Lake Lure’s Brief, Bizarre Chapter as the Headquarters of a Model Cult 

Lake Lure, a popular vacation destination in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, appeared in the news frequently after Hurricane Helene devastated the town in September 2024. Its triumphant reopening in April also generated headlines.

But the small Rutherford County town got press for a weirder reason this summer. Lake Lure, which has a year-round population of 1,365, is the setting for two episodes of the HBO docuseries Bring Me the Beauties: A Model Cult, about the doomsday cult Eternal Values. The group operated out of a palatial lakefront compound there during the 1980s and ’90s. 

Clearly, some explanation is in order. 

Eternal Values was the brainchild of Frederick von Mierers, a Manhattan socialite who claimed to be both a blue-blooded man-about-town and an alien from the star Arcturus occupying a human’s corporeal form. Von Mierers’ real name was Fred Meyers. The son of a dry cleaner from Brooklyn, he found minor success as a model in the ’60s and then reinvented himself following a serious illness in 1978, after which he claimed an alien had taken over his body. (He uses the term “walk-in,” a concept popularized in the 1979 book Strangers Among Us: Enlightened Beings from a World to Come.)

Throughout the ’80s, von Mierers promoted Eternal Values as a New Age movement, recruiting other attractive young people in the interest of replenishing the populace following an apocalypse he said was imminent. That included Hoyt Richards, among the most popular male supermodels of the day and a prominent source for the documentary. Through a representative, Richards declined to comment for this story.

Von Mierers told his members that Eternal Values could safely ride out the end times in Lake Lure due to the high elevation of the mountains. The cult bought and redecorated a large house dubbed the “Pink Palace” and split their time between New York City and North Carolina. 

The three-part HBO docuseries debuted in June. “The town was buzzing about it for sure,” said Tracy Williams, a resident whose family had a summer home there at the same time as Eternal Values.  

“When you first hear about this, you’re, like, ‘What? They thought he came from a star?’” said Robin Proctor, whose husband was mayor of Lake Lure at the time. “It’s just so mind-blowingly ridiculous.”

‘Out There in Their Little Speedo Bathing Suits’

Williams grew up visiting the house that became the Pink Palace. Her childhood neighbors in Hendersonville, the Hodge family, owned the property at 21 Buffalo Shoals Road. 

The Hodges had six children, and the “Hodge Lodge,” as the kids called it, wasn’t nearly as lavish at the time. It had no heat or A/C, Williams said. “In the downstairs, where the bunk beds were, was dirt floor,” she explained. “It was giant, sprawling, not-well-cared-for.” 

After the parents divorced, the 3.3-acre property was sold to people from New York for $400,000, according to an Associated Press article. In 1988, the property was transferred to a group called Unified Cosmogeny, Inc., which was another name Eternal Values used.  

The group sold cassettes and books about astrology and mysticism, and they earned an income from a gemstone grift that was the subject of a 1990 Vanity Fair exposé that led New York prosecutors to investigate the group. (The case was dropped after von Mierers’ death.) 

In Lake Lure, the cult also started a construction company called The Lotus Group as well as Lake Lure Boat Tours. All told, the cult operated 36 different businesses, Richards explained in the docuseries. It was “this really big, weird corporate mess,” Proctor said.

The group’s working models also financially supported Eternal Values; Richards modeled for Ralph Lauren, Versace, Valentino, Cartier, and other luxury brands. A 2018 documentary about Richards estimated he gave more than $4.5 million over two decades. 

Von Mierers told the group that Earth would undergo a magnetic pole shift in 1999, causing oceans to flood in a cataclysmic event in which only one-tenth of the population would be spared. “Frederick found that the Smoky Mountain region was far enough away from the oceans and it wasn’t going to be affected,” former member Russ Meyers explains in the docuseries. 

(Richards noted the irony in an Instagram post earlier this year: “Fast forward some forty years later and, literally, the place was decimated by Hurricane Helene.”)

Aliens would then come rescue Eternal Values members and put them in “rejuvenation chambers.” “I remember Freddie looking at it and saying, ‘Oh, yes, this will be a perfect spot to build the platform where the spaceship will land,’” Richards recalls in the show. 

They also accumulated an arsenal, Proctor recalled, which was “just another piece of weirdness.” 

They stockpiled food, too, recalled a prominent local who didn’t want her last name associated with them in print but had plenty to say. 

“It was like what the astronauts had, what you take to space and survivalists live on,” she recalled. “They had all of this food in their basement.” 

Von Mierers redesigned the house with an “amber-stained seawall,” a dock, and a locked gate on the driveway, per reporting at the time. But it appears to have kept the dormitory feel, per the docuseries, with members crammed into twin beds in its six bedrooms.

