The Secret Society of Strangers Podcast

She inherited a fortune built on a rifle. The story goes that a medium told her every soul ever killed by that gun was coming for her — and the only way to stay alive was to keep building. Never let the hammers stop. Never let the house be finished. Sarah Winchester built. For thirty-six years, in a house in San Jose, California, the construction never stopped — until the day she died. 160 rooms....

Some people have one strange experience in a lifetime. Samantha Leifker has spent thirty years collecting them. This week the Strangers sit down with Samantha Leifker, author of Born Awakened: An Otherworldly True Story — a memoir that refuses to stay in any single category. It starts in a childhood home where the dead didn't stay quiet, and it spans decades of UFO contact, out-of-body travel, mis...

He called himself a prince. He created a flag, a constitution, a currency. He published a 355-page guidebook to a capital city with an opera house and a cathedral. And none of it existed. In the finale of our April Fools series, we tell the story of Gregor MacGregor — the Scottish soldier who invented an entire nation called Poyais, convinced hundreds to invest their life savings, and sent 250 set...

She called herself a Princess of Bavaria. The newspapers called her "The Empress of Swindle." In 1888, Ann O'Delia Diss Debar convinced one of New York's most powerful attorneys that she could summon oil paintings from thin air—works created by Raphael and Rembrandt from beyond the grave. She took his fortune, his mansion, and his sanity. But that was just the beginning. From the Gilded Age parlor...

She had no money. No trust fund. No Swiss bank account. What Anna Delvey had was a fake name, a designer wardrobe, and the nerve to walk into New York's most exclusive rooms and act like she owned them. For four years, she fooled banks, hotels, and Manhattan's social elite — using Microsoft Word and an AOL email address. In this episode, Josh walks us through the full story: from a working-class s...

INMATE #25367 — The True Story of Frank Abagnale Jr. You know the legend. The teenage con artist who impersonated a Pan Am pilot, a doctor, a lawyer. Who cashed $2.5 million in fraudulent checks. Who escaped from prison twice. Who became so famous that Steven Spielberg made a movie about him. There's just one problem. While Frank Abagnale claimed he was crisscrossing the globe as a teenage super-c...

The man who invented the modern world died alone in a New York hotel room. By the next morning, federal agents had seized everything. 80 trunks of research. A legendary safe deposit box. Decades of documents. All of it taken by the Office of Alien Property — despite Tesla being an American citizen for over 50 years. The man who evaluated his papers? Dr. John G. Trump — Donald Trump's uncle. His ve...

Nikola Tesla invented the modern world — but the textbooks leave out the mystic. At three years old, he stroked a cat and watched blue fire erupt from its fur. By adulthood, he could design complete machines entirely in his mind, run them for weeks, check for wear — then build them once, perfectly. "My brain is only a receiver," he said. A receiver of what? In the finale of March Madman Madness, w...

John Dee built the greatest library in England. He advised the most powerful queen in Europe. He coined the phrase "British Empire." Then Edward Kelley knocked on his door. In Part 2, the angels go quiet, the library gets looted, and a covenant signed in Třeboň changes everything. What happened in that room in 1587 — and what it cost Dee to believe. CREDITS: Hosts: Lee, Josh, Jen | Edited by: Jere...

In 2016, researchers X-rayed a famous painting of Dr. John Dee standing before Queen Elizabeth I. Underneath the surface — painted over, deliberately hidden — he was standing in a circle of human skulls. Someone decided that was too honest. John Dee built the largest private library in Elizabethan England. He coined the phrase "British Empire." He picked the date of Elizabeth's coronation — and sh...

Somewhere right now, someone is sitting in a windowless building holding two metal cans connected to a machine, telling a stranger their deepest secrets. Everything they say is being written down. And kept. They don't know that yet. In Part 1, we showed you the con artist. The college dropout who faked a war record, stole Jack Parsons' girlfriend and savings, and turned a self-help book into a mov...

A man lies in a naval hospital bed in 1945, claiming war injuries nobody can verify. He's been relieved of command — twice. One time for fighting enemy submarines that didn't exist. But by the time he tells the story himself? He's a decorated combat veteran who healed his own wounds through sheer willpower. None of it was true. And that was just the warm-up. Before Scientology, before the tax-exem...

Part 1 ended in Cairo. A man in an apartment. Three days. A voice speaking over his left shoulder. Part 2 is everything that followed — and it's stranger than anything he claimed to have conjured. A Mediterranean farmhouse. A dead Oxford graduate. A press corps that gave him a headline he wore like a crown. Benito Mussolini personally ordering him out of Italy. A British intelligence file that sug...

