Guest post written by A Mother Always Knows author Sarah Strohmeyer
Sarah Strohmeyer is a bestselling and award-winning novelist whose books include We Love to Entertain, Do I Know You?, The Secrets of Lily Graves, How Zoe Made Her Dreams (Mostly) Come True, Smart Girls Get What They Want, The Cinderella Pact (the basis of the Lifetime Original Movie Lying to Be Perfect), The Sleeping Beauty Proposal, The Secret Lives of Fortunate Wives, Sweet Love, and the Bubbles mystery series (Bubbles Unbound won the Agatha Award for Best First Mystery). A former newspaper reporter, her writing has appeared the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Boston Globe among other outlets. She lives with her family in Vermont where she is the elected town clerk of the small town of Middlesex.
About A Mother Always Knows (out July 1st 2025): The beloved, award-winning author of Do I Know You? and We Love To Entertain returns with an electrifying novel of psychological suspense that explores the way our pasts shape our futures in so many unexpected ways.
Thanks to a plethora of podcasts, books (both fiction and non-fiction) and addictive documentaries, cults have become modern society’s freak shows – grotesque, disturbing and weirdly entertaining. It’s tempting to imagine ourselves buying into a movement with such passion that we’d abandon our families and jobs to, say, massage the feet of a bearded leader who demands vodka smoothies and midnight basketball tournaments. (Some of that I made up; some of that I didn’t.) Could we fall prey to the right message, succumb to the right leader?
My own obsession with cults began as a newspaper reporter for the Cleveland Plain Dealer when I covered the horror story of a family who’d been murdered after a spaghetti dinner and buried in the floor of a garage in Kirtland, Ohio, by an offshoot group of fundamentalist Mormons. What at the time (1989) seemed impossible became the unfathomable. Two-bit cult leader Jeffrey Lundgren had persuaded his few delusional followers to murder Dennis and Cheryl Avery and their children. I drew on this experience decades later when I wrote A Mother Always Knows – which begins when a mother is murdered fleeing a Vermont “spiritual dowsing” cult with her young daughter.
Most cults share common themes – a charismatic leader, a prophecy, dietary restrictions and sacrifices required of its followers. None of that sounds appealing and, yet, there are hundreds of cults currently operating in the United States. That is, depending on how you define cult. Here are a few well known and lesser known I find most interesting:
1. Jim Jones, Jonestown and the People’s Temple (1978)
Jim Jones persuaded and even forced over 900 of his followers to commit “revolutionary mass suicide” by drinking poisoned Kool-Aid at the Peoples Temple compound in Guyana in November 1978, days after he’d ordered the murder of California Congressman Leo Ryan and four others who’d visited Jonestown on a fact-finding mission. Tragically, 276 of those who died were children. Jonestown forever altered the American psyche. It was the worst US mass casualty until September 11th. It also birthed the phrase “to drink the Kool-Aid.”
2. House of David (1902 – ?)
Founded by Benjamin and Mary Purnell in Fostoria, Ohio, the House of David cult prohibited sex, alcohol, tobacco, meat and property ownership in return for a fun-filled eternity in paradise. They ran their own zoo, schools, amusement park and even power plant in a Michigan town. But what they were really known for was … baseball. Theorizing that their message could be spread through nine innings, the House of David baseball team of bearded members was so popular at one point that legendary Babe Ruth considered playing for the team. The cult fizzled when Benjamin Purnell, who’d proclaimed himself the “Seventh Messenger” from the Book of Revelations, was caught up in a sex scandal involving underage girls. Supposedly, only two members of the cult exist today, patiently waiting for their paradise.
3. The Twelve Tribes (1972 – today)
Of all the cults that inspired A Mother Always Knows, the Twelve Tribes had the biggest influence largely because of their controversial and intriguing Vermont chapter. It’s also one of the most complex cultish organizations I’ve encountered with international branches – and international scrutiny. Founder Eugene Spriggs, now deceased, was part of an earlier religious order that pissed him off when it cancelled a Sunday church service due to the Superbowl. He founded an offshoot group called the Twelve Tribes of Israel that in the late 1970s moved to a remote part of Vermont where they opened the popular, hippie-themed Yellow Delis, which can now be found nationwide. They even used to follow the Grateful Dead, recruiting “Deadheads” to become their members. In 1984, their community in Island Pond, Vermont, was raided by the FBI on allegations of child abuse, removing 112 children from their parents. A federal judge forcefully ruled the raid as illegal and the children were returned. While The Twelve Tribes denies they are a cult, the Southern Poverty Law Center disagrees citing their White supremacist views on the benefits of slavery and their intolerance toward the LGBTQ community.
4. Love Has Won or the Galactic Federation of Light (2009-2021)
When it comes to cults, Love Has Won has it all, including a connection to the mystical area of Vermont where I set A Mother Always Knows. New Age, QAnon, the Lost Continent of Lemuria, there’s a lot to absorb here. Founder Amy Carlson believed Donald Trump was her father in another life, though, to be fair, she’d been reincarnated over 500 times including as Jesus, Joan of Arc and, naturally, Marilyn Monroe. She communicated with a deceased Robin Williams and strictly forbade alcohol consumption among her twenty or so members though she, herself, drank copious amounts of vodka. Booze, anorexia and a constant ingestion of colloidal silver contributed to her premature death at age 45, thereby ending the cult. Some members reformed a new group “5D Full Disclosure” which operates out of a town on the Vermont/Canadian border. HBO produced a fascinating three-part series on the whole craziness.
These are but a few of so many documented in excellent books such as Cults by Max Cutler (Gallery Books, 2022) based on his popular podcast. Of course, none of us operates in a vacuum and those who join radical cults often, by the very nature and demands of a cult, leave their distressed loved ones behind. That’s why I made the focus in A Mother Always Knows on Stella, the daughter who witnesses her mother’s murder at age ten. Stella must reconcile why the gentle, loving woman who gave her life also was crazy enough to join a cult, thereby putting Stella’s life in danger as well.
