Jonestown was a short-lived settlement made in northwestern Guyana by the Peoples Temple, a cult from California.
Jonestown became lastingly and internationally notorious in 1978 when all but a few residents died in a mass murder-suicide orchestrated by their leader, Jim Jones. The name of the settlement thus also became a term for that incident.
In November 1978, United States Congressman Leo Ryan led reporters and a delegation of concerned relatives of Peoples Temple members on a visit to Jonestown to investigate allegations of abuses there. The visit ended in the murders of Ryan and four others by members of the Peoples Temple, shot at the Port Kaituma airstrip as they were about to fly out. That evening, November 18, Jones led his followers in their mass murder-suicide. Approximately nine hundred men, women and children perished, along with Jones, who shot himself.
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