Disturbing History
byDisturbing History-True Stories
HistorySocietyCultureTrue Crime
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...
Episodes(40 episodes)
The Dozier School for Boys
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 more than a century, the state of Florida ran a place in the panhandle town of Marianna that called itself a school. It opened on January 1, 1900 and didn't close until June 30, 2011. In those one hundred and eleven years, it operated under four different names. The Florida State Reform School. The Florida Industrial School for Boys. The Florida School for Boys. And finally, the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys. S...
Published: May 13, 2026Duration: 1h 2m 20s
The Real "Wild West"
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 novels, traveling shows, and ghostwritten biographies, often produced while the events themselves were still unfolding. The actual frontier was something else. It was a continent-sized arena of fraud, racial terror, corruption, hired killing, and government-protected theft, and the men we now call legends had a direct hand in selling us a version of it that left almost all of that out.In this episode we walk out into th...
Published: May 10, 2026Duration: 1h 24m 3s
The Resurrection Men in America
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 trade grew up in the shadows of every major American city, and for nearly a hundred years, the foundation of American medical education was built on graves that had been emptied in the dark. This episode walks through the full arc of the Resurrection Men in America. We start in 1788, with the Doctors' Riot in New York City, where a careless medical student waving a severed a...
Published: May 8, 2026Duration: 1h 11m 34s
The Forgotten Horror of the Lake Shawnee
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 going to come. This episode tells the layered story of Lake Shawnee. It starts in the year 1282, with a wave of sickness that swept through a Fort Ancient village and killed too many of its children. It moves forward to 1775, when a colonial settler named Mitchell Clay brought his wife and fourteen children to a stretch of bottomland by the Bluestone River, where they became t...
Published: May 6, 2026Duration: 1h 3m 26s
The Real Stranger Things?
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 place, about a real abandoned military base on the eastern tip of Long Island. In this episode, we walk the full length of one of the strangest legends in modern American folklore.The Montauk Project. A claimed black operation hidden beneath a decommissioned Air Force radar station, involving mind control, time travel, psychic experimentation, kidnapped children, and a creature that supposedly tore through reality on August 12t...
Published: May 4, 2026Duration: 1h 15m 31s
Diamonds Are Forever
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 turned out to be a 21-carat diamond. Within a few years, the world's diamond supply had multiplied beyond anything the markets had ever seen. By every law of supply and demand, the price should have collapsed.It didn't. And the reason it didn't is one of the most successful, sustained, and openly documented market manipulations in modern history.In this episode, Brian traces the full arc, from...
Published: Apr 29, 2026Duration: 1h 8m 34s
Who Found America First: Columbus or the Vikings?
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 fir and juniper trees, building sod houses that would still be visible in the grass nearly a thousand years later. We can name the year. We can name it down to a single twelve-month window.The year was ten twenty-one, and we know it because of a solar storm that struck the sun in the year nine hundred and ninety-three, leaving an invisible fingerprint in every tree growing...
Published: Apr 26, 2026Duration: 1h 3m 35s
The American Gold Rush
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 — the history that didn't make it onto the plaques.On 1/24/1848, James Marshall found gold at Sutter's Mill on the American River.California was still technically Mexican territory at the time; the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which formally transferred the region to the United States, wasn't signed until 2/2/1848 — nine days later. What followed was one of the most consequential and destructive episodes in American history, compressed into less...
Published: Apr 25, 2026Duration: 1h 7m 13s
The 1857 Mountain Meadows Massacre
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 headed to California. They never made it. Over the course of five days, members of the local Mormon militia and recruited Paiute warriors besieged the Fancher-Baker party at Mountain Meadows, and on September 11, under a white flag of truce, lured the emigrants into surrendering their weapons with a promise of safe escort.What followed was one of the worst mass killings in American frontier history. The men were shot...
Published: Apr 22, 2026Duration: 1h 19m 36s
The Aurora Texas Alien Crash
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 mysteries in American history.On April 17, 1897, a cigar-shaped airship allegedly crashed into a windmill in the tiny town of Aurora, Texas, killing its pilot, who locals claimed was not of this world. The creature was buried with Christian rites in the Aurora Cemetery, and the wreckage was dumped into a nearby well.The story, written by local cotton buyer S. E. Haydon and published in the Dallas Morning...
Published: Apr 19, 2026Duration: 1h 18m 28s
Eugenics in America
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 Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor and the rise of Harry Laughlin's model sterilization laws.We cover the fraudulent family studies of the Jukes and the Kallikaks, the dangerously elastic diagnosis of feeble-mindedness, and the passage of compulsory sterilization laws beginning with Indiana in 1907.The narrative follows Carrie Buck's story through the landmark 1927 Supreme Court decision in Buck v. Bell, where Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes declared that "three generations of imbeciles...
