point, Adams invited the local doctor Bob Must to join Gesundheit!’s board of advisers alongside the celebrity doctor Benjamin Spock and the peace activist Norman Cousins, who promoted laugh therapy. The invitation held some bitter humor. In the years after Adams purchased his property, Must went to medical school and became an osteopathic doctor; practiced medicine around the region at hospitals, prisons, and clinics; opened a private practice in Hillsboro; led the board of Pocahontas Memorial Hospital; and was named the 2012 Outstanding Rural Health Provider of the Year in West Virginia—all while Adams failed to treat a single person in the county. Must told me it had cost him about $71,000 to open his clinic, which saw thousands of people over its decade in operation—including, ironically, people from the Gesundheit! Institute.

  Must declined to join Gesundheit!’s board. Looking into the organization’s bylaws, he determined it was essentially a dictatorship under Adams. He suggested to Adams that, instead of trying to raise tens of millions of dollars for a full-service hospital, he might instead focus on offering wellness promotion and disease prevention at a clinic that could start seeing people immediately. But Adams would not be swayed from his vision.

  Danette (Brandy) Condon was once part of Adams’s organization. A petite woman from Detroit, she had helped scout out the property in 1980 and then lived on the land for several seasons. In 1981, she moved to Lobelia, raising two sons with a back-to-the-lander. In the years since leaving Gesundheit!, Condon had studied midwifery, become a member of the Midwives Alliance of West Virginia, and assisted in hundreds of home births, doing real medical work that Adams had failed to provide in Pocahontas.

  “I think it’s a big scam,” said Allen Johnson, the former libraries director. As a social worker and administrator at a nursing home in Marlinton from 1987 to 1993, and then a mental health social worker from 1994 to 2000, Johnson was well aware of the county’s health needs—and of Adams’s empty record in servicing them. “For thirty years they’ve been talking about this free hospital,” Johnson said. “Where is the hospital?”

  Gesundheit! volunteers occasionally went clowning at the Marlinton nursing home and participated in local activities. One time, they offered to repaint the lookout tower at Droop Mountain Battlefield State Park, so superintendent Mike Smith prepared the materials. “After they painted the easy logs at the bottom and off the stairs, they decided, ‘Nah it’s awful hot,’ and they went down to the river to go swimming,” Smith said. “Me and my one worker had to finish the rest of the tower.” I saw it as an analogy for what had been happening with Gesundheit! for decades: good intentions and meager results, with the community left to do the real work. “As for as actual real results of people coming in and being healed and helped, it just hasn’t happened,” Smith said.

  In the 1990s, Sheriff Jerry Dale started hearing complaints about Gesundheit! and opened an informal fact-finding investigation. “Patch was a celebrity after the movie,” Dale told me. “My opinion was that he was using the notoriety of the movie to bring people in and donate money and start a hospital and this and that. What I was concerned about was people that were disillusioned by the whole reason that they came here to begin with.” But the investigation led nowhere. “I kind of walked away from that whole thing feeling sorry for Patch and feeling sorry for a lot of the people that were there,” Dale said. “It seemed that they were lost, looking for a place in life and something meaningful.”

  Dale had more pressing issues. With only one sheriff and a handful of deputies tasked with responding to accidents, giving speeding tickets, making drug busts, collecting taxes, conducting welfare checks, serving court papers, providing courtroom security, monitoring a neo-Nazi group, and solving murder cases in a county that was nearly the size of Rhode Island, law enforcement never stood a chance.

  THERE’S A SCENE in the ’90s television series Twin Peaks in which FBI agent Dale Cooper, who is enchanted by the quaintness of a sleepy mountain town—the cherry pie, the Douglas firs, the “way of living I thought had vanished from the earth”—learns of a dark undercurrent.

  “There’s a sort of evil out there,” the sheriff tells Cooper. “Something very, very strange in these old woods. Call it what you want. A darkness, a presence. It takes many forms but . . . it’s been out there for as long as anyone can remember.” Later, Cooper encounters the darkness himself, and there’s no going back. There’s no unknowing.

