CULT: Power in the Woods: Bohemian Grove

0:00Hi listeners, it's Vanessa. Are you the type to fall down an internet rabbit hole and not come up for hours? You'll love crimes of Reddit. A new crime house original with Sabrina, Diana, Roge, and Alexis Linklenter. Every week, one host brings real true crime stories from Reddit, while the other reacts completely blind. No prep, no spoilers, then they swab. It's the feeling of sending your group chat a Reddit 2am that starts with, you have to see this. But Sabrina and Alexis are in the chat with you. Follow Crimes of Reddit on Apple podcasts and Spotify, or subscribe at Crimes of Reddit pod on YouTube. This is Crime House. Deep in the redwoods of Northern California, a group of men in hooded robes walk through the trees. It's almost pitch black. The only light comes from the torches in their hands.

1:02Eventually, they reach the edge of a small lake and a few of the men step forward. They're carrying a long wooden box shaped like a coffin, and inside is a dummy. They call it dull care. They set the box in a black boat and another man in a hood guides it across the water to an altar on the other side. Behind the altar is a giant statue of an owl, 40 feet tall, made of concrete. The high priest lifts his arms. He calls out, the owl is in his leafy temple, let all within the grove be reverent before him. Then he lights a torch at the owl's feet and sets the box on fire. Dull care goes up in flames. Parks go off over the lake. A brass band marches out of the trees and about 1500 of the most powerful men in America stand up and cheer. This is opening night at the most exclusive club in the United States, and they've spent

2:07more than 100 years making sure the rest of the world never finds out what really goes on in these woods. From UFO cults and mass suicides to secret CIA experiments, presidential assassinations, and murderous doctors, these aren't just theories, they're real stories that blur the line between fact and fiction. I'm Vanessa Richardson, and this is conspiracy theories, cults and crimes, a crime house original powered by Pave Studios. Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, I'll explore the real people at the center of the world's most shocking events and nefarious organizations. These cases are wild, and I want to hear what you think. At the end of each episode, leave a comment wherever you listen. Be sure to rate, review, and follow so we can continue building this community together.

3:07And if you want even more, subscribe to Crime House Plus and get every episode of this show and the rest of the Crime House lineup add free and early, plus at least two bonus episodes every month. To join, go to CrimeHousePlus.com, or if you listen on Apple podcasts, tap Try Free at the top of the conspiracy theories, cults, and crimes show page. Today I'm taking you deep into the red woods of Northern California to unmask one of America's oldest and most influential secret societies, the Bohemian Grove. What started as a private club for writers and artists became an exclusive retreat for the ultra-wealthy and powerful. The members are all men, and they range from CEOs and bankers to cabinet secretaries and multiple US presidents. Once a year, they gather at a remote redwood camp for a two week retreat. Some people say it's nothing more than an adult summer camp, just a bunch of rich guys

4:07reliving their frat days. But others are convinced something much darker is going on out there, things like secret deals, occult rituals, maybe even human sacrifice. To know which version is true, you'd have to get inside those gates and see for yourself. Almost no one ever has, because as far as the members are concerned, what happens in the Grove stays in the Grove. Or does it? Call that and more coming up. The story of the Bohemian Grove doesn't begin with presidents or secret rituals or a giant owl. It begins more than 150 years ago on the American frontier. These days, we tend to see that frontier through rose-colored glasses, little house on the prairie reboots, homesteading influencers churning butter on Instagram. But they didn't call it the Wild West for nothing.

