The Palace of Gold: West Virginia’s Hare Krishna Utopia Turned Hell
This week, I’m diving into one of the most bizarre, beautiful, and ultimately broken places in West Virginia: The Palace of Gold.
Perched above the hills near Moundsville, what began as a spiritual sanctuary for Hare Krishna devotees became a national headline factory in the 1980s—complete with FBI raids, murder plots, fraud, racketeering, and one of the most surreal downfalls in religious history.
I’ll walk you through:
-How a WV hilltop became a marble-and-gold mecca built by hand
-The rise of Swami Bhaktipada (Keith Ham) and the New Vrindaban community
-The power, control, and devotion…
The skinny
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