The Cremation of Care: A Burning Effigy and a 40-Foot Owl
On a summer night in the redwoods, a procession of men in red and black hooded robes moves through the trees carrying torches. They are heading toward a small artificial lake, and ahead of them, rising forty feet out of the shoreline, stands a massive stone owl. At the water’s edge they set down what they are carrying: a small coffin holding an effigy, a human figure that represents Care — the worries, ambitions, and burdens of the outside world.
A voice booms across the lake, seeming to come from the owl itself. For decades that recorded voice belonged to Walter Cronkite, the CBS anchorman once called the most trusted man in America, who was a club member and lent his unmistakable baritone to the role of the Owl. To music and pyrotechnics, a robed High Priest addresses the gathering, and the effigy of Care is consigned to the flames, freeing the assembled men from their cares for the duration of the encampment. The audience watching the fire includes sitting and former presidents, the heads of major corporations, and men who run banks, studios, and government agencies.
This is the single most documented fact about Bohemian Grove, and it is genuinely strange enough that it has never needed embellishment. The Cremation of Care has been performed since 1881, and the truth of it — that the men who run much of America put on robes and burn an effigy to a giant owl every summer — is more interesting than the satanic fantasy that has grown up around it. Bohemian Grove is not a place where a shadow government secretly rules the world. It is something more revealing and more real: the one place the American elite can go to be genuinely unobserved. The secrecy is not a means to some darker end. The secrecy is the product. What these men are buying, behind the redwoods and the owl and the robes, is two weeks in which the most powerful people in the country are accountable to no one and recorded by nobody — and in that unwatched space, real history has occasionally been made.
What Is Bohemian Grove? The Club That Bought a Redwood Forest
Bohemian Grove is the summer encampment of the Bohemian Club, an exclusive, all-male, invitation-only social club founded in San Francisco in 1872. The club itself maintains a clubhouse in the city, but it is the Grove — the forest property near Monte Rio in Sonoma County, about 75 miles north of San Francisco — that has made it famous and notorious. For two weeks each July, the club decamps to the redwoods, and the gathering has become one of the most concentrated assemblies of wealth and political power in the world.
From a San Francisco Press Club to 2,700 Acres of Redwoods
The Bohemian Club began as something close to the opposite of what it became. It was founded in 1872 by journalists, artists, writers, and actors — the literal bohemians of San Francisco’s cultural scene — as a place to drink and talk about art. Almost immediately, the economics of running a club pulled it toward money, and the artists began admitting wealthy businessmen as members to pay the bills. The businessmen stayed, the balance shifted, and within a generation the club of struggling writers had become a club of the people who employed them. The members began holding summer outings in the redwoods in the 1870s, renting the current Grove site from 1893 and purchasing it outright in 1899 from a logger named Melvin Cyrus Meeker. Over the following decades the club expanded the property to its present scale, an entire forested river basin held private.
“Weaving Spiders Come Not Here”: The Motto and the Rule of Secrecy
The club’s motto is a line lifted from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “Weaving Spiders Come Not Here.” It is meant to signal that the Grove is a refuge from the scheming of the outside world, a place where members leave business and ambition at the gate. The motto is also, by most accounts, honored mainly in the breach. The official rule against conducting business at the Grove sits awkwardly beside the reality that the encampment gathers the decision-makers of American government and industry in one unsupervised place for two weeks, and the proximity has produced consequences no spider-free motto could prevent. The all-male, invitation-only structure and the absolute ban on press and outside observers complete the design: a sealed environment, by men of power, for men of power, with the door shut.
Inside the Encampment: Camps, Rituals, and the Lakeside Owl
The Grove is not a single campsite but a small secret city of the elite, organized into roughly 120 individual camps scattered through the redwoods, each with its own name, character, and membership. The two weeks revolve around the camps, the lakeside ceremonies, and a program of entertainment and talks, all of it conducted in a privacy so complete that most of what is known comes from a handful of infiltrations, leaked documents, and the accounts of the rare member willing to describe it.
The Owl Shrine and the Lakeside Cremation Ceremony
The owl is the club’s totem, chosen as a symbol of wisdom, and the 40-foot owl shrine at the edge of the Grove’s lake is the stage for the Cremation of Care. The ceremony, as captured in the footage that has leaked over the years, is a full theatrical production — robed performers, an offstage chorus, a tree spirit called the Hamadryad emerging from the redwoods, a High Priest, music, and elaborate pyrotechnics, all building to the burning of the effigy of Care. The documentary filmmaker Jon Ronson, who used infiltration footage in his work on the secret world of the powerful, described what he saw not as a satanic rite but as resembling an “overgrown frat party” — grown men in costume putting on an amateur-dramatics pageant in the woods. The production values are high, the symbolism is borrowed from Druidic, classical, and medieval sources, and the effect is undeniably eerie. But it is theater, performed by and for the members, not the human sacrifice that conspiracy lore insists upon.