5:10Life out there could be exciting one day and brutal the next, and everybody was one bad break away from losing everything. Still, lots of gamblers and dreamers were willing to take that risk. And that became a lot easier when the Transcontinental Railroad was built in 1869. Suddenly, the West Coast was only a week away from New York. Thousands of thousands of people poured in and a lot of them landed in San Francisco. You had transplants from back east, immigrants from Europe, China, Mexico, South America, and miners and cowboys living side-by-side with bankers and merchants. And scattered through all of it were the writers and reporters. At the time, people had a word for that crowd. They called them Bohemians. They described the traveling journalists and wandering artists, the people who lived a little outside of respectable society. In the winter of 1872, a group of these journalists started meeting up at pubs in San

6:13Francisco, drinking and arguing and swapping stories. Before long, they wrote up a charter, started putting on their own little shows they called Jinx, and named themselves the Bohemian Club. At first, it was mostly working journalists with a few artists and musicians led in as honorary members. The club leaned into its artsy reputation, throwing poetry readings, concerts and staging plays. They also did a lot of drinking. The biggest names of the era drifted through. Mark Twain and another writer named Brett Hart were both made honorary members. A little later, Jack London also joined. Another early member was Henry George, a reformer who spent his whole career attacking the concentration of wealth. And yet, when the poet Oscar Wilde stopped by in 1882, he took one look around and reportedly said he'd never seen so many well-dressed, well-fed business-looking Bohemians in his life.

7:17That's because in addition to all those radical members, the club was also starting to fill up with rich ones. It made sense. Artists aren't exactly wealthy, and putting on plays and banquets and summer trips costs money. So eventually, the Bohemians started letting in a different kind of member, men with deep pockets, who could help pay for all of it. Inside the club, there was actually a name for the divide. The writers and painters and musicians were the men of talent. The rich guys, bankrolling the whole thing, were the men of use. At first, the club tried to keep some balance, inviting wealthy men who at least appreciated the arts. But money follows money, as soon as a few businessmen got in, a lot more wanted in, too. Some of the original Bohemians said this went against the whole point of the club. It didn't matter. The floodgates were already open. By the late 1880s, the club had grown to more than several hundred members, and its roster

8:19started filling up with some of the wealthiest men in San Francisco. Around the same time, the club found the thing it would become famous for, the great outdoors. In the summer of 1878, about a hundred Bohemians hauled themselves out to a creek in Marin County. They were having a going-away party for a popular actor who was leaving for New York. They called the event a high jinx. By most accounts, that first camp out was a bit of a disaster. Cold, damp, full of poison oak, and they never went back to that particular spot, but they were hooked on the idea. For the next few summers, they camped along the Russian river up near a little town called Gernville. And eventually, they started leasing a patch of land filled with redwoods downriver near an even smaller town called Montereo. Most trees were, and are, truly staggering. Some of them are more than a thousand years old and hundreds of feet tall.

9:21Standing among them, you feel very small and very quiet. The Bohemians wanted to bottle that feeling, so in 1899, they bought the grove they'd been renting. Over the following decades, they kept buying up the land around it until eventually the retreat was spread across roughly 2,700 acres of private forest. To this day, every July members head up to those 2,700 acres of redwoods for a two-week trip. The ground sit behind locked gates and miles of fence tucked so deep in the forest that you could drive right past and never know it was there. And this isn't your typical summer camp situation. Gattered through the forest are more than 100 separate camps, each with its own name and its own personality from cozy tents on wooden platforms to full redwood cabins. The names include things like caveman, owls nest, hillbillies, jungle, and wild oats.

10:24And the camps aren't all created equal. Some are rowdy and casual, others are old money exclusive. For the most coveted sits up on a hill with its own cable car to carry guests to the top. So, for all the talk about everyone being equal at the grove, where you sleep says a lot about who you are. Members do eat all together at a spot called the dining circle. And during the day, the whole point is to do nothing. There's ski-t shooting and swimming and lakeside concerts, there are lectures and plays, and there's drinking. Starting with gin fizzes brought to your bed in the morning, there's one rule everybody knows. And it's carved right into the club's home base back in San Francisco under a concrete owl by the front door. Weaving spiders come not here. It's a line from Shakespeare's Amid Summer Night's Dream, and inside the club it means one thing. Leave your business at the gate.

