End of Days by Sylvia Browne

Posted by admin_akashic on Aug 9th, 2022 in Stories

In other words, we really don’t have the luxury of believing that if we’re not drug-crazed hippies, we’re immune to persuasive doomsday “saviors” with off-center, self-serving interpretations of the book of Revelation. Whether Charles Manson actually believed his complicated view of the Apocalypse or whether he simply used it when he discovered it was an effective manipulation device is anybody’s guess. But then, let’s face it, the same issue could easily be raised about Marshall Applewhite, Jim Jones, David Koresh, Sun Myung Moon, Jeffrey Lundgren, and every other doomsday cult leader who’s systematically destroyed the lives of a lot of trusting, vulnerable, unfulfilled, God-fearing people.

Charles Manson was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, on November 12, 1934. His mother was sixteen years old. The identity of his father was never clearly established, and whoever he was, Manson claims never to have met him. Manson’s last name came from his mother’s brief marriage to an older man named William Manson.

Manson had what can best be described as an unstable childhood. For the most part he was raised by his grandmother and/or his aunt while his mother was either in prison for armed robbery or simply not around for days and weeks at a time. He was twelve years old when he began bouncing back and forth between boys’ homes and jail—he committed his first armed robbery when he was thirteen and was in and out of prisons and reformatories until he was nineteen. He was evaluated by any number of prison counselors and too few psychiatrists, all of whom found him disturbed and disturbing. At the same time, one of them commented that Manson possessed “certain facile techniques for dealing with people. These … consist of a good sense of humor and an ability to ingratiate himself.” In fact, he enthusiastically took a Dale Carnegie course on “how to win friends and influence people” during his teenage years, and even though he didn’t finish, he apparently picked up some effective pointers.

He also seems to have picked up some effective pointers for attracting “the family” in the future when he began his first real career in Los Angeles, as a pimp. (He traveled to Los Angeles in 1955 in a car he stole in Ohio.) Then came more prison time, for a variety of federal offenses, during which he dabbled in Scientology, the Bible, and Buddhism long enough to adopt some jargon from all three, and he became obsessed with songwriting, playing the guitar, and, most significantly, the Beatles.

It was after those stints in prison that Charles Manson began accumulating followers, the vast majority of whom were in their late teens to early twenties and, for a variety of reasons, in search of a sense of belonging and being part of something that mattered. Or, as one of the Family members put it, “traveling around the country looking for God.” He started in the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco, one of the most famous gathering places for the hippie movement of the late 1960s, and returned to Los Angeles with the first female members of the Family.

Between his guitar playing, songwriting, female entourage, and developing philosophy about the approaching Armageddon, Manson temporarily attracted the curiosity of Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson and record producer Terry Melcher, the son of actress Doris Day, who was living with actress Candice Bergen at 10050 Cielo Drive, a small street near Benedict Canyon, which cuts through the Hollywood Hills. One night, Charles Manson happened to be a passenger when Dennis Wilson drove Terry Melcher home to Cielo Drive and dropped him off at the gate. The Cielo Drive house was subsequently leased to director Roman Polanski and his beautiful actress wife, Sharon Tate.

There are strong theories that it was Terry Melcher’s ultimate rejection of Charles Manson and his music that inspired Manson to choose 10050 Cielo Drive as the target for six savage murders committed at his command on August 9, 1969—of Steven Parent, age eighteen; Sharon Tate, twenty-six, actress; Sharon’s unborn son; Abigail Folger, twenty-five,