Ancient Mysteries - Inside America's Only Polygamist Town: Secrets Hidden From the Outside World

Episode Date: June 5, 2026

A town unlike any other in America.This video takes you inside one of the country's most secretive communities, where polygamy has shaped everyday life for generations. Behind its quiet streets lies a world of traditions, beliefs, and social rules that few outsiders ever witness.What is life really like inside America's only polygamist town?Some communities remain hidden in plain sight.👁️ The deeper you look, the stranger it becomes.

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wrong turn out of the 1800s and never looked back. Welcome to Colorado City, the only fully polygamous town in America, headquarters of the FLDS and the former kingdom of a guy named Warren Jeff's. Profit, FBI Most Wanted, now serving life in prison for crimes against children. Yeah, it gets dark fast. My guide today is Sam, a former member who grew up here with 35 siblings, 35. My family reunion has 11 people and we still can't pick a restaurant. He's taking me inside the mansions, the secret escape doors, and the forbidden mountain, places outsiders almost never see. Before we roll, smash that like button and drop a comment telling me what city you're watching from. Seatbelts on. Let's go. The drive out of Phoenix starts the way every Arizona road trip starts. Traffic sunburned

through the windshield, gas station selling beef jerky older than the cashier, and that one stretch of highway where your phone gives up on civilization and decides you're on your own now. But this isn't a normal six-hour drive. This is a drive that slowly peels away the 21st century like a sticker, layer by layer, until you arrive somewhere that genuinely shouldn't exist anymore. The first hour is pure modern America, strip malls, Tesla's charging at rest stops, drive-through coffee places where the barista calls you buddy and spells your name four different wrong ways. Then comes the second hour and the chain restaurants start thinning out. By hour three, you're passing through towns where the biggest building is a feed store and the local news is

whatever's pinned to a bulletin board outside the post office. By hour four, even the bulletin boards are gone. It's just road, red rock and the occasional cow that looks at your car like it personally invented disappointment. Somewhere around our five, you cross into a stretch of desert that feels less like a region, and more like a mood. The mountains start getting taller and weirder like nature decided to show off. The cell signal pulls one bar, two bars, then waves goodbye entirely, and then, almost out of nowhere, you see it. A cluster of huge, oddly shaped houses tucked under a giant red cliff, surrounded by tall fences that clearly were not built with backyard barbecues in mind. Welcome to Colorado City. Population, complicated, vibe, uneasy.

The first thing that hits you isn't the architecture, even though the architecture is doing a lot. It's the silence. I've been to ghost towns before. The kind tourists take selfies in next to a rusty saloon sign. This isn't that. Ghost towns are quiet because nobody lives there. Colorado City is quiet because people do live there and they would very much prefer you didn't notice. Curtains stay drawn. Driveways have cars but no movement. You'll see a kid peek out a window, then disappear so fast you start to question whether you have actually saw a kid, or if your brain invented one out of guilt. There are no billboards welcoming you. No little wooden sign that says something like howdy friends or population 8,000 plus one visitor. No coffee shop with a punny name. No gas station that doubles as a tourist trap selling magnets shaped like the state. Naturally, the things every other American small town has weaponised for cash,

this place has aggressively rejected. The streets are wide enough to land a small plane on, which makes sense once you realise they were designed to fit massive families and even more massive trucks, not pedestrians who might want to stroll around and ask questions. The geography itself is the first clue that something here is off, and I mean off in the legal sense, not just the spiritual one. Colorado City sits directly on the Arizona-Uta border, like... Directly. The state line cuts through the town like somebody drew it with a ruler while not paying attention.

On one side of the road, you're in Arizona. On the other side, you're in Utah. Same neighbourhood, same families, two completely different sets of laws, two completely different police forces, two completely different court systems. For decades, the leaders of the FLDS treated this border like a personal cheat code. If Arizona started asking too many questions, they shuffled people to the Utah side. If Utah got curious, everybody went south. By the time investigators figured out which jurisdiction they were even supposed to be operating,

in, the paperwork had aged into a fossil. Imagine playing tag, but you can always touch the base, and the base is an entire other state. That's basically how this town worked for half a century. Unsurprisingly, that's also how a religious community can grow into a 5,000-person operation, with its own internal economy, its own enforcement, and its own version of reality, while the rest of America just keeps assuming it's a Netflix documentary that hasn't been greenlit yet. I park along a side street that doesn't have a net, name, or if it does, the sign disagrees and would rather not say. The fences here are not the cute white picket nonsense from a hallmark movie. These are tall, solid, wood plank fences,

sometimes ten feet high, sometimes higher, often with a second fence behind the first one, just in case the first one started slacking. You can't see the houses, you can barely see the trees, you definitely can't see what anybody's doing in their yard, and that's the point. The fences aren't there to keep things out. They're there to keep things unseen. Out of the truck steps Sam, and the first thing you notice about Sam is that he doesn't look like a guy walking back into trauma. He looks like a guy who's about to take you on a tour very calmly, with the energy of someone who has thoroughly processed the worst chapters of his life, and now mostly finds them deeply weird. He's friendly, he's funny. He points at houses the way other people point at celebrity graves.

Sam grew up in Colorado City. He grew up here with 35 brothers and sisters. He walked away at 18, which means. Since he left behind the only world he had ever known, plus most of the people he had ever loved, and got handed in exchange a question nobody had ever taught him how to answer, which was something like, So What Now? Sam runs a YouTube channel called Growing Up in Polygamy, which is a title that does exactly what it says on the tin.