      His mother called him "the Beast." She meant it as an insult. He spent seventy-two years turning it into a legacy.           Born into a deeply religious Victorian household in 1875, Edward Alexander Crowley became one of the most controversial figures in modern history — a world-class mountaineer, a self-styled prophet, a poet, a chess master, and the man the British press would eventually...

In Part 1, Jack Parsons built the future. He co-founded JPL, invented solid rocket fuel, and proved that getting to space wasn't science fiction — it was chemistry. In Part 2, a con man walks through his door and takes everything. L. Ron Hubbard arrived at the Parsonage in 1945 — charming, connected, and completely full of lies. Within months he would steal Parsons' girlfriend, drain his life savi...

He helped invent the fuel that would take us to the Moon. He co-founded what became NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. And he also tried to summon a goddess in the Mojave Desert. This week on Secret Society of Strangers, we kick off March Madman Madness with the unbelievable rise of Jack Parsons — rocket pioneer, occult leader, and one of the most quietly erased figures in American space history. I...

🪓 THE AXE FILES — FILE #4 The Brom Family Massacre On February 18, 1988, in a quiet township outside Rochester, Minnesota, a 16-year-old walked into school and calmly told his friends: “I killed my family last night.” They laughed. He wasn’t joking. In the early morning hours, David Brom murdered his father Bernard “Bernie” Brom (41), his mother Paulette Brom (41), his sister Diane (13), and his...

In 1919, a killer sent a letter from "Hell" demanding an entire city play jazz — or die. New Orleans obeyed. Between 1918 and 1919, someone terrorized the Crescent City. They entered homes through impossibly small openings. They used the victims' own axes. They targeted Italian immigrant grocers almost exclusively. They never took money. And they never got caught. Six confirmed dead. Multiple surv...

On June 10, 1912, the small town of Villisca, Iowa woke up to its worst nightmare. Eight people—two entire families—were found brutally murdered in the Moore family home. Parents Josiah and Sarah Moore, their four children, and two young overnight guests were killed with an axe while they slept. But this wasn't a quick crime. The killer stayed for hours. He ate their food. He covered every mirror...

Welcome to THE AXE FILES — a month-long series tracking one of humanity's oldest tools through some of its most violent crimes. Four cases. One weapon. No romance. Lots of blood. 🪓 File #1 is open. Thirty hatchet blows. Two bodies. One spotless suspect. On August 4th, 1892, someone walked into a modest home in Fall River, Massachusetts and committed one of the most brutal double murders in Americ...

February 1978. Five men. A basketball game. A snack run. And then—a 70-mile drive in the wrong direction into a frozen mountain wilderness. It's been called "The American Dyatlov Pass." A case so baffling that nearly 50 years later, investigators still can't explain what happened. Ted Weiher. Jack Madruga. Bill Sterling. Jackie Huett. Gary Mathias. Five friends from Yuba City, California drove to...

Marie Laveau. The Voodoo Queen of New Orleans. A name whispered in French Quarter alleys for nearly 150 years. Was she a compassionate healer who nursed yellow fever victims and prayed with condemned prisoners? Or a ruthless sorceress who cursed bloodlines into extinction and commanded spirits that bent reality? In this episode, we separate documented history from accumulated legend—exploring the...

🚨 NEW CASE ALERT: We're introducing a story we'll be following as it develops—and this one's already horrific. Jonathan Gerlach, 34, of Ephrata, Pennsylvania now faces 500+ criminal charges after authorities discovered over 100 human skulls, mummified hands and feet, decomposing torsos, and EIGHT full human corpses stored in his basement and storage unit. It started with a tip on December 23rd: "...

A child signed death warrants. A teenager ordered executions. A 15-year-old died screaming while his body rotted from the inside. Edward VI became King of England at 9 years old. By 15, he was dead—leaving behind over 10,000 corpses and a religious reformation built on blood and fire. History remembers his sister Mary as "Bloody Mary." But Edward's six-year reign produced a body count that dwarfs...

In 1959, nine experienced Soviet hikers died in the Ural Mountains under circumstances so bizarre that even the official cause of death was listed as "an unknown compelling force." They cut through their tent from the inside. Fled barefoot into -25°F temperatures. Some had massive internal injuries with no external wounds. Others were missing eyes and tongues. The case was immediately classified....