Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes

By 2017, Jeff and Shaleia Divine were running Twin Flames Universe out of rural northern Michigan, selling a promise: everyone has one predestined soulmate, and for a fee, they would tell you who yours was. Members paid tens of thousands of dollars for classes, practiced a technique called the mirror exercise that turned every complaint into self-blame, and were assigned soulmates who had agreed to nothing and sometimes had never met them. Former members say that because the group was mostly women, Jeff told some of them they were divine masculine and should live as men. In July 2025, Michigan's attorney...

Most nights, Niecy Nash and her daughter, Dia, end up in bed talking true crime, and now they’re inviting you in.

If you love Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes, you are going to love Crime House’s new podcast out now called Mother Knows Murder. It’s the same team that helps us make this podcast!

Mother Knows Murder is hosted by actress Niecy Nash and her daughter, Dia Nash. Each week, one of them brings a case and the other hears it for the first time. They catch different details and lock in their own ve...

On the night of September 19th, 1961, Betty and Barney Hill were driving home through the White Mountains of New Hampshire when a light in the sky started following their car. Barney pulled over, looked through binoculars, and said figures were looking back. They got home two hours later than they should have, with no memory of where the time went. Betty started having nightmares. Two years later a Boston psychiatrist hypnotized them separately, and both described being taken aboard a craft and examined. The psychiatrist never bought it, and thought Betty had dreamed the whole thing and Barney had...

On October 8th, 2009, Bobby and Sherilynn Jamison and their six-year-old daughter Madyson drove into the Sans Bois Mountains of Oklahoma to look at land, and vanished. Eight days later hunters found their pickup locked on a dirt road, the dog starving inside. Their phones, wallets and IDs were still in it, along with $32,000 in cash under the seat. Security footage showed the couple making dozens of silent trips to the truck, in what witnesses called a trance. Their remains turned up four years later, three miles away, with no determinable cause of death. Theories have ranged from murder to...

In 1920 Aleister Crowley rented a farmhouse above Cefalù in Sicily and called it the Abbey of Thelema, a school for unlearning everything society had taught you. Residents greeted the sun four times a day, took whatever drugs he handed them, and cut their forearms whenever they said the word I. He made every one of them keep a diary of what they did and what they wanted, and he read all of it. When a 22-year-old Oxford graduate died there in 1923, his widow went to the London papers, and within a month Crowley was the wickedest man in the w...

In November 1957, police in Plainfield, Wisconsin went looking for a missing hardware store owner, Bernice Worden, and found her body in a shed behind Ed Gein's farmhouse. Inside the house, they found furniture, clothing and keepsakes made from human remains. Gein admitted killing Worden and a tavern owner named Mary Hogan, and to robbing more than 40 graves. He was found unfit to stand trial; when he was tried in 1968, a judge convicted him of a single murder and found him legally insane. He died in a state hospital in 1984. In the meantime, his farmhouse had reshaped American horror three...

On Thanksgiving Eve in 1928, three men broke into a farmhouse in Rehmeyer's Hollow, an area of York County, Pennsylvania known locally as Hex Hollow, looking for a book. Nelson Rehmeyer was a farmer and a practitioner of powwow, a Pennsylvania Dutch folk-healing tradition, and he had once cured one of the intruders as a child. John Blymire was convinced that Rehmeyer was the witch who had hexed him, and that burning Rehmeyer's copy of a folk-magic book called The Long Lost Friend would lift the curse. The three men beat Rehmeyer to death and set his body alight. The...

Founded in London in the mid-1960s by two former Scientologists, Robert de Grimston and Mary Ann MacLean, the Process Church of the Final Judgment taught that Christ and Satan were not opposites but complementary forces to be reconciled. Members wore black robes with a goat emblem, traveled with German Shepherds, and sold apocalyptic magazines with titles like Fear and Humanity is the Devil on the streets of London, New York, Chicago and New Orleans. They built a commune on the Yucatan, recruited from the counterculture, and attracted contributions from Marianne Faithfull and Funkadelic. Then their magazine ran an...