He talks about the rules, the relationships, the food, the wives, the profits, the punishments, the schools, the marriages, and the very specific kind of mind games you can only really understand if you've lived inside them. Coming back here for the first time in years to film with a stranger is not nothing. It's the kind of thing most people from his background would never do, partly because returning makes the memories louder, and partly because it might cost you the last threads of contact you have with family members still inside. That's the part outsiders never quite grasp on the first try. Leaving the FLDS isn't like quitting a club or moving away from a small town, it's a total relational nuke. The moment you walk out, the door doesn't just close behind you,

it gets cemented over, and then a mural of your missing face gets painted on top, except the mural is just a blank wall, because they're not allowed to acknowledge you anymore. Sam has dozens of siblings he hasn't been able to hug since he left, brothers who would cross to the other side of the street if they saw him at a gas station, sisters who are not permitted to even nod hello. If a family member still believes in Warren Jeff's, they're required to act like Sam is dead, which is somehow worse than actual death, because at least at a funeral people are allowed to say your name out loud. What makes Sam an absolutely perfect guide isn't just the trauma resume, though it's certainly thorough. It's that he has the rarest combination in a place like this.

He has the insider's knowledge, every street, every house, every family tree, every story behind every weird detail, and he also has the outsider's clarity, the part of his brain that finally got to step back and ask the obvious questions everybody else here is forbidden from asking. He'll point at a building and tell you who lived there, who married whom, how many wives were involved, which kids got reassigned to which fathers, and then he'll pause and say something like, yeah, and looking back that was completely unhinged, wasn't it? That double vision, simultaneously native and foreign is the only way to actually understand this place. Without it, you're just a tourist gawking at fences.

Sam offers to drive me to the one and only park in town, and that's where we head first. Cottonwood Park is exactly what it sounds like, a patch of grass, some old playground equipment, a few trees doing their best, and the unmistakable energy of a place that used to mean something, and now mostly means nothing. There are no kids running around. There are no families having picnics. There's no pick-up basketball game, no group of teens being dramatic on the swings.

The park is just sitting there, the way old high school yearbooks sit on shelves long after the school burned down. But this park used to be the social heart of the entire community. Sam paints the picture, and once you can see it, you can't unsee it. Fourth of July, town picnic, summer gatherings, weddings, every milestone the community celebrated,

it all happened right here on this grass, long tables full of casserole dishes, kids in matching pioneer style outfits, because that's the dress code, and we'll get to that. Elders giving speeches. Music playing, the kind of music that was technically allowed, which mostly meant hymns and very wholesome folk songs. It was, by all accounts, not the absolute prison camp the outside world imagines when they hear the word FLDS. There were birthdays, there were jokes, there was even sometimes fun, or at least the closest. thing to fund that the rules of the time permitted, which is its own asterisk. The reason the park used to feel like that, and doesn't anymore, has a name, and the name is Warren Jeff's.

To understand what Warren did to this place, you first have to understand what came before him, because the contrast is the whole story. Before 2002, the prophet of the FLDS was a man named Roulan Jeffs, Warren's father, by the standards of a fundamentalist polygamous sect, and yes, that is a sentence I just wrote. Roulon was relatively, and I want to put this word in extremely careful quotation marks that I'm not allowed to write here, normal. People in town respected him. He had his many wives, he had his many children, he ran the community, he preached, he made the rules, but the rules were rules people could live with. They had their park days, they had their weddings, they had their meals at home with the family, they had their version of a life.

When Roulon died, the leadership transition didn't go to a committee, didn't go to a county, didn't go to a Council of Elders didn't go through anything resembling a vote. It went to Warren, and Warren had ideas, the kind of ideas that, in retrospect, should have caused alarm bells to ring across multiple zip codes. Within months, Warren started rewriting the place from the inside. He didn't just step into his father's shoes, he set his father's shoes on fire and bought a new pair that only he was allowed to wear. He declared himself not just the leader of the church, but the literal mouthpiece of God on earth. When Warren spoke, God was speaking. When Warren decided your marriage wasn't going to work out anymore,

God was apparently the one filing the paperwork. Sam remembers being a kid and watching Warren preach. He says the showmanship was incredible. Warren would be in front of the entire community mid-sermon, and then he'd stop. Just stop. Eyes closed, head bowed, totally silent for an uncomfortably long time. The kind of pause that, at a normal church,

would have people checking their watches and wondering if the pastor was having a stroke. And while everybody held their breath, somebody would lean over to little kid Sam and whisper, with absolute reverence that Warren was receiving a revelation right now, live in real time. God was downloading new instructions, and Warren's job was to wait patiently for the buffering to finish. It's the kind of stagecraft that should have been laughable

and would have been laughable in literally any other setting. But context is everything. If you've grown up since birth being told this man is the direct line to the creator of the universe, you don't see theatre, you see proof, you see a quiet pause and you fill in the rest with whatever your parents trained you to believe. By the time those silent moments ended, and Warren opened his eyes again to deliver whatever fresh nonsense had supposedly just been beamed down to him, the room was already in his pocket. Nobody was questioning the source. Nobody was asking why the all-powerful creator of the cosmos kept needing to speak through a guy

with the public speaking skills of a tax accountant. They just nodded, they wrote it down, and they reorganised their entire lives around whatever he said next. Cottonwood Park, that little square of grass that used to host the casseroles and the kids and the imperfect but recognisable version of community life didn't survive that transition. As Warren tightened his grip,

gatherings got smaller, then rarer, then suspicious, then forbidden. Hey, y'all's Kelly Clarkson with Wayfair. Ever order furniture online and wonder what if? Like, what if it doesn't hold up? That sofa was four days old. You should have ordered from Wayfair. With Wayfair, there's no what if.