11:26No deals, no work. This is a place to escape all of that. The grove also has a reputation for being aggressively all male. And one of its proudest traditions is that very important men are free to pee against any red wood they like. There's even a handwritten sign near the dining area, politely begging them to spare a few of the popular trees. And then there's the entertainment. Some of the biggest events are shows that the members write and perform themselves. There's a serious stuffy production called the Grove Play, and a rowdy musical comedy called The Low Jinks. Since no women are allowed, the men play all the female parts themselves in wigs and dresses and heels. That detail alone has launched a thousand jokes. For the club's first few decades, all of this was surprisingly public. The Bohemians were proud of the place, and they wanted the world to know who was rubbing elbows in their halls.

12:27All into the early 1900s, they'd essentially send out press releases about the famous people who'd visited, actors, senators, foreign officials. Bay Area newspapers covered the club constantly, and the Bohemians aided up. Being written about was part of the appeal, and then as the 1930s came on, all of that stopped. The lists dried up. The doors closed. The club that used to court the press went quiet. As by then, the men gathering in those redwoods were just writers and local businessmen anymore. The Grove had become a private retreat for some of the most powerful people in the country, including a future president of the United States, and they had decided that whatever happened out there was nobody else's business. So what were they really doing behind those gates? And why were they so desperate to keep it secret?

13:30Four universities, four deaths, and four times the truth got buried under the institution that was supposed to protect it. I'm Vanessa Richardson, and this is Campus Crimes, a four-part bonus series on Crime House 24-7. It starts in 1905 when Stanford's own co-founder is fatally poisoned, and the school quietly recast it as natural causes. A biology professor denied tenure opens fire in a faculty meeting. A graduate student stabbed to death in a crowded library and a killer who simply vanishes. And a college basketball player murdered by his own teammate, while his coach schemes to smear the victim to save himself. Every case asks the same question, what happens when an institution has more to protect than the truth? Listen every Sunday in August on the Crime House 24-7 feed or join Crime House Plus to get all four episodes right now, add free.

14:32Join on Apple Podcasts or at CrimeHousePlus.com. By the 1930s, the Bohemian Grove had gone quiet, with started as a club for broke journalists, was now a private retreat for the most powerful men in America, and they had sealed it off from the outside world. Whenever they were guarding in there, it started with a ritual. The one from the very top of this episode, The Cremation of Care. It's the opening ceremony of the two-week camping trip, and versions of it go back to the early days of the Redwood retreat. The elaborate one people know today was mostly created by a member named Joseph Redding in the 1890s, but the giant owl shrine at the edge of the lake, the one made of concrete, went up in 1929. The idea behind the ceremony is simple. That dummy in the coffin, the one they call dull care, is meant to represent all the worry and ambition and stress the members carry in the outside world.

15:38By burning it, they're symbolically freeing themselves to relax for two weeks. But as the priests move to burn the dummy, the voice of care itself booms out of the trees, mocking them, quote, fools, when will ye learn that me ye cannot slay? The idea is that you can banish your worries for two weeks, but they'll be waiting the moment you get back to the real world, so the priests turn to the giant owl and beg it for guidance. And the owl answers, for years that booming voice belonged to a very familiar one, the news anchor Walter Cronkite, who was himself a member. So it's theatrical and a little ridiculous, but the pageantry was never really the point of the grove. The men watching it were. If you want to know how a club for broke poets turned into a gathering of presidents, one of them tells that story better than anyone, Herbert Hoover.

16:38Before he took office in 1929, Hoover was a mining engineer and a self-made millionaire. He also loved the outdoors, and he loved the grove. He founded his own camp there, the one called Caveman, and he came back year after year. He once called the retreat the greatest men's club in the world. And for Hoover, it turned out to be more than a getaway. He was up at Caveman camp when the news came through that President Calvin Coolidge had announced he would not run for re-election. At the time, Hoover was Coolidge's commerce secretary, and suddenly, he was the obvious frontrunner for the Republican nomination. In his memoirs, Hoover wrote that within an hour, a crowd of publishers, editors, and public officials, who happened to be up at the grove, came to his camp. He said they demanded that he announce his candidacy. Hoover won the White House in 1928, and even after the Depression wrecked his presidency,