  That’s what discovering the many layers of the Quiet Zone felt like. The vision that drew me in turned out to be a mirage. The Quietest Town in America was full of WiFi and smartphones. The astronomy observatory was partly a cover for a government spy facility. The electrosensitives seemed to be fleeing something in their lives aside from electromagnetic radiation. The free hospital for rural Americans who desperately needed access to health care was a joke.

  At this point, I was not surprised to hear there had once been something of a sex cult in Pocahontas. Of course there had been. And of course it had been advertised as an idyllic commune.

  The Zendik Farm, about twenty miles south of Green Bank, appeared on the surface to have been a kind of artists’ collective where young people tilled the land, ate organic food, and published quirky literature and music that they sold on city streets and at festivals nationwide, which earned them a bit of publicity. On MTV in 2004, the pop singer Christina Aguilera wore a Zendik T-shirt with the slogan “Stop Bitching, Start a Revolution.”

  On the inside, the commune was a dystopian nightmare for some. A former member named Elliott Kelly described the Zendiks as a hippie version of Nxivm, the upscale self-help firm based in New York that was uncovered in 2017 to be a cult where women were manipulated into becoming the leader’s sex slaves. That’s how women were treated by the Zendik Farm’s founder, Wulf Zendik, according to Kelly. Another former member named Helen Zuman has also questioned whether Wulf Zendik was “scheming, from the beginning, to gain sexual access to nearly every post-pubescent female” in the commune.

  “I knew that underneath it there was lots of dark stuff going on,” Zuman told me. “I didn’t think it was wrong. I just thought, ‘This is what has to happen if you want to start a revolution.’”

  Wulf Zendik had been born as Larry Wulfing, first establishing his anti-capitalist commune in California in 1969. At times numbering up to seventy people, the group migrated around the country—to Texas, Florida, North Carolina, and finally, in 2004, to West Virginia. The group was attracted to Pocahontas County’s low population, ecological health, and forests—in essence, its quietude—according to Zuman, who was then a member and did research to help find their property outside Marlinton.

  By the time the group arrived to the Quiet Zone, Wulf Zendik had died and his widow, Arol Wulf (born Carol Merson), had assumed control. Through authoritarian fear and Big Brother–esque oversight, she oversaw all the group’s decisions—be they sexual, financial, or otherwise. Zuman had just graduated from Harvard with a $13,500 grant to explore alternative communities. She handed over most of the money to the group. She was encouraged to have multiple sex partners, forbidden from having monogamous relationships, and required to seek permission for many aspects of her sexual life. A likely factor in her contracting herpes during that time was that condoms were forbidden in the commune; the ban was lifted in 2004, though members still had to get permission from the group’s central authority to use one. Zendiks also didn’t believe in HIV or AIDS. Illness and death were caused by having bad “vibes.”

  But from the outside, the Zendiks just looked like another group of hippies.

  “Class group, I enjoyed those people,” said the county prosecutor Eugene Simmons, who was also a farmer and sold the Zendiks alfalfa hay. “Those people were a hippie type but not rowdy people. They participated in the community, did flowers and stuff, never had any problems with them.”

  For years, Arol Wulf wrote a monthly ga
rdening column for the Pocahontas Times and tended flower boxes along the main street through Marlinton. Before she died in 2012, she asked a local woman to keep up the flower beds, and they still lined the sidewalks when I rolled through town, although by then the group had dispersed. Their property, known as Wulfsong Ranch, went up for sale in 2013 for nearly $1 million. Rumor had it that John Travolta looked into buying it but passed because it couldn’t support an airstrip.

  Instead, the ranch was leased out to a family looking for a place that was “cheap, remote, and inaccessible,” as they told me. When I visited, I saw some of the eclectic items that the Zendiks had left behind: colorful informational pamphlets, homemade musical instruments, and a six-foot-tall stone monument by a pond where Wulf Zendik’s body was still buried.

  In a shed, I found a huge, ornately framed canvas painting of an astronaut standing on the moon and looking mournfully toward Earth. The label read “Post-Ecollapse Apology.” I asked if I might keep the painting—a memento of the fringe ideas that fermented in the Quiet Zone. The family was happy to see it go. I later learned the name of the ex-Zendik who’d painted the canvas and emailed him to ask if he wanted it back. He said no. He’d since become a professional dog portraitist in New Jersey.

