Sara Northrup Hollister

Sara Northrup Hollister

Sara Elizabeth Bruce Northrup Hollister (April 8, 1924 – December 19, 1997) was the second wife of L. Ron Hubbard, from 1946 to 1951, and wife of Miles Hollister from 1951 to her death in 1997. She had one daughter, Alexis Valerie, fathered by Hubbard in 1948.

Sara Northrup was a major figure in the Pasadena branch of the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO), a society founded by the English occultist Aleister Crowley. From 1941 to 1945 she had a turbulent relationship with John Whiteside Parsons, the head of the Pasadena OTO, who was married to her sister Helen. Although she was a committed member of the OTO, to whom she was known as "Soror Cassap", she acquired a reputation for disruptiveness that prompted Crowley to denounce her as a "vampire".

She began a relationship with L. Ron Hubbard, whom she met through the OTO, in 1945. It led to the couple eloping with a substantial amount of Parsons' life savings and marrying bigamously a year later while Hubbard was still married to his first wife Margaret. Sara played a significant role in the development of Dianetics, Hubbard's "modern science of mental health", between 1948 and 1951, during which time she was Hubbard's personal auditor and one of the seven members of the Dianetics Foundation's Board of Directors, alongside Hubbard himself. However, their marriage broke up in extremely acrimonious circumstances amid accusations of kidnapping and Communist plots, which prompted lurid headlines in the Los Angeles newspapers. She subsequently married one of Hubbard's former employees, Miles Hollister, and moved to Hawaii and later Massachusetts.