Podcast · History

Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes

by Crime House · English · History

New episodes: Several times a week
Typical length: 41 min
Latest: 9 Oct 2026
Language: English

Latest episode

9 Oct 2026 · 41 minNew

CRIME: Britain's First Female Serial Killer: Mary Ann Cotton

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, & Crimes,…

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Earlier episodes 29 most recent

E125 · 7 Oct 2026 · 44 min

CULT: When Prophecy Fails: The Seekers

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 about…
E124 · 5 Oct 2026 · 44 min

CONSPIRACY THEORY: Is Anyone Real Anymore? The Dead Internet Theory

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…
4 Oct 2026 · 38 min

Introducing WHAT THE FACT with Connor Tomlinson and Carter Roy, a new Rewind podcast!

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…
E123 · 2 Oct 2026 · 35 min

CRIME: Victor Lustig: He Sold the Eiffel Tower Twice

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, take $5,000 off Al Capone, and print so…
E122 · 30 Sep 2026 · 41 min

CULT: The Church Universal and Triumphant

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…
E121 · 28 Sep 2026 · 44 min

CONSPIRACY THEORY: Aviation Industry Whistleblowers

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…
E120 · 25 Sep 2026 · 35 min

CRIME: MH370

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,…
E119 · 23 Sep 2026 · 38 min

CULT: The Rosicrucians

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…
E118 · 21 Sep 2026 · 49 min

CONSPIRACY: The Mad Monk Who Controlled the Romanovs

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…
E117 · 18 Sep 2026 · 32 min

CRIME: The Murder That Started World War I: Franz Ferdinand

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…
E116 · 16 Sep 2026 · 38 min

CULT: The Thule Society: The Secret Group That Birthed the Nazi Party

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…
E115 · 14 Sep 2026 · 47 min

CONSPIRACY: What Is Denver Airport Hiding?

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…
E114 · 11 Sep 2026 · 38 min

CRIME: Who Killed JonBenét?

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…
E113 · 9 Sep 2026 · 36 min

CULT: Power in the Woods: Bohemian Grove

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…
E112 · 7 Sep 2026 · 38 min

CONSPIRACY THEORY: Did the CIA Invent Modern Art?

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…
E111 · 4 Sep 2026 · 37 min

CRIME: LSD & Mind Control: Operation Midnight Climax

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…
E110 · 2 Sep 2026 · 42 min

CULT: God's Drug Empire: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love

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…
E109 · 31 Aug 2026 · 56 min

CONSPIRACY THEORY: Brazil's UFO Cover-Up: The Varginha Incident feat. Laurah Norton from One Strange Thing

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…
E108 · 28 Aug 2026 · 43 min

CRIME: Chico Mendes: Killed for the Trees

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…
E107 · 26 Aug 2026 · 43 min

CULT: The Ayahuasca Cult: Santo Daime

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…
E106 · 24 Aug 2026 · 39 min

CONSPIRACY THEORY: The Ark of the Covenant

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 of the…
E105 · 21 Aug 2026 · 39 min

CRIME: The Mysterious Murder of Barry & Honey Sherman

In December 2017, billionaire pharmaceutical founder Barry Sherman and his wife Honey were found dead in their Toronto mansion, their bodies posed beside the indoor pool, each hanging from a railing by a belt. Police initially suggested a murder-suicide, a theory the couple's family furiously rejected. As private investigators and a second autopsy revealed the truth, the case was reclassified as a targeted double homicide, the work of someone who had carefully staged the scene. Barry had built the generic drug giant Apotex into a fortune worth billions, leaving behind a tangle of lawsuits,…
E104 · 19 Aug 2026 · 47 min

CULT: Secrets of Opus Dei

Founded in Spain in 1928, Opus Dei is a Catholic organization built on discipline, secrecy, and the belief that ordinary life can be a path to holiness. Officially recognized and championed by the Vatican, it has counted powerful politicians, judges, and business leaders among its members. But critics, including many former members, describe something far more troubling behind the devotion: rigid control over members' daily lives, pressure and isolation in recruitment, and the practice of corporal mortification, where the most committed members inflict physical pain on themselves as a form…
E103 · 17 Aug 2026 · 41 min