Just style you love and quality you can trust. Visit Wayfair.ca. Wayfair, every style, every home. The park sat there, mowed and trimmed and abandoned like a stage with no actors. The community didn't fall apart exactly. It just got pulled inward, behind the fences, into the houses, into the silence. By the time Warren was fully in control, the park was left. lesser park and more a monument to a softer era, nobody was allowed to mention anymore.

Sam stares at the empty swings for a second, half smiles, and says something that lands harder than it should. He says, yeah, this used to be where the fun lived, and then the fun got outlawed too. Once the park stopped being the park, the church needed a new centre of gravity, something less visible than picnic tables and more useful than grass. Naturally, what they reached for wasn't a building. It was a piece of paperwork, and not just any paperwork. A financial trust with a name so boring it sounds like it was specifically designed to make your eyes glaze over before you could ask any follow-up questions. The United Effort Plan

Say it out loud and your brain immediately files it under municipal sewage committee or local 4H volunteer association. That's the magic. Nobody investigates a trust that sounds like a high school group project. The United Effort Plan, or UEP, was the financial spine of, the entire FLD's world. On paper, it was a communal property trust, the kind of well-meaning religious structure you might find in a commune or a kibbutz, where members pool resources and everybody benefits. The pitch was beautiful. You're not just buying a house, brother, you're contributing to the kingdom. Your land is the Lord's land. Your business is the Lord's business.

Your sweat is the Lord's sweat, which is a sentence that gets weirder the longer you sit with it. In practice, the UEP wasn't a commune. It was a vacuum cleaner. And the man man holding the hose was Warren Jeff's. Sam walks me down a street lined with homes that in any other zip code would be worth a small fortune. Big lots, solid construction. Some of these places have 10, 12, 16 bedrooms, because when your household includes a man, four wives and a roster of children that requires a spreadsheet to keep track of, you don't get to live in a starter condo. And yet, technically, nobody on this street owned their home, not legally, not in any way that would hold up in a courtroom. The houses belong to the trust. The land belonged to the trust.

The driveways, the fences, the wells, the satellite dishes, the swing sets, nobody was allowed to play on. All of it. Trust. The families just lived there. The way you might live in a hotel where the front desk also decides whether you get to keep your kids. The genius and the horror of the UEP was that it made everything reversible. If you got out of line, if you asked the wrong question, if you got too friendly with the wrong neighbour, your house could be reassigned to a more loyal family literally overnight. Unsurprisingly, that put a damper on free thinking. Nothing motivates a man to nod along with the prophet quite like the realisation that his entire physical existence is rented from God's landlord, and God's landlord just happens to be the guy at the pulpit who didn't like

the look on his face last Sunday. Warren didn't just run the UEP, he fed it, aggressively. He built an entire economic engine inside Colorado City and then funneled the engine through his own office. The town's biggest moneymaker by a wide margin was construction. FLDS men were and still are famously skilled builders. Framing, roofing, concrete, plumbing, the kind of trades where you can crank out a 4,000 square foot house faster than most contractors can finish their quote. Cruise from Colorado City worked all over the southwest, taking on commercial jobs, residential jobs, government jobs, you name it. The money was real, the money was good, and the money came home, Warren noticed, Warren absolutely noticed, and one by one, the most successful builders in town

got called into private meetings, where Warren explained, in the gentle voice of a man who knows he doesn't need to raise it, that their thriving construction company really ought to be signed over to the trust, for the kingdom, for the profit, for God. For the obvious unspoken reason that refusing wasn't really on the menu. Sam tells me about families who had built businesses worth millions of dollars, with employees and equipment and contracts and reputations who handed the entire thing over without a fight, not because they were forced at gunpoint,

because they were absolutely certain that Warren was speaking on behalf of God, and God was apparently very interested in their bookkeeping. That's the part that's almost impossible to wrap your head around from the outside. Nobody had a gun to their head. They just had a worldview to their head, which turns out to be a much stronger weapon. Years later, ex-members asked themselves what on earth they actually signed away. The honest answer is basically everything.

While the UEP was busy quietly owning the town from the inside, the outside world was finally starting to pay attention. By the mid-2000s, the FBI had Warren Jeffs on their most wanted list. Yes. That most wanted list. The one usually reserved for serial killers, cartel bosses, and the occasional rogue cybercriminal. Now sharing the wall with a soft-spoken man in a button-up shirt and slacks,

who looked less like a fugitive and more like the assistant manager of a regional office supply store. The charges were severe, the hunt was real, and Colorado City, far from cooperating with federal agents, did the absolute opposite. The town didn't just hide its profit. It engineered a custom escape system for him, like a religious version of a heist movie, except instead of stealing gold the heist was Please don't arrest our spiritual leader. Thank you. Have a nice day.

Sam takes me to the old meeting house, the giant assembly building where the entire community used to gather to hear Warren preach. Today it's mid-demolition. Construction equipment is parked out front. Half the roof is gone. A wall is missing in a way that suggests gravity was politely asked to step in. As religious symbolism goes, watching the Prophet's stage get reduced to a pile of plywood is pretty,

on the nose. But Sam isn't here to film the wreckage. He's here to show me the doors, the back doors, the ones the church leaders used to slip out of whenever federal agents got too close. The doors, a heavy steel, painted some forgettable shade of beige, and dented in a way that doesn't look accidental. Sam points at the marks. Rounded indentations, small, clustered together, exactly where a person trying to push through a locked door from the wrong side might apply force with something a lot harder than a fist. He shrugs and says they could be a lot of things, could be normal wear, could be tools, could be, well, the kind of marks federal agents leave when they're real motivated to get inside and the door is real motivated to stay shut. He's not making

