Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes

In 1802, a journalist reported that President Thomas Jefferson was keeping an enslaved woman named Sally Hemings as a concubine and had fathered her children. Jefferson said nothing. His family denied it. America's most prominent historians dismissed the story for nearly two hundred years.But Hemings' own descendants told a different story, one passed down through generations of oral history that the white historical establishment refused to take seriously. Did the man who wrote the Declaration of Independence have a secret family with a woman he enslaved? And if he did, why did it take the country so long to admit it? In this episode of Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes, Vanessa Richardson revisits one of the most contested questions in American history, and the family that refused to let it go.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…, Serial Killers & Murderous Minds, Crime House 24/7, Murder True Crime Stories and more wherever you get your podcasts!Follow me on SocialInstagram: @CrimehouseTikTok: @CrimehouseFacebook: @crimehousestudiosX: @crimehousemediaYouTube: @crimehousestudios

In the spring of 1846, a group of nearly ninety American pioneers set out from Springfield, Illinois, bound for California. They were farmers, merchants, and families with young children, led by a 60-year-old man named George Donner. They expected to reach the West Coast by autumn.They never made it. After taking an unproven shortcut called the Hastings Cutoff, the party fell weeks behind schedule and was trapped by an early snowstorm high in the Sierra Nevada. By the time the first rescuers reached them in February 1847, nearly half were dead, and stories of what the survivors had done to stay alive would haunt American history for the next century and a half. In this episode of Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes, Vanessa Richardson revisits the Donner Party, the choices made in the snow, and the fights over what really happened that still haven't been settled.Head over to our Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes YouTube channel to WATCH our video episodes: https://www.youtube.com/@ConspiracytheoriescultscrimesIf 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…, Serial Killers & Murderous Minds, Crime House 24/7, Murder True Crime Stories and more wherever you get your podcasts!Follow me on SocialInstagram: @CrimehouseTikTok: @CrimehouseFacebook: @crimehousestudiosX: @crimehousemediaYouTube: @crimehousestudios

In 1848, a preacher named John Humphrey Noyes founded a religious community in upstate New York built around an idea most Americans found unthinkable. At Oneida, traditional marriage was abolished in favor of what Noyes called "complex marriage," a system in which exclusive pairings were forbidden and sexual relationships were governed by the community's leadership. Children were raised collectively. Reproduction was controlled through a program of selective breeding Noyes called stirpiculture. For more than thirty years, the Oneida Community grew, prospered, and held itself out as proof that human beings could live without sin. Then it collapsed. In this episode of Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes, Vanessa Richardson explores how one of the most ambitious utopian experiments in American history became one of the strangest, the doctrine of perfection that justified it, and what was really happening inside the community walls.Head over to our Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes YouTube channel to WATCH our video episodes: https://www.youtube.com/@ConspiracytheoriescultscrimesIf 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…, Serial Killers & Murderous Minds, Crime House 24/7, Murder True Crime Stories and more wherever you get your podcasts!Follow me on SocialInstagram: @CrimehouseTikTok: @CrimehouseFacebook: @crimehousestudiosX: @crimehousemediaYouTube: @crimehousestudios

In Peru's scorching Nazca Valley, ancient inhabitants carved enormous animal figures into the desert floor over a thousand years ago, figures so large they can only be understood from the air. In this episode of Conspiracy Theories, Cults, and Crimes, Vanessa traces the decades-long quest to decode these mysterious formations, from the mathematician who dedicated her life to the desert to the bestselling author who claimed they were built for alien spacecraft.Head over to our Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes YouTube channel to WATCH our video episodes: https://www.youtube.com/@ConspiracytheoriescultscrimesJoin Crime House+ to binge a special limited series on Murder: True Crime Stories for America’s 250th: The Crimes That Built America. These are the cases that created the FBI, gave us Miranda rights, sparked criminal profiling, and gave us America’s Most Wanted. Join at crimehouseplus.com or if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, tap “Try Free” at the top of this show’s page. You’ll also get episodes of Conspiracy Theories, Cults, and Crimes ad-free and released one day early.🎧 Need More to Binge? Listen to other Crime House Originals Clues, Crimes Of…, Serial Killers & Murderous Minds, Crime House 24/7, Murder True Crime Stories and more wherever you get your podcasts!Follow me on SocialInstagram: @CrimehouseTikTok: @CrimehouseFacebook: @crimehousestudiosX: @crimehousemediaYouTube: @crimehousestudios

