Disturbing History is a dark history podcast uncovering the strange, sinister, and little-known stories the past tried to bury. Each week, we explore unsolved mysteries, secret societies, forgotten crimes, eerie folklore, lost civilizations, historical conspiracies, and disturbing events that never made it into your high school textbook.Hosted by author, investigator, and storyteller Brian King-Sharp, Disturbing History dives deep into:Unsolved historical mysteriesSecret societies and hidden power structuresDark folklore and urban legendsLost colonies and vanished civilizationsTrue crime cases buried by timeHistorical conspiracies and cover-upsParanormal events rooted in real historyThrough immersive storytelling and investigative research, we uncover the shadowy corners of...
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Nov 13, 2026 · 1:00:47
In the coalfields of West Virginia, the mining companies didn't just control the jobs. They controlled the houses, stores, schools, and sometimes even the law. When miners…
Nov 11, 2026 · 1:02:11
In 1794, hundreds of armed farmers marched on the Pennsylvania home of a federal tax collector, setting off a violent confrontation that would become known as the Whiskey…
Nov 8, 2026 · 1:02:37
On one of the most isolated islands on Earth, an ancient Polynesian civilization carved nearly 1,000 enormous stone statues and somehow transported them across miles of rugged…
Nov 6, 2026 · 1:04:07
What if everything we've been told about dinosaurs was a lie? Were these prehistoric giants real, or is the entire dinosaur industry built on fabricated fossils, museum replicas,…
Nov 4, 2026 · 1:06:52
In 1958, scientist Charles David Keeling began measuring carbon dioxide levels high atop Hawaii's Mauna Loa volcano. The atmosphere contained approximately 316 parts per million…
Nov 1, 2026 · 1:04:13
Five mass extinctions. Billions of years of evolution. Entire species wiped from existence. And one disturbing question: Are we living through the next one? In 1796, a young…
Oct 30, 2026 · 1:03:27
For more than four decades, one of America's most terrifying serial killers hid in plain sight. He was a burglar, a serial rapist, a murderer—and for six years, a sworn police…
Oct 28, 2026 · 1:04:01
You'd never confess to a crime you didn't commit, right? Out of the first 375 people in the United States cleared by DNA evidence after a conviction, 102 of them had. In this…
Oct 25, 2026 · 48:37
The Hills Have Eyes: The Terrifying Legend Behind the Horror MovieIn episode three of our Spooky Season series exploring the true stories behind Hollywood’s most terrifying…
Oct 23, 2026 · 1:01:22
What do Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, and Amy Winehouse have in common? They all died at 27, becoming part of one of music history's most…
Oct 21, 2026 · 1:04:09
In 2013, Time branded millennials “The Me Me Me Generation.” The accusations were familiar: lazy, entitled, and obsessed with themselves. Yet teenage drinking, smoking,…
Oct 18, 2026 · 1:14:11
What if our universe contains entire dimensions of space that we cannot see, touch, or detect? What if those hidden dimensions exist all around us, occupying the very rooms we…
Oct 16, 2026 · 1:03:26
The 2000s began with America preparing for a disaster that never happened: Y2K. But while the country worried about computer failures, a far more dangerous threat was already…
Oct 11, 2026 · 1:03:20
What if the terrifying premise behind A Nightmare on Elm Street wasn't entirely fiction? What if people really were going to sleep, experiencing horrifying nightmares, and dying…
Oct 9, 2026 · 1:01:41
On the night of August 21, 1986, a small crater lake in the highlands of northwest Cameroon released something close to a quarter of a cubic mile of carbon dioxide in a matter of…
Oct 7, 2026 · 1:02:32
On August 20, 1949, the Washington Post put a story on its front page under the headline "Priest Frees Mt. Rainier Boy Reported Held in Devil's Grip." It said a 14-year-old from…
Oct 4, 2026 · 1:09:54
In September 2024 a documentary filmmaker named Ky Dickens released the first episode of a podcast called The Telepathy Tapes. By the first week of January 2025 it had passed Joe…