In November 1974, Ronald DeFeo Jr. shot and killed six members of his family in their house on Ocean Avenue in Amityville, New York. Thirteen months later, George and Kathy Lutz moved in with their three children and left after 28 days, describing green slime, swarms of flies, a demonic pig and voices in the walls. The book that followed sold in the millions and launched one of the most profitable horror franchises in history. Then the story started coming apart, and the word attached to it was hoax: neighbors reported nothing, and investigators found no records supporting key events. DeFeo's...

Something has crept into this feed…For Halloween, Hidden History with Dr. Harini Bhat has slipped through the walls to haunt your feed with an episode just for you.

Locked in Yale's Beinecke Library sits a 600-year-old book written in an alphabet that exists nowhere else on Earth: roughly 38,000 words across 240 pages of calfskin, and not one sentence has ever been verified as translated. Emperors paid fortunes for it, the codebreaker who cracked Japan's WWII cipher gave up on it, and supercomputers have made no progress. The evidence is complete and fully photographed...so why can't anyone re...

Over four days in August 1990, five students were murdered near the University of Florida campus in Gainesville. Their names were Sonja Larson, Christina Powell, Christa Hoyt, Tracy Paules and Manuel Taboada. The killings emptied the town, sent students home mid-semester, and produced a manhunt that arrested the wrong man before DNA and a cassette tape recovered from a wooded campsite identified a drifter named Danny Rolling. The press called him the Gainesville Ripper. He pleaded guilty in 1994, later admitted to a triple murder in Shreveport, Louisiana, and was executed in 2006. Along the way, a young screenwriter named Kevin Williamson...

Around 53 BC, Julius Caesar wrote that the Gauls built enormous human figures out of woven branches, filled them with living people, and set them alight. That passage, written by a general describing the enemy he was conquering, became the foundation of one of the most durable images in Western imagination: the wicker man. Later readers called it the wicker man, and it has since been a horror film, a music festival, and a shorthand for pagan savagery. What it has never been is archaeologically settled. Roman writers had every reason to describe the Celts as barbarians, and the physical...

In 1970, a nursing student in Connecticut was given a Raggedy Ann doll for her birthday. Within weeks she and her roommate believed it was moving around their apartment on its own, leaving handwritten notes, and attacking a friend. They called Ed and Lorraine Warren, the self-described demonologists who would later become the most famous paranormal investigators in America. The Warrens declared the doll haunted by a demonic presence, took it home, and sealed it in a glass case in their occult museum in Monroe, Connecticut. Fifty years later, a Hollywood franchise had made the doll a household name, the...

Early on February 5th, 2007, Air Force captain Colleen Shipman was walking to her car at Orlando International Airport when a woman in a wig and a trench coat followed her, banged on her window, and sprayed a chemical through the gap. The woman was Lisa Nowak, a NASA astronaut who had flown aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery seven months earlier. Nowak had driven roughly 900 miles from Houston to confront the woman now dating her former lover, a fellow astronaut, in a case the tabloids named the astronaut love triangle. Police found a knife, a mallet, a BB gun and...

In the hills outside Melbourne, Australia, a yoga teacher named Anne Hamilton-Byrne convinced several hundred followers that she was Jesus Christ. Her members were not dropouts: they were doctors, lawyers, nurses, psychiatrists and social workers, and at one point they effectively controlled a private psychiatric hospital that fed her new recruits. Between 1969 and 1975, she collected 14 children who were not hers, registered every one as her own birth, and raised them behind a barbed-wire fence at a property on Lake Eildon. Their hair was bleached identical shades of blonde. They were starved, beaten, and dosed with sedatives, and at 14 they...

In 2009, at a science fiction convention in Atlanta, a paranormal researcher named Fiona Broome discovered that strangers shared her vivid memory of Nelson Mandela dying in prison in the 1980s. Mandela walked free in 1990 and died in 2013. Broome named it the Mandela Effect, and the catalogue grew: a children's book spelled wrong, a logo with a horn that never existed, a Sinbad genie movie nobody made. Believers concluded that reality had been edited and their memories were souvenirs of a lost timeline. Then in 2022, University of Chicago researchers put the phenomenon in a lab, confirmed that huge numbers of...

