On Thanksgiving Eve in 1928, three men broke into a farmhouse in Rehmeyer's Hollow, an area of York County, Pennsylvania known locally as Hex Hollow, looking for a book. Nelson Rehmeyer was a farmer and a practitioner of powwow, a Pennsylvania Dutch folk-healing tradition, and he had once cured one of the intruders as a child. John Blymire was convinced that Rehmeyer was the witch who had hexed him, and that burning Rehmeyer's copy of a folk-magic book called The Long Lost Friend would lift the curse. The three men beat Rehmeyer to death and set his body alight. The trial that followed, covered nationally as the York witch trial, put a 200-year-old belief system in front of a jury. In this episode of Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes, Vanessa Richardson traces the powwow tradition Nelson Rehmeyer practiced, the curse three men believed had ruined their lives, and the trial that asked a courtroom to take witchcraft seriously as a motive for murder.

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Founded in London in the mid-1960s by two former Scientologists, Robert de Grimston and Mary Ann MacLean, the Process Church of the Final Judgment taught that Christ and Satan were not opposites but complementary forces to be reconciled. Members wore black robes with a goat emblem, traveled with German Shepherds, and sold apocalyptic magazines with titles like Fear and Humanity is the Devil on the streets of London, New York, Chicago and New Orleans. They built a commune on the Yucatan, recruited from the counterculture, and attracted contributions from Marianne Faithfull and Funkadelic. Then their magazine ran an interview with the imprisoned Charles Manson, and the group spent the next fifty years attached to a rumor it fought in court. In this episode of Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes, Vanessa Richardson unravels the theology of a church that worshipped both Christ and Satan, the communes and celebrity admirers it collected on two continents, and how a single chapter in a 1971 book tied it to the Manson murders long after a publisher retracted the claim.

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In November 1974, Ronald DeFeo Jr. shot and killed six members of his family in their house on Ocean Avenue in Amityville, New York. Thirteen months later, George and Kathy Lutz moved in with their three children and left after 28 days, describing green slime, swarms of flies, a demonic pig and voices in the walls. The book that followed sold in the millions and launched one of the most profitable horror franchises in history. Then the story started coming apart, and the word attached to it was hoax: neighbors reported nothing, and investigators found no records supporting key events. DeFeo's own defense attorney later said he and George Lutz had invented much of it over several bottles of wine. In this episode of Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes, Vanessa Richardson revisits the murders that came first, the 28 days the Lutzes always insisted were real, and the question the case has never fully shaken: how much of the most famous haunting in America was ever true? Please note, this episode contains descriptions of extreme violence and may not be suitable for all audiences.

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