The general stuff/'horror stories' about Scientology you can find online easy enough, the pressuring of members to either bring their friends & families into the Scientology fold or else cut them out of their lives forever and to only socialize with other Scientologists; the expensive audits and paying money to have enough audits to be 'cleansed' enough to have different tiers of 'truth' revealed to them (apparently deliberately bankrupting members); the long work hours for meagre pay and the way normal medicine and medical help is forbidden to followers if they get sick; the groups of them that supposedly live on ocean boats out of the reach of the law where they can make members work like slaves, the pressure and deliberate manipulation they are supposed to practice on new recruits... all that stuff is related out there. I don't know how true all that is. All I can say is that some of what I know of these local Scientologists agrees with some of it and strengthens that picture.
It's not a "Scientology hotel" in name or anything - to all appearances, it's a normal-looking English hotel that looks like a 60s-style pebbledashed thing, calling itself "luxury" and charging luxury rates to stay there. In actuality it looks very shabby on the outside and inside it is supposedly even shabbier. The rooms aren't luxury and rather than having luxury furniture in the expensive ones, the furniture is apparently old, and they have no sinks or working toilets. A lot of people have mentioned in their reviews that instead, a plastic portable toilet like an airline toilet sits in the corner of each room's bathroom, and the rooms are cold and drab. It is called the "Camelot Castle" hotel (you can Google it... for lulz try this: Google "Camelot Castle Hotel reviews" and compare the reviews on their official site with the overwhelmingly negative ones in other places... or maybe just Google "worst hotel in Tintagel" and see what comes up XD). It was bought by a couple of Scientologists a few years back for roughly £1 million. Where they got a million to throw around like that, you tell me - the rest of their fold maybe, and their extortion rackets?
You'd think they'd run the place like a normal hotel if they were interested in running a business that could - given its foundations and location - generate a lot of money; for one thing, smarten it up, but they show no interest in doing that. Instead, the hotel seems to be more of an occasional meeting place for people, and otherwise doesn't get any more guests than they can fool with nice pictures on their website (apparently at one point, their website inserted a picture of a beach in the Algarve instead of the tiny, cold, pebbly beach that sits under Camelot Castle in reality). They're not above lying that blatantly! Any bad reviews they remove for their site right away. But you can find plenty about the dishevelled appearance and poor value for money of the hotel from guest accounts, and I can well believe it. I've been near enough to it to get a look at the interiors through windows on the ground floor, although I refuse to go inside it. They don't go to much effort in the village itself to advertise the hotel, yet they always have plenty of money to waste on poorly-imagined side projects. So... few guests, not much income probably... yet they are always mucking around with something in the village. Last year's project was they built a small 'art gallery' in the village and furnished it with hundreds of almost identical paintings that looked like what kids make in kindergarten with glitter and plastic butterflies stuck on them, and tried to sell them as high-end art. They didn't sell. Now, these paintings are painted by one of the Scientologists who is friends with the Hotel's owners, and his name is Ted Stourton. He is not a particularly accomplished artist, believe me. Yet he refers to himself publicly as "one of the World's Greatest Living Artists" and he proclaims it to just about everyone. His art adorns most of the walls of the hotel and seems to cause a lot of guests plenty of laughs and/or horror because of how childlike and garish it is... the guy is not famous at all yet he's got famous price tags on these paintings. So what they seem to be doing, is using the hotel as a little lair for some hard-selling on the guests. I'm not kidding. They start 'indoctrinating' the guests right away if they're there, either into cultivating an interest in Scientology, or else in trying to pressure them into buying these horrific pieces of art. Google "Camelot Castle Hotel Light Box" if you don't believe me... the guy has a cellar that he coaxes guests into where he sings them songs and tries to convince them to buy some illuminated art for £9000 or something like. This cellar is his infamous "light box", which I guess is designed to pressure people into feeling committed or obligated to buy the art because of how intensely he is pushing them. The evidence suggests he sometimes succeeds... I've seen a few of his paintings immediately reauctioned on eBay by guests who fell prey (and they're lucky to sell for £5).
So far this just sounds like a bit of gossip. But he uses hard-sell evidently to a greater effect in his hotel dungeon than he did in the Tintagel gallery: he lies about how famous he is, and definitely tries to engage people with Scientology. I've heard it from people. The locals laugh at him, and none of the hotel people mix with us outside. They stick to themselves. When the gallery failed they tried something else in the same building - an 'official' supplier of Doc Martin merchandise, which I guess is anything but official.
As for the hotel itself - now for the less hilarious stuff of Ted and his 'art', the grimmer stuff we know about them. The BBC were planning to make a documentary on this hotel I heard, a couple of years back (about a year before I moved here, so I missed it), but I am not sure if it aired, and it was to do with the Scientology work ethic. Ex-workers have come forward to say how they were bullied, refused pay, underpaid, overworked, frightened etc., some said that the hotel deliberately recruits Polish cooks who speak very broken English who will keep to themselves and who are not properly paid... my boyfriend has said that he's seen them around in the local shop and they do not mix with the locals... preferring to get drunk in the hotel, buy themselves very cheap beer and hurry back... in accordance with the Scientology habit of paying staff pathetic wages and trying to ensure that they mix as little as possible with outsiders. Other workers have claimed that part of their work involved studying Scientology which was never a part of the contract, and is a condition of being paid, along with 12 hour days. Some have left the hotel without ever having received pay after several months' promised. The staff get bare minimum of everything, and are expected to room in the hotel. It all fits with the descriptions I've seen before of first isolating, then extorting people through psychological pressure.
One of the owners has a criminal record for fraud - not something you can really ignore in this scenario as a factor. The place is located in a lonely isolated area, the staff room under the Scientologists who can basically dictate to them, and the hotel gets used as a selling den for the other guy's art, and also a recruitment den if they can for their Scientology prattle. I know all this because there's a handful of locals who have researched and/or know these people and would really like them to leave Tintagel for good. People are aware of the ex-workers and seem to be compiling legal cases against the hotel's activities wherever possible. There was much amusement when Ted built his gallery, I can tell you... they all see to be very familiar and tired of him and his trying to fool innocent guests into buying his crap.
I've never met them personally and I rarely see them (it seems they know better than to hang out with the locals), but I can piece together from all of this that they appear to be a little triumvirate of con-artists holed up in their castle, happy to lie to, overcharge, cheat, and extort from people. I feel sorry for the people who fall for the website and actually stay at the hotel, although a few of them apparently leave before their holiday is supposed to be over, without refund. It's that bad.
It's not common knowledge that they are Scientologists up there. It's hush-hush almost, like they want it kept low-key and the villagers are just so annoyed and ****ed by them they don't speak about it much. I knew nothing about it until my boyfriend was told by his local coworkers about it once. Then I looked into it and found all kinds of hilarious and unpleasant things out about the owners with a bit of internet searching. Nothing is especially well-hidden about them, but nobody has come forward yet to really take them on for some of the things they've done. People take their website at face value, rather than delving in to who they are and what they do, so they get ripped off by booking at a grotty hotel that looks nice on the site, and then probably wooed with Scientology talk and given Ted's creepy-ass basement treatment before they go.
They must have bought the hotel for a practical reason, but it just seems they treat it like a plaything, half-seriously, and it's a dump. I can't help wondering if any meetings go on in there like that one in "The Witches". XD