17:39he kept coming back to the grove for the rest of his life, where he gave a speech at the lake almost every year. His lakeside talks became a tradition. And this is where the It's Just Summer Camp story starts to fall apart, because for a place whose entire motto is, no business here, an astonishing amount of serious business has happened in those woods. Besides the Hoover story, the most stunning example is one most people have never heard. In September of 1942, in the middle of World War II, a small group of scientists and military officers held a meeting at the Bohemian grove. On the table were some of the most important physicists in the country, including Jay Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and Arthur Compton. Some were on the executive committee of a secret program, codenamed S1. Eventually, it would become the Manhattan Project. Within weeks of that meeting, the army officially took control of the whole operation, and soon,

18:44Oppenheimer was running the secret weapons lab at Los Alamos. The bomb he helped create would go on to end a World War and kill more than 100,000 people. One of the darkest chapters in history began here in a redwood grove, far from prying eyes. The atomic bomb was an extreme case, but the pattern kept repeating, especially in politics. In 1950, a young California congressman named Richard Nixon went to the grove as a guest of Herbert Hoover, up at Caveman camp, and it was there in the redwoods that Nixon first met a general named Dwight Eisenhower. Two years later, Eisenhower was elected president, with Nixon as his vice president. Nixon became a devoted Bohemian, and in 1967, when he was plotting his own run for the White House, the club invited him to give the featured lakeside talk in honor of the late Herbert

19:44Hoover. Nixon later called that speech the first milestone on his road to the presidency. That same summer at the grove, Nixon had a quiet conversation with another rising Republican star, the new governor of California, Ronald Reagan. According to Reagan himself, the two men reached an understanding out there in the woods. Reagan agreed he wouldn't challenge Nixon for the 1968 nomination. He'd wait his turn. And the lakeside talks I mentioned, Hoover's old tradition, those weren't just cozy fireside chats. Over the years, the men who spoke at that lake included secretaries of state, defense contractors, spy chiefs, and foreign heads of government. One year, the commander of the US strategic air command stood up in front of the crowd and made a direct pitch for a new stealth bomber. He told them, quote, I am a warrior. And then asked them point blank to get him his B2.

20:47The talks are officially off the record, which is a little absurd given that a few thousand people are sitting there listening, but that's the deal. A general, a diplomat, a CEO can say things at that lake they'd never say in a press conference and know it will never leave the woods. That mix of candor, secrecy, and real power is exactly why the Grove has drawn serious scholars, not just conspiracy theorists. The most important of them was a sociologist named G. William Dombhof, who spent years studying the Grove, and wrote the book Most Researchers Still Start With, The Bohemian Grove and Other Retreats. And his conclusion had nothing to do with the occult or a secret world government. It was something more subtle and a lot more terrifying. Dombhof argued that the Grove is where the American ruling class goes to bond. It's where the head of a bank, the head of an oil company, and a former secretary of state get drunk together, sing songs, and come away trusting one another.

21:52The relationships they build there follow them out into the real world. And the numbers backed him up. In a single year, a huge share of America's biggest corporations and banks had a top officer at the camp. Researchers ran the study again years later, and almost nothing had changed. Still for decades, almost no one on the outside had ever seen the Grove for themselves. Everything the public knew about it was second hand. But that was about to change. Because one man was about to do what no outsider ever had. Walk straight through the gates, slip into a crowd of the most powerful people on Earth, and come back out with the story they'd spent generations trying to hide. Some mysteries have haunted us for centuries. Others are unfolding right now. This is how it is a modern airliner with 239 people on board disappear from the sky without

22:57a trace. This is History's greatest mysteries, a history channel original podcast brought to you by Rewind Studios. Adapted from the hit TV show, every episode dives into one of the world's greatest enigmas, The Vanishings, The Myths, The Lost Relics, and The Unexplained. With contributions from top historians, authors, scientists, and researchers, we separate fact from folklore and evidence from rumor, from unsolved crimes to buried treasure, to the deaths and disappearances of famous figures. These are the stories we think we know, but dig beneath the legend and the truth gets far stranger. Although history's greatest mysteries available now wherever you listen to podcasts. For more than a century, the men of the Bohemian Grove had kept the world out of their red woods, and for a long time hardly anyone pushed back. But a place that secret, holding that much power, was bound to draw suspicion eventually.