Oct 2, 2026 · 1:04:31
This episode asks a simple question: if someone really discovered a cure for cancer, would the medical industry suppress it? Brian begins with a clear disclaimer that he is not a…
Sep 30, 2026 · 1:12:28
On July 16, 1990, Time magazine put a group of young adults on its cover beneath the word “twentysomething” and asked whether they were laid back, late blooming, or simply lost.…
Sep 27, 2026 · 1:18:58
Listener discretion is advised. This episode contains descriptions of real-life violence and death, including the shooting deaths of a fourteen-year-old boy, his mother, and a…
Sep 25, 2026 · 1:09:46
The 1980s began with 52 Americans still being held hostage in Tehran and ended with crowds tearing open the Berlin Wall. Between those two moments came one of the most turbulent,…
Sep 23, 2026 · 1:01:20
On the night of May 18, 1910, people across the world waited for Halley’s Comet to kill them.Hotels in New York opened their rooftops. Miners in Pennsylvania refused to go…
Sep 21, 2026 · 1:19:04
This episode discusses sexual violence against children and teenagers, torture, and murder and is not suitable for younger audiences. Listener discretion is strongly advised. On…
Sep 18, 2026 · 1:02:13
The 1970s opened in conflict.On April 30, 1970, President Richard Nixon announced the expansion of U.S. military operations into Cambodia. Days later, four students were killed…
Sep 16, 2026 · 1:00:22
On March 27, 1964, The New York Times published a story that would become one of the most famous examples of human indifference ever told. According to the report, 38 people in…
Sep 13, 2026 · 1:02:03
Everybody knows the line: “Don’t trust anyone over thirty.” It became shorthand for an entire generation, even though the man who said it was a 24-year-old Berkeley graduate…
Sep 9, 2026 · 51:10
A warning before you press play: this episode contains descriptions of extreme violence and what was done to several victims, including after death. In early January 2008, police…
Sep 6, 2026 · 56:38
Everybody carries a version of the 1950s around in their head, and the strange thing is that a surprising amount of it is true. For millions of American families, one paycheck…
Sep 4, 2026 · 1:19:53
On the evening of January 17, 1961, with just three days left in his presidency, Dwight D. Eisenhower delivered a 16-minute farewell address containing one warning that would…
Sep 2, 2026 · 1:02:10
Everyone knows the voice, the perm, and the happy little trees. Far fewer people know what happened to Bob Ross’s name after the cameras stopped rolling. In this episode, we…
Aug 30, 2026 · 1:33:01
On March 28, 1979, at 4:00 a.m., a relief valve at Three Mile Island opened as designed—and then failed to close. For more than two hours, operators believed it had shut because…
Aug 28, 2026 · 1:05:34
On July 12, 1562, in the Yucatán town of Maní, Franciscan friar Diego de Landa ordered Maya books, sacred objects, and religious images gathered in front of the church and…
Aug 26, 2026 · 1:01:32
On the night of January 27, 1986, a Morton Thiokol engineer named Allan McDonald refused to sign a document saying it was safe to launch the space shuttle Challenger the next…
Aug 23, 2026 · 1:00:04
On December 15, 1967, ten days before Christmas, the Silver Bridge at Point Pleasant, West Virginia collapsed into the Ohio River during rush hour, killing 46 people. Federal…
Aug 21, 2026 · 54:09
78 minutes after the front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building came off, an Oklahoma Highway Patrol trooper named Charles Hanger pulled over a yellow Mercury on Interstate…
Aug 19, 2026 · 1:07:03
In September 1950, a United States Navy vessel spent eight days off the San Francisco coastline spraying clouds of live bacteria into the wind, and nobody on shore was told. The…
Aug 16, 2026 · 1:23:03
You clicked “I Agree.” You never clicked anything for the camera on the pole outside your kid’s school. On May 9, 2025, a deputy with the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office in Texas…
Aug 14, 2026 · 1:08:20
On the morning of March 16, 1968, an American helicopter pilot named Hugh Thompson dropped a smoke grenade to mark a wounded Vietnamese woman so a medic could reach her. He flew…
