The Secret Society of Strangers Podcast

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 hers. He watched heretics burn with...

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...

Was Elizabeth Báthory history's most prolific female serial killer—or the victim of a political hit job?

In 1610, a raid on Cachtice Castle uncovered bodies, dying victims, and evidence of unspeakable torture. The accusations? That Countess Elizabeth Báthory murdered up to...

Christmas Day, 1929. A family portrait becomes a death prophecy. Seven people dead. One survivor. And nearly a century of unanswered questions.

Tonight, we're unwrapping one of America's most disturbing holiday tragedies: The Lawson Family Christmas Massacre - where docume...

    He was a hero once. The man who tried to stop John Wilkes Booth. The Union Army officer who grappled with Lincoln's assassin and took a knife to the arm while America's president bled out beside him.

But what happened to Major Henry Rathbone after April 14, 1865, is a story history forgot—and it's far more disturbing than the assassination itself.

This week on Secret Society of Strangers, host Jen explores the slow, tragic unra...

**EPISODE DESCRIPTION:** The Lost Colony of Roanoke remains America's oldest unsolved mystery. In 1587, 117 English colonists—including 17 women, 11 children, and newborn Virginia Dare—arrived at Roanoke Island. Three years later, they had vanished completely. No bodies. No graves. No bones. John White, the colony's governor, left his family behind to get emergency supplies. When he returned in 1590, he found only a fortress, sca...

 

On November 16, 1957, police entered a Wisconsin farmhouse investigating a theft. What they found would traumatize seasoned investigators and change horror cinema forever.

Ed Gein's crimes weren't just murders—they were documented r...

November 1930. Canadian Arctic. 25 people. Gone.

French-Canadian fur trapper Joe LaBelle arrives at a familiar Inuit settlement at Anjikuni Lake expecting warmth, food, and shelter. Instead, he finds something impossible: an entire village abandoned mid-task. Cooking pots still over dead fires. Rifle...

Eastern State Penitentiary wasn't just America's first true penitentiary—it was a revolutionary experiment in breaking the human mind through isolation. In this deep-dive investigation, we explore how Benjamin Franklin and Dr. Benjamin Rush's vision of moral reformation through solitary confinement became one of history's most haunted locations.

From Charles Wil...

March 1997. A mansion in Rancho Santa Fe. 39 bodies in matching Nike sneakers and purple shrouds. The largest mass suicide on U.S. soil.

This is the finale of our Heaven's Gate series - the story of how Marshall Applewhite convinced 38 people that a comet was their spaceship home.

⚠️ Content Warning: Suicide, c...

⚠️ CONTENT WARNING: Suicide, cult manipulation, graphic medical content. Crisis support: 988

What happens when your co-messiah dies? Marshall Applewhite faced total theological collapse in 1985 when Bonnie Nettles died of cancer—after years of teaching they were immortal extraterrestrial beings.

This is t...

 Part 2: The Classroom | When Evolution Becomes Erasure

September 1975. Waldport, Oregon. Population: 2,000.

A poster appears on telephone poles: "UFO'S - Why they are here. Who they have come for. When they will leave."

That night, 200 curious people walked into a commu...

There's a website that's been running for 27 years. HeavensGate.com. Still maintained. Still recruiting.

March 1997: Thirty-nine people died believing they were boarding a spaceship. But this story starts twenty-five years earlier—in a Houston hospital, with two broken people who turned their shared delusion into cosmic destiny.

Read more