CRIME: Danny Rolling: The Killer Who Inspired Scream

Around 53 BC, Julius Caesar wrote that the Gauls built enormous human figures out of woven branches, filled them with living people, and set them alight. That passage, written by a general describing the enemy he was conquering, became the foundation of one of the most durable images in Western imagination: the wicker man. Later readers called it the wicker man, and it has since been a horror film, a music festival, and a shorthand for pagan savagery. What it has never been is archaeologically settled. Roman writers had every reason to describe the Celts as barbarians, and the physical evidence for ritual killing in Iron Age Europe is real but stranger and more ambiguous than a giant burning effigy. In this episode of Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes, Vanessa Richardson explores what Caesar claimed, what the archaeology of Iron Age human sacrifice does and does not support, and why a two-thousand-year-old story about a Celtic ritual refuses to die. 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 1970, a nursing student in Connecticut was given a Raggedy Ann doll for her birthday. Within weeks she and her roommate believed it was moving around their apartment on its own, leaving handwritten notes, and attacking a friend. They called Ed and Lorraine Warren, the self-described demonologists who would later become the most famous paranormal investigators in America. The Warrens declared the doll haunted by a demonic presence, took it home, and sealed it in a glass case in their occult museum in Monroe, Connecticut. Fifty years later, a Hollywood franchise had made the doll a household name, the museum had been closed by zoning officials, and Annabelle was touring the country in front of paying crowds. In this episode of Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes, Vanessa Richardson explores the young women whose story started it all, the investigators who built a career on it, and the strange afterlife of a child's toy that became one of the most feared objects in the world. 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

Early on February 5th, 2007, Air Force captain Colleen Shipman was walking to her car at Orlando International Airport when a woman in a wig and a trench coat followed her, banged on her window, and sprayed a chemical through the gap. The woman was Lisa Nowak, a NASA astronaut who had flown aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery seven months earlier. Nowak had driven roughly 900 miles from Houston to confront the woman now dating her former lover, a fellow astronaut, in a case the tabloids named the astronaut love triangle. Police found a knife, a mallet, a BB gun and latex gloves in her car. She was charged with attempted murder, and became the first astronaut NASA ever fired. In this episode of Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes, Vanessa Richardson traces the two decades of work that put Lisa Nowak in orbit, the obsession that unravelled her in a matter of weeks, and what the case forced NASA to admit about the mental health of the people it sends into space. 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 the hills outside Melbourne, Australia, a yoga teacher named Anne Hamilton-Byrne convinced several hundred followers that she was Jesus Christ. Her members were not dropouts: they were doctors, lawyers, nurses, psychiatrists and social workers, and at one point they effectively controlled a private psychiatric hospital that fed her new recruits. Between 1969 and 1975, she collected 14 children who were not hers, registered every one as her own birth, and raised them behind a barbed-wire fence at a property on Lake Eildon. Their hair was bleached identical shades of blonde. They were starved, beaten, and dosed with sedatives, and at 14 they were given LSD in an initiation ritual. Police did not go through the gate until August 1987. In this episode of Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes, Vanessa Richardson traces how one woman assembled a family out of other people's babies, the professional network that made the paperwork possible, and the survivors who brought the whole thing down after every institution around them failed. Please note, this episode contains descriptions of child abuse and discussion of suicide and may not be suitable for all audiences. 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 2009, at a science fiction convention in Atlanta, a paranormal researcher named Fiona Broome discovered that strangers shared her vivid memory of Nelson Mandela dying in prison in the 1980s. Mandela walked free in 1990 and died in 2013. Broome named it the Mandela Effect, and the catalogue grew: a children's book spelled wrong, a logo with a horn that never existed, a Sinbad genie movie nobody made. Believers concluded that reality had been edited and their memories were souvenirs of a lost timeline. Then in 2022, University of Chicago researchers put the phenomenon in a lab, confirmed that huge numbers of strangers share the same specific false memories, and reported no clear explanation for why. In this episode of Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes, Vanessa examines the false memories millions of people share, the parallel-universe and CERN theories built to explain them, and the uncomfortable question underneath all of it: is it scarier to live in an edited universe or to have a mind that cannot be trusted? 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