As though putting Exodus 20:3 into action (“You shall have no other gods before me”), the Fort Hill Community kicked off a secret war against other communes led by gurulike figures in 1971. When the leader of the Kerista commune (whose decisions were arrived at daily via Ouija board) wrote Lyman telling him he was the messiah, a Fort Hill member showed up and threw his typewriter out a window. Next, the Family targeted Brotherhood of the Spirit, a western Massachusetts commune and rock ’n’ roll band led by Michael Metelica, a twenty-one-year-old with a Confederate flag fetish. (Hunter S. Thompson refers to him as “What’s His Name” in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.) “I didn’t see any spirit in flesh there today,” Mel’s new wife Eve told The New Yorker. “I saw a bunch of dirty hippies having a love-in.” Meanwhile, Faith Gude went to California to observe the inner workings of Victor Baranco’s Lafayette Morehouse “sex cult.” (Motto: “Fun is the Goal, Love is the Way.”) George Peper trailed Gude with a message from Mel, delivered during one of Baranco’s “Advanced Hexing” courses, to little effect. Attempts were even made to flip one of Manson’s closest followers, Squeaky Fromme, who claimed she was beaten up when she refused to follow Lyman instead of Manson.
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IN THE SPIRIT of the 1970 Manson story he cowrote for Rolling Stone, David Felton set out to cover what he thought might be its East Coast counterpart. The investigation would take him from Roxbury to Martha’s Vineyard, culminating with his long-delayed in-person interview with Lyman at their house in the Hollywood Hills. By then, Lyman had replaced all of his rotting teeth. As the journalist soon realized, he had developed an alter ego named Richard Herbruck with a different personality; Lyman only became Herbruck when he wore dentures.* Upon meeting the frail, toothless man, Felton wondered, “Was this Mel Lyman or some terminal junkie they had bailed out of the deformity ward at County General?”
Since the L.A. contingent of the Fort Hill Community had been placed on a “night schedule,” the interview took place at dawn after a long dinner comprising bean curd, mushrooms, noodles, and “stringy green stuff.” Lyman recounted his life story. He blamed “those fucking bastards” at 23 Kenwood in Newton—an outpost of Leary and Alpert’s International Federation for Internal Freedom—for giving acid to his former sweetheart, Judy Silver, which drove her straight to “the nuthouse.” He showed a photo from his funny encounter on TV with Johnny Carson, and described how Family members sometimes spent entire evenings at the L.A. mansion talking in “different accents.” He remarked how well John Kostick’s star sculptures were selling lately. “Boston is sort of like a boot camp,” he said, explaining how each outpost of his community served an overarching goal. “This is a whole new culture. We’re really starting a new country.”
Felton finally asked, point-blank: “Are you God?”
No, Lyman answered. He was using the concept as a metaphor. “But I can tell you I know God better than anybody in the world.” Felton pushed him for more of an explanation. “All I can tell you is I’m His best instrument on earth.” Lyman slipped into the house’s swimming pool and remained there as Felton let himself out. Soon, the frail harmonica player floating in the water would be on the cover of Rolling Stone. Outside of Ouija boards, he’d never talk to another journalist again.
“What this Mel Lyman guy needs is a good punch in the mouth,” someone wrote in. A more eloquent reader predicted that fascist communities like Fort Hill would spread “as long as people continue searching their fears, on acid or straight, and no one else is there to talk them straight and direct and sympathetically about it.” The Fort Hill Community felt betrayed by the piece. In the eighties, Felton would occasionally hear from a coworker about running into a Lyman Family member somewhere in New York. “Felton’s the devil!” the person would rail. “He ruined the family.”
As early as 1972, it was rumored that Lyman was rarely—or never—seen by his followers. One writer dubbed him the “Howard Hughes of the Underground.” In 1975, the Globe tracked down some significant Boston personalities of the late sixties. None could say what happened to the guru of Fort Hill. The question wouldn’t go away. “Is Mel Lyman still around?” director John Waters quipped at a Boston appearance in 2004. “I love those sorts of notorious characters.” Nobody knew.