24:03And by 1980, a group of activists and reporters had started circling the Grove out to expose whatever was happening inside. The most determined of them was a woman named Mary Moore. Back in 1953, Moore had been crowned a county fiesta queen on California's central coast, but by 1980, her life had changed dramatically. She'd become a committed leftist activist living north of San Francisco, and she was deeply suspicious of the Grove. So Moore helped pull together a coalition of dozens of left wing groups into something called the Bohemian Grove Action Network. Their argument was simple. They thought this wasn't a harmless summer camp. It was a gathering of the ruling class, making decisions that affected everyone else with zero public oversight. The action network staged protests outside the gates every summer, and they kept track of who was showing up. In 1984, demonstrators tried to blockade the camp, and around 50 people were arrested.

25:08Still, year after year, they managed to get hold of the Grove's guest list, which they fed to reporters. But for all their effort, they could barely get anyone inside. A few reporters got in for an hour or two at a time, but they came out with vague, watered down stories, and some of their editors simply killed the pieces. The club didn't have to fight back. It just had to wait. By the mid-1980s, the country's appetite for going after the rich had cooled. The protests thinned out, and the action networks energy started to fade. The Grove had outlasted them. It stayed a mystery until 1989, that is. That summer, a young journalist named Philip Weiss decided he was going to get in and stay in. He wrote about it in the November issue of spy magazine, in a now famous article called Masters of the Universe Go To Camp.

26:09Everything Weiss had heard made the Grove sound like a fortress, barbed wire, electronic sensors, helicopters patrolling the ridge lines. But when he actually studied it with help from Mary Moore and a local guide, he found the security was mostly a myth. He wrote that the real perimeter seemed to be one guard on a back road, plus a few elderly members puddling around on the daily bus tour. So Weiss simply dressed the part. He put on a pressed shirt, khakis, a sport coat, carried a drink in his hand, and had that morning's Wall Street Journal tucked under his arm. He looked and acted like he belonged. And it worked. He came and went for seven days of the two week camp, and nobody stopped him. In some ways, what he found matched the wildest rumors. The cremation of care was real. The hooded robes were real, but it was also a whole lot goofier than anyone on the outside

27:11imagined. His most famous line says it all. Weiss wrote that you know you're really at the Grove when you come around to bend in the woods and spot a powerful man standing there with a beer in one hand, happily peeing in the bushes. Because that's really what it mostly was, an overgrown, frat party. Rich old men getting drunk and sentimental in the woods while being weighted on hand in foot by camp valleys. But Weiss also picked up on something stranger, running underneath all the back slapping and brotherhood. The Grove loves to tell itself that everyone inside is equal, that a struggling artist and a billionaire are just brother bohemians for two weeks. Except they're not. The camps are ranked some way more exclusive than others, and you need the right sponsor to get into the best ones, and only certain people were even welcomed into the club. The club was and still is all men.

28:14By the time Weiss visited, California was circling, threatening its liquor license because it barred women completely, but the Grove had no interest in changing. Keeping women out wasn't the flaw in the design. It was the design. The club wasn't shy about admitting that the whole place was built to be a refuge from women, from the modern world, from accountability of any kind. It wasn't much friendlier on other fronts either. Historically, the club admitted very few black members, and by its own old records, very few Jewish ones. And the jokes they told about women and minorities were revealing. But out of everything Weiss saw, nothing was more staggering than the guest list. He watched Henry Kissinger drawing a crowd and hogging the payphones. He sat through one of those lavish, low-jinks drag shows, which a member told him it cost around $75,000 to put on for a single night.

