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The 9,000-square-foot “castle” at 22 Crestmont Road was built from 1902 to 1905 for Frederic Ellsworth Kip, a textile magnate, and his wife Charlotte Bishop Williams Kip, who oversaw the design of its 30 rooms, six fireplaces, and octagonal rose garden. That article begins: “A guru from India wheels into town in a Rolls-Royce, buys the biggest house in the community – a castle, actually – and places an advertisement in Time magazine preaching spirituality through sex.” One local resident voiced dismay about the quiet bedroom community of Montclair becoming “an international headquarters for a free-sex cult.”īhagwan Shree Rajneesh with one of his Rolls Royces, in a still from Wild Wild Country. It’s there that the cult first started rankling neighbors, as evidenced by a New York Times headline: CULT IN CASTLE TROUBLING MONTCLAIR. That summer, before moving on to their 64,000-acre utopia out west, Bhagwan and his followers would make their home in a 10-bedroom, Rhineland-style “castle” on the border of Montclair and Verona, New Jersey. But Bhagwan didn’t make his famous proclamation in Oregon he made it right here in New York City, at JFK airport.
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If you’ve binge-watched the new Netflix documentary Wild Wild Country, you know the Indian guru went on to establish the communal town of Rajneeshpuram and become a target of federal law enforcement. When Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh arrived in the United States in June of 1981, he stepped off of a Pan Am 747 and declared, “I am the Messiah America has been waiting for.”