CONSPIRACY THEORY: The Pizza Connection

For nearly a decade, the Sicilian Mafia ran the largest heroin pipeline in the world, hiding it inside something as ordinary as the neighborhood pizza parlor. Morphine was bought in Turkey, refined into heroin in Sicily, smuggled into the United States, and sold through family-owned pizzerias across the American Northeast, while the profits were laundered through banks in New York, the Bahamas, and Switzerland. The operation moved an estimated $1.65 billion in drugs before the FBI, aided by an undercover agent who had spent years embedded inside the Bonanno crime family, coordinated arrests…
E102 · 14 Aug 2026 · 38 min

CRIME: $200,000 and a Parachute: D.B. Cooper

In November 1971, a man calling himself Dan Cooper boarded a commercial flight in Portland, Oregon, told a flight attendant he had a bomb, and demanded $200,000 and four parachutes. After releasing the passengers in Seattle, he ordered the crew back into the air, then lowered the plane's rear stairs and leapt into the freezing night somewhere over the Pacific Northwest. He was never seen again. The hijacking exposed just how little security existed in the early days of commercial aviation, when passengers boarded without screening and a man in a suit could carry a bomb onto a plane…
E101 · 12 Aug 2026 · 45 min

CULT: Lords of Darkness: The Hellfire Club

In the 18th century, England's most powerful men, politicians, aristocrats, and intellectuals, gathered behind closed doors for a secret society known as the Hellfire Club. Founded by the wealthy rake Sir Francis Dashwood, the club met in candlelit caves and a converted abbey, where members reportedly indulged in drunken feasts, mock religious ceremonies, and rituals that scandalized polite society. Rumors swirled of devil worship, orgies, and occult rites performed by men who ran the country by day and mocked God by night. But how much of the legend was real, and how much was the inevitable…
E100 · 10 Aug 2026 · 42 min

CONSPIRACY THEORY: The Princes in the Tower

In 1483, two boys, the 12-year-old King of England and his 9-year-old brother, were placed in the Tower of London by their uncle, who had sworn to protect them. In 1483, two boys, the 12-year-old King of England and his 9-year-old brother, were placed in the Tower of London by their uncle, who had sworn to protect them. Instead, he declared them illegitimate and crowned himself King Richard III. The princes were seen playing in the Tower gardens that summer, and then they vanished. Their uncle had the clearest motive, but so did his closest ally and the man who later overthrew him, leaving…
E99 · 7 Aug 2026 · 38 min

CRIME: Never Caught: Jack the Ripper

In the autumn of 1888, a killer stalked the impoverished streets of London's Whitechapel district, murdering and mutilating at least five women in a matter of weeks. The press dubbed him Jack the Ripper, a name drawn from a taunting letter supposedly sent by the killer himself, and the city descended into panic. The murders exposed the squalor and desperation of Victorian London's East End, where poverty, overcrowding, and inequality left women with few options and little protection. Despite one of the largest manhunts of the era, police never caught him. More than 130 years later, the list…
E98 · 5 Aug 2026 · 45 min

CULT: Blood and Brotherhood: The Yakuza

For more than a century, the Yakuza have operated as Japan's most powerful organized crime syndicates, hiding in plain sight with corporate offices, business cards, and fan magazines. But beneath the legitimate front is a world bound by ritual, absolute loyalty, and a rigid hierarchy that mirrors the devotion of a cult. New members are initiated through sacred sake ceremonies that bind them to a boss as a kind of father, severing ties to their own families. Those who break the code perform yubitsume, slicing off a fingertip to atone. Full-body tattoos mark a lifetime of belonging that few…

About Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes

Conspiracy Theories, Cults, and Crimes explores true stories of belief taken too far: murderous cults, criminal cover-ups, mass manipulation, and the conspiracies that still won't die. Hosted by Vanessa Richardson, three weekly episodes dig into cases like Jonestown, Heaven's Gate, CIA mind control experiments, and presidential assassinations. This is true crime at the intersection of faith, fear and manipulation.Conspiracy Theories, Cults, and Crimes is a Crime House Original, powered by PAVE Studios. Follow us on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe to @crimehousestudios on YouTube and follow us @crimehouse on Instagram.

Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes is a English history podcast from Crime House. Melo plays each episode straight from the publisher's own feed — no ads added, no account needed — and remembers where you stopped, in this browser only.

Publisher: Crime House
Language: English
Category: History
New episodes: Several times a week
Typical length: 41 min
Latest episode: 9 Oct 2026
Feed: RSS — paste into any podcast app
Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1828469754
Rights: PAVE Studios

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