Long before the name Jack the Ripper struck fear into Victorian England, a respectable-looking widow named Mary Ann Cotton was quietly killing her way through the north of the country. By the time investigators caught up with her in 1872, she had outlived four husbands, a lover, and eleven of her own children, nearly all of them poisoned with arsenic and many insured for cash. Hiding in plain sight behind the mask of a grieving mother and wife, she is now considered Britain's first known serial killer, and one of its most overlooked. In this episode of Conspiracy Theories, Cults...

In 1954, a housewife in Oak Park, Illinois named Dorothy Martin began taking down messages from beings she called the Guardians, and told the small circle around her that a flood would destroy the middle of North America before dawn on December 21st. Flying saucers would collect the believers first. The group, who called themselves the Seekers, gave away possessions and quit jobs, and on the night of the 20th pulled every scrap of metal off their clothes and sat down to wait. Three social psychologists led by Leon Festinger were sitting in the room under false names. Their 1956 book...

In 2021, an anonymous forum post floated a theory that sounded absurd: the internet effectively died around 2016, and most of what we now see online, the posts, comments, arguments, and trends, is generated by bots and AI designed to manipulate what we think, buy, and believe. People laughed, until the evidence started piling up. Bots surpassed human traffic online for the first time in 2024, more than a third of new websites are now AI-generated, and state actors run thousands of fake accounts to shape public opinion. With every passing month, the idea that the internet is fake looks less like...

Fun fact: Did you know Jaws almost never existed because the shark kept sinking while filming? That is Connor Tomlinson just getting started. If that sounds fascinating, you are going to love Rewind Studios’ new podcast out now called WHAT THE FACT hosted by Connor Tomlinson and Carter Roy. It’s produced by the same team that brings you Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes.

Connor and co-host Carter Roy pull three unbelievable true facts every week and tell you the full story behind each one. Nothing is off limits. Myths and monsters. Forgotten scandals. Accidental discoveries. Untold stories behi...

In 1925, a con man calling himself Count Victor Lustig read that the Eiffel Tower was costly to maintain. He took a suite at one of the best hotels in Paris and invited five scrap dealers to a confidential meeting. On stationery bearing a government seal, he introduced himself as a ministry official, said the state had secretly decided to demolish it, and offered them its 7,000 tons of iron. One dealer paid, and was too humiliated to report it. So Lustig came back and ran it again. He went on to sell a fake money-printing machine to a Texas sheriff...

In the 1980s, a charismatic woman named Elizabeth Clare Prophet convinced thousands of followers that she was channeling messages from Jesus, Buddha, and a spiritual entity called Saint Germain, and that nuclear apocalypse was imminent. Her devotees sold their homes, quit their jobs, and moved to a sprawling 12,000-acre compound beside Yellowstone National Park, where the church built an enormous underground bunker system stocked with weapons and supplies. On March 15th, 1990, some seven thousand people descended into the shelters to wait for the end of the world, only to emerge the next morning to find everything exactly as they'd...

John Barnett spent 32 years at Boeing before going public with alarming claims about faulty oxygen masks, substandard parts, and a corporate culture that punished anyone who dared to speak up. In March 2024, in the middle of giving deposition testimony against the company, he was found dead in a hotel parking lot from a gunshot wound. Less than two months later, Joshua Dean, a 45-year-old quality auditor who had flagged the very manufacturing defects Boeing later admitted to, died within two weeks of a sudden infection after being perfectly healthy. Both men shared the same attorney, both had documented retaliation...

On March 8th, 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 vanished from the sky with 239 people aboard, disappearing during a routine flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. The plane's transponder went dark, it changed course over the ocean, and then it was simply gone, triggering the largest and most expensive search in aviation history. In the years since, theories have multiplied, ranging from deliberate pilot sabotage to hijacking to a military cover-up, but despite scattered debris washing ashore, the main wreckage has never been found. In this episode of Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes, Vanessa Richardson investigates the disappearance of MH370, the baffling final...

