Audiobooks by Samuel Fort

The Mysterious Miss Empress: Hollywood's Forgotten Film Vampire

Marie Empress was an English singer, dancer, male impersonator and comedienne who performed in vaudeville and theater around the world at the turn of the twentieth century. She achieved her greatest success as an actress in early American motion pictures and was known as 'the sublime vampire woman.' She was considered one of the most beautiful women in the world, and for a short period, her star was very bright. But her life, like her sudden appearance on the world stage in 1910, and her disappearance less than a decade later, is cloaked in mystery. She had many names and many histories. None were real. Beneath every mask was yet another mask. She claimed to be born in France, England, and the United States, and on different years. She identified several imaginary family members but never a real one. She kept strange company and disappeared for months at a time from the public view. She never once provided the name of a family member as a point of contact on a ship's manifest, despite having crossed the Atlantic more than a dozen times, often with the stated objective of visiting with them. There were rumors that she was connected to the British aristocracy or perhaps the Rothschild family and that her unceasing obfuscations were an attempt to conceal her pedigree. Empress was so gifted at misdirection that the world assumed her mysterious 1919 disappearance was a publicity stunt. It was, after all, a very odd disappearance. The events leading up to it and the events after it were markedly peculiar. Long after she was last seen in public, newspapers continued to proclaim the inevitable, imminent reappearance of the missing vampire woman. They were wrong. But what really happened?

Samuel Fort (Author), Amy Putt (Narrator)

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Cult of the Great Eleven

Cult of the Great Eleven is a true account of one of the twentieth century's weirdest and most mysterious cults. Human and animal sacrifices, vanishings, the preserved corpse of a teenage cult princess, angelic encounters, a woman cooked in an oven, a mother chained to her bed for two months, resurrection experiments, refrigeration warehouses for the dead, abductions, nocturnal rituals, orgies, a breathing universe, an esoteric tome known as The Great Sixth Seal, hints of Hecate worship, and a post-apocalyptic world ruled by eleven queens from a hill in Hollywood... The United States witnessed an explosion of cult activity in the 1920s that today is almost inconceivable. California, in particular, was a haven for an estimated 200,000 cultists, with over 400 active cults in southern California alone. These ranged from "love cults" that conducted ritual orgies to "devil worshipping" cults that branded their members with hot irons and beheaded their enemies.  Among all these, the Simi Valley's "Divine Order of the Royal Arms of the Great Eleven" was considered by many to be the most extraordinary. A death cult, the Great Eleven was founded by May Otis Blackburn, Portland, Oregon's unheralded filmmaking pioneer, and Ruth Wieland, her luscious femme fatale daughter. The cult was so bizarre that accounts of its activities "elicited expressions of amazement" from justices on the California Supreme Court in 1931, who admitted, "they have never heard anything so weird."  Not until the nephew of oil magnate J.B. Dabney admitted he had been a member of the cult would the world at large learn of the existence the "divine order." Not until detectives opened a trap door in the floor of a cult couple's Venice cottage would the world be exposed to its darkest secrets.

Samuel Fort (Author), Ben Granger (Narrator)

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