Historical society shines light on Shirley ‘Sheet People’ cult of 1980s
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It was considered quite the “odd thing,” a gathering of people in Shirley in the 198os who were not like everyone else.
They were a group, up to 50 of them, who lived in a communal setting and dressed in white-sheet robes. They were known as the “sheets of Shirley.”
They were a cult who never wore shoes, or ate meat, but smoked marijuana and had a tendency to smell bad, a local historian said.
Their leader, a man originally from California named Charles Franklin McHugh, called himself “Jesus Christ Lightning Amen.” He and the men and woman in the cult all took the last name “Christ.” Longtime local residents recall a group from the cult used to sit around a home in Shirley, along the road that led from Wilkinson to Shirley — creating quite the gossip as to what the group was up to.
Hancock County Historical Society’s Michael Kester has been reading a 2023 book, “Finding Baby Holly.” The book is written by Holly Marie. When she was 10 months old she was brought to the door of a church in Arizona by three barefoot women in white-sheet robes and head coverings.
The child was adopted by a family there, but later in life two detectives showed up and told Holly, now a woman, that she had a large family in Florida who had been searching for her for over 40 years. She was also told her biological parents, Tina and Dean Clouse, had been brutally murdered in Texas in 1981.
When Kester found out the girl’s parents were supposedly part of the “sheet people,” Kester said, “the book spurred the idea of sharing that history, because to me the surprising part is part of that group somehow landed in Shirley, Indiana, and the people there were just a gasp!”
Kester, who noted he’s always looking for something unusual to share through the county’s Historical Society programming, reached out to fellow board member and local historian Brigette Cook Jones. Cook Jones provided much more information about the “sheet people” and their time in Shirley, during a historical presentation Sunday afternoon at the Chapel in Riley Park.
“I had always wondered about the ‘sheet people’ because my family moved out to Eastern Hancock when I was in the seventh grade, and I was taking piano lessons in Wilkinson when they moved in and it was such an oddity,” Cook Jones said. “We always called them the ‘sheets of Shirley,’ and we would drive by and I would tell my mom, ‘Let’s drive by the sheets and see what they are doing.’”
Cook Jones noted she was never scared of the group but was always very curious about them. One of the things she shared in her presentation was how the “sheets” ended up in Shirley. Cook Jones noted a Shirley man welcomed the sheet people there, and he ended up joining them, giving them rights to his property located along the Shirley-Wilkinson road, west of New Jersey Street.
“They were in the Alexandria area, and they talked with a guy who lived here in the area. I think he was at a low time in his life, and these people talked to him, and he thought that was the way to go — and when he joined them he invited them to his house in Shirley, and that caused his wife and kids to leave him,” Cook Jones said. “He ended up signing his house over to them.”
When Cook Jones started her presentation she asked the crowd how many had ever heard of the “sheets of Shirley,” and nearly half the crowd of over 40 people raised their hands.
Content retrieved from: https://www.greenfieldreporter.com/2025/08/28/historical-society-shines-light-on-shirley-sheet-people-cult-of-1980s/.