the claim. He's just letting your imagination do the math. He walks me around the building to show me the choreography. The meeting hall was set up so that the stage where Warren preached had a hidden corridor running directly behind it. From any seat in the audience, the back of the stage looked like a solid wall. From backstage that wall opened into a hallway that led to those reinforced back doors. From those doors, you stepped out onto a paved area that sloped down toward a wash, which is the local word for a dry creek bed that cuts through the town. The wash was crucial, it was below street level, it was hidden by vegetation, and naturally it was where the getaway cars waited. Sam describes one specific Sunday meeting,

the one he remembers the way most people remember historic news days. He was a kid, sitting in the audience listening to whoever was preaching that day. From the back of the hall, near the main entrance, there was a sudden commotion, voices raised, footsteps moving with purpose, the kind of sound that, in a normal community, would make people turn around and crane their necks to see what was going on. In this community, it produced something far weirder,

instant, silent, total stage evacuation. He glanced toward the front and the entire row of church leadership, men who had been sitting calmly in their assigned spots a heartbeat earlier were just gone, vanished, like a magic trick performed by people who had practiced this exact trick many times before. What happened next was even more telling. The men at the back, the loyal foot soldiers of the church, who functioned as unofficial bodyguards, planted themselves at the main doors. Politely, firmly, immovably, they weren't threatening anyone. They didn't need to. They were just standing there being a very large biological wall.

while federal agents tried to make their way inside. Outside in the wash, vehicles were already idling, engines running, doors open. By the time the agents managed to get past the human roadblock and into the building, the leadership had already cleared the stage, cleared the back hallway, cleared the doors, cleared the wash, and were halfway to a safe house on the other side of the state line. It's almost impressive. In the same way it's almost impressive when you watch a really well-executed bank robbery in a movie before remembering, oh right, this is a crime. The community had built an infrastructure of evasion, lookouts, drivers, signal systems, designated houses where leaders could hide, children who were coached on how to answer doorbells

and questions. The whole town operated like a single living organism whose autonomic nervous system was tuned to one purpose. Protect the Prophet. The Prophet in return kept right on telling them what God wanted, which conveniently always overlapped with what kept him out of handcuffs a little longer. Once you understand how the town protected Warren, you start to notice how the town also protected Warren's rules, and the rules used every tool in the toolkit, including a tool that almost feels too on the nose to be real. Looming directly over Colorado City, like a piece of stage design, is a massive mountain. Reddish, dramatic, tall enough to make you tilt your head back and squint. The kind of mountain that, in any normal small town, would be the first thing on the tourist brochure.

locals would have hiking trails up it. There would be a high school football team named after it. Some optimistic person would have opened a coffee shop at the base called Mountain Brew or Peak Perks or something equally guilty. In Colorado City, you were not allowed to go up that mountain. Not as a hike. Not as a picnic. Not as a teenage dare.

Not even, technically, as a glance held too long. The mountain wasn't off limits because of safety. There were no rattlesnakes nobody could handle. There were no avalanche zones. there was no military testing ground even though, honestly, that would have been a more conventional excuse. The mountain was off limits because, according to the church, it was haunted, and not haunted in a cute Halloween way, haunted in a deep, specific, biblically branded way. The story drilled into every FLDS child from the time they could understand sentences was that

the mountain belonged to the Gadiant-Ton-Robbers. If you're not deep in Mormon scripture, the Gadiens-Ton-Robbers are a group from the Book of Mormon, a secret society of the world of of murderers and conspirators who, depending on how you read the text, sort of represent every flavour of human evil all at once. According to the church, the spirits of these robbers still lived on that mountain. They were hungry, they were watching, they were one bad decision away from snatching some curious eight-year-old who climbed too high. Children were told this not as a metaphor, not as a colourful parable, but as a literal weather report. Go up that mountain and the robbers will get you. They might possess you. They might kill you.

They might drag you off into the rocks and you'd never come back, and your family would have to live with the fact that you chose disobedience over your eternal soul. Naturally, in a community that already taught children to fear God, fear sin, fear the outside world, fear questioning, and fear puberty, adding one more fear to the list wasn't a heavy lift. The mountain stayed clean of footprints, the rule held. The genius of using the Gadionton story instead of a regular boring no trespassing sign is that signs can be ignored, religion cannot, a sign says you'll get in trouble, a scripture says

you'll be damned, one you can negotiate with, one you can't. By dressing up an ordinary geographic restriction as a sacred warning, the church accomplished two things at once. They kept the mountain off limits, and they reminded everyone on a daily basis, that obeying the rules wasn't optional because the rules were stitched into the supernatural fabric of reality itself. The interesting question, of course is why. Why this mountain? Why such an elaborate spiritual perimeter around one specific piece of rock? Sam has theories, like most ex-members do, and they fall along a spectrum. On one end, the practical theory, that leaders were hiding things up there. Documents, supplies, money, people they didn't want the FBI to find. The mountain has caves, and caves are caves,

which is to say, extremely useful when your business model relies on not being seen. On the other end, the symbolic theory, that the mountain wasn't hiding anything in particular at all, and the entire ban was about psychology, a constant visible reminder looming over every backyard, every walk to school, every glance out the kitchen window, that there are places you don't go, things you don't see, and questions you don't ask. The mountain didn't need to hold a secret. It just needed to be a secret-shaped object hanging over the town forever. Probably it's a little of both. Probably leaders did stash things up there. Probably the symbolism was the bigger deal. Either way, the mountain worked. Generations of FLDS children grew up too terrified to even point at it for too