In the early 17th century, mysterious manifestos appeared in Europe announcing the existence of a secret brotherhood called the Rosicrucians, said to possess hidden knowledge of alchemy, mysticism, and the deepest secrets of the universe. Whether the order truly existed or was an elaborate hoax has been debated for centuries, but the legend inspired real societies, esoteric traditions, and endless speculation about suppressed ancient wisdom. In this episode of Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes, Vanessa Richardson explores the enigma of the Rosicrucians, the blend of symbolism and secrecy that fueled their mystique, and the enduring question of whether they guarded...

In the final years of Imperial Russia, a mysterious peasant mystic named Grigori Rasputin rose to extraordinary influence over the royal Romanov family. Trusted by the Empress for his apparent ability to ease her son's illness, Rasputin became a figure of endless rumor, accused of everything from manipulation and debauchery to holding secret sway over the crumbling empire. His dramatic murder in 1916, said to have required poison, bullets, and drowning to finally kill him, only deepened the legends surrounding him. In this episode of Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes, Vanessa Richardson explores the strange life and death of Rasputin, the...

On June 28th, 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, was shot and killed alongside his wife on the streets of Sarajevo by a young nationalist named Gavrilo Princip. The assassination was the work of a shadowy network of secret societies bent on breaking apart the empire, and within weeks, it plunged the world into the catastrophe of World War I. A single act of violence had toppled the fragile balance of power holding Europe together. In this episode of Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes, Vanessa Richardson examines the assassination that changed the course of history, the secret nationalist...

In the aftermath of World War I, a secretive occult group emerged in Germany called the Thule Society, blending Norse mythology, racial mysticism, and extreme nationalism into a dangerous new ideology. Its members believed in a master race descended from a mythical northern homeland, and their obsession with ancestry and bloodline would seep directly into the beliefs of the fledgling Nazi Party. Though the society itself faded, its ideas and several of its members helped shape one of history's darkest movements. In this episode of Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes, Vanessa Richardson explores the Thule Society, the toxic fusion of...

Since it opened in 1995, Denver International Airport has been the subject of some of the most enduring conspiracy theories in America. Built years behind schedule and wildly over budget, the airport is famous for its unsettling apocalyptic murals, a towering demonic horse statue with glowing red eyes, cryptic dedication plaques, and a sprawling network of underground tunnels. To believers, these details point to secret bunkers for the elite, headquarters for shadowy organizations, or something even stranger hidden beneath the runways. Officials insist the tunnels are mundane and the art is simply misunderstood, but the speculation has only grown over...

A History Channel original podcast brought to you by Rewind Studios, History's Greatest Mysteries examines the top theories surrounding the world's most enigmatic unsolved mysteries. If you love Conspiracy Theories, Cults, and Crimes, then you’re gonna love History’s Greatest Mysteries. Each episode unpacks these puzzles with contributions from top historians, authors, scientists, and researchers. From unsolved crimes to lost and buried treasures, and the deaths and disappearances of famous figures, History's Greatest Mysteries explores possible explanations to some of the world's most confounding events. Follow the show for a new episode every Wednesday: https://pod.link/6801242598

In December 1996, 6-year-old beauty queen JonBenét Ramsey was found murdered in the basement of her family's home in the quiet mountain town of Boulder, Colorado, in a case that would become one of the most controversial in American history. A bizarre ransom note, a badly mishandled crime scene, and a swirl of suspicion around her own family turned a private tragedy into a national spectacle, with the media declaring the Ramseys guilty long before any evidence could. Nearly three decades later, despite endless theories and renewed DNA testing, no one has ever been charged, and the truth remains b...

Deep in the redwood forests of Northern California lies Bohemian Grove, a private retreat where some of the most powerful men in the world, presidents, business titans, and political power brokers, have gathered in secret for more than a century. Each summer, members of the exclusive Bohemian Club convene for two weeks of camping, revelry, and a strange opening ritual called the "Cremation of Care," performed before a towering stone owl. That secrecy has fueled decades of speculation, from rumors of occult worship to theories that world-shaping decisions are quietly made around its campfires. In this episode of Conspiracy...

