The Ministry is fictional. The building is not.
Since 2022, GHOST have used Mountain View Mausoleum in Altadena, California as the physical stand-in for the Ministry — the band's invented ecclesiastical institution. It is where they filmed their March 2022 performance of "Call Me Little Sunshine" for "Jimmy Kimmel Live!", and it has turned up repeatedly in promotional photos and videos since. For a band whose entire premise is an elaborate church that does not exist, it is a useful thing to have a real building that looks the part.
The building needs help. Mountain View Mausoleum opened in 1923 and was designed by Cecil E. Bryan, an architect who had previously worked alongside Frank Lloyd Wright, and it stands in a community that the Eaton Fire tore through in January 2025. Preservation work on a century-old structure is not cheap, and the surrounding Altadena businesses have had a hard two years.
A fan group called Mystic Ministry has decided that this is their problem too. The group has raised $3,902.47 for the mausoleum and currently sits in first place on its donation leaderboard — not an enormous sum against the cost of preserving a 1923 landmark, but enough to put a fan community at the top of a list it has no obvious business being on.
"GHOST has always been about more than the music," says Mystic Ministry founder Amati Avaul. "Once you view the Mausoleum, read about its history, you realize it's so much more than a filming location." On why a fan club ended up doing historic preservation: "If loving this band brought us to Mountain View, then helping preserve it feels like a pretty wonderful way to give something back."
The group is running three limited-capacity tours of the mausoleum on Saturday, October 3, capped at twenty guests each, with the focus on the building's history rather than its recent screen career. That feeds into a three-month campaign telling the mausoleum's story alongside those of the Altadena businesses still recovering from the fire.
It is a strange outcome for a piece of theatre. GHOST built a fake religion with a fake headquarters, borrowed a real building to photograph it in, and the congregation went and started looking after the building.