Home of Truth

Out here in Utah's Dry Valley, about ten miles north of Monticello, a cluster of adobe buildings slowly crumbles back into the desert. This is the Home of Truth, a utopian religious colony founded in nineteen thirty-three by Marie Ogden, a New Jersey socialite who believed she could receive divine messages through her typewriter.

Ogden gathered around one hundred followers and laid out the settlement in three concentric rings she called Outer, Middle, and Inner portals, each representing a stage of spiritual advancement. The experiment unraveled after Ogden insisted that a member who died in nineteen thirty-five was merely resting and could be revived, and she tried again in nineteen thirty-seven. By the end of that year only seven people remained. Today the ruins sit unmarked on private land, a quiet monument to how far belief can carry people, and how quickly the desert reclaims what faith leaves behind.