  Chapter Seventeen

  “The True Epitome of Darkness”

  WEAVING AROUND POTHOLES and downed branches, my car jerked up and down and scraped over rocks. It was late spring of 2018, and the dirt road to the National Alliance’s mountain compound was even more washed out and rutted than the previous fall, when David Pringle had told me he was planning an alt-right festival for Hitler’s birthday. April 20 had come and gone, however, and I’d heard nothing about any gathering.

  I drove through the entry gate, which was propped wide open. A Toyota Corolla and a beat-up Subaru were parked outside the cottage where Pringle and his wife had been living.

  “Hello?” I called into the house. “Hello?”

  A grinning face appeared in the window.

  “C’mon in!” said Jay Hess, whom I’d met before. “I’m just finishing painting this bathroom.”

  I poked my head around the corner. Holding a wet brush, Hess proudly pointed to a fresh coat of white paint on the bathroom trim. He said he was turning the cottage into a “VIP headquarters,” “like a bed and breakfast or something.”

  “Wow,” I said. “You must have a lot of people living here?”

  Actually, Hess was alone. Pringle had departed in early 2018 after a series of incidents, namely the four-wheeler accident and his hosting of “unsanctioned” gatherings, to the irritation of the group’s chairman in Tennessee. Pringle had relocated to Nebraska to work in a gunsmith shop, bringing his long-range rifle with him.

  The number of people on the property had dropped by two-thirds—to one—but Hess nevertheless insisted the Alliance was on the verge of a turnaround, recruiting “people from around the country” to live there in exchange for providing labor to rehab the decaying buildings. “We expect them to come any day now,” he said, trying to sound optimistic. “They’ll be fixing up the infrastructure, all the normal things people do to keep everything looking nice.”

  A dryer in the pantry buzzed. Hess made a show of taking out the laundry and folding it neatly, as if it were just another beautiful day in the neighborhood. I’d heard things weren’t so tranquil. He had been recently busted for shoplifting a pair of pants and shoes from the Men’s Shop in Marlinton. (Hess said it was all a misunderstanding.) He seemed desperate for cash, not to mention company. After living in Florida for thirty years, he’d had a tough winter in Appalachia, with the snow piling up so deep as to strand him at the compound for weeks. He’d done a lot of reading in the cold.

  As for the National Alliance’s plans for a massive alt-right gathering, Hess said the agenda was pared down to a “little festive birthday celebration” for Hitler. A dozen people attended. “We got together and had a nice meal inside the main building,” Hess said. In recognition of Hitler’s vegetarianism, he added, “the women prepared a wonderful eggplant Parmesan.”

  HESS FINISHED PAINTING the trim and called it quits. As we walked out of the cottage, a short, wiry man in dirty jeans tromped down the wooded hillside with a burlap sack slung over his shoulder. It was Bryan Dewitt “De” Thompson, husband of the woman with the two Rottweilers who’d led me up to the compound a year earlier. The Thompsons lived in the RV a half mile down the road.

  Thompson tossed the sack in his Subaru. Hess and I walked over and looked inside. It was full of foraged fiddleheads and ramps.

  “Do you have a secret spot where you know to get ramps?” I asked.

  “Don’t need to be that secret because people are lazy, they won’t get out and do this stuff much,” Thompson said. He lit a cigarette.

  Only in his fifties, Thompson looked ancient. Glasses rested at the tip of his nose. His hair was white, with a yellow tint from chain-smoking. He had no teeth—he lost most of them from doing meth, and the rest fell out during chemotherapy for squamous cell carcinoma. He took a swig from a container of vodka. A bowie knife was slung on his belt.

  Though Thompson foraged on National Alliance property, he said he was not a member. His late father, Boyd Thompson, had owned the surrounding land. (In fact, we stood just off Boyd Thompson Road.) He said he’d lived in the area long enough to have met William Pierce, whom he described as someone who “knew how to live here” because “he didn’t get into nobody’s business.” One time, however, Thompson did almost shoot Pierce’s German shepherd when the dog charged him. Thompson had taken out his gun, had lifted the safety, and was about to fire when Pierce called the dog off.