Aug 12, 2026 · 1:04:49
In June of 1780, on a hill outside what's now Lincolnton, North Carolina, more than a thousand men killed each other in fog so thick you couldn't see fifty feet. There was no…
Aug 9, 2026 · 1:14:38
Around 1200 BC, a king named Ammurapi dictated a letter from the port city of Ugarit describing seven enemy ships, burned towns, and an army that was somewhere else. That tablet…
Aug 7, 2026 · 57:18
Part one left the old man under an obelisk in Cleveland, ninety-seven years old, the richest human being who had ever lived, and remembered by most of America as a kindly figure…
Aug 5, 2026 · 1:10:09
In February of 1908, a reporter for Joseph Pulitzer's New York World walked into a drugstore in Freeport, Illinois, put a photograph on the counter, and finally closed a manhunt…
Aug 2, 2026 · 1:02:29
A man in Zhengzhou spent eight years living in a $42-a-month rental and sending every spare yuan home to his wife so she'd feel secure. When he finally asked to see the bank…
Jul 31, 2026 · 1:17:32
At two minutes past seven on the evening of December 21, 1988, an air traffic controller at Prestwick watched a single radar return break apart into a spray of echoes over the…
Jul 29, 2026 · 1:21:00
The wealth divide in America did not settle the way sediment settles. It was built, revised, briefly reversed, and then rebuilt with better engineering, and nearly every stage of…
Jul 26, 2026 · 1:07:50
For more than two thousand years, powerful institutions have understood something that gets rediscovered in every generation: an absorbed public is a manageable public. In this…
Jul 24, 2026 · 1:06:41
In June of 1816, snow fell on Vermont and killing frost swept through New England in the middle of what should have been the growing season. Frost returned in July and again in…
Jul 22, 2026 · 1:13:32
How many calls from unknown numbers did you get today? The one about your car's extended warranty, the text about a package that couldn't be delivered, the voice on the line…
Jul 19, 2026 · 1:11:57
On the night of February twentieth, 1954, President Dwight Eisenhower finished dinner at a private ranch in Palm Springs and vanished from public view. A wire service reportedly…
Jul 17, 2026 · 1:23:43
He was elected President of the United States 4 times, and a whole generation of Americans grew up unable to remember anyone else in the office. In this episode of Disturbing…
Jul 15, 2026 · 1:15:03
Taxes don't sound like Disturbing History territory, until you learn the trail of blood and power behind them. This episode traces the entire violent history of taxation in…
Jul 12, 2026 · 1:01:07
There's a building in Washington where, for the better part of a century, ordinary Americans mailed in the impossible. Flesh that fell from a clear sky onto a Kentucky farmwife…
Jul 10, 2026 · 1:01:28
Some nights the well runs dry, and I do what everybody does — I sink into the couch and let Netflix babysit me for a while. That's how I ended up watching The Worst Ex Ever, and…
Jul 8, 2026 · 1:07:48
He was the mouthpiece of God to ten thousand followers. To the FBI, he was a face on the Ten Most Wanted list. And to a Nevada state trooper working a dark stretch of Interstate…
Jul 5, 2026 · 1:01:28
In the winter of nineteen fourteen, a five-year-old girl named May Pierstorff stood on a train platform in Grangeville, Idaho, with fifty-three cents in postage stamps pinned to…
Jul 3, 2026 · 59:17
Before the Food and Drug Administration, before warning labels, before anyone had to prove a medicine was safe or even admit what was inside it, America ran on the bottle. This…
Jul 1, 2026 · 1:04:32
The word propaganda began as something holy. In sixteen twenty-two a committee of cardinals in Rome coined it to mean the spreading of the faith, and in this episode I follow…
Jun 28, 2026 · 55:34
On the night of June 9, 1912, in the small railroad town of Villisca, Iowa, someone walked into the home of Josiah and Sarah Moore and killed all eight people sleeping inside.…
Jun 26, 2026 · 1:04:14