The 120 Camps and the Real Business of the Grove
The camps are where the encampment’s real life happens. Each of the roughly 120 camps is a small compound with its own lodge, bar, and traditions, and membership in a particular camp — places with names like Mandalay, Owl’s Nest, and Hill Billies — is itself a marker of status, sorting the powerful into smaller circles within the larger one. The Grove also hosts a series of daytime “Lakeside Talks,” informal addresses given by members and guests on politics, science, and policy, often by figures who would never speak so freely on the record. It is here, in the camps and the talks and the unrecorded conversations between them, that the no-business motto dissolves. Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon are reported to have reached an understanding at the Grove in 1967 about the order in which they would seek the presidency, the kind of arrangement that the encampment’s total privacy was built to enable.
Where the Atomic Bomb Was Planned: The Grove’s Real History
The most consequential thing that ever happened at Bohemian Grove had nothing to do with owls or robes. It happened in a meeting room, and it helped end the Second World War and open the nuclear age. The story of the Grove is not, in the end, a story about a strange ceremony. It is a story about what powerful men do when no one is allowed to watch, and the most important example is also the most sobering.
The 1942 Manhattan Project Meeting in the Redwoods
In September 1942, a group of scientists and officials gathered at Bohemian Grove for a planning meeting that would shape the Manhattan Project. The physicist Arthur Compton, who led key parts of the American atomic effort, convened the session in the privacy of the Grove precisely because its seclusion made it ideal for discussing the most secret undertaking in the country. Among the matters reportedly weighed in the redwoods were the feasibility and organization of building an atomic bomb, decisions that fed directly into the effort that would culminate at sites like Los Alamos. The image is almost too on-the-nose for a place wrapped in conspiracy theory: the weapon that would kill more than a hundred thousand people at Hiroshima had part of its institutional groundwork laid in a forest where men gather to burn an effigy of their worldly cares. The Grove’s defenders point to the meeting as proof of the encampment’s genuine importance; its critics point to it as proof of exactly the unaccountable power they fear. Both are right.
Presidents, Kingmakers, and the Nixon Tape
The membership and guest rolls explain why anyone takes the Grove seriously. Every Republican president from Calvin Coolidge onward is said to have been a member or guest, and the encampment has hosted Democratic power-brokers, foreign dignitaries, cabinet officials, and, as a leaked 2023 roster and later reporting confirmed, Supreme Court justices including Clarence Thomas. Richard Nixon, himself a longtime attendee, was caught on the White House tapes describing the Grove in scathing terms — calling it, in a private moment, the most faggy goddamned thing he could imagine, even as he acknowledged that a man could not be president without going there. The remark, crude and revealing, captures the Grove’s real function better than any conspiracy theory: not a place where power is secretly exercised over the world, but a place where the price of admission to American power is paid, in person, in the woods, away from the cameras.
Satanism, Alex Jones, and the Conspiracy Industry
Bohemian Grove occupies a singular place in American conspiracy culture, and it owes that status largely to one man with a hidden camera. In July 2000, the radio host and Infowars founder Alex Jones, accompanied by a cameraman, infiltrated the Grove and secretly filmed the Cremation of Care. Jones presented the footage to the world as evidence of a “ritual sacrifice” and an occult ceremony at the dark heart of the global elite, and the video became foundational to a whole genre of conspiracy theorizing about the Grove as a site of literal Satanism and human sacrifice.
The grounded reporting tells a different story. The same footage that Jones called a ritual sacrifice was examined by the documentary filmmaker Jon Ronson, who concluded it was theater — the overgrown frat party, robes and pyrotechnics and amateur dramatics, not murder. The effigy is an effigy. The owl is a statue. What is genuinely objectionable about the Grove is not supernatural; it is political, and the people who have understood that best are the protesters who have gathered at the gates since 1980. The activist Mary Moore organized the Bohemian Grove Action Network and staged a counter-ceremony called the Resurrection of Care, but her concern was never devil worship — it was that corporate and political leaders were making decisions affecting millions in a setting where the public could never see or challenge them. The conspiracy theories, for all their lurid energy, actually let the Grove off easy, replacing a real and documentable problem about unaccountable power with a cartoon about Satan that is easy to dismiss. The same dynamic surrounds Skull and Bones and the House of the Temple, where the fantasy of hidden evil obscures the more mundane and more durable reality of elite networks doing business in private.
The fantasy has also drawn the genuinely dangerous. In January 2002, a man named Richard McCaslin broke into the deserted off-season Grove at night, armed and wearing a skull mask, convinced by the conspiracy theories that he would find evidence of child sacrifice and intent on stopping it. He found an empty forest, set some fires, was arrested, and went to prison. He had come to fight a Satanic cult that existed only in the stories, and the only real casualty was himself — a small, sad illustration of what happens when the invented horror is believed.
