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 Amityville Horror

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, New York. His father, mother, two sisters, and two brothers — six people ranging in age from 9 to 43 — were all found face down, shot at close range, in what remains one of the most chilling mass murders in Long Island history. No one in the house appeared to wake up. No neighbor called the police. DeFeo confessed within 48 hours and was convicted on all six counts of second-degree murder, receiving six consecutive sentences of 25 year...

Published: Mar 18, 2026Duration: 1h 19m 3s

Tesla's Death Ray

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 at a distance of two hundred and fifty miles. The press called it a death ray. He called it a peace beam. And the man making the claim wasn't some fringe eccentric chasing headlines. It was Nikola Tesla, the same mind behind the alternating current electrical system that powers the modern world, the same inventor who held over three hundred patents and whose work laid the foundation f...

Published: Mar 15, 2026Duration: 1h 17m 15s

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 technology and exotic physics in the underground mines of Lower Silesia during the final years of World War Two. We trace the rise of SS General Hans Kammler, the engineer who built the gas chambers at Auschwitz and eventually controlled every advanced weapons program in Nazi Germany, from the V-two rockets to the jet fighters to whatever was happening deep beneath the Owl Mountains of what is now southwestern Poland.We examine...

Published: Mar 13, 2026Duration: 1h 21m 39s

Operation Northwoods: America's False Flag

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 drafted and signed by every member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff that outlined a series of false flag operations designed to trick the American public into supporting a full-scale military invasion of Cuba.The proposals included staging terrorist attacks in Miami and Washington, D.C., blowing up an American ship and blaming it on Castro, faking the destruction of a civilian airliner, conducting a terror campaign against Cuban refugees on American...

Published: Mar 11, 2026Duration: 1h 20m 32s

Who Killed Martin Luther King Jr?

On April 4th, 1968, a single rifle shot ended the life of Doctor Martin Luther King Junior on the second-floor balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. He was thirty-nine years old. The official story has always been simple: a lone escaped convict named James Earl Ray, acting out of personal racial hatred, pulled the trigger and was caught sixty-five days later in London. Case closed. Except it wasn't. And it isn't.In this episode of Disturbing History, we go deep into one of the most consequential and most deliberately obscured murders in American history. We trace Doctor K...

Published: Mar 8, 2026Duration: 1h 36m 47s

The CIA Acoustic Kitty Project

In the early nineteen sixties, at the height of Cold War paranoia, the CIA's Technical Services Division conceived and built one of the strangest intelligence programs in American history. They called it Acoustic Kitty. The idea was straightforward in the most disturbing possible way: surgically implant a microphone, a radio transmitter, and a battery inside a living cat, thread an antenna along its spine, and deploy it near Soviet officials having conversations in public parks. A cat wandering up to a park bench raises no suspicion.Nobody looks twice. It was, in theory, the perfect surveillance platform.It...

Published: Mar 6, 2026Duration: 1h 17m 44s

The Vampire Panic of New England

For nearly a century, families across rural New England dug up their dead, cut out their hearts, burned them, and fed the ashes to the living. They weren't insane. They were desperate. In this episode, we dive deep into the New England Vampire Panic — a terrifying chapter of American history driven by tuberculosis, grief, and folk beliefs that most history books conveniently leave out.We start with the tuberculosis epidemic that killed one in four Americans and Europeans in the 1800s and explore how the natural process of decomposition mimicked the very "signs" that communities believed proved vampirism. Fr...

Published: Mar 4, 2026Duration: 1h 18m 58s

The War Of The Worlds

On October 30th, 1938, a twenty-three-year-old Orson Welles and his Mercury Theatre troupe performed a radio adaptation of H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds that supposedly sent millions of Americans into mass hysteria. But did it really happen that way?In this episode of Disturbing History, we pull back the curtain on one of the most misunderstood events in broadcasting history. We walk through Depression-era America and a nation already on edge from the looming threat of war in Europe, break down how Welles and writer Howard Koch crafted a broadcast so realistic that it mimicked the...

Published: Mar 1, 2026Duration: 1h 19m 23s

The Dancing Boys of Afghanistan

This episode of the Disturbing History Podcast contains graphic discussion of child sexual exploitation, human trafficking, and violence against minors. The content is historically accurate and factually sourced but extremely disturbing in nature. Listener discretion is strongly advised and this episode is not suitable for younger audiences.The dancing boys of Afghanistan represent one of the darkest and most deeply hidden traditions in human history. In this episode of the Disturbing History Podcast, we uncover the true story behind the ancient Afghan practice known as Bacha Bazi — a term that translates to "boy play" — and trace the...

Published: Feb 27, 2026Duration: 1h 21m 45s

DH Ep:67 The Betty and Barney Hill Alien Abduction

On the night of September 19th, 1961, Betty and Barney Hill were driving home to Portsmouth, New Hampshire after a short vacation in Canada. Somewhere on a dark stretch of US Route 3 in the White Mountains, they encountered a bright light in the sky that followed their car, descended toward the road, and changed their lives forever. What happened over the next two hours remains one of the most thoroughly documented and hotly debated cases in the history of the UFO phenomenon.In this episode, we explore the full story of the Betty and Barney Hill abduction from beginning...

Published: Feb 26, 2026Duration: 1h 18m 44s

DH Ep:66 Shadows Over the White House

Tonight's episode takes you inside the most famous house on the planet for two stories that are equally strange and equally disturbing. The first is about a ghost that won't leave. Abraham Lincoln is the most frequently reported spirit in the history of the White House, seen by presidents, first ladies, prime ministers, and queens over the span of more than a hundred and fifty years.But this isn't just a ghost story. It's a deep dive into Lincoln's own fascination with the supernatural, the séances held inside the White House after the death of his son W...

