Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes

Long before the name Jack the Ripper struck fear into Victorian England, a respectable-looking widow named Mary Ann Cotton was quietly killing her way through the north of the country. By the time investigators caught up with her in 1872, she had outlived four husbands, a lover, and eleven of her own children, nearly all of them poisoned with arsenic and many insured for cash. Hiding in plain sight behind the mask of a grieving mother and wife, she is now considered Britain's first known serial killer, and one of its most overlooked. In this episode of Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes, Vanessa Richardson uncovers the chilling story of Mary Ann Cotton, the string of deaths that followed her from town to town, and how a woman managed to murder on such a staggering scale for so long before anyone noticed.
Head over to our YouTube channel to WATCH our video episodes: https://www.youtube.com/@crimehousestudios
If you’re new here, don’t forget to follow Conspiracy Theories, Cults, and Crimes to never miss a case! To hear episodes ad-free and released a day early, subscribe to Crime House+. Join at crimehouseplus.com or if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, tap “Try Free” at the top of this show’s page. Conspiracy Theories, Cults, and Crimes is a Crime House Original Podcast, powered by PAVE Studios.
🎧 Need More to Binge?
Listen to other Crime House Originals Clues, Crimes Of Reddit, Serial Killers & Murderous Minds, Crime House 24/7, Murder True Crime Stories and more wherever you get your podcasts!
Follow me on Social
Instagram: @Crimehouse
TikTok: @Crimehouse
Facebook: @crimehousestudios
X: @crimehousemedia
YouTube: @crimehousestudios

In 1954, a housewife in Oak Park, Illinois named Dorothy Martin began taking down messages from beings she called the Guardians, and told the small circle around her that a flood would destroy the middle of North America before dawn on December 21st. Flying saucers would collect the believers first. The group, who called themselves the Seekers, gave away possessions and quit jobs, and on the night of the 20th pulled every scrap of metal off their clothes and sat down to wait. Three social psychologists led by Leon Festinger were sitting in the room under false names. Their 1956 book about that night, When Prophecy Fails, gave the world the phrase cognitive dissonance and is still assigned in classrooms. In this episode of Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes, Vanessa Richardson examines the prophecy Dorothy Martin took down from the Guardians, the researchers who joined under false names, and the private archive that undid a study taught in classrooms for 70 years.
Head over to our YouTube channel to WATCH our video episodes: https://www.youtube.com/@crimehousestudios
If you’re new here, don’t forget to follow Conspiracy Theories, Cults, and Crimes to never miss a case! To hear episodes ad-free and released a day early, subscribe to Crime House+. Join at crimehouseplus.com or if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, tap “Try Free” at the top of this show’s page. Conspiracy Theories, Cults, and Crimes is a Crime House Original Podcast, powered by PAVE Studios.
🎧 Need More to Binge?
Listen to other Crime House Originals Clues, Crimes Of Reddit, Serial Killers & Murderous Minds, Crime House 24/7, Murder True Crime Stories and more wherever you get your podcasts!
Follow me on Social
Instagram: @Crimehouse
TikTok: @Crimehouse
Facebook: @crimehousestudios
X: @crimehousemedia
YouTube: @crimehousestudios

In 2021, an anonymous forum post floated a theory that sounded absurd: the internet effectively died around 2016, and most of what we now see online, the posts, comments, arguments, and trends, is generated by bots and AI designed to manipulate what we think, buy, and believe. People laughed, until the evidence started piling up. Bots surpassed human traffic online for the first time in 2024, more than a third of new websites are now AI-generated, and state actors run thousands of fake accounts to shape public opinion. With every passing month, the idea that the internet is fake looks less like a conspiracy theory and more like a description of reality. In this episode of Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes, Vanessa examines the Dead Internet Theory, the mounting signs that much of the online world is no longer human, and the unsettling question of what happens to a society that can no longer tell the difference.
Head over to our YouTube channel to WATCH our video episodes: https://www.youtube.com/@crimehousestudios
If you’re new here, don’t forget to follow Conspiracy Theories, Cults, and Crimes to never miss a case! To hear episodes ad-free and released a day early, subscribe to Crime House+. Join at crimehouseplus.com or if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, tap “Try Free” at the top of this show’s page. Conspiracy Theories, Cults, and Crimes is a Crime House Original Podcast, powered by PAVE Studios.
🎧 Need More to Binge?
Listen to other Crime House Originals Clues, Crimes Of Reddit, Serial Killers & Murderous Minds, Crime House 24/7, Murder True Crime Stories and more wherever you get your podcasts!
Follow me on Social
Instagram: @Crimehouse
TikTok: @Crimehouse
Facebook: @crimehousestudios
X: @crimehousemedia
YouTube: @crimehousestudios

Fun fact: Did you know Jaws almost never existed because the shark kept sinking while filming? That is Connor Tomlinson just getting started. If that sounds fascinating, you are going to love Rewind Studios’ new podcast out now called WHAT THE FACT hosted by Connor Tomlinson and Carter Roy. It’s produced by the same team that brings you Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes.
Connor and co-host Carter Roy pull three unbelievable true facts every week and tell you the full story behind each one. Nothing is off limits. Myths and monsters. Forgotten scandals. Accidental discoveries. Untold stories behind the songs everyone knows. Disasters that sound made up but absolutely happened. Carter sets the scene and Connor makes you fall in love with history.
The wildest stuff is real, and the real stuff is wilder than you think. New episodes every Wednesday.
What the Fact with Connor Tomlinson and Carter Roy is a Rewind Original, powered by PAVE Studios.
Listen and Follow: https://pod.link/6811124906

In 1925, a con man calling himself Count Victor Lustig read that the Eiffel Tower was costly to maintain. He took a suite at one of the best hotels in Paris and invited five scrap dealers to a confidential meeting. On stationery bearing a government seal, he introduced himself as a ministry official, said the state had secretly decided to demolish it, and offered them its 7,000 tons of iron. One dealer paid, and was too humiliated to report it. So Lustig came back and ran it again. He went on to sell a fake money-printing machine to a Texas sheriff, take $5,000 off Al Capone, and print so much counterfeit cash that the Secret Service named it for him. In this episode of Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes, Vanessa Richardson traces the ten rules Victor Lustig wrote down for deceiving people, the confidence trick that sold a national monument twice, and the jealous phone call that finally put the smoothest con man in America inside Alcatraz.
Head over to our YouTube channel to WATCH our video episodes: https://www.youtube.com/@crimehousestudios
If you’re new here, don’t forget to follow Conspiracy Theories, Cults, and Crimes to never miss a case! To hear episodes ad-free and released a day early, subscribe to Crime House+. Join at crimehouseplus.com or if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, tap “Try Free” at the top of this show’s page. Conspiracy Theories, Cults, and Crimes is a Crime House Original Podcast, powered by PAVE Studios.
🎧 Need More to Binge?
Listen to other Crime House Originals Clues, Crimes Of Reddit, Serial Killers & Murderous Minds, Crime House 24/7, Murder True Crime Stories and more wherever you get your podcasts!
Follow me on Social
Instagram: @Crimehouse
TikTok: @Crimehouse
Facebook: @crimehousestudios
X: @crimehousemedia
YouTube: @crimehousestudios