Published: Apr 17, 2026Duration: 1h 22m 49s
The Battle of Blair Mountain
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 textbooks and public memory.In the late summer of nineteen twenty-one, roughly ten thousand coal miners in southern West Virginia, many of them World War One veterans, picked up rifles, tied red bandanas around their necks, and marched through the Appalachian mountains to fight for the right to join a union. They were met at Blair Mountain by roughly three thousand deputies, mine guards, and armed c...
Published: Apr 10, 2026Duration: 1h 14m 29s
The Horror of Holmesburg Prison
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 novel. Beginning in 1951, University of Pennsylvania dermatologist Dr. Albert Kligman turned the prison into one of the largest non-therapeutic human research operations in American history, exposing inmates to infectious diseases, radioactive isotopes, mind-altering drugs for the CIA and U.S. Army, dioxin at 468 times the authorized dosage for Dow Chemical, and injections of asbestos funded by Johnson and Johnson.The overwhelming majority of the men subjected to these experiments were Black...
Published: Apr 8, 2026Duration: 1h 18m 52s
The SR-71 Blackbird: The Cold War at Mach Three
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 than two decades it flew reconnaissance missions over hostile territory that no weapon on earth could stop. But the real story behind the Blackbird isn't just one of engineering brilliance.It's a story of deception carried out at an almost absurd scale.In this episode, we trace the full history of the aircraft from the Cold War intelligence crisis that made it necessary to the secret test flights at Groom Lake to...
Published: Apr 5, 2026Duration: 1h 24m 2s
The Berlin Wall
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 half. Barbed wire had gone up overnight, soldiers lined the streets, and the lives of millions of people were changed forever. What followed was twenty eight years of concrete, guard towers, death strips, and a level of psychological control that reshaped an entire society from the inside out.This episode traces the full arc of the Berlin Wall, from the post-war carving up of Germany at Yalta...
Published: Apr 3, 2026Duration: 1h 18m 2s
The Hatfield and McCoy Feud
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 three decades along the Tug Fork of the Big Sandy River on the West Virginia-Kentucky border, this was far more than a backwoods rivalry over a stolen pig. It was a blood feud born from Civil War guerrilla violence, deepened by land disputes and a failed justice system, and driven to its worst extremes by vigilante executions, a doomed love affair, and a midnight raid that left children dead and a home in...
Published: Apr 1, 2026Duration: 1h 12m 16s
The Monkey Trial
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 noble defense attorney humiliates a Bible-thumping prosecutor, science defeats ignorance, and progress marches forward. Almost none of that is accurate.In this episode, we go back to Dayton, Tennessee to tell the real story. It starts not with a brave teacher defying an unjust law, but with a handful of small-town businessmen hatching a publicity scheme in the back of a drugstore. George Rappleyea, a restless New Yo...
Published: Mar 29, 2026Duration: 1h 18m 53s
The Bonus Army: America Attacks Its Own
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 promised under the World War Adjusted Compensation Act of 1924. Led by former Army sergeant Walter W. Waters of Portland, Oregon, the Bonus Expeditionary Force built a sprawling encampment on the Anacostia Flats and spent weeks peacefully lobbying Congress to pass the Patman Bonus Bill.The House passed it on June 15, 1932, but the Senate killed it two days later by a vote of 62 to 18.When the veterans refused to leave, President...
Published: Mar 26, 2026Duration: 1h 19m 50s
The Phantom Airships of the 1890's
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, citizens of Sacramento, California, watched a bright light move slowly across the overcast sky at roughly a thousand feet. Some heard voices shouting from the craft. Others reported singing.A witness named R.L. Lowery described a cigar-shaped body with wheels on the sides, powered by two men pedaling a bicycle-like frame. Within days, newspapers from coast to coast had picked up the story, and the first great UFO wave in American history...
Published: Mar 23, 2026Duration: 1h 20m 22s
The Real Moby Dick
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 whaling voyage. Just over a year later, on November 20, 1820, roughly 2,000 miles west of South America, an 85-foot bull sperm whale rammed the ship twice with what first mate Owen Chase described as deliberate malice, sinking her in minutes.The twenty crew members escaped in three small whaleboats with limited provisions and faced an impossible decision about where to sail. Fearing reports of cannibalism in the nearby Marquesas Islands, they chose...
Published: Mar 20, 2026Duration: 1h 24m 30s