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Disturbing History

Disturbing History-True Stories

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 mysteries
Secret societies and hidden power structures
Dark folklore and urban legends
Lost colonies and vanished civilizations
True crime cases buried by time
Historical conspiracies and cover-ups
Paranormal events rooted in real history

Through immersive storytelling and investigative research, we uncover the shadowy corners of the past — the uncomfortable truths, forgotten tragedies, and disturbing secrets that shaped our world.If you’re fascinated by dark history, obsessed with unexplained events, or drawn to stories that blur the line between fact and legend, this podcast is for you.

Because the past isn’t always dead.
Sometimes it’s just been buried.

Follow Disturbing History and turn on automatic downloads for weekly deep dives into history’s most unsettling stories.

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28 episodes
a few times a week
Avg 1 hr 8 min
English

Episodes 28

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Sunday · 1 hr 33 min
Three Mile Island Meltdown
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 the control-room indicator showed the electrical command, not the valve’s...
- Transcript
Friday · 1 hr 5 min
The "True Story" Of The Mayan Calendar
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 burned. The destruction came at the end of a brutal campaign in which thousands...
- Transcript
August 26 · 1 hr 1 min
The Challenger Disaster
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 morning. The engineers who built the shuttle's solid rocket boosters had...
- Transcript
August 23 · 1 hr
The Silver Bridge Collapse
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 investigators traced the disaster to a single cracked steel bar, eyebar 330,...
- Transcript
August 21 · 54 min
The Oklahoma City Bombing
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 35 because there was no license plate on the back bumper. He wasn't...
- Transcript
August 19 · 1 hr 7 min
Operation Sea Spray
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 operation was called Sea-Spray, and it was designed to answer a question...
- Transcript
August 16 · 1 hr 23 min
Privacy Not Included
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 typed “had an abortion, search for female” into a license plate reader...
- Transcript
August 14 · 1 hr 8 min
The Massacre At Son My
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 a circuit and came back a few minutes later. She was dead, and an...
- Transcript
August 12 · 1 hr 4 min
The Tory War
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 British army there. There was no Continental army there. Every man on that...
- Transcript
August 9 · 1 hr 14 min
The Silence Of Empires
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 was still sitting in the ruins more than 3,000 years later when a French...
- Transcript
August 7 · 57 min
John D. Rockefeller Junior
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 who handed out dimes and beat hookworm in the South. That reputation did...
- Transcript
August 5 · 1 hr 10 min
John D. Rockefeller Sr. The Man Who Bought the Story
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 that had run for seven years. The man in the picture had died there two...
- Transcript
August 2 · 1 hr 2 min
Say My Name
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 account, she refused. Then she broke down and told him it was gone — roughly...
- Transcript
July 31 · 1 hr 17 min
The Bombing Of Pan Am Flight 103
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 Solway Firth. Thirty-eight minutes out of Heathrow, at 31,000 feet, a bomb...
- Transcript
July 29 · 1 hr 21 min
The Wealth Divide
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 it can be traced to identifiable people making documented decisions in...
- Transcript
July 26 · 1 hr 7 min
The Distraction Machine
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 episode I follow that idea from the sands of the Roman arena all the way...
- Transcript
July 24 · 1 hr 6 min
The Year Without a Summer
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 August, the corn crop collapsed across the northern states, and families...
- Transcript
July 22 · 1 hr 13 min
The Watchers We Invited In
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 claiming your grandson is in jail and needs bail money right now. In this...
- Transcript
July 19 · 1 hr 11 min
Ike And The Alien Treaty
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 flashed that he was dead. The next morning he surfaced at church, and the...
- Transcript
July 17 · 1 hr 23 min
FDR: The Man Who Could Have Been King
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 History, we pull apart the myth of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and look at...
- Transcript

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