long, let alone climb it. They walked under its shadow every day and let the shadow do its job. After Sam left the church, after he had a few years of distance and started untangling the rules from the reality, he made a decision. He drove back into town, he parked. He looked up at the mountain, and he climbed it. Not for the view, although the view turned out to be ridiculous, and he says that quietly, almost embarrassed by how good it was. He climbed it because he needed to prove something to himself, in his own bones that the fear had been a story, that the spirits weren't waiting, that the robbers weren't real, that a mountain is just a mountain, and a rule is just a rule, and a prophet is just a guy. When he reached the top, the only thing

that grabbed him was the wind. The only thing that took him was the realization that he'd spent his entire childhood afraid of a piece of rock. He stood there for a while. Then he walked back down, got in his truck and drove home, no spirits attached, no curses applied, no eternal damnation invoice to his account. Coming down from a mountain you weren't supposed to climb is a good way to start noticing how many other things you weren't supposed to do. Because the ban on the mountain wasn't a one-off rule. It was a single bullet point on a list so long that, by the late 2000s, daily life in Colorado City had started to look less like a religious community and more like a very polite hostage situation. Warren Jeff's didn't just regulate behavior. He regulated Joy,

specifically he was anti-joy, like professionally anti-joy. If Joy walked into the room, Warren would have looked up from his sermon notes, made eye contact, and told Joy to leave its shoes by the door and never come back. To get a sense of the energy, picture North Korea, but in the American Southwest and cowboy country, with cell phones theoretically available, except nobody's allowed to use them properly. That's the closest cultural analogues Sam can come up with as we drive past streets where every house looks identical and every window is curtained shut. The comparison sounds dramatic until he starts listing what was actually banned, at which point you realize the comparison is almost too generous. Christmas was the

the first big casualty, which is a wild sentence to write in the context of a Christian community. Warren decided that Christmas had become too worldly, too commercial, too contaminated by the influence of, you know, every other Christian on the planet. No trees, no lights, no stockings, no presents, no carols, no leftover ham, no drunk uncle falling asleep on the couch by 7pm. The entire holiday, gone, scrubbed off the calendar like an embarrassing typo. Imagine being a kid and growing up in a country where Santa is a national obsession, and your only exposure to the whole concept is the puzzled look on a relative's face when somebody slips up and mentions December 25th.

Naturally, that wasn't the only date that got vaporised. Thanksgiving, watered down. Birthdays, downsized to the point of non-existence in many households. Holidays in general got the same treatment as everything else. evaluated, found insufficiently spiritual and quietly removed from the schedule. The library was next. Colorado City had a town library, the way most small towns do, with a few rooms of books, the standard mix of novels and reference in the occasional cookbook. Warren took one look at the building, did some quick math about how many ideas were sitting

inside that he didn't personally write and shut it down. The doors closed, the shelves emptied, and the entire concept of a place where citizens could walk in and read whatever they felt like reading was retired from public life. Are you one of those media strategy people clicking through slides, scrolling spreadsheets? Yes? Good. This is for you. Because on Spotify, there's an audience that's different. Locked in. Loyal, invested. They're called fans. Fans don't just listen to music. They feel seen by it, like it belongs to them. So when your brand shows up on Spotify, that's who you're talking to.

and you're right next to artists like me, Lizzo. So, are you ready to talk to fans? Spotify advertising, you're among fans. The only acceptable reading material going forward was naturally the Prophet's own sermons, FLDS approved scripture and church hymnals. Anything else was, in his vocabulary, a doorway to the world. And the world in Warren's vocabulary was basically the title of a horror movie. Music got hit just as hard.

If Christmas being banned sounds extremely, stream, try imagining the entire sound of the outside world being switched off. No top 40, no country radio, which in this part of the country is roughly the equivalent of banning oxygen. No rock, no rap, no pop, no R&B, no anything with a beat that didn't originate inside the FLDS church. Sam grew up not knowing who Britney Spears was. He didn't know Eminem existed. He had never heard a Taylor Swift song. He had heard the word Hillary Duff once, in a whispered warning, the way most kids hear about strangers offering candy. Listening to a single song from any of these people was treated like spiritual contraband. You could ruin your soul with three minutes of pop music. The math didn't favor

experimentation. The cherry on top of all of this was the language itself. Warren actually banned specific words. Not curse words, not insults, not anything you'd reasonably expect a religious leader to crack down on. Regular words. The big one, the one Sam still gets a kick out of telling people, was the word fun. Yes, fun. The three-letter cornerstone of childhood vocabulary. Warren preached that fun was a worldly concept. Fun was what the people outside the church chased after. Fun was what corrupted you. True believers, naturally, weren't supposed to seek fun. They were supposed to seek God, and God's calendar was apparently fully booked with scripture, chores and obedience. So if you actually did enjoy something, a game with your siblings, a meal you liked, a moment in the sun,

you weren't allowed to call it fun. You had to call it pleasant, or nice, or, in extreme cases, edifying, a word so deeply uncool that just saying it makes a kid feel 40 years older instantly. Try, for a second, to imagine being eight years old and being told to scrub the word fun out of your sentences. You jump off a swing, you land in the grass, you laugh, you turn to your sibling and say, that was pleasant. The light dies a little behind your eyes, the swing something. feels less interesting now. Repeat that recalibration on every joyful moment for an entire childhood and you start to understand the actual technique. It wasn't about the word, it was about teaching a child that pleasure itself was suspicious. That happiness had to be downgraded into a more

