The Secret Society of Strangers

In 2016, researchers X-rayed a famous painting of Dr. John Dee standing before Queen Elizabeth I. Underneath the surface — painted over, deliberately hidden — he was standing in a circle of human skulls.

Someone decided that was too honest.

John Dee built the largest private library in Elizabethan England. He coined the phrase "British Empire." He picked the date of Elizabeth's coronation — and she reigned for forty-four years after it. He may have served as her spy, embedded in the same intelligence network that cracked the Babington Plot and sent Mary Queen of Scots to the block.

By any measure, he was the most important intellectual in England.

And none of it was enough.

Part 1: From Cambridge to the Queen's court — a mind that mastered mathematics, navigation, and espionage, but couldn't stop chasing the one question no library could answer.

Part 2 drops Friday: A convicted forger with no ears knocks on his door. In under forty-five minutes, everything changes.

ss building holding two metal cans connected to a machine, telling a stranger their deepest secrets. Everything they say is being written down. And kept. They don't know that yet.

In Part 1, we showed you the con artist. The college dropout who faked a war record, stole Jack Parsons' girlfriend and savings, and turned a self-help book into a movement. In Part 2, the con becomes a church — and the church becomes something far worse.

When governments revoke his tax exemptions and ban him from their borders, Hubbard does the only logical thing: he buys a fleet of ships and declares himself Commodore. What follows is a floating authoritarian state crewed by devotees working hundred-hour weeks for ten dollars, pre-teen girls appointed as his personal messengers, and punishments that included being thrown overboard in open water. While his followers ate rice and beans, Hubbard was pulling fifteen thousand dollars a week through shell corporations and stashing cash in Swiss bank accounts.

Then there's OT III — the secret scripture members spend years and tens of thousands of dollars to access. Written by the same man who spent two decades cranking out pulp sci-fi for a penny a word.

Operation Snow White. The Rehabilitation Project Force. The IRS capitulation. And a final act that ends with a paranoid old man hiding in a motorhome in California under a fake name, surrounded by llamas, asking someone to build him a lethal E-meter.

He died alone. The machine kept running.

🕯️ Come Curious. Stay Strange.

This is Part 4 of March Madman Madness — five two-part deep dives into history's most dangerous minds.

CREDITS: Hosts: Lee, Josh, Jen | Edited by: Jeremy/Lee

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           The Secret Society Of Strangers Podcast is a Strange Static Media production 

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Somewhere right now, someone is sitting in a windowless building holding two metal cans connected to a machine, telling a stranger their deepest secrets. Everything they say is being written down. And kept. They don't know that yet.

In Part 1, we showed you the con artist. The college dropout who faked a war record, stole Jack Parsons' girlfriend and savings, and turned a self-help book into a movement. In Part 2, the con becomes a church — and the church becomes something far worse.

When governments revoke his tax exemptions and ban him from their borders, Hubbard does the only logical thing: he buys a fleet of ships and declares himself Commodore. What follows is a floating authoritarian state crewed by devotees working hundred-hour weeks for ten dollars, pre-teen girls appointed as his personal messengers, and punishments that included being thrown overboard in open water. While his followers ate rice and beans, Hubbard was pulling fifteen thousand dollars a week through shell corporations and stashing cash in Swiss bank accounts.

Then there's OT III — the secret scripture members spend years and tens of thousands of dollars to access. Written by the same man who spent two decades cranking out pulp sci-fi for a penny a word.

Operation Snow White. The Rehabilitation Project Force. The IRS capitulation. And a final act that ends with a paranoid old man hiding in a motorhome in California under a fake name, surrounded by llamas, asking someone to build him a lethal E-meter.

He died alone. The machine kept running.

🕯️ Come Curious. Stay Strange.

This is Part 4 of March Madman Madness — five two-part deep dives into history's most dangerous minds.

CREDITS: Hosts: Lee, Josh, Jen | Edited by: Jeremy/Lee

📩 [email protected] 🔗 linktr.ee/SSOSPOD

🎧 Listen & Subscribe: Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube: @SSOSPodcast | Podbean

☕ Support the Show: Buy Me a Coffee

📱 Follow Us: Instagram: @secretsocietyofstrangerspod | TikTok: @ssospodcast

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A man lies in a naval hospital bed in 1945, claiming war injuries nobody can verify. He's been relieved of command — twice. One time for fighting enemy submarines that didn't exist. But by the time he tells the story himself? He's a decorated combat veteran who healed his own wounds through sheer willpower.

None of it was true. And that was just the warm-up.