During the Cold War, the CIA quietly turned modern art into a weapon. Convinced that America needed to prove its cultural superiority over the Soviet Union, the agency secretly promoted abstract expressionist painters like Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning as symbols of American freedom. Through a front group called the Congress for Cultural Freedom and a network of fake foundations, the CIA funneled millions of dollars into touring exhibitions across Europe, partnering with the Museum of Modern Art, all without the artists ever knowing who was funding their success. The irony was staggering: many of the...

In the 1950s and 60s, at the height of the Cold War, the CIA launched a secret program called Operation Midnight Climax as part of its notorious MKUltra mind-control research. Operating out of safehouses in San Francisco and New York, agents used sex workers to lure unwitting men, then dosed them with LSD without their knowledge and observed the results through one-way mirrors. The goal was to study whether psychedelics could be weaponized for interrogation, coercion, and control. What unfolded was a chilling abuse of government power, hidden from the public for decades until investigations finally exposed it. In...

In the late 1960s, a group of California idealists calling themselves the Brotherhood of Eternal Love set out to change the world through psychedelics, believing that LSD could bring about spiritual awakening and universal peace. Inspired by figures like Timothy Leary, the Brotherhood started as a hippie collective but soon became one of the largest drug-smuggling operations in the country, trafficking massive quantities of LSD and hashish across the globe. What began as a utopian dream drifted steadily into a criminal empire, drawing the attention of federal authorities and culminating in a sweeping prosecution. In this episode of Conspiracy...

In January 1996, the small Brazilian city of Varginha became the center of one of the most famous UFO stories in South American history. Multiple witnesses, including three young women, reported seeing a strange creature with a large head and red eyes lurking in the streets, while others claimed the military had captured one or more living beings and recovered a crashed craft. As soldiers reportedly swarmed the area and a young military police officer who allegedly handled a creature later died under murky circumstances, the official denials only deepened public suspicion that something was being covered up. To this...

Reddit is an endless archive of humanity’s most disturbing, bizarre, and deeply human stories. If you love Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes, you are going to love CRIMES OF REDDIT with Alexis Linkletter and Sabrina Deana-Roga.

Every Tuesday, one host brings a set of true-crime stories while the other reacts in real time with no prep, no spoilers asking the questions on everyone’s mind. They pull at every thread until the whole twisted picture comes into view. It’s dark, it’s messy, and the scariest part is simple: THESE ARE STORIES POSTED BY REAL PEOPLE.

Fol...

Chico Mendes was a Brazilian rubber tapper who became one of the world's most important environmental activists, organizing peaceful resistance against the destruction of the Amazon rainforest. By the 1980s, he had drawn international attention to the violent clash between cattle ranchers clearing the forest and the communities who depended on it to survive. His activism made him a global symbol of the fight to save the Amazon, and it also made him a target. In December 1988, Mendes was shot and killed outside his home by a rancher's family, a murder that exposed the deadly stakes of standing between...

Founded in the Brazilian Amazon in the 1930s, Santo Daime is a religion that blends Catholicism, indigenous tradition, and African spirituality around a single sacred sacrament: ayahuasca, a powerful psychedelic brew. During hours-long ceremonies, devotees drink the bitter tea, sing hymns, and describe profound visions, healing, and spiritual enlightenment. The faith has spread far beyond Brazil, drawing followers around the world and sparking legal battles over the religious use of a substance banned in many countries. But alongside the devotion come questions about its rigid structure, the intensity of its rituals, and the line between spiritual practice and something...

According to the Bible, the Ark of the Covenant was a gold-covered chest built to hold the Ten Commandments, an object of such immense divine power that it could level cities and strike down anyone who touched it. Then, sometime after the destruction of the First Temple in Jerusalem, it vanished from history. For thousands of years, the question of what happened to it has fueled legends and obsessive searches, with some claiming it lies hidden in a church in Ethiopia, others pointing to secret chambers beneath Jerusalem, and still others insisting it sits locked away in the vaults...