Disturbing History

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 wi...

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...

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 dar...

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 tho...

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'...

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 w...

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 ho...

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 differe...

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, wher...

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 H...

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...

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...

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 durin...

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 chap...

In this special episode of Disturbing History, we step away from ancient mysteries and infamous crimes to confront something far closer and far more unsettling: the forces shaping our thoughts, behavior, and attention right now. This is not a story about the past. It is a story unfolding in real time, in your hands, on your screen, and inside your mind. We begin with a simple observation: most of...

On the night of September 26th, 1983, a Soviet lieutenant colonel named Stanislav Petrov sat in a bunker monitoring early warning systems when alarms signaled the launch of American nuclear missiles. Alone with the decision, he had mere minutes to determine whether to report the strike and unleash retaliation that could have ended civilization. Petrov hesitated, trusting his gut over the machine....

What if the War on Drugs was never really about drugs at all? In this episode of Disturbing History, we pull back the curtain on a devastating truth. For over fifty years, the U.S. government has waged a costly, brutal campaign that’s locked up millions, empowered police militarization, devastated entire communities—and yet, drugs are cheaper and more accessible than ever, with overdose deaths now...

Disturbing History exists to sit with the parts of our past we’d rather avoid—the moments that force us to ask who we really are when fear takes over. In this episode, Brian walks through one of the darkest chapters in American history: the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. This wasn’t something that happened under a foreign dictatorship.  It happened here, carried out...

On the morning of December 14, 1807, the residents of southwestern Connecticut witnessed something that would change the course of American science forever. A blazing globe of fire, nearly two-thirds the apparent size of the full moon, streaked across the New England sky from Vermont to Fairfield County. Three thunderous explosions shook the frozen ground. And then, impossibly, stones began to fal...

In August of 1973, Houston police were still pulling bodies from the dirt floor of Dean Corll’s boat shed when a frightened young man in Dallas picked up the phone and called the FBI. What he had witnessed inside a Cole Avenue apartment convinced him that the horrors unfolding 240 miles south were not isolated—and that the man he was living with might be part of something far larger. Days later, D...

In 1932, the United States government told six hundred Black men in rural Alabama that they had "bad blood" and promised them free treatment. What these men didn't know—what they would never be told—was that they had just become subjects in one of the most horrifying medical experiments in American history. For forty years, the U.S. Public Health Service watched these men suffer and die from syphi...

This is the episode we've been building toward. The one that sits at the very heart of what disturbing history means. Because nothing in the American story comes close to what happened between 1861 and 1865. Nothing. We're talking about a war that killed more Americans than every other conflict in our history combined. A war where brothers lined up across battlefields and shot each other dead. A w...

On February 24, 1978, five friends from Yuba County, California, drove to Chico State University to watch their favorite college basketball team play. It should have been a routine trip: an hour north for a Friday night game, a stop for snacks, and then home to bed. The next morning, all five men were scheduled to compete in a Special Olympics basketball tournament, where the winning team would ea...

This episode explores one of history’s greatest crimes in all its complexity. We examine not only the European demand that fueled the transatlantic slave trade, but also the African kingdoms, warlords, and merchants who participated in capturing and selling millions of their fellow human beings. We trace the trade from its origins with Portuguese captain Antão Gonçalves in 1441 through its explosi...

In this comprehensive episode of Disturbing History, we journey back over five centuries to examine the true story of Christopher Columbus, stripping away the mythology that has long obscured one of history's most controversial figures. This is the story they did not teach you in school, the history that was sanitized and romanticized for generations of American schoolchildren who grew up believin...