Editor’s note: This story contains a graphic image showing an aerial view of the deaths at Jonestown in 1978.

Friends and colleagues sent me variants of this darkly humorous message when I mentioned I was going to Jonestown, site of one of history’s most infamous mass murder-suicides. Jonestown has an enduring place in our cultural memory, with the name instantly recognized to this day. It has remained an unsettling puzzle—a charismatic leader and hundreds of people voluntarily following him to their death—and despite books and documentaries, and a potential biopic with Leonard DiCaprio in the lead role, we’re no closer to understanding the events that transpired there.

Plus, until very recently, you couldn’t visit the physical location where it all happened.

On Nov. 18, 1978, more than 900 people—mostly Americans, mostly Black, and perhaps as many as 300 children and teenagers—died in the jungle of northwestern Guyana at the People’s Temple commune, ordered to commit “revolutionary suicide” by their messianic leader, Jim Jones.

The fledgling commune had been established in 1974 as an offshoot of a religious movement in the United States. It had grown steadily in the intervening years, with believers asked to give up their homes and livelihoods to enter what was promised to be a paradise free of racism and the evils of capitalism.

“I like Guyana, in the terms we can be our own independent government,” Jones remarked at one point to his congregation, dispelling a rumor he had started that the entire community might migrate once again, this time to the Soviet Union. “For all matters and purposes, we are our own independent sovereign existence. That’s something you won’t have any place in the world.”

Guyana has changed a lot since the 1970s. An offshore oil and gas boom has made what was once a backwater British colony into one of the world’s fastest-growing economies, propelling it to high-income status in 2024. Guyana is now on a major push to bring tourists to the only majority English-speaking country in South America. There’s a hotel building-boom, and major North American and European carriers are adding flights to the country. And now, there’s Jonestown tours offered by a Guyanese company; I was one of the first journalists to go on one. Since these tours were first announced last year, though, there have been strong critics—as well as equally vocal proponents.

The Kaituma River in Port Kaituma, Guyana, on Jan. 11. The Jonestown Memorial Tour, operated by a company called Wanderlust Adventures GY, includes a stop in Port Kaituma, the town closest to the former People’s Temple site.Federico Rios/The New York Times

He told me that he and six or seven friends went to Jonestown three days after the massacre, when he was just 11 years old. “At first we didn’t recognize what we were seeing—the bodies looked like hung clothes on the grass.”

Opponents of making the site a tourist attraction include the country’s influential Stabroek News newspaper, as well as some survivors in the United States. “I think it’s a bad idea. I don’t think it’s appropriate to aggrandize that kind of cult activity,” former U.S. Rep. Jackie Speier told local California media in December. In 1978, Speier was a 28-year-old aide accompanying her boss, Rep. Leo Ryan, on an inspection of Jonestown. Ryan traveled with journalists and members of a group called Concerned Relatives, who were worried their relations were being held at Jonestown against their will. The congressional visit, intended to discover if there was truth to these rumors, went awry and Jones’s henchmen ambushed the party—including Speier—at the Port Kaituma airfield as they tried to leave. Speier was shot five times and laying bleeding on the runway for more than 20 hours until she was rescued. Ryan and four others died.

I flew from the capital of Georgetown aboard a small, single prop plane and landed on the same lone, jungle-fringed runway where the congressman was murdered. Then, my group was driven out of town in a small passenger van along a deeply rutted, red-dirt road. Flatbed trucks roared by carrying large fuel drums, bringing in their wake clouds of choking dust. Eventually we turned onto a grassy track and parked near a sign reading “Welcome to the People’s Temple Jonestown.” The sign is not the original; that, plus the original security checkpoint, have long disappeared.

Chris Persaud, our Guyanese guide, gathered the tour group into a circle for a moment of silence. Under a blazing sun, we then walked up the track with a local man named Karl Daniels, who has been assisting with mapping the site. We reached a clearing where the main pavilion once stood, and around which most of the bodies were discovered. There is a small stone memorial to the victims that was erected in 2009.

A local man looks at the memorial for Jonestown victims on Sept. 21, 2022. Patrick Fort/AFP via Getty Images

“Our intention with the Jonestown Memorial Tour is to create an experience that educates others about the dangers of cults, the consequences of unchecked power, and the importance of critical thinking and vigilance,” said Roselyn Sewcharran, the owner of the tour company Wanderlust Adventures GY. (Her company also offers, among other things, multiday tours to the remote Rupununi region of the country.) According to Sewcharran, the Jonestown tour has been nearly three years in the making. She and her team conducted historical research, mapped part of the site, sought the approval of local and regional councils, and worked closely with the Guyana Tourism Authority.

“Jonestown is a very taboo topic in Guyana. This is a part of our history not told accurately,” Persaud said.

“It is not taught in schools, and rightly so in my opinion,” said Neville Bissember, a senior lecturer in the law department at the University of Guyana and a vocal critic of the tours. “Jonestown is a blip on the screen of Guyana’s history.”