Bohemian Grove Today: The Forest You Still Cannot Enter
Bohemian Grove remains exactly what it has always been: private, sealed, and inaccessible. There are no tours, no public access, and no prospect of an ordinary visitor passing the gates near Monte Rio, where the encampment convenes each July behind layers of security. The most a member of the public can do is what the protesters have done for over forty years — gather on the public road outside the entrance and watch the powerful arrive. The 2023 leak of a membership roster offered a rare confirmed glimpse of who attends, naming business leaders, politicians, and public figures from across the country, but the Grove itself stayed as closed as ever.
The redwoods around it are some of the most beautiful in California, and the irony of the setting is not lost on anyone: an ancient, public-feeling natural cathedral, fenced off and reserved for the few. For the visitor who makes the trip to Monte Rio, the experience is one of standing outside, on the road, looking at a gate and a forest that will not open, much like standing on the sidewalk outside the windowless Tomb in New Haven. The privilege on the other side of the fence is precisely the privilege of not being looked at.
Standing at the gate, the honest conclusion is neither the conspiracy theorist’s nor the club’s. The Grove is not a satanic temple, and it is not the innocent artists’ retreat the motto pretends. It is the back room of American power, relocated to a forest, where the most influential men in the country go to be unaccountable for two weeks a year — to make their arrangements, give their off-the-record talks, watch their strange old pageant, and return to running the world having answered to no one but each other. The burning effigy by the lake is theater. The unwatched conversations in the camps are not, and never were.
Frequently Asked Questions About Bohemian Grove
What is the Cremation of Care at Bohemian Grove?
The Cremation of Care is the ceremony that opens the Bohemian Club’s annual summer encampment, performed since 1881. Robed members carry an effigy called Care to the edge of a lake and burn it before a 40-foot stone owl, symbolically banishing the worries of the outside world for the duration of the retreat. The ritual involves music, pyrotechnics, a High Priest, and a recorded voice of the Owl, provided for many years by news anchor Walter Cronkite. Despite conspiracy claims, documentary footage shows it to be an elaborate theatrical pageant rather than an occult sacrifice.
Was the atomic bomb really planned at Bohemian Grove?
A significant Manhattan Project planning meeting was held at Bohemian Grove in September 1942, convened by the physicist Arthur Compton, who used the Grove’s seclusion for discussing the highly secret atomic program. Decisions weighed there fed into the broader effort to build the bomb, which culminated at sites including Los Alamos. The meeting is one of the most consequential documented events in the Grove’s history. It is frequently cited as evidence of the encampment’s genuine importance to American power.
Who attends Bohemian Grove?
Bohemian Grove draws around 2,000 men each July, including current and former presidents, cabinet officials, Supreme Court justices, business leaders, and prominent figures from the arts and sciences. Every Republican president from Calvin Coolidge onward is reported to have attended. A leaked 2023 membership roster confirmed attendees including business titans and public figures, and reporting has placed Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas at the Grove. Membership is all-male and invitation-only.
Is Bohemian Grove a satanic cult?
There is no credible evidence that Bohemian Grove is a satanic cult or that any sacrifice takes place there. The conspiracy theory stems largely from a 2000 hidden-camera video by Alex Jones, who characterized the Cremation of Care as a “ritual sacrifice.” Documentary filmmaker Jon Ronson, examining the same footage, described it as resembling an “overgrown frat party.” The real criticism of the Grove, voiced by decades of protesters, concerns the unaccountable concentration of political and corporate power, not the supernatural.
Can you visit Bohemian Grove?
The public cannot visit Bohemian Grove. It is a private 2,700-acre property near Monte Rio in Sonoma County, California, sealed off and heavily secured, especially during the July encampment. There are no tours or public access of any kind. The closest a member of the public can get is the public road outside the gates, where protesters have gathered since 1980 to watch attendees arrive.
What does the owl symbolize at Bohemian Grove?
The owl is the totem of the Bohemian Club, chosen as a symbol of wisdom and knowledge. The 40-foot stone owl shrine at the edge of the Grove’s lake serves as the stage for the Cremation of Care ceremony. Conspiracy theorists have linked the owl to ancient deities and occult worship, but the club presents it straightforwardly as an emblem of wisdom. The owl appears throughout the club’s imagery and traditions.
Sources
The Bohemian Grove and Other Retreats: A Study in Ruling-Class Cohesiveness — G. William Domhoff (1974)
Bohemian Grove: Cult of Conspiracy — Mike Hanson (2004)
Them: Adventures with Extremists — Jon Ronson (2001)
The Power Elite — C. Wright Mills (1956)
Manhattan Project Planning Records — U.S. Department of Energy historical office
Bohemian Grove Leaked Roster Reporting — The Press Democrat (2023-2026)
Protesters Line Route to Bohemian Club Retreat — United Press International (1981)
The Bohemian Club — Encyclopaedia Britannica
California v. Richard McCaslin, Sonoma County Court Records — (2002)