humble emotion. That if anything felt too good, the feeling itself was a warning sign that you might be drifting away from God. That's not parenting. That's emotional governance. The result was a generation of kids who could barely tell you what they liked. Sam describes growing up in a home where preference itself was a quiet thing. You didn't get excited about a meal, you got fed. You didn't get excited about a song because you'd never heard a song that wasn't a hymn. You didn't get excited about a book because the books didn't exist anymore. The full range of normal kid feelings, the loud, joyful, messy bandwidth that most people take for granted, got compressed down to a narrow band of acceptable expressions. Quiet contentment, gentle,

gratitude, polite cheer. Anything above that range was a sin. Anything below it was a different sin. Most of childhood, basically, lived in the dead zone in between. Once the library was closed, the music was silenced, the holidays were cancelled, and even the language had been pruned. The only experience left for FLDS kids was the experience of being told what experience they were supposed to have. Warren filled the silence with his own voice. Every sermon, every printed pamphlet, Every recording his followers were required to listen to, all of it pointed back to the same speaker. He was, in effect, the only content provider in the entire town. If Spotify had been an option, Warren would have been the only artist on the platform,

and the platform would have been mandatory. What's surreal is how completely it worked. Kids didn't push back because there was nothing to push back with. You can't miss what you've never been allowed to know exists. The outside world wasn't tempting because the outside world had been. described to them in vivid detail as a cesspool of demons, addicts, fornicators, and people who, horror of horrors, listen to country music in their pickup trucks. By the time these kids hit their teens, they weren't dreaming about freedom. They were dreaming about whichever

heavily curated version of obedience was going to earn them the most approval. That's the part that lingers, hearing Sam describe it. The cage didn't have to have bars. The cage was inside the head, and then you turn a corner and at the edge of town stands the building Sam has been quietly building up to all day. The mansion. If the mountain over the city is nature's contribution to the local skyline, the mansion is humanities, or, more accurately, one specific humans. It rises out of the desert with the subtle elegance of a maximum security correctional facility designed by someone who watched too many medieval castle documentaries. From the road, it looks bigger than it has any business being. Closer up, it looks like somebody hit a fancy hotel with a

paranoia ray. Massive, walled, gated, cold. Sam Parks, gets out, and gestures at the front of the building the way a tour guide might gesture at a particularly absurd national monument. This was supposed to be Warren Jeff's home. Not a home like yours and mine. A home built for a man and 80 wives. 80. That's not a typo. Not a metaphor. Not a Sam exaggeration. after a long day of touring. 80 individual marriages, all to the same man, all expected to live under the same roof, all theoretically about to share a kitchen,

which is the part that makes any rational person stop and ask logistical questions. How do you assign laundry days? How do you schedule the bathrooms? How does a sentence like, Sweetheart, I'm home, ever land correctly? None of it matters because Warren never moved in. Construction wrapped up after he was already arrested behind bars

and very much not coming back any time before the heat death of the universe. The mansion was built for a man who would never sleep in it. It's a monument to a household that never happened, which gives the whole structure a vibe somewhere between abandoned dreamhouse and very expensive haunted museum. The architecture is generously, paranoid. The walls are about 30 inches thick, which is the kind of measurement you only need

when you're either expecting an artillery strike or trying to keep your wives from hearing each other through the drywall. The front entry isn't a door, it's a system. A pair of heavy metal gates set up in a sequence with a holding area between them. You drive into the first set the first set closes behind you, the second set opens in front of you, and you proceed inward. Anybody who has ever seen the entry sequence of a county jail will recognise the layout immediately. It's a sally port.

A sally port is a security design used to prevent escape and control entry. It is, by definition, the architectural language of a prison. Sam looks at all of it, this fortress of double gates and quarter-foot walls and slit windows, and he laughs, not a bitter laugh, an actual genuine dark amusement laugh. He says something that lands harder than he probably means it to. He says, you know, Warren basically built his own cell before the government got around to giving him one. The man designed a maximum security home for himself and his many spouses, complete with thick walls to keep the outside out, gates to control who came in,

and a footprint big enough to make sure nobody who lived inside ever needed to leave. He just got the address wrong. The actual maximum security building Warren ended up in is a few hundred miles east, run by the state of Texas, and has significantly stricter visitation policies. Naturally, life finds a way. And the mansion didn't stay empty. After the trust unraveled, after the ownership got reshuffled, the building eventually came into the hands of people who decided to do something with it

that would probably make Warren personally short-circuit if he ever found out, they turned it into a hotel, a working hotel, with rooms you can book online, with a name. The name, which is the single greatest piece of historical sarcasm in the entire town, is the most wanted. Yes, the hotel is named after the fact that its original intended occupant was, at his peak, one of the most wanted criminals in America. You can sleep in a room inside the building that was supposed to house a fugitive prophet's 80-person wedding album. That is, by any measure, an extremely specific Airbnb experience. The most wanted hotel has become a low-key tourist destination for people who specifically want to look this story directly in

the face. Curious travellers, documentary nerds, the occasional journalist, the rare ex-member who wants to see what their old prophet thought heaven was going to look like in flesh and concrete. There's something almost therapeutic about the place now. The walls that were built to keep the world out are now open to the world. The double gates that were built to keep secrets in are now backdrops for selfies. The bedrooms intended to enforce a deeply uncomfortable hierarchy of wives are now booked by random couples from Salt Lake City and Las Vegas, who just wanted somewhere weird to stay for the weekend. The dark irony, the part Sam circles back to as we walk around the perimeter, is that a lot of Warren's followers are absolutely not in on the joke. Out there, still in town,

still living in homes that the trust used to own, there are people who continue to. to believe with full conviction that this entire situation is temporary, that the prophet is being held by his enemies, that the prison walls in Texas are no real obstacle, that God himself will, any day now, intervene, break those walls down, and return Warren to his throne. They look at the mansion not as a museum, not as a hotel, not as a punchline, but as a home waiting for its rightful owner, patiently, confidently, indefinitely. After the mansion, Sam wants to show me a smaller building, not a fortress, not a monument, not a hotel anybody would ever name after a fugitive, just a house, his house, the one he grew up in.