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THE REASON BEHIND the ’78 Ouija board interviews wouldn’t make a lick of sense until 1985, when Los Angeles Times reporter David Cay Johnston wrote, “His Family says that he died in April 1978, after a lingering illness. He would have been 39.” The community’s first collective output since 1969—the short-lived U & I Magazine—had coaxed them out of hiding, and their news of Lyman’s death seven years earlier was disquieting. If this information was to be believed, then surely his final interviews were those conducted via Ouija board the month before his purported passing. But if he was alive in March 1978, why not just do those interviews in person? Perhaps he was too ill to be physically present. When a reporter asked about the strange interview format, the Family said that it was easier this way, as their leader now orbited the planet in a spaceship. Even stranger, “Members of the community hint at an involvement with the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” Steven Spielberg’s 1977 hit.
The Family let Johnston know that Mel had died by showing him their “holy records,” the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist says, referring to a private manuscript written by Lyman’s widow, Eve. (Johnston recently made headlines by appearing on The Rachel Maddow Show with one of President Trump’s tax records.) They didn’t reveal Mel’s final resting place, but Johnston suspects either the Boston compound or the Kansas farm. The Family refused to discuss the absence of a death certificate or funeral. Such secrecy even extended to some of their own Family members. “They deny rumors that he fled the Family and lives in Europe,” Johnston wrote in 1985.
Since Felton’s article, the Lyman Family had grown deeply insular—and financially successful. Their contracting business, Fort Hill Construction, was thriving, catering to Hollywood’s A-list, with customers like Spielberg and Dustin Hoffman. Jim Kweskin reminisces about closing a construction deal with music-industry mogul David Geffen, who didn’t let on that he had once worked for Kweskin in another life until after the papers were signed. “Do you remember when you were managed by Albert Grossman?” Geffen asked. “I was the kid over in the corner on the telephone, booking your gigs.” M*A*S*H cocreator Larry Gelbart raved about the group’s artistry, but worried about their place in the modern world. “Once we were talking about what a great man Abraham Lincoln was when one of them looked up at the sky and said, ‘Did you see that fleet of spaceships go by?’”
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• • •
JESSIE BENTON NOW spends winters in Mexico and summers in Martha’s Vineyard, where she can easily make the occasional visit to Fort Hill. Sharp and self-aware at seventy-eight, she’s a natural storyteller. (She still refers to her father, Thomas Hart Benton, as “Daddy.”) There’s little hint here of the woman who brooded over Ouija boards or told a reporter that her husband did manipulate his Family, but not “for evil.” In fact, everyone I speak to from the FHC today is patient and thoughtful—folks you’d assume were part of mainstream society. Did they grow out of their odd beliefs and eccentric behaviors? Was it all just a show they grew tired of putting on? Or maybe this is another show.
The only thing curious about my call with Benton is the unidentified man in the room with her, who sometimes feeds her answers to my questions or provides her with additional details. I ask Benton what parts of the Rolling Stone article weren’t true, and she says she simply objected to the general portrayal of the Family as “creepy.” But some of those scenes, quotes, and incidents are without a doubt creepy, and dozens of other reporters and visitors had also documented similar things emanating from Fort Hill. (And isn’t the guy offstage, unseen but heard, also a bit creepy?) She talks about a vit
al energy that was once present in the world: “There was a feeling in the air, you felt you were a part of something. That has disappeared. That does not exist anymore.”
Why were you secretive about Mel’s death? I ask.
“We were?” She considers for a long time, then finally says, “Perhaps it was just too painful.”
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• • •
ANIMETRICS, THE COMPANY that makes the algorithms for facial recognition software, analyzes the photograph I found of a man who looks like an older Mel Lyman. Their results are inconclusive. The report tells me that “marionette and nasolabial creases appear similar” and “appearance of long neck and Adam’s apple are consistent,” but in the end, making the call utilizing just one photograph is impossible. Maybe it’s not Mel after all. With all the pseudonyms and look-alikes that litter the Lyman story, I wonder if I’ve been chasing a false lead this entire time.