Published: Feb 18, 2026Duration: 1h 20m 29s

DH Ep:65 The Curse Of Oak Island

In this episode, we travel to a tiny, hundred-and-forty-acre island off the coast of Nova Scotia, Canada, where a mystery first uncovered by three teenagers in 1795 has consumed fortunes, destroyed lives, and killed six men over the course of more than two hundred and thirty years.We start with sixteen-year-old Daniel McGinnis and his discovery of a mysterious depression on Oak Island, complete with oak log platforms buried every ten feet underground.From there, we trace the full history of the Money Pit — the Onslow Company's excavation and the catastrophic flooding at ninety feet, the Truro Co...

Published: Feb 11, 2026Duration: 1h 17m 12s

DH Ep:64 "In Event of Moon Disaster"

In July of 1969, while the world watched Apollo 11 head for the Moon, a speech sat folded in a White House desk drawer. Written by Nixon speechwriter William Safire, the memo titled "In Event of Moon Disaster" was a contingency address prepared for the very real possibility that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin would never leave the lunar surface. The ascent engine that had to fire to bring them home had no backup and had never been tested under actual lunar conditions. If it failed, two men would die on the Moon while the world listened.This e...

Published: Feb 8, 2026Duration: 1h 15m 39s

DH Ep:63 The Night I Turned Off the Grammys

Something happened the other night that got me thinking. I sat down to watch the Grammy Awards, expecting a celebration of music. What I got instead felt more like a political rally than an awards show.And it made me ask a question I think a lot of us have been asking quietly. When did everything become political? When did we lose the ability to just enjoy things together?This episode is different from our usual content. No serial killers. No mass graves. No presidents with dark secrets. But the most disturbing changes in history aren't...

Published: Feb 4, 2026Duration: 1h 16m 51s

DH Ep:62 The Holocaust

This episode takes you through the full, unflinching story of the Holocaust — from the ancient roots of antisemitism that made it possible, to the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party in a broken and humiliated post-World War One Germany, and into the systematic, industrialized murder of six million Jews and millions of others deemed unworthy of life. We walk through the ghettos of Warsaw, where hundreds of thousands were starved behind walls and barbed wire. We follow the Einsatzgruppen death squads across Eastern Europe, where entire Jewish communities were marched to ravines and shot. We step inside the ma...

Published: Feb 1, 2026Duration: 1h 7m 43s

We all know where we were that morning. The clear blue sky. The impossible images on our television screens. The moment when time itself seemed to split into before and after.In this episode of Disturbing History, we go back to September eleventh, two thousand and one, and tell the complete story of the deadliest terrorist attack on American soil. From the years of planning in Afghan caves and Hamburg apartments to the final desperate moments aboard four hijacked aircraft, this is the full account of how nineteen men murdered nearly three thousand innocent people and c...

Published: Jan 27, 2026Duration: 1h 19m 4s

In June of 1981, the CDC published a brief report about five young gay men in Los Angeles diagnosed with a rare pneumonia. Two were already dead. That report marked the official beginning of the AIDS epidemic in America, though the virus had been killing long before anyone noticed.This episode examines how a preventable health crisis became a catastrophe through government neglect, institutional indifference, and moral condemnation.President Reagan refused to publicly say the word AIDS until 1985, by which time over 12,000 Americans had died. He didn't give a major speech on the epidemic until 1987, when the death toll...

Published: Jan 22, 2026Duration: 58m 15s

DH Ep:59 Did We Fake The Moon Landing?

In this special follow-up to our Space Race episode, we dive headfirst into one of the most persistent conspiracy theories in American history. Did NASA really land men on the moon six times between 1969 and 1972, or was the whole thing an elaborate hoax filmed on a soundstage?We start with Bill Kaysing, the former Rocketdyne technical writer who self-published "We Never Went to the Moon" in 1976 and launched a conspiracy movement that refuses to die. From there, we explore the cultural moment that made America ripe for such theories, including the shadow of Vietnam, the Pentagon Papers, and...

Published: Jan 18, 2026Duration: 1h 29m 15s

DH Ep:58 The Bay Of Pigs

On October twenty-seventh, nineteen sixty-two, the world came within a single vote of nuclear annihilation. Deep beneath the Caribbean Sea, Soviet submarine commander Valentin Savitsky prepared to launch a nuclear torpedo at American destroyers. Two officers had already said yes. Only Vasili Arkhipov's refusal to authorize the launch saved humanity from extinction. But that terrifying moment during the Cuban Missile Crisis didn't happen in a vacuum. It was the direct consequence of a botched invasion that had occurred eighteen months earlier on the beaches of Cuba's southern coast.In this episode of Disturbing History, we take you inside...

Published: Jan 16, 2026Duration: 54m 56s

DH Ep:57 The McCarthy Hearings: America's Reign of Fear

In the spring of 1954, Wyoming Senator Lester Hunt walked into his Senate office with a rifle hidden beneath his overcoat. Weeks of blackmail by allies of Joseph McCarthy had broken him. The gunshot that followed should have warned America about the darkness that had descended upon the nation. It didn't.This episode of The Disturbing History Podcast takes you inside one of the most troubling chapters in American history. Senator Joseph McCarthy's four-year reign of terror destroyed thousands of lives, drove good people to suicide, and held an entire nation hostage to paranoia. From his infamous 1950 W...

Published: Jan 12, 2026Duration: 1h 24m 54s