A notorious Christian cult, tied to murders and mysterious disappearances, officially disavowed by the Catholic Church, that once drew 100,000 people to rural Wisconsin, sits a short 90-minute drive from Madison? It’s true.

Necedah, a small town that had a population of about 700 through most of the 20th century (and is now just over 1,000), is in something of a state dead zone, tucked away from larger regional hubs like the Wisconsin Dells and Wisconsin Rapids. Yet the Necedah Shrine was for decades a huge draw for believers, skeptics and scoffers alike, while amassing local property and power. 

The now-crumbling shrine is still free and open to the public.

Visitors can patronize its thrift store and gift shop, observe the location of the apparitions of its late founder and leader, Mary Ann Van Hoof, as well as peer into a replica of her farmhouse. There’s also somewhat of a campus of life-sized plaster-cast dioramas of Bible scenes.

Most striking is the House of Prayer, a stadium-sized building that the cult began to construct nearly 50 years ago. It is a partially built behemoth of rebar and cinders, simultaneously under construction and falling apart. The shrine claims to still be raising money for its construction, but progress stalled in the 1980s. A statue of Jesus perched on a globe sits next to the building, flanked on both sides by statues of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. The flag beside them remains at half-mast at all times, in honor of the aborted unborn.

“Mystery after mystery after mystery,” is how Sawyer McDonell, amateur historian of the cult, describes the experience of going down the rabbit hole of the Necedah Shrine.

Mary Ann Van Hoof (1909-1984) was the founder of what became Queen of the Holy Rosary, Mediatrix of Peace Shrine — colloquially known as the Necedah Shrine.

Van Hoof, a sharecropper, reported her first vision of the Virgin Mary in late 1949. So-called Marian apparitions are controversial in the Catholic Church; local clergy typically dismiss them and even those that are escalated through the Church hierarchy are seldom verified. There are fewer than 20 verified apparitions globally. (Weirdly, the only verified Marian apparition in the United States is in Wisconsin. In 1859 a Belgian immigrant in Champion, Wisconsin, reported seeing the Virgin Mary three times and being told to teach children to pray. During the 1871 Peshtigo Fire, the witness to this apparition took refuge in a church and refused to leave even though it was in the fire’s path. The surrounding area was burned but the church, along with everyone inside of it, survived.)

Van Hoof continued to report her Marian apparitions through 1950 and drew increasingly large crowds to witness them. The local Chamber of Commerce, headed by Henry Swan, saw an economic opportunity and promoted Van Hoof’s apparitions as a local attraction.

On Aug. 15, 1950, the New York Times reported an estimated 100,000 people were in attendance to witness Van Hoof share messages from the Virgin Mary.

While the number seems implausibly high, it’s impossible to disprove. The scale of crowds interested in Van Hoof’s message, however, is undeniable. Van Hoof and her followers built up the shrine on a large plot of land outside Necedah. The “Shrine Belt,” a cottage industry that sprung up in the surrounding area, offered hundreds of rooms to accommodate visitors and roadside shops. Its remnants can still be seen today. Visitors driving around the area will notice a curious number of old motels and cabin lodgings for such a small town. Road signs with names like “Shrine Road” surround the edge of the shrine’s land, where houses that were once donated to the cult line the street.

An investigation by the Catholic Church was initiated in 1950; Van Hoof’s apparitions were officially condemned as “supernatural” in 1955. Van Hoof and her followers — from believers who moved into shrine-owned homes to shrine priests — carried on undeterred. Their footprint on Necedah grew to the point that the town was, for a period of time, ostensibly run by the shrine leadership.

You can read about nearly all of Van Hoof’s apparitions from the 1950s to the 1980s (through its LLC, For God and Country Inc., the shrine has published multiple books recording them that are sold onsite), which range from repeated visits from Tsar Alexander III to shockingly antisemitic “warnings” about “the enemy.” Scandal visited the group over the years as grifters and con artists introduced scams, and shootings and other violent crimes took place and were allegedly covered up by shrine leaders.

Van Hoof died in 1984 after many years of poor health. The cult then entered a period of schism and power struggle from which it never recovered.

As for the shrine’s organization, it has continued a steady decline in power and members. “Kids have left, people have died, houses have been bought by non-members,” says historian McDonell, who suggests that the ostracization from the Catholic Church began wearing on shrine members in the years after Van Hoof’s death.

“Necedah has mostly become a normal town again,” says McDonell.

Kenneth Van Hoof, one of Mary Ann Van Hoof’s children, appears to be in a leadership position with the shrine today, which also still runs a private K-12 “Queen of the Holy Rosary School.” An attendant at the thrift store tells me they have about ten students. The website, which was revamped earlier this year, boasts a double-digit staff who teach courses that include Latin, Chinese, and home economics. One of Mary Ann Van Hoof’s daughters is also a staff teacher.

McDonell says it’s hard to estimate how many members the shrine has today. “Definitely below 100, probably below 50. As a general guess.”

Today, the shrine draws the curious, history buffs, paranormal tourists, and a handful of religious faithful. “We get a lot of Polish people from Chicago,” the elderly information center attendant strangely remarked.

During my two trips this year, the shrine was mostly empty. Aside from a couple of townspeople at the thrift store, there were scant non-members around. There were a couple sets of footprints in the snow on the campus in February. In May, our only company was vicious swarms of mosquitoes that hounded us back to our car.

Those making a day trip can also enjoy nearby Buckhorn State Park and the Necedah National Wildlife Refuge. Cabins dot the woods and farmland outside town, some of which are Airbnb rentals boasting amenities like hot tubs and saunas. Necedah is home to a traditional supper club, the Woodbine Inn, serving up old fashioneds and Friday night fish fries since the 1980s.

If nothing else, the shrine’s weird and, at times, dark story appeals in our era of online sleuths and religious cult documentaries, a reminder of a mostly forgotten moment in Wisconsin history.