Weird California describes itself as “Your Travel Guide to California’s Local Legends and Best Kept Secrets,” and as such it lists the sites of a number of utopian communes, including the Rancho Santa Fe location of the Heaven’s Gate mass suicide of 1997.
You may recall that the cultists were dressed in identical black shirts and sweat pants and brand new black-and-white Nike tennis shoes, with purple shrouds over their dead bodies. There were two details I didn’t know though. First, their track uniforms included patches saying “Heaven’s Gate Away Team”. (That seems darkly comical.) Second, they each had their passports and $5.75 in hand.
Weird California claims that the protagonist of Mark Twain’s Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven takes his passport and $5.75 for fare to Heaven, but that’s simply not the case.