Jonestown is also a blip on the map: It is in the country’s far northwest, less than 30 miles from the border with a hostile Venezuela. In a country with few roads outside of the capital, the only way in or out is by small plane or boat. Nearby Port Kaituma is a mining and logging hub with a frontier feel, with rusting freighters unloading industrial supplies for transporting further into the bush. Jonestown had its own small cargo ship, the Cudjoe, that was based here, and which used to bring in—some would say smuggle—people and goods from the United States.

Jonestown aside, Guyana has over the past year risen in prominence as a top place to go and small wonder: It offers hundreds of miles of open savannah, tropical forests, jaguars and other giant species of flora and fauna, rich Indigenous culture, wonderful ecolodges, and great food. The government is gambling that small-group tours to Jonestown will serve as a gateway attraction to seeing much more of the country.

Mother Nature, however, has spent the past decades reclaiming Jonestown, erasing most of the physical evidence of what Jones and his followers attempted to bring about. From housing and workshops to carefully planted rows of field crops, virtually nothing is left of the massive 3,800-acre site.

There are no paths—and ours was only the fourth tour to venture into the bush like this—so our guides macheted their way through the brush as we stopped at decaying half-buried vehicles, massive truck tires, and a portable cement mixer. On the ground and on the trees were trails of industrious leaf-cutter ants. Persaud pointed out vines and ferns working their way out of the cab of a badly listing flatbed truck that was simultaneously being swallowed from below by the earth. Only a few weeks before, he and Daniels had cleared the vehicle of vegetation.

Viewed nearly 50 years later, the Jonestown compound smacks of colonialism, a small-town American theocracy parachuted into the jungles of a very poor country, where it set up a plantation and posted guards. Jones had had the idea of relocating his church overseas where “interracial socialism could flourish” from the early 1970s, according to John R. Hall’s book, Gone From the Promised Land: Jonestown in American Cultural History. He also hoped to escape critical media coverage and governmental scrutiny. Politically and culturally, Jones’s church and Guyana seemed a good match—the latter was a socialist country run by the People’s National Congress, a party dominated by Guyanese of African descent; its leader, Prime Minister Forbes Burnham, was friendly to the Jones cause.

Hundreds of dead bodies are seen from above at Jonestown on Nov. 18, 1978. David Hume Kennerly/Getty Images

A U.S. soldier takes a break from gathering bodies of victims of mass murder-suicide at Jonestown, on Nov. 25, 1978.UPI/Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

The U.S. Embassy was hands off and not particularly interested in assisting with Ryan’s doomed fact-finding mission, noting, “It is essential that before undertaking any trip to Georgetown with the expectation that he will be able to visit Jonestown community, Congressman Ryan should first obtain agreement from the People’s Temple to such a visit.”

The average Guyanese citizen would have been unaware of the temple’s existence at the time, Bissember said, and the government has largely ignored it since. But it’s possible that tours have come at the right moment, as a seemingly volatile time in the world has put many in the mood for dark tourism. “Jonestown is a warning from the tragic past of how society is fragile and open to manipulation by those who wish to control people and place,” said Philip Stone, the director of the Institute for Dark Tourism Research at the University of Central Lancashire.

Dark tourism can include sites of massacres, assassinations, cemeteries, prisons, and battlefields. For instance, perhaps thanks to the 2019 HBO miniseries Chernobyl, the exclusion zone around the nuclear facility in modern-day Ukraine became a popular tourist site—before Russia invaded the country.

In a “post-truth world,” Stone said, “dark tourism at Jonestown has a potential role to play in telling the truth about the event, about what happened before, during, and after.”

A portrait of Jim Jones, the founder of the People’s Temple, in San Francisco on July 3, 1976. Janet Fries/Getty Images

In the leadup to 1978 and the murder-suicides, Jones was spiraling, becoming a heavy drug user, paranoid, and abusive. Nonetheless, until the end, many people thought highly of Jonestown. The farm was an exemplar in agricultural production and parishioners put on free cultural shows in Port Kaituma. Clement Adams recalled that he, like many other residents of the town, went to Jonestown for its high-quality medical and dental treatment, the next closest option being 60 miles away.

Relatives and mourners hold hands in prayer at a memorial for those who died at Jonestown, at Evergreen Cemetery in Oakland, California, on Nov. 18, 1980. Lonnie Wilson/MediaNews Group/Oakland Tribune via Getty Images

The Jonestown of today is a work in progress. There is frankly not much to see on a tour, and the insect activity can be oppressive. Adams would like some infrastructure built on the site, maybe a memorial center. Bissember agreed that a more substantial monument should be erected. “That apart, it should be left as it is, shuttered and not open to the public, other than perhaps for academic research,” he said. “I fail to see any value or merit in holding up to scrutiny a black site where all manner of crimes and human rights violations occurred.”

Doubtless Kraft Heinz, owner of a certain powdered fruit-flavored drink mix, also would like Jonestown to remain in obscurity. (Though some now think that the cult members consumed cyanide-laced Flavor Aid from another company.) But people are interested: According to Wanderlust’s Sewcharran, Jonestown tours are already sold out through November.