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, indigenous communities across Melanesia developed powerful religious movements in response to the sudden arrival of European colonizers and wartime military forces bearing vast material wealth. Believing this "cargo" was spiritually theirs but deliberately withheld, followers built symbolic airstrips, mimicked military rituals, and wove new beliefs into ancient traditions. In this episode of Conspiracy Theories, Cults, and Crimes, Vanessa explores how these movements were far more than misunderstandings. They were sophisticated acts of cultural resistance in the face of colonial upheaval.Head over to our Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes YouTube channel to WATCH our video episodes: https://www.youtube.com/@ConspiracytheoriescultscrimesJoin Crime House+ to binge a special limited series on Murder: True Crime Stories for America’s 250th: The Crimes That Built America. These are the cases that created the FBI, gave us Miranda rights, sparked criminal profiling, and gave us America’s Most Wanted. Join at crimehouseplus.com or if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, tap “Try Free” at the top of this show’s page. You’ll also get episodes of Conspiracy Theories, Cults, and Crimes ad-free and released one day early.🎧 Need More to Binge? Listen to other Crime House Originals Clues, Crimes Of…, Serial Killers & Murderous Minds, Crime House 24/7, Murder True Crime Stories and more wherever you get your podcasts!Follow me on SocialInstagram: @CrimehouseTikTok: @CrimehouseFacebook: @crimehousestudiosX: @crimehousemediaYouTube: @crimehousestudio

By her early 30s, Griselda Blanco had transformed herself from a poverty-stricken Colombian girl into one of the wealthiest and most feared drug lords in history, architecting a cocaine empire that flooded Miami with violence and money. Her business acumen was matched only by her willingness to order killings, including those of rivals, associates, and even husbands. In this episode of Conspiracy Theories, Cults, and Crimes, Vanessa traces how one woman climbed to the top of a brutal industry and left a trail of bodies in her wake.Head over to our Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes YouTube channel to WATCH our video episodes: https://www.youtube.com/@ConspiracytheoriescultscrimesJoin Crime House+ to binge a special limited series on Murder: True Crime Stories for America’s 250th: The Crimes That Built America. These are the cases that created the FBI, gave us Miranda rights, sparked criminal profiling, and gave us America’s Most Wanted. Join at crimehouseplus.com or if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, tap “Try Free” at the top of this show’s page. You’ll also get episodes of Conspiracy Theories, Cults, and Crimes ad-free and released one day early.🎧 Need More to Binge?Listen to other Crime House Originals Clues, Crimes Of…, Serial Killers & Murderous Minds, Crime House 24/7, Murder True Crime Stories and more wherever you get your podcasts!Follow me on SocialInstagram: @CrimehouseTikTok: @CrimehouseFacebook: @crimehousestudiosX: @crimehousemediaYouTube: @crimehousestudios

In the mid-1800s, a British naturalist named Philip Sclater proposed the existence of a vast sunken continent called Lemuria to explain a gap in the fossil record. What began as a genuine scientific hypothesis was seized upon by occultists, racists, and spiritual movements, mutating over 150 years into a living religion practiced at the foot of a California volcano. In this episode of Conspiracy Theories, Cults, and Crimes, Vanessa Richardson traces how one man's theory about lemur fossils became the foundation for a conspiracy touching Atlantis, Theosophy, Nazism, and the New Age.Head over to our Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes YouTube channel to WATCH our video episodes: https://www.youtube.com/@ConspiracytheoriescultscrimesJoin Crime House+ to binge a special limited series on Murder: True Crime Stories for America’s 250th: The Crimes That Built America. These are the cases that created the FBI, gave us Miranda rights, sparked criminal profiling, and gave us America’s Most Wanted. Join at crimehouseplus.com or if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, tap “Try Free” at the top of this show’s page. You’ll also get episodes of Conspiracy Theories, Cults, and Crimes ad-free and released one day early.🎧 Need More to Binge? Listen to other Crime House Originals Clues, Crimes Of…, Serial Killers & Murderous Minds, Crime House 24/7, Murder True Crime Stories and more wherever you get your podcasts!Follow me on SocialInstagram: @CrimehouseTikTok: @CrimehouseFacebook: @crimehousestudiosX: @crimehousemediaYouTube: @crimehousestudios