I pull real estate filings from the Massachusetts Registry of Deeds related to Fort Ave. Terrace and United Illuminating, Inc., from around the time of Lyman’s purported death, and find something startling. On a document dated September 1978, five months after the date of death given to the Los Angeles Times, there’s a notarized signature provided by one Melvin Lyman. It would have been difficult, but not impossible, to hoodwink a notary and have someone else stand in for Lyman during a signing of a legal document. Again, Mel’s “clones” come to mind here. But no matter the explanation, it’s an unusual find: a supposedly dead man signing documents months after his reported passing.
There is no death certificate for Mel Lyman. Even close Family member Wayne Hansen—his is one of seven signatures on the realty trust documents—was kept in the dark. “I was told that Melvin died and I believe that,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1985. “I have to take on faith that he died.” Death certificates are required by law for myriad reasons, but I don’t believe the failure to register his passing was done for the usual ulterior motives, such as social security fraud. Rather, it was an act of myth building, a way of keeping him alive. After all, what kind of bible lets you know precisely how God dies? Everyone I spoke to, whether they loved or hated Mel, had a theory about what happened to the musician turned guru. Lyman’s non-ending recasts him as a kind of ghost floating through Boston’s counterculture history, impossible to pin down.
But what if this story had a definitive ending? I kept searching.
Michael Kindman—the Fort Hill Community member who never entered the inner circle, who felt manipulated by skewed astrology charts, and who finally left the group in 1973—spent much of his post-FHC life trying to break the grip that Lyman had on him. He reconstructed Lyman’s astrology chart with an expert, revealing that Mel was not so much an “avatar and cultural leader,” but more of a “needy person with a very low sense of self-worth.” Kindman’s exchange of letters with Lyman in 1977, published later in Kindman’s memoir, are some of Mel’s last known writings. “Why didn’t you use your influence in the community to clear away the bullshit that separated us from each other?” Kindman asked him. Lyman’s response, mailed from Martha’s Vineyard, begins, “My son, your criticism was well taken,” before confessing, “I may have been labeled as some kind of guru or spiritual teacher, in my own secret recesses I never felt this way . . . I only issued orders upon request.”
Kindman’s rebuttal is incandescent with righteous anger; it’s too bad he never mailed it.
Let’s begin by getting something straight; I’m not your son, and never have been. . . . You’re about as innocent of wrongdoing as Richard Nixon was, and about as naïve. Maybe take a couple of your favorite wives and kids and helpers and go back to the woods and start over. Remember how you used to threaten to do just that, every year or so? We ingrates just weren’t worthy of your presence, and it was too hard to create with all these panderers around, and so forth? You never managed to make the break then; evidently you were as addicted to being followed as we were to following. I’m not sure where you are now in relation to all that, but in your letter you sure sound stuck. And, man, you sure could make music before.
Kindman learned of Lyman’s death the way most people did: a 1985 newspaper piece on the Fort Hill Community. “I imagined Mel killing himself, or becoming depressed and dying of some mysterious disease. Who could know?” he writes. Studying one of the article’s accompanying photos, Kindman couldn’t be sure that one of the men pictured was actually not Mel Lyman. “I believed they were capable of telling the media anything, regardless of the truth.”
In 1991, shortly after completing his memoir, Michael Kindman died of AIDS. Poignantly, the final words in his story quote the man he used to follow: “Getting to write about all of it has been a tremendously healing, and confrontational, experience for me,” Kindman reflects. “After all, as Mel Lyman used to say, ‘Recapitulation is the only real learning.’”
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MELVIN JAMES LYMAN was born in Eureka, California, on March 24, 1938, to James and Jessie Mae Lyman, arriving while James was out on the road giving guitar and violin lessons. “I’m afraid Mel was not very pretty when he was born,” his father later said of the jaundiced infant. “But his mother was very proud of him.” James served in the navy in 1941 and divorced Jessie Mae eight years later; he would subsequently have little interaction with his son. Little Mel loved cats and sitting by himself, daydreaming. At primary school, he provided the drumroll as they raised the flag and was wary of bullies.
