New Vrindaban: the Hare Krishna commune in West Virginia with a dark secret at its core
Sat in one of the northernmost points of West Virginia, near the borders of the Mason-Dixon line itself and among the country roads that take John Denver home, is a palace of gold. To be clear, there are several baffling things one can find on a roadside in the south. Everything from ancient, immaculately preserved Native American settlements to an ice cream shop with goats on the roof. This, however, takes the cake.
So much so that someone encountering it unexpectedly may think the sun finally got to them and they’re hallucinating. However, there really is a palace of gold sitting in the thin slice of the Mountain State tucked between Ohio and Pennsylvania. Not only that, but the history behind it is as bloody and disturbing as the structure itself is beautiful.
The palace is the crown jewel of New Vrindaban, one of the largest Hare Krishna communities in the United States. Founded in 1968 by the main character of this story, Kirtanananda Swami. Kirtanananda was born Keith Ham in Peekskill, New York. Despite being the son of a Conservative Baptist minister, he joined the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (Hare Krishna for short) in 1966.
Not only did he join the society, but he also accepted the organisation’s founder, AC Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, as his personal guru. At Prabhupada’s request, Kirtanananda was to develop a settlement specifically for American followers of the Hare Krishna movement. After putting the word out, he received an offer from the author Richard Rose Jr Rose, who had ties to the Krishnas and offered his land in Marshall County, West Virginia, as the site of this new settlement.
Despite being little more than a manure-filled mudhole when ground was broken on the project, by 1980, New Vrindaban was one of the largest Hare Krishna settlements in the world. As the 1970s went on, ambition had grown and grown on the project. What had begun as a simple settlement and a community hub for US-based Krishnas had grown into nothing less than a Hare Krishna theme park, giving the community the nickname “Spiritual Disneyland”.
While everything was hunky-dory on the surface, Kirtanananda’s followers were essentially scamming members of the public to fund the project. Selling counterfeit clothes and collecting money for fake charities. Higher-ups in the community were involved in even bigger scams, funnelling millions of dollars into the project by selling copyrighted materials. Bold moves for an organization preaching anti-materialism.
However, the crimes perpetrated by members of this community were even darker and more cruel than that. Several higher-ups, most notably Dennis Gorrick (Dharmatma), were unrepentantly abusive to their wives. Gurukula, the community’s boarding school, was rife with physical abuse. This rot went to the very top, with Kirtanananda himself being indicted for a multitude of crimes in 1990, including racketeering, conspiracy to murder and child sexual abuse.
Infuriatingly, no jury ever successfully convicted him of his crimes despite overwhelming evidence. He and his legion of followers were ousted from the community in 1994, and New Vrindaban is still active to this day despite the rot present in its very foundation—the kind of rot that not even a Palace of Gold, built to house the very founder of Hare Krishna itself, can ever truly cover-up.