29:15At one point he realized one of the campers that year was Michelle Rhocaw, the sitting prime minister of France, who had slipped into the woods on a secret trip that never made the news. But it wasn't all lounging and pageantry. Despite that famous, no-business motto, Weiss heard deals being discussed on all sides. The payphones were jammed with men hauling their offices. And at the lakeside talks, powerful people asked for things the audience could actually give them. One Soviet speaker even joked that there was no glass-nosed here, meaning no openness. And he got a laugh. Weiss walked right up to Ronald Reagan by then a former president relaxing at his camp and asked him point blank about that 1967 deal with Nixon. Reagan looked at him and said, yes, yes, that's true. So which is it? A silly summer camp or a smoke-filled backroom for running the country?

30:16For Weiss and for Domhoff, the answer is that it's both at once. But for some, powerful men networking was never going to be a satisfying answer. And that's where the Grove leaves the world of documented fact and enters the world of full-blown conspiracy. In 2000, a Texas radio host named Alex Jones snuck into the Grove with a hidden camera and filmed the cremation of care for himself. Then he presented it to the world as evidence of something sinister. He and others claimed the ceremony wasn't theatrical at all. They said the giant owl represented an ancient god named Mollock. According to them, it was tied to child sacrifice and the robed elite were secretly worshipping it. The club's response was telling. A spokesperson didn't deny that Jones's footage was real. They just said his interpretation of it was wrong. They've always maintained that the owl is simply a symbol of wisdom and the ceremony

31:20is a piece of century old theater about shedding your worries. There's no evidence of any actual sacrifice, human or otherwise, but critics look at the same owl and see something dark. Once you've seen hooded figures burn a body-shaped dummy in the dark, that image is hard to shake. The owl itself is a good example of how the same object can mean two completely different things depending on who's looking. So let me lay out the main theories fairly, one by one. The first is that Bohemian Grove is exactly what the club says it is, an adult summer camp where important men go to relax, tell dirty jokes and forget about work. The second is what the scholars found, that it's a real engine of power where the American establishment builds the private trust that shapes public decisions, and the third is the darkest, that the rituals are what they look like and that something genuinely occult

32:21is happening in those woods. The documented evidence lands squarely on the first two. The third rests almost entirely on how that fire lit ceremony looks to an outsider, but the reason all three theories survive is the same reason the club fascinates us in the first place. They won't let us watch, and when powerful people insist on total secrecy, we tend to fill in the darkness with our own worst fears. So what do you think is really going on out there in the Redwoods? A harmless boys club, a place where the powerful quietly get their way, or something stranger? Head over to the comments wherever you're listening and let me know, I'd love to hear your thoughts. For me, the scariest thing about the Bohemian Grove was never the owl. It's the guest list. It's the fact that the atomic bomb got planned there, and presidents got picked there.

33:24And maybe that's why the wilder theories will never really die. It would almost be comforting if the men in the woods were doing something cartoonishly evil, worshipping a demon owl, plotting one grand conspiracy. Because then you could point at it. The truth is harder to grab onto. There's no single plot. There's just a few thousand of the most powerful people in the world, deciding they trust one another over gin fizzes and campfire songs where no one else can see. That's not a horror movie. It's something quieter, and in its own way, almost more unsettling, which oddly enough is the same lesson taught by another secret brotherhood, one that traded owls and redwoods for tweed and Latin. In Cult Watch this week, I'm highlighting the Cambridge Apostles. Founded at Cambridge University in the 1820s, the Apostles started out as a debate club.