In 1955, at age seventeen, Mel studied computer programming at a night school in San Francisco, which some would later cite as evidence that his rambling hillbilly aesthetic was fraudulent. (“I shot dope and ran IBM machines,” he wrote in his journal, the sole mention of his computer skills.) Despite marriage to a woman named Sophie and multiple children, Lyman took off on cross-country rambles, visiting the musicians he worshipped.* One such hero was Woody Guthrie, at the time living at Brooklyn State Hospital in the middle of a long, cruel decline from Huntington’s disease. (Bob Dylan was another visiting acolyte.) “I can’t ever forget the time he struggled up from his chair and said he was going to hop a freight train and go to the west coast again,” Lyman wrote in 1961, “and I knew he’d never seen the west coast . . . I still dream over and over that Woody is well again and raising hell and it’s just too damn sad.”
By the time Lyman arrived in Asheville, North Carolina, in the early sixties to commune with banjo player Obray Ramsey, his main source of income was selling marijuana. “I have to write my own bible in order to know how to live,” he decided. In 1963, several changes appear in his journals: He starts hanging out in New York City and experimenting with psychedelic drugs. “Hallooneysations, hassooleenations,” runs one entry. Immersing himself in the New York art scene that Jonas Mekas and Andy Warhol belonged to, Lyman was pulled away from that world by Judy Silver. Deeply in love, he followed her back to Brandeis University, in Waltham, Massachusetts. Around this time, he and Judy both seemed habitually ill. Lyman chalked up his own problems to “infectious hepatitis from shooting heroin with a dirty needle.”
“We may study ESP if we live,” he wrote. “We probably won’t live.”
They did. Lyman hit her (“Last night I struck my love and my insides came out”), took acid with her at Richard Alpert’s Newton home, and dedicated his second book, Mirror at the End of the Road, “To Judy, who made me live with a broken heart.” “I don’t think Mel ever got over that,” says Charles Giuliano, a good friend of the couple at the time, calling it “the devastating setback of his life.” After a police bust during a trip to Florida to check on his marijuana crop, Lyman narrowly escaped jail time by promising to find a job.
The job, of course, was playing with the Jim Kweskin Jug Band. Here, Lyman’s life becomes unmistakably rooted in Massachusetts; you can tell from the references that begin to appear in his journals. “I walked into Dunkin Donuts . . . and the
waitress talked to me about poetry.” (Dunkin’ Donuts!) There in Lyman’s diary from 1963 is the first inkling of things to come: “I am indeed a supreme being and deserve to be in the company of gods like myself.”* Broadside of Boston noted his arrival in September 1963, welcoming him as a devoted follower of Guthrie. By then, Lyman was living in Kweskin’s attic in Cambridge, working steadily with the band, picking up solo gigs all over Boston, and trying to shake that lovelorn feeling. He noted in a 1965 journal entry that loneliness was his “sole motivation.”
It wouldn’t be long before Mel Lyman took the darkened Newport stage alone, harmonica in hand. Later, in Sing Out magazine, Irwin Silber called Lyman’s Dylan-chasing performance “the most optimistic note of the evening.”
Which brings the story to where it began—a mournful “Rock of Ages” performed on harmonica, a “tiny hole for all that spirit to go through, that little tiny reed.” And now it can end—with mourning for Mel.
* * *
• • •
MEL LYMAN WORKED hard to become a public figure. He was known for his music, and notorious for his leadership of the Fort Hill Community. It’s baffling that the 1985 announcement of his 1978 death sparked no apparent investigation into what happened. Faking your own death—in the eyes of either the public, government, or your family—is extraordinarily difficult, requiring a permanently private life with no contact with the outside world. There is no doubt that Lyman was in poor health for most of the seventies. “The dozens of framed photographs of Lyman that hang in the Family’s houses depict a man growing progressively ill,” David Cay Johnston reported in 1985. “His private writings . . . speak intimately of approaching death.” It seems likely that, on some level, his family was telling the truth that he died, even if the dates they provided seemed mysteriously off.
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