  Thompson said he’d also met the other local celebrity, Patch Adams, and gone skinny-dipping “with a bunch of beautiful fucking women” at the Gesundheit! Institute.

  “What’s this?” Hess chimed in.

  “Patch Adams,” Thompson said. “The movie.”

  “Robin Williams? Really? Geez.”

  “You live too protected of a life,” Thompson said. He added that he knew many of the back-to-the-landers and hippies associated with Adams, and he’d even attended the 1980 Rainbow Gathering, where he’d been greeted by naked women and gotten “a screaming case of it” from their food.

  Oh, and he knew who committed the unsolved Rainbow murders.

  “It was a couple ignorant rednecks and they picked up a couple of hippie girls, said, ‘Hey, y’all want to get high?’” he said. “Jacob Beard, he was the motherfucker who pulled the pistol . . . There was like one, two, three, four people I know for a fact was there because at one time or the other they got drunk and blah blah blah. You listen to everybody’s stories and then you can pretty well decipher what happened.”

  “Did you ever hear Beard admit to the killings?” I asked.

  “Hell no, he’s not that stupid,” Thompson said. “Even if he would have said it, it would have been so far back and in a time before cellphones and recording devices. Anything he’s ever done I’m sure he’ll take to the grave.”

  “If Beard killed those girls with so many people watching, how could he convince them all to keep quiet?” I asked.

  “They were terrified,” Thompson said. “He’d have sold his fucking farm and paid somebody to kill you. Hell, my dad was going to pay somebody to kill me at one time.”

  Thompson said he also knew all about another double killing in Lobelia that I’d been hearing about. It was a bizarre case from 1975 involving one of the first hippies to arrive in the area: a young man named Peter Hauer from Pennsylvania, who was a respected caver and secretary-treasurer of the American Spelean History Association. In 1970, Hauer had purchased a Lobelia farmhouse that had a large cave in the backyard. Thompson remembered Hauer as “intelligently ignorant”—smart about what he knew but socially awkward, with “an exaggerated sense of purpose in saving mother nature and all.”

  Soon, strange things began happening that signaled Hauer was unwelcome. He found
a snake in his mailbox. Then sticks were shoved down his horse’s throat. Then the horse was killed, its head bashed in. His goats’ ears and bellies were slashed open, their innards spilling out. Laurie Cameron, another of the early hippies, had some farm experience and helped sew up one of Hauer’s goats that “was gashed open along its flank.” A veterinarian’s daughter told me she recalled her father being called to Hauer’s house late one night to find “limbs, pieces of trees, everything down the horse’s throat.”

  Hauer came to believe his antagonist was a local man named Tommy McNeill, who worked on a nearby farm owned by Boyd Thompson. A police investigation led to the arrest of McNeill, who in early 1975 was sentenced to six months in Weston State Mental Hospital. Shortly before McNeill would have been released, two young men went missing in Lobelia. One was Hauer. The other was his friend.

  On June 4, 1975, a West Virginia University honors student named Walter Smith had been riding his ten-speed Schwinn bicycle home from Watoga State Park, where he had a summer job. He never arrived. Smith was the son of a National Steel Corporation executive, so his disappearance triggered a major search. Nothing turned up.

  Hauer, who had seen Smith the day he disappeared, told his ex-girlfriend over the phone that “he was also fearful for his life,” according to Henry Rauch, an emeritus geology professor at West Virginia University who knew Hauer and investigated the case for a 2018 article in the Journal of Spelean History. Hauer disappeared on June 9, the day after the phone call.

  After no sign of Hauer for three days, police entered his house and found a typewritten letter in which the author confessed to having murdered Smith and stashed his body in the cave behind the house. According to the letter, Smith had been “in the wrong place at the wrong time.” The letter said Hauer’s own body would “eventually be found in a cave in the nearby hills.”

  That evening, police uncovered Smith’s partially buried body in the cave. He had been shot in the head above each eyebrow and once in the neck with a .25-caliber pistol. Smith had also been sodomized, probably prior to his death, according to the West Virginia University medical autopsy report.