As our community prepares for the family-friendly festival of ghosts and ghouls that is Halloween, I present to you a real-life horror story.

No haunted house, play or creep show could ever compare to the absolute horror that befell 909 men, women and children at the Peoples Temple Agricultural Project in Jonestown, Guyana on Nov. 18, 1978. More than a dozen of them had roots in Vicksburg and Warren County.

Jim Jones had promised his followers a paradise of equality in the jungles of South America. There, Jones had pledged, all of God’s children — black and white, rich and poor — could live in harmony.

Instead, Jones gave a gruesome death to the weak, huddled masses he had preyed upon.

Gloria Faye Warren, who was born in Vicksburg in 1959, believed in him, as did her sisters Janice Marie and Brenda Anne Warren.  So did Gloria’s young children Emmett and Camella and her precious niece Dana.

Hazel Maria Newell, who was born here in 1927, also bought Jones’ message of love, peace and equality. Jones, after all, didn’t care about the color of her skin or the fact that her parents had been sharecroppers or their parents’ slaves.

Jones’ message of equality that so swept up Newell, I’m sure also appealed to her children — Allen, Christopher, Karl, Jennifer and Shirley. Shirley’s son, Isaac, was born into the traditions of Peoples Temple when it was in San Francisco.

They believed in Jim Jones, but why?

Jones began his career as a politically progressive Disciples of Christ minister in Indiana during the civil rights movement. He preached that God’s command was to love thy fellow man regardless of race or economic status.

Jones’ message resounded with African-Americans who had spent virtually every moment since emancipation struggling for equal rights.  But eventually, any mention of Jesus left from Jones’ sermons.

“If you want me to be your brother, I’ll be your brother. If you want me to be your father, I’ll be your father. If you want me to be your God, I’ll be your God,” one of the surviving Peoples Temple members recalled Jones saying during a sermon.

The lack of Jesus in Jones’ preaching didn’t matter to the Warren or Newell families. They were believers. They would follow Jones to their death, and they did. He had loved them when no one else would. He was their father, their brother and the living incarnation of God.

Jones used mind control tactics on his church members. He isolated them from the outside world, turned them against each other and told them to reject anyone who was not a member of the Temple.

After the Temple members move to Guyana in 1977, Jones began instituting what he called White Nights — basically practice for how the congregation would handle a U.S. invasion.

America was the enemy, Jones said. America was who had oppressed his flock, he said.

One of these plans was committing what Jones called “revolutionarily suicide” by drinking punch laced with cyanide.  But what happened in Jonestown in November 1978 was far from a mass suicide that led to the phrase “don’t drink the Kool-Aid.”

“Jonestown has become a punch line, a catch phrase, an icon for ‘mindless or blind loyalty,’” massacre survivor Tim Carter wrote in a 2006 essay.

The blind loyalty, I say, is exactly what Jones wanted us outsiders to believe. We all fell for it, so how could we blame his followers?

What really happened, said Carter, who fled into the jungle after witnessing Jones order his followers to poison their children and the elderly, was murder. Jones ordered his inner circle to murder U.S. Rep. Leo Ryan who had traveled to visit the Temple. Then he used Ryan’s death as an opportunity to order his followers to murder each other as armed guards watched.

In an audiotape of the last hours at Jonestown, children — Dana, Isaac and Camella among them — can be heard wailing in the background as they are lined up to be executed by their own parents.

“Don’t be afraid to die … if these people land out here, they’ll torture some of our children here. They’ll torture our people, they’ll torture our seniors. We cannot have this,” Jones tells his followers on the tape amid the gut-wrenching sound of children screaming and choking on poison.

Tim Carter was tasked with going back to Jonestown after the massacre to help identify the bodies in what was the largest single loss of American civilian lives before 9/11. The majority of people, Carter says, had marks where they had been injected with poison.

“I’m sure those that were forcibly injected with poison would be aghast and shocked to hear that they were ‘ready to die,’ and that their struggle to live has become instead an icon for meekly surrendering,”

Among the bodies, Carter found his own wife clutching their child. I imagine Gloria Warren was clutching her children, too.

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Josh Edwards is a reporter and can be reached by email at josh.edwards@vicksburgpost.com or by phone at 601-636-4545.