It sits on a street that looks like every other street in town, low slung, oversized, surrounded by a fence tall enough to keep a giraffe out of the front yard. But once you understand what happened inside it, the building stops being generic and starts radiating the kind of quiet intensity, you only feel when you're standing in front of someone's actual childhood. Roughly 20 people lived in this house when Sam was a kid. One father, four wives. The rest, children, ranging from teenagers down to whichever baby had been born most recently.

Twenty people sharing one kitchen, a handful of bathrooms, a dinner schedule, a sleep schedule, a chore schedule, and a single, very stressed-out hot water heater. Imagine the world's most chaotic group house, except nobody pays rent, nobody has roommates by choice and the landlord is also the husband the father the disciplinarian and the local representative of God that's not a household

that's a small village with one full-time CEO and a lot of unpaid staff the vocabulary inside the house was the first clue that this wasn't going to be a casual family vibe each of the four wives had to be addressed as mother followed by her first name mother Sarah

mother Linda mother Ruth not mum never mum Mum was a worldly word, a soft, intimate, casually affectionate word, and casual affection was apparently a luxury this house didn't budget for. Mum would have implied warmth. Mum would have implied that this was a regular family. Mum was for the people out there, the people with their music and their Christmas and their fun.

In here you used mother. You used the first name. You said it like you were filing a form. The father got the same treatment but worse. He was just father. No name, no nickname, no affectionate. at variation, not dad, not pop, not papa. Not even a slightly silly invented kid word like the rest of the world's children get to use.

Just father, said clearly with eye contact with respect, because anything less would be read as a small act of rebellion. There's something almost theatrical about it. Every interaction in the house, even the most mundane, came pre-stamped with formality. Please pass the salt, father. Thank you for the bread, Mother Ruth. May I be excused? May I sit down. May I leave the room? May I leave the room. The whole place ran on phrasing that wouldn't be out of place at a particularly tense Victorian dinner party. The only thing missing was a butler clearing his throat in the corner. The kitchen, in any normal home, is the warm, chaotic heart of the building. The place where people graze, where snacks happen, where a kid can wander in at 3pm and convince a parent to

crack open the peanut butter. In Sam's childhood home, the kitchen was a regulated zone with operating hours. You did not enter the kitchen outside the shed. meal times. You did not browse the cupboards. You did not open the fridge looking for something interesting. The fridge was not for browsing. The fridge was for storage, and storage was the business of the wives, who took turns on rotation managing the impossible math of feeding 20 people with one budget. If you wandered in unauthorised, you got asked politely to wander right back out. If you wandered in unauthorized twice, the second response was significantly less polite. Naturally, 20 people sharing meals meant the meals themselves had to scale, and scaling

meant the menu had a certain industrial efficiency to it. Sam describes the rotation with the kind of unimpressed shrug, only a person who has eaten the same six dishes for 15 years can pull off. Bread soaked in milk with honey on top, which sounds quaint until you realize it was a default kid meal because it was cheap, fast and could be assembled in volume. Rice and beans, in many configurations, all of them eventually indistinguishable. Stews, casseroles, bulk dishes that could feed a small army because structurally, that's what this household was. Growing kids burn a lot of calories.

Growing kids in a house with 20 mouths to feed and a single cooking schedule sometimes do not get those calories met. Sam was hungry. A lot. Not in a starving way, not in a tragedy way, just in a constant low-grade background hum way. The kind of hungry where you start daydreaming about your next allowed meal. meal three hours before you're scheduled to receive it. What you cannot do in this kitchen, ever, under any condition, is improvise. You cannot make yourself a sandwich, you cannot grab fruit,

you cannot decide that you would like a glass of milk at an unscheduled time. Hunger in this house was not a problem to be solved with food. It was a feeling to be endured until the next scheduled meal arrived. That, more than anything else, captures the texture of life inside. even basic biological needs ran on someone else's clock. Your body could ask for things. The clock would answer for the body. The wives, in this whole arrangement, lived a life Sam describes with a particular kind of quiet sadness.

They were the engine of the household, the cooks, the cleaners, the childcare, the laundry crew, the mediators between dozens of siblings, the constant low-key emotional regulators of a building that always had at least three crises happening simultaneously, and yet when it came to opinions, decisions, preferences, votes, they got none of those. A wife was not supposed to disagree with her husband. A wife was not supposed to share her opinion at the dinner table unless asked, which was, as you might guess, not often.

A wife was supposed to defer, smile, support and execute. The hierarchy of voice in the house went farther at the top, sons in descending age order in the middle, and the wives somewhere just below the wallpaper. Discipline in the house was, By modern standards, a very tough subject to discuss out loud, and yet it has to be said because it's part of the texture of every kid's childhood there. Spanking was routine, not as a rare last resort, but as a structural ingredient of parenting. Misbehavior had a price, and the price had a sound.

Sam mentions, with a kind of dry survivor's humour, the trick a couple of his older brothers taught him when he was small. They would stuff a book down the back of their pants before a known disciplinary event, because a book is a beautiful thing for a thousand reasons, but in this particular case its highest function was being a shock absorber. The boys nicknamed certain books accordingly. Some books got worn smooth, some books got retired from active duty. There is a particular flavour of dark comedy,

in the idea of a child stuffing the scriptures themselves into their waistband as armour, against a punishment they got for not memorising the scriptures hard enough, but that's the kind of contradiction this house produced as a normal weeknight event. By the time Sam was a teenager, he had absorbed every layer of this system without ever having a single tool to question it. Twenty people in one house. Four mothers, no moms. A father, never a dad. A kitchen on a timer.