34:24The name came from the fact that there were 12 original members, echoing the 12 Apostles of the Bible. They gathered to discuss big questions, from philosophy to religion to art. Like the early Bohemian Club, the Apostles saw themselves as the intellectual elite of the campus. With their weekly Saturday meetings, one member would read an essay on a chosen topic. Then everyone would debate the question and vote. But to spice it up, they made the whole thing, top secret, new members swore a vow of secrecy and signed their name in a leather-bound journal they simply called the book. And membership was for life. Once you graduated, you became what they called an angel, and you could come back to sit in on meetings. A lot of those same angels went on to shape British culture. People like the economist John Maynard Cain's and Leonard Wolff, the writer and publisher who married Virginia Wolff. But the Apostles are best remembered for a handful of members who took that talent for

35:26secret keeping to an extreme. Three known Apostles turned out to be Soviet spies. Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, and John Cairncross were all recruited for the Soviet cause while they were still students at Cambridge in the 1930s. After they graduated, they climbed into the highest levels of the British establishment and betrayed it from the inside. Burgess worked in British intelligence and the foreign office. Blunt served in MI5, Britain's domestic security service, and later became the art advisor to the Queen. He was even knighted before he was finally exposed and stripped of the honor decades later. But Cairncross did some of the most damaging work of all. He was stationed at Bletchley Park, the secret site where British codebreakers, including Alan Turing, were cracking Nazi communications. Cairncross worked in the section that handled decrypted German army and air force traffic and fed those secrets straight to Moscow.

36:28He also worked as a secretary to a senior official involved in overseeing Britain's early atomic research. To this day, historians wonder just how much nuclear information reached the Soviets through him. There's not much evidence that these men operated as a single unit, but their shared experience as apostles helped set them on the same path. They'd learned to trust one another completely and to keep a secret no matter what. And that training served them very well. Some of them betrayed their country for decades before anyone caught on. It's the same exact worry people still have about the Bohemian Grove that the bonds formed inside a secret brotherhood don't stay inside it. They follow these men out into the world. And sometimes, the consequences are deadly. Thanks so much for listening.

37:31I'm Vanessa Richardson and this is Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes. Come back next time. We'll hear another story about the real people at the center of the world's most notorious, Cults, Conspiracies and Criminal Acts. Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes is a crime house original powered by Pave Studios. Here at Crime House, we want to thank each and every one of you for your support. If you like what you heard today, reach out on social media at Crime House on TikTok and Instagram. Don't forget to rate, review and follow Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes wherever you get your podcasts. Your feedback truly makes a difference. And to enhance your Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes, Listening Experience, subscribe to Crime House Plus. You'll get every episode of this show and the rest of the Crime House lineup add free and early plus at least two bonus episodes every month. To join, go to CrimeHousePlus.com or if you listen on Apple podcasts, tap Try Free at the top of the Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes Showpage.

38:36Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes is hosted by me Vanessa Richardson and is a crime house original powered by Pave Studios. This episode was brought to life by the Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes team. Max Cutler, Ron Shapiro, Alex Benadon, Natalie Pritzowski, Laurie Maranelli. Sarah Camp, Alyssa Fox, Mara Delarosa, Claire Swartzlander and Michael Langsner. Thank you for listening. Hi, ghouls and goblins. I'm Vanessa Richardson. It's officially our favorite time of year at Crime House, spooky season. Every Sunday this month we're dropping a bonus episode on Crime House 24-7 where true crime becomes paranormal. A ghost hunt that ends with an innocent man dead in the street. A skeleton sealed inside a hollow tree, nameless for 80 years. A ghost testimony that puts a killer in prison and a murder defense built on demonic possession.

39:40Listen every Sunday on Crime House 24-7 or join Crime House Plus for all four right now ad free. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or at Crime House Plus dot com. High listeners, it's Vanessa. Are you the type to fall down an internet rabbit hole and not come up for hours? You'll love crimes of Reddit. A new crime house original with Sabrina Deanna Roge and Alexis Linklenter. Every week, one host brings real true crime stories from Reddit while the other reacts completely blind. No prep, no spoilers, then they swab. Just the feeling of sending your group chat a Reddit 2am that starts with You Have to See This. Except Sabrina and Alexis are in the chat with you. Follow Crimes of Reddit on Apple Podcasts and Spotify or subscribe at Crimes of Reddit pod on YouTube.