Their new neighbors saw little of them. “They were rather reclusive,” then-Police Chief Frank Fritts told the AP in 1990. “They pretty much stayed to themselves.” 

“They’ve been very good neighbors,” then-town council member Alex Karr told the Asheville Citizen-Times in 1990. “They’re quiet; their landscaping is fantastic.” 

“I’m a gardener,” Proctor confirmed, “and it was absolutely one of the most beautiful pieces of property, with gardens all around it.”  

That’s not to say Lake Lure residents didn’t find the new arrivals strange. “The locals called us bead-wearing homosexual stargazers,” former member Dar Dixon recalls in the third episode. 

“The Eternal Values folks, they wanted to keep a low profile,” former mayor Jim Proctor tells the filmmakers. “But they weren’t very good at it. You’ve got these extremely beautiful people coming into this little bitty town, and they stick out like a sore thumb.” 

It was easy to tell who was a member, Williams said. You’d stumble upon  “the world’s biggest male supermodel hanging out, buying local honey and some mustard.” You’d drive past the Pink Palace’s boat house, “and they’re all out there in their little Speedo bathing suits.”

‘Stepped Out of the Pages of Vogue’

To this day, the talkative local still doesn’t know why she was invited to a summer party at the palace sometime in the late ’80s. 

She is from a prominent Hendersonville family and owned a vacation home in Lake Lure with her late husband. The invitation came out of the blue, she told me at Lake Lure’s Grey Hawk Bar & Gardens restaurant. “I don’t remember knowing anybody there,” she said, though she recognized one local who was working as waitstaff.

Her husband wore a white silk sport coat; she wore a sailor dress. They pontooned over, and she slipped while disembarking, fell into the water, and cut her leg. “How I started out looking, I did not look that way any longer because of the heat, and now was just in a fluster.” 

They were greeted by a beautiful woman who asked how they were. “I said, ‘Oh, I’m a little hot and sweaty right now.’ And she said, ‘Oh, darling, are you premenopausal?’” She told her no. Then the woman asked, “Do you have vaginal dryness?” 

Even if the questions caught the couple off guard, they still wanted to see the inside. It didn’t disappoint. “The party was gorgeous—the pink marble floors, there were mirrors everywhere, everything blues and purples,” she said. “The most impressive thing was the windows had venetian blinds. Every venetian blind was painted so that when the blinds were closed, it was the same view as if the blinds were up—it was a mountain and lake view, the view outside.” 

The party “was rather a formal affair” with waitstaff passing food on platters and about 50 guests. 

“Everyone was gorgeous,” she said. “Everybody there looked as if they had stepped out of the pages of Vogue.”

They didn’t stay long due to her scratched leg, wet dress, and a general feeling of not fitting in, she said. “I really didn’t ask very many questions,” she said, “because I was afraid of what the answer might be.”

Fleeing, Plus Fabio 

After von Mierers died of AIDS at the Lake Lure property in 1990, Eternal Values began a gradual decline. 

In Bring Me The Beauties, Richards describes being forced to shave his head so he couldn’t model anymore and doing chores at the Lake Lure house instead. He began having doubts, but it took two tries to escape the cult. The first time he left Lake Lure, members followed him to New York City, trapped him in his apartment, and brought him back to North Carolina, he said. 

When he finally succeeded in leaving, friend and fellow model Fabio let Richards stay at his California home. It was there he realized he’d been in a cult; he is now a consultant and public speaker about cult recovery.

The rest of the members in Lake Lure dwindled. Robin Proctor said by 1996, only two or three men still lived at the Pink Palace. Richards later sued the remaining members, who were living in a house he paid for and working at companies he’d financed. 

Richards returned to Lake Lure at least twice when her husband was mayor, Proctor said, likely related to attempts to sell the house. 

He stayed at the Proctors’ house for multiple nights, and she fondly recalled conversations over dinner. “Nice guy,” she said. “It was a huge, huge thing that happened to him, and he has been dealing with it ever since.”

The house was eventually sold to a contractor, but it burned down during reconstruction, locals said. Now, nothing comes up on Google Maps at 21 Buffalo Shoals Road, though a local family appears to own the lot.  

The documentary crew started showing up in town years ago, interviewing Lake Lure residents past and present. Much like the cult itself, that didn’t seem to bother residents. Everyone has a live-and-let-live mentality, Williams said. “It’s a touristy place—people come and go.”

“Lake Lure is wonderful,” Proctor said. “It attracts odd people, but it’s wonderful.”