In the high desert of Nevada, about twenty miles south of the town of Lovelock, a dry limestone cave holds one of the richest archaeological records in the American West — and…
Jun 24, 2026 · 1:03:38
What happens when the most powerful man in the world asks his own government a direct question and still can't get a straight answer? When Bill Clinton took office in 1993, he…
Jun 19, 2026 · 1:02:49
Walt Disney built the most trusted brand in the world, and he built it on top of a story the company has spent eighty years hoping you would never hear. Behind the castle, the…
Jun 17, 2026 · 59:58
The murder of John F. Kennedy in Dallas on November twenty-second, nineteen sixty-three remains the most contested crime in American history, and at the center of the contest…
Jun 14, 2026 · 1:17:56
Ulysses S. Grant left the White House without a fortune, never took a bribe, and never sold an office, yet his administration produced more documented corruption than any…
Jun 12, 2026 · 1:12:12
On New Year's Day 1927, New York City's medical examiner stood in front of reporters and accused the United States government of poisoning its own citizens. He could prove it,…
Jun 10, 2026 · 1:00:33
On January 6, 1949, two starving Japanese machine gunners walked out of the caves on Iwo Jima and surrendered to American airmen who had no idea they were there. The war had been…
Jun 7, 2026 · 1:00:10
For weeks this show has lived in the corridors of power, among presidents and spies and the men who shaped the country from behind closed doors. This time we leave all of that…
Jun 5, 2026 · 1:14:36
In this episode of the Disturbing History presidential series, we cross out of settled history and into living memory to examine the presidency of George W. Bush through the…
Jun 3, 2026 · 1:10:23
The nation wept for Warren G. Harding in August 1923. The funeral train crawled home through crowds that stretched for miles, mourners singing hymns by the tracks, certain they…
May 31, 2026 · 59:57
This week we step away from the corridors of presidential power and head into the North Georgia mountains, to a hand-built stone castle on Taylor's Ridge and one of the most…
May 29, 2026 · 1:05:17
Everyone knows George Washington was the first President of the United States. Technically true. But it's also a sleight of hand, because fourteen men held the title of President…
May 27, 2026 · 1:06:52
Dwight Eisenhower is the president most Americans remember as the calm grandfather of the nineteen fifties. The general who beat Hitler. The man who built the interstate…
May 24, 2026 · 1:01:14
The story of the Foo Fighters of World War Two is one of the strangest, best-documented, and least-resolved cases in the history of military aviation. In the late autumn of…
May 22, 2026 · 1:04:52
Most people think they know Watergate. They don't. They know the headline. The break-in, the tapes, the resignation, the wave from the helicopter on the South Lawn. They know the…
May 20, 2026 · 1:04:15
In the late afternoon of November twenty-first, 1986, Marine Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North and his secretary Fawn Hall stood inside an office a short walk from the Oval Office…
May 17, 2026 · 1:04:49
On the day after Christmas, 1862, 38 Dakota men were hanged from a single scaffold in Mankato, Minnesota. It remains the largest mass execution in American history. The man who…
May 15, 2026 · 1:04:55
Andrew Jackson sold himself as the champion of the common man. His face has been on the twenty dollar bill since 1928. There are statues of him in city squares from Tennessee to…
May 13, 2026 · 1:02:20
This episode contains discussion of child abuse, physical and sexual violence against minors, and descriptions of deaths in state custody. Listener discretion is advised. For…
May 10, 2026 · 1:24:03
The Wild West most of us inherited is a marketing campaign. The cowboy in the lighter hat, the noble sheriff, the high-noon duel in a dusty street — those came out of dime…
May 8, 2026 · 1:11:34
For most of the nineteenth century, American medicine had a problem nobody wanted to talk about. The medical schools needed bodies. There was no legal way to get them. So a quiet…
May 6, 2026 · 1:03:26
