The Secret Society of Strangers
Secret Society of Strangers digs into history's darkest and strangest cases: unsolved murders, disappearances, cults, con artists, high strangeness. Ever gone down a 3am rabbit hole about a murder that shouldn't have been possible? Questioned a disappearance that violates logic? Wondered how one con artist fooled an entire city? You found your people. Lee, Josh, and Jen investigate the cases that refuse to resolve cleanly: - Unsolved murders where every suspect has an alibi that works - Disappearances that don't obey logic - Cults, con artists, and the people who believed them - Historical crimes where the official story doesn't add up - Cryptids, hauntings, and documented high strangeness New episodes every other week. A Strange Static Media production. Also from SSM: Side Quest — shorter, stranger, and assigned by C4554NDR4. Merch: ssos-shop.fourthwall.com (code SSOSPOD) Got a high strangeness story? ssospodcast@gmail.com Stay Curious. Stay Strange.
Episodes
A couple days late. Thanks for your patience, Strangers.
A girl asks a peddler for a handful of pins. He says no. She curses him as he walks away, and a few steps later he collapses, half his body dead. That is how the Pendle witch trials of 1612 begin, and by August, 10 people are hanged at Lancaster.
In Pendle Forest, Lancashire, two nea...
Before there was Mother God, there was just Amy. A McDonald's manager from Houston who found a website that told her she was divine — and spent the next 13 years becoming a 19-billion-year-old creator of the universe with 534 past lives, a spiritual advisory board that included Robin Williams and Steve Irwin, and a Cabal of enemies trying to assassinate her. Her followers called her Mother. Her ...
In November 1996, a 16-year-old from Murray, Kentucky who called himself Vesago — a 500-year-old vampire — drove 800 miles to Eustis, Florida with 3 followers. Hours later, Richard Wendorf and Naoma Ruth Queen were dead in their home, and 5 teenagers were headed for New Orleans in the family's Explorer. We follow the Vampire Clan from the Vampire Hotel to a Baton Rouge Howard Johnson: the ...
The Vampire Clan case remains a chilling example of how teenage isolation can warp into dangerous obsession. We break down the reality behind Rod Ferrell and his followers.
This episode examines the trajectory of a group that started with small-town boredom and ended in a double homicide. By looking at the specific dynamics of their interactions, we separate the sensationalized mythos from the documented facts. It is a necessary ...
A man vanishes from a moving bus in December 1949 — his bags still overhead, the other passengers none the wiser until his seat turns up empty. He was never found.
That's where Part Two begins. Lee, Josh, and Jen return to Glastenbury Mountain for the cases that built the legend of the Bennington Triangle: James Tedford, gone from that bus; eigh...
In the dense woods of Glastenbury Mountain, Vermont, people don't just get lost — they vanish. No bodies. No answers. Just a mountain that's been taking people for as long as anyone can remember.
Some places you can only reach on purpose. The Bennington Triangle isn't one of them — you can see it from a college campus, a gas station, a kitchen window.
In Part One, Lee leads Josh and Jen up the Green Mountain to trac...
Some places you can only reach on purpose. The Bennington Triangle isn't one of them — you can see it from a college campus, a gas station, a kitchen window. And it's been taking people for a very long time. In Part One, Lee leads Josh and Jen up Glastenbury Mountain: the Abenaki who knew it was inhabited, the settlers who couldn't hold it, the town that dissolved off the map, and the ...
She co-founded the order that gave Dracula his name. She was accused of drinking blood, running an alchemy lab, and cutting a deal with the devil. Six hundred years later, Croatian kids still play a schoolyard game named after her.
Her name was Barbara of Cilli — Holy Roman Empress, Queen of Hungary, Bohemia, and Germany, and one of the most powerful women of the 1...
In 1941, a quiet Denver neighborhood became convinced one house was haunted. Lights switched on in empty rooms. Footsteps echoed behind locked doors. A widow fled her own home; her housekeeper quit, certain the place was cursed. They were all closer to the truth than the police — because something WAS in that house. Not a ghost. A man. This week, Lee leads Josh and Jen through the case of Theodo...
In the summer of 1980, an eleven-year-old boy in Brookfield, Connecticut saw something in an empty bedroom — a withered figure with black eyes and cloven hooves. Over the next seven months, what started as a child's nightmare consumed an entire family, brought Ed and Lorraine Warren to their door, and ended with a nineteen-year-old stabbing his landlord to death outside a dog kennel.
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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 ...
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 ref...
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 settlers to die in an empty jung...
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 parlors of Madison Avenue to the co...
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...
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-criminal — the records s...
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 verdict: nothing of value...
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 &m...
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 ...
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.
S...
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