The Jonestown Mass Deaths Shocked the World
On this day · 18 November 1978
On a single day in a Guyanese jungle settlement, more than 900 followers of a charismatic preacher died together.
On November 18, 1978, the Peoples Temple settlement of Jonestown in remote Guyana became the site of one of the deadliest non-natural losses of American civilian life in history. In a single day, 918 people died in and around the compound led by preacher Jim Jones.
The catastrophe began when Congressman Leo Ryan of California flew in to investigate reports of abuse. As his delegation prepared to leave from the nearby Port Kaituma airstrip, gunmen ambushed the group, killing Ryan and several others. Hours later, Jones directed his followers to drink a fruit punch laced with cyanide. 907 people died of cyanide poisoning, many of them children and many forced or coerced.
It was the largest single deliberate loss of American civilian lives until the September 11, 2001 attacks.
The deaths gave the phrase “drinking the Kool-Aid” its grim modern meaning. The FBI later recovered around a thousand audiotapes from the site, and tens of thousands of investigative pages now sit in the National Archives, preserving a chilling record of how devotion curdled into tragedy.
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