High Stakes: Life inside a Vampire Cult

About this episode

Celeste Mott shares her experience of being drawn into a vampire cult through an online message board and the challenges of leaving it.

As a lonely, grieving teenager in the early days of the internet, Celeste Mott is drawn into a secretive message board called "The Looking Glass": a place where self-proclaimed vampires demand total belief, reward devotion, and punish doubt. What begins as fantasy soon becomes something much more dangerous: a closed world built on manipulation, hierarchy, and psychological control. Years later, Celeste tells the story of how she was pulled in, why it was so hard to leave, and the charismatic figure at the center of it all.

People in this episode

Guest: Celeste Mott

Topics covered

• vampire cults
• manipulation
• psychological control
• internet communities
• teenage loneliness

Keywords

• vampire cult
• manipulation
• psychological control
• internet
• teenager
• message board

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