A man bought a piece of land in southern West Virginia in nineteen twenty-six and built an amusement park on it. He didn't know what was already there. He didn't know what was…
May 4, 2026 · 1:15:31
What if Stranger Things wasn't science fiction? What if the show that became one of the biggest cultural phenomena of the last decade started as a real story, set in a real…
Apr 29, 2026 · 1:08:34
For most of human history, diamonds were genuinely rare. Then in 1867, on a sheep farm near the Orange River in South Africa, a fifteen-year-old boy picked up a shiny pebble that…
Apr 26, 2026 · 1:03:35
A thousand years before Christopher Columbus saw a light on a Bahamian beach, a small band of Norse settlers stood on the northern tip of Newfoundland, swinging iron axes against…
Apr 25, 2026 · 1:07:13
Most of us learned a version of the Gold Rush that was cheerful, portable, and mostly wrong. In this episode we set that version aside and go looking for what actually happened —…
Apr 22, 2026 · 1:19:36
In September 1857, a wagon train of roughly one hundred and forty men, women, and children from Arkansas made camp in a remote valley in southwestern Utah Territory. They were…
Apr 19, 2026 · 1:18:28
In this episode of Disturbing History, we step away from the dark corridors of government experiments and serial killers to explore one of the strangest and most enduring…
Apr 17, 2026 · 1:22:49
This episode traces the full history of eugenics in America from its origins in Francis Galton's Victorian-era theories through the establishment of Charles Davenport's Eugenics…
Apr 10, 2026 · 1:14:29
The Battle of Blair Mountain stands as the largest armed insurrection on American soil since the Civil War, yet for nearly a century it was virtually absent from the nation's…
Apr 8, 2026 · 1:18:52
For more than two decades, incarcerated men inside Philadelphia's Holmesburg Prison were used as human test subjects in experiments that sound like something out of a dystopian…
Apr 5, 2026 · 1:24:02
The SR-71 Blackbird remains the fastest air-breathing manned aircraft ever built. It cruised above Mach three, operated at altitudes above eighty-five thousand feet, and for more…
Apr 3, 2026 · 1:18:02
Tonight on Disturbing History, we're going to Berlin. On the morning of August 13th, 1961, the residents of one of the world's great cities woke up to find their home cut in…
Apr 1, 2026 · 1:12:16
In this episode of Disturbing History, we take a deep and unflinching look at the Hatfield-McCoy feud, the most infamous family conflict in American history. Spanning nearly…
Mar 29, 2026 · 1:18:53
The Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925 is one of the most misunderstood events in American history. Most people know the version they learned in school or saw in Inherit the Wind — a…
Mar 26, 2026 · 1:19:50
In the summer of 1932, roughly twenty thousand World War One veterans and their families descended on Washington, D.C., to demand early payment of bonus certificates they'd been…
Mar 23, 2026 · 1:20:22
Decades before Roswell, decades before the term UFO even existed, something was already flying over America that nobody could explain. On the evening of November 17, 1896,…
Mar 20, 2026 · 1:24:30
On August 12, 1819, the whaleship Essex departed Nantucket Island with a crew of twenty men bound for the Pacific Ocean on what was expected to be a routine two-and-a-half-year…
Mar 18, 2026 · 1:19:03
On November 13, 1974, Ronald "Butch" DeFeo Junior took a .35 caliber Marlin rifle and murdered his entire family as they slept in their beds at 112 Ocean Avenue in Amityville,…
Mar 15, 2026 · 1:17:15
In the early nineteen thirties, an aging inventor living alone in a New York City hotel room told the world he'd built a weapon capable of destroying ten thousand enemy aircraft…
Mar 13, 2026 · 1:21:39
In this episode of Disturbing History, we investigate Die Glocke, the Nazi Bell, an alleged top-secret SS weapons program that may have been experimenting with anti-gravity…
Mar 11, 2026 · 1:20:32
In this episode of Disturbing History, we dive into one of the most shocking declassified documents in American history. Operation Northwoods was a nineteen sixty-two proposal…
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