A discipline policy with a hidden book section. A schedule, a rotation, a hierarchy, a vocabulary. All of it stitched together so tightly that the only way out was, eventually. Out. Sam left at 18. He didn't take much with him. He didn't have much to take. take. Walking away from his childhood home, Sam suggests we make one more stop. The thrift store.

Every town has one. Every thrift store looks roughly the same. And in Colorado City, the thrift store is one of the very few places in town where outsiders and insiders can actually overlap in physical space. People come. People leave. People sift through racks of long, modest dresses and donated shirts. It's the closest thing the city has to a public living room, which is exactly why it ends up being the place where I have the strangest conversation of the entire trip. Inside the thrift store, between racks of donated clothes, I run into a woman who grew up in the FLDS and is, to my genuine surprise, an enthusiastic and unapologetic defender of plural marriage.

She is friendly, articulate, calm, and absolutely not interested in being framed as a victim. She tells me that growing up with multiple mothers in the house was in her experience fantastic. There was always someone to talk to. There was always someone in the case. kitchen, someone tending a baby, someone willing to listen. She describes her childhood not as a prison, but as a village inside a single home, and she means it. She's not reading from a script. She's sharing her truth. She also tells me, without any apparent reservation, that she would consider becoming a sister-wife herself of her own choice in an adult relationship with someone she actually

wanted. Not because anyone is forcing her, because she values the model. It's important to sit with this for a second, because the easy version of this story is to flatten every woman who has ever existed inside the FLDS into a single identical victim. The reality is much messier. Some women in this culture have been harmed in ways that are difficult to describe out loud. Some women have made a peace with the structure and built lives inside it that they describe, in their own words, as full and meaningful. Some women want out, get out, and never look back. Some women want in, choose it and stay. The woman in the thrift store is part of the texture of this place

and pretending she's a fabrication or a brainwashed prop would be dishonest. Her experience is hers. It coexists, uncomfortably, with everything else this video is covered and that coexistence is part of why Colorado City is so difficult to summarize in a single headline. Then there's the opposite end of the spectrum and her name is Briel Decker. Briel holds a title nobody volunteers for. She was the 65th wife. of Warren Jeff's, the 65th. That's not a typo, and it is not an honorary number. It is a literal

count. She was 18 years old when she was married to him, which is its own conversation, and she lasted four months before deciding that whatever she had signed up for, whatever had been signed up for on her behalf, was not survivable. She left the way you leave when leaving is forbidden. She climbed out a window. What she has done since then is the part that genuinely changes the shape of this story. Briel now runs an organisation out of the very building where she was once trapped. The same 44-room compound that was for years the operating headquarters of Warren's most intense household control is now a refuge. A centre she calls a dream centre. The walls that used to enforce one man's authority now house women who have escaped abusive

situations, survivors of trafficking, people fighting addiction, people who walked away from communities like this one with nothing in their hands, somewhere far less prepared than the average refugee. She turned the building inside out. The location is the same. The function is finally the opposite. The wildest detail about the compound, the one that ties everything in this story together into one neat dark bow, is what the new owners found when they actually started inspecting the place. Hidden wiring, old, layered, deliberately installed wiring, cabling that ran behind walls through ceilings under floors in patterns that didn't match any plumbing or electrical map.

When investigators traced it, the wiring turned out to be a custom surveillance system. Warren had spent years listening in on phone conversations across the community, recording calls, capturing private discussions, harvesting personal details from people who had no idea their lives were being broadcast into his office. He then used those private details in counselling sessions, in marriage assignments, in punishments, in confrontations. He would tell a member that God had revealed something

specific about them, and the specific thing would land like a thunderbolt, because the member knew, with absolute certainty, that they had never told a single soul. Of course, they hadn't told a soul. They had said it on the phone, to their sister, from their kitchen, three weeks ago. It's hard to overstate how powerful a tool that is when you weaponise it inside a religious community. If your prophet appears to know things only God could know, your faith goes nuclear. If your prophet is just a man with a tap on every phone line in town, your faith is a magic trick, and the magic trick is, naturally, the oldest scam in the playbook. Warren spent years convincing his followers that he had a direct line to the divine, when

what he actually had was a direct line to the local phone exchange. The god in his ear was A.T. and T. Briel stands in the building now, the same building, with the wiring exposed in a few preserved spots, and runs a place dedicated to helping people who survived versions of what she survived. The mansion that was once a closed system is now an open door. The hallways that used to be patrolled are now offices, dorms, classrooms, kitchens where people actually get to eat when they're hungry. Survivors of the FLDS sometimes come back to this place to talk, to process, to remember, to grieve, to laugh. Survivors of completely unrelated traumas from completely unrelated worlds sometimes end up in the same hallway. There is something

almost biblical about the symmetry, in a different sense of biblical than the one the original architect had in mind. Standing in the doorway of the dream centre, looking around at women working, kids playing, art on the walls, snacks in a kitchen, anyone is allowed to walk into at any time of day, you realise something simple about this town that took the entire day to actually land. Colorado City is not just a museum of damage. It's a place where the future is also being written, in real time, by people who have every reason to walk away and choose, instead to stay and fix it. The fences are still tall, the houses are still oversized, the mansion is still a hotel, the mountain is still a mountain. But the wiring in the walls has been pulled out, the doors are open,

and the people inside finally get to call their hunger by its actual name, and walk straight into the kitchen to do something about it.