Before Scientology, before the tax-exempt empire and the celebrity recruits — L. Ron Hubbard was a college dropout, a pulp fiction writer cranking out stories for a penny a word, and a man with an extraordinary talent for reading what people wanted to hear. In Part 1, we trace Hubbard from a restless childhood spent as the perpetual new kid, through a wildly embellished military career, into the occult rituals of Jack Parsons' Pasadena mansion, and straight to the publication of Dianetics — the book that turned a broke science fiction writer into the leader of a movement.

Along the way: a bigamous marriage, a kidnapped baby, and the moment a con artist realized that if you package a self-help system as a religion, the money never has to stop.

Part 2 drops Friday.

🕯️ Come Curious. Stay Strange.

Secret Society of Strangers is part of the March Madman Madness series — five two-part deep dives into history's most dangerous minds. Catch up on Jack Parsons, Aleister Crowley, and more in your feed now.

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Part 1 ended in Cairo. A man in an apartment. Three days. A voice speaking over his left shoulder.

Part 2 is everything that followed — and it's stranger than anything he claimed to have conjured.

A Mediterranean farmhouse. A dead Oxford graduate. A press corps that gave him a headline he wore like a crown. Benito Mussolini personally ordering him out of Italy. A British intelligence file that suggests the "wickedest man in the world" may have been working for the Crown the whole time.

And then there's the triangle that changes everything: a rocket scientist who helped build what became NASA, a young writer who would go on to found Scientology, and Aleister Crowley — spiritual father to both of them.

All of that is documented. All of it is real.

Josh closes out the Crowley investigation this week, and Lee comes to some personal realizations he's not entirely comfortable with.

The man died broke, addicted, and alone in Room 13 of a boarding house in Hastings. His funeral was so chaotic the British government had to write new regulations.

That tracks.

🕯️ Come Curious. Stay Strange.

Content note: This episode discusses drug use, ritualistic death, and occult practices. Listener discretion advised.

Part of the March Madman Madness series — dropping every Tuesday and Friday in March.

SOURCES: Crowley, Aleister. The Confessions of Aleister Crowley (1929/1969) Sutin, Lawrence. Do What Thou Wilt: A Life of Aleister Crowley (2000) Kaczynski, Richard. Perdurabo: The Life of Aleister Crowley (2010) Symonds, John. The Great Beast (1951) Spence, Richard B. Secret Agent 666 (2008) Carter, John. Sex and Rockets: The Occult World of Jack Parsons (1999) Churton, Tobias. Aleister Crowley: The Beast in Berlin (2014) Jacot-Guillarmod, Jules. Expedition diary, Kangchenjunga (1905)

CREDITS: Hosts: Lee, Josh, Jen Edited by: Jeremy/Lee

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#AleisterCrowley #GreatBeast666 #MarchMadmanMadness #Occult #Thelema #JackParsons #LRonHubbard #BritishIntelligence #OTO #AbbeyOfThelema #TrueCrime #DarkHistory #HistoricalMystery #MadScientist #CultLeader #TrueCrimePodcast #SSOS #SecretSocietyOfStrangers

Come Curious. Stay Strange.

      His mother called him "the Beast." She meant it as an insult. He spent seventy-two years turning it into a legacy.

          Born into a deeply religious Victorian household in 1875, Edward Alexander Crowley became one of the most controversial figures in modern history — a world-class mountaineer, a self-styled prophet, a poet, a chess master, and the man the British press would eventually brand "the Wickedest Man in the World."

But before all of that — before the rituals, the scandals, and the scripture — there was a boy who climbed cliffs that no one had dared attempt, rose faster through the ranks of the most powerful occult society in England than anyone before him, got blocked at the door, and burned the whole thing down.

And then went to Cairo.

In Part 1, Josh takes us from a cursed childhood through Cambridge, up the faces of K2 and Kangchenjunga, into the inner chambers of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn — and into a Cairo apartment in 1904, where a man sat alone for three days and claimed to receive the scripture of a new age of humanity.

Was he a genuine mystic? History's greatest con artist? Something stranger than either?

Part 2 is where it gets fully unhinged. This is where it starts.

🕯️ Come Curious. Stay Strange.

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SOURCES

In Part 1, Jack Parsons built the future. He co-founded JPL, invented solid rocket fuel, and proved that getting to space wasn't science fiction — it was chemistry.

In Part 2, a con man walks through his door and takes everything.

L. Ron Hubbard arrived at the Parsonage in 1945 — charming, connected, and completely full of lies. Within months he would steal Parsons' girlfriend, drain his life savings, and disappear on a boat Parsons bought. Parsons would spend the rest of his short life fighting to get it back.

Then the government got involved. His security clearance was revoked. His name was erased from the institutions he built. And on June 17, 1952 — one day before he was set to leave the country for good — an explosion tore through his home lab.

The official ruling: accident. The evidence: not exactly clean.

Lee, Josh, and Jen break down the Babalon Working, the Hubbard con, the five competing theories about how Jack Parsons died — and why the man who made the Space Race possible was written out of history.

