New book uncovers the story behind infamous North Bay cult
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Decades before Charles Manson’s followers spread terror in Los Angeles and Jim Jones orchestrated mass suicide in Guyana, a bearded mystic named Thomas Lake Harris preached salvation in the hills above Santa Rosa.
He claimed to speak with spirits, rewrote the Bible and battled demons in trances. His followers gave him their money — sometimes a great deal more. What began as a utopian experiment called Fountaingrove ended in scandal and headlines about “spiritual harems” and mind control.
In a new book, “Unholy Sensations: A Story of Sex, Scandal and California’s First Cult Scare” (Oxford University Press, 2025), historian Joshua Paddison revisits Harris’ rise and fall. It is a sensational tale of faith, fraud and forbidden desire that captivated 19th-century America, with themes that still resonate today.
From England to Sonoma County
Paddison, a history instructor at Texas State University, situates Harris within the context of a 19th-century spiritual awakening, an era marked by a search for meaning beyond the industrial age, during which utopian communities emerged across the country.
Born in 1823 in the village of Fenny Stratford, Buckinghamshire, England, Harris came to the United States when he was five years old. His solidly middle-class family settled in Utica, New York, where his father was a grocer and devout Calvinistic Baptist. His mother died when he was nine.
Harris said he experienced an “overflowing” love of Christ at 15, when he attended a revival meeting. He began his public life as a Unitarian minister in New York around 1845. But his path soon veered into the realm of spiritualism. Claiming the ability to serve as a medium, he drew inspiration from the teachings of the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, whose writings sparked a lifelong fascination with the spirit world.
Harris spent four years in Britain, where he founded the Brotherhood of the New Life, a utopian group dedicated to spiritual purity, manual labor and retreat from what they viewed as the corrupting forces of urban society.
During the Civil War, Harris returned to the United States, where he established three colonies in New York. A decade later, he felt moved by the spirits to relocate once again; this time, 2,600 miles west to Sonoma County.
Content retrieved from: https://www.pressdemocrat.com/2025/09/15/new-book-chronicles-the-rise-and-fall-of-notorious-north-bay-cult/.
