America’s Strangest History

Close encounters with aliens have been reported for decades but today I want to talk to about one from 1897. That was the year that a UFO - or UAP as they’re now known - crashed on a farm in Texas. Locals reportedly recovered the mangled body of its alien pilot and later buried it in a local cemetery. Alien ships? Alien bodies? I’m John Genua, host of America’s Strangest History. And this is the s...

Every year around 12 million people go missing around the world. Over 75% of these missing people are found or return voluntarily within 24 hours. 85% of cases are resolved within a week. And close to 99% are resolved within a year. And then there’s the bottom 1%, that’s where we find Brandon Swanson. What makes this 19 year old’s disappearance case so perplexing is that we have all the informatio...

A chilling howl in the dead of night. A massive, shadowy figure lurking on a snowy road. In the winter of 1991, something terrifying stalked Elkhorn, Wisconsin—but was it a wild animal or a nightmare come to life? In this episode of America’s Strangest History, John Genua and Jimmy dive into the legend of the Beast of Bray Road. With journalist Linda S. Godfrey—the first to report on these eerie e...

What kind of teacher convinces seven teenagers to burn and cut themselves to release demons? In one of the strangest cases out of Florida, literacy teacher Danielle Harkins led a horrifying exorcism ritual that left her students scarred—both physically and mentally. But why did they remain loyal to her? And what secrets were they hiding? Join us as we uncover the disturbing truth behind The Demon-...

What kind of teacher convinces seven teenagers to burn and cut themselves to release demons? In one of the strangest cases out of Florida, literacy teacher Danielle Harkins led a horrifying exorcism ritual that left her students scarred—both physically and mentally. But why did they remain loyal to her? And what secrets were they hiding? Join us as we uncover the disturbing truth behind The Demon-...

Think you know serial killers? Think again. While names like Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, and John Wayne Gacy haunt our nightmares, there’s one dark chapter in history that’s even more disturbing. Meet the Bloody Benders—America’s first serial killer family, whose chilling crimes on the windswept prairies of Kansas shocked the nation in the 1870s. What lay hidden beneath a trapdoor in their murder h...

It was September 2014. The summer was enjoying its last few waning weeks of the year before submitting to Fall. And a Utah teenager returned home to find the unimaginable; his parents and three siblings were dead. There was no suicide note but instead a to-do list was found in a notebook. “Feed the pets” it said. And: “find someone to watch after the house.” It took a year for some of the secrets...

It was July 1929 and the city of Detroit was waking up to the shocking news that an entire family had been gruesomely and violently murdered. But was it the work of...a demon? Benny Evangelist had been found slumped forward on his roll top desk, his hands neatly folded in his lap, but his head - well, that lay face-up a few feet away on the floor. Benny’s pregnant wife Santina was upstairs in bed,...