🕯️ Come Curious. Stay Strange.

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Primary Sources:

- George Pendle, Strange Angel (Harcourt, 2005)

- John Carter, Sex and Rockets: The Occult World of Jack Parsons (Feral House, 1999)

- Russell Miller, Bare-Faced Messiah: The True Story of L. Ron Hubbard (1987)

- Fraser MacDonald, Escape from Earth: A Secret History of the Space Rocket

- FBI Declassified Files on Jack Parsons

- JPL Archives / GALCIT Records

- Jack Parsons, Liber 49 (The Book of Babalon); The Book of Antichrist

- Jack Parsons, Freedom Is a Two-Edged Sword, ed. Marjorie Cameron and Hymenaeus Beta

Secondary Sources:

- Pasadena Now, "A Look Back at Jack Parsons on the 70th Anniversary of His Explosive Death" (2022)

- Pasadena Now, "Exploring the Occult World of Jack Parsons"

- JSTOR Daily, "Sex-Cult Rocket Man" (December 2025)

- Peter Grey, "Who Killed Jack Parsons?" (Substack, June 2024)

- Space Safety Magazine, "Jack Parsons and the Occult Roots of JPL"

- Supercluster, "The Occult History Behind NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory"

- The California Tech, "Jack Parsons: The Paradoxical Figure" (March 2025)

- Strange Remains, "The Occultist Rocketeer of the Real-Life Suicide Squad" (2016)

- Pasadena Independent, Parsons obituary, June 19, 1952

- Los Angeles Times, June 1952 coverage

He helped invent the fuel that would take us to the Moon.

This week on Secret Society of Strangers, we kick off March Madman Madness with the unbelievable rise of Jack Parsons — rocket pioneer, occult leader, and one of the most quietly erased figures in American space history.

In Part 1, we trace Parsons from Pasadena’s Millionaire’s Row to the corrugated iron sheds of Devil’s Gate, where a group of young misfits known as “The Suicide Squad” cracked the code of solid rocket fuel. His asphalt-based formula — GALCIT-53 — became the backbone of American missile systems and every Space Shuttle launch that followed.

At the same time, Parsons was running an occult lodge devoted to the teachings of Aleister Crowley, reciting hymns to Pan before rocket tests, and turning his mansion — “The Parsonage” — into a commune of scientists, writers, artists, and ritual magicians.

Then a red-haired science fiction writer named L. Ron Hubbard walked through the door.

What follows is a story of genius, belief, betrayal, and the beginning of something far bigger than any of them understood.

Was Jack Parsons a visionary who refused to separate science from mysticism?

Huge thank you to listener Satchel for the recommendation — you were absolutely right. This one is pure SSOS.

Part 2 drops Friday.

Come Curious. Stay Strange. 🕯️

Lee

Produced by Jeremy

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Primary Sources:

- George Pendle, Strange Angel (Harcourt, 2005)

- John Carter, Sex and Rockets: The Occult World of Jack Parsons (Feral House, 1999)

- Russell Miller, Bare-Faced Messiah: The True Story of L. Ron Hubbard (1987)

- Fraser MacDonald, Escape from Earth: A Secret History of the Space Rocket

- FBI Declassified Files on Jack Parsons

- JPL Archives / GALCIT Records

- Jack Parsons, Liber 49 (The Book of Babalon); The Book of Antichrist

- Jack Parsons, Freedom Is a Two-Edged Sword, ed. Marjorie Cameron and Hymenaeus Beta

Secondary Sources:

- Pasadena Now, "A Look Back at Jack Parsons on the 70th Anniversary of His Explosive Death" (2022)

- Pasadena Now, "Exploring the Occult World of Jack Parsons"

- JSTOR Daily, "Sex-Cult Rocket Man" (December 2025)

- Peter Grey, "Who Killed Jack Parsons?" (Substack, June 2024)

- Space Safety Magazine, "Jack Parsons and the Occult Roots of JPL"

- Supercluster, "The Occult History Behind NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory"

- The California Tech, "Jack Parsons: The Paradoxical Figure" (March 2025)

- Strange Remains, "The Occultist Rocketeer of the Real-Life Suicide Squad" (2016)

- Pasadena Independent, Parsons obituary, June 19, 1952

- Los Angeles Times, June 1952 coverage

On February 18, 1988, in a quiet township outside Rochester, Minnesota, a 16-year-old walked into school and calmly told his friends:

“I killed my family last night.”

They laughed.

He wasn’t joking.

In the early morning hours, David Brom murdered his father Bernard “Bernie” Brom (41), his mother Paulette Brom (41), his sister Diane (13), and his little brother Ricky (9) with a timber axe inside their home in Cascade Township.

Fifty-seven blows.

Then he went to sleep.

Then he went to school.

But this isn’t just a story about a teenage killer.

It’s about ignored warning signs.

And it’s about what happened next.

After serving 37 years in prison, David Brom was granted release following changes to juvenile sentencing laws in Minnesota. In 2025 and again in 2026, parole decisions put him back into the community under supervision.

So we’re asking the question:

When does a teenager cross the line from rebellion to annihilation?

And after nearly four decades behind bars — does justice end, or does it evolve?

The Brom family dynamic and the Catholic pressure cooker of 1980s Minnesota

The warning signs friends heard for months

The detailed premeditation in David’s notebook

The confessions at school that finally triggered a welfare check

The legal battle over the insanity defense under the M’Naghten Rule

The 2012 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that reshaped juvenile life sentences

The 2025–2026 parole decisions and community response

🕯️ Come Curious. Stay Strange.

Lee

Produced by Jeremy

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State v. Brom, Minnesota Supreme Court (1990)

Chicago Tribune – “Boy Held in Ax Deaths of 4 Family Members” (February 1988)

Post Bulletin (Rochester, MN) – Trial coverage (1989)

Post Bulletin – “Brom Murders: 5 Years Later” (1993)

Duluth News Tribune – “33 Years Later, This Teenager’s Crime Still Shocks Rochester” (2022)

Star Tribune – “Ax Murderer David Brom Set to Be Released from Prison” (July 2025)

Star Tribune – “David Brom Released from Prison” (July 29, 2025)

KTTC News – “Inside Look at Investigation Case File” (July 31, 2025)

KROC News – “David Brom Approved for Work Release” (2025)

KAALTV – “35 Years Since Brom Family Murders” (2023)

FOX 9 Minnesota – Coverage of 2025 Work Release

Wikipedia – “David Brom” (cross-referenced with court records and reporting)

In 1919, a killer sent a letter from "Hell" demanding an entire city play jazz — or die. New Orleans obeyed.

Between 1918 and 1919, someone terrorized the Crescent City. They entered homes through impossibly small openings. They used the victims' own axes. They targeted Italian immigrant grocers almost exclusively. They never took money. And they never got caught.

Six confirmed dead. Multiple survivors with stories that don't add up. A seven-month disappearance that perfectly overlaps with the Spanish Flu pandemic. And one of the most infamous letters in American criminal history — a message claiming to be from a "fell demon from hottest hell" who promised to spare anyone playing jazz on St. Joseph's Day.

The entire city stayed up past midnight making music. No one died that night.

Was the Axeman a Mafia enforcer? A lone predator exploiting pandemic chaos? A skilled burglar who understood exactly how to weaponize fear? Or something the early 20th century simply wasn't equipped to explain?

Josh takes the lead on this one as the Strangers dig into court documents, witness testimony, forensic evidence, and over a century of theories — separating documented fact from folklore one swing at a time.

🕯️ Come Curious. Stay Strange.

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THE AXE FILES continues next week with FILE #4.

🪓🕯️

🪓 Come Curious. Stay Strange.

SOURCES & FURTHER READING: (Full source list available at secretsocietyofstrangers.com)

🎧 New episodes weekly 👉 Subscribe & join the Society 💬 Got a case we should investigate? Drop it in the comments.

#TrueCrime #UnsolvedMysteries #AxemanOfNewOrleans #SecretSocietyOfStrangers #SSOS #HistoricalTrueCrime #NewOrleans #JazzHistory #ColdCase

On June 10, 1912, the small town of Villisca, Iowa woke up to its worst nightmare. Eight people—two entire families—were found brutally murdered in the Moore family home. Parents Josiah and Sarah Moore, their four children, and two young overnight guests were killed with an axe while they slept.

But this wasn't a quick crime. The killer stayed for hours. He ate their food. He covered every mirror in the house. He took the time to ensure no one survived. Then he locked the doors, took the house keys, and vanished into the Midwest night.

The investigation was doomed from the start when over 100 townspeople trampled through the crime scene before police could preserve evidence. Three suspects emerged: a powerful Iowa Senator with a vendetta, a disturbed traveling preacher who confessed then recanted, and a suspected serial killer riding the rails across the Midwest.

No one was ever convicted. The killer was never identified. And the house at 508 East Second Street? It still stands—and according to paranormal investigators and visitors alike, something remains inside.

Join Lee, Josh, and Jen as they examine the crime scene, dissect the suspects, and explore why this 112-year-old unsolved murder still haunts the American Midwest.

Episode Content Warning: Graphic violence, crime scene descriptions, child victims

Part of The Axe Files series exploring history's most brutal unsolved axe murders.

🕯️ Come Curious. Stay Strange.

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THE AXE FILES continues next week with FILE #3.

🪓🕯️