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 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 who grew their own food watched a year's survival vanish from the fields. Nobody in America knew why.In this episode I trace the answer back 14 months and 10,000 miles to Mount Tambora in the Indonesian archipelago, where the largest volcanic eruption in recorded human history blew away the top mile of a mountain in April...

Published: Jul 24, 2026Duration: 1h 6m 41s

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 episode of Disturbing History, I trace how those strangers came to know so much about you, and the answer is a two-hundred-year story that starts long before the internet ever existed. We go back to the eighteen forties, when a sealed letter had stronger legal protection than your email does today and anonymity...

Published: Jul 22, 2026Duration: 1h 13m 32s

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 White House explained everything with a chicken wing and a chipped tooth.Seventy years later, that missing evening is still the foundation of the most durable presidential legend in American history: that Ike was driven into the Mojave Desert that night, walked into a hangar at Edwards Air Force Base, and negotiated a secret treaty with beings...

Published: Jul 19, 2026Duration: 1h 11m 57s

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 what the textbooks leave out.For more than 2 decades, Roosevelt ran the most successful concealment operation in presidential history, hiding from the public the fact that he could not walk a single step unaided, with the full cooperation of a press corps that agreed never to photograph the wheelchair and Secret Service agents who ripped...

Published: Jul 17, 2026Duration: 1h 23m 43s

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 America, from the Stamp Act riots of 1765, when Boston mobs tore apart a rich man's home and tax collectors were tarred and feathered in the streets, through the Whiskey Rebellion, where George Washington personally led nearly 13,000 troops against American citizens, to the Supreme Court case where a lawyer called the income tax communism and won.Then comes the great backfire of 1909, when Senate conservatives proposed the 16th Amendment believing it...

Published: Jul 15, 2026Duration: 1h 15m 3s

The Smithsonian's Strange Phenomena Files

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 making soap. A swarm of insects wide as the state of California. A booming like cannon fire off the Carolina coast with no ship and no storm anywhere in sight.Somebody at the Smithsonian had to open those letters and decide which was a lie, which was an honest mistake, and which one needed a drawer. This episode is the story of what happened when serious, credentialed people...

Published: Jul 12, 2026Duration: 1h 1m 7s

Loving the Monster

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 that's how I ended up staring at the story of Wade Wilson, the so-called Deadpool Killer, a man who strangled two women to death in a single day in Cape Coral, Florida, and now sits on death row with two death sentences and a fan club.Because that's the part that put my jaw on the floor. Not the murders. The love le...

Published: Jul 10, 2026Duration: 1h 1m 28s

The Rise and Ruin of the FLDS Church

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 Fifteen, he was just a nervous man in a red Escalade with a bad paper tag and a pulse he couldn't hide.This week I'm taking you inside the rise and ruin of the FLDS church, from its roots in the polygamy crisis of the eighteen hundreds to the isolated fortress town of Short Creek, where one man came to control every marriage...

Published: Jul 8, 2026Duration: 1h 7m 48s

Children Sent Through the Mail

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 her coat. Her parents had just mailed her to her grandmother.In this episode, I dig into one of the strangest true stories in American history, the brief window between nineteen thirteen and nineteen fifteen when poor rural families discovered that the brand new parcel post service would accept a child at the counter, weigh her like a crate of apples, and deliver her, and the federal government had never...

Published: Jul 5, 2026Duration: 1h 1m 28s

The Poison Bottles America Trusted

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 episode opens the cabinet on the patent medicine era, the long stretch of years when a quarter and a clipped newspaper advertisement could buy a family a cure-all that promised relief from nerves, weakness, pain, sleeplessness, women's complaints, and almost anything else a body could suffer, and then it asks the only question that matters, which is what those beautiful bottles actually held. We start in a...

Published: Jul 3, 2026Duration: 59m 17s

Nazi Propaganda & The American Mirror

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 that single word as it curdles across the bloodiest century human beings have ever managed to produce.This is the story of how mass persuasion got built, who built it, and the deeply uncomfortable truth that the most murderous propaganda machine in history did not invent its methods from nothing. It borrowed them, and some of what it borrowed, it borrowed from us.We start...

Published: Jul 1, 2026Duration: 1h 4m 32s

The Villisca Axe Murders

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. The parents. Their four children, ages 5 to 11. And two young sisters, Lena and Ina Stillinger, who had only come over after a church program for a sleepover that should have ended with them riding home.The weapon was an axe taken from the family's own woodpile. The mirrors were covered, a lamp was left burning low with its chimney removed, a slab of bacon was found on the...

Published: Jun 28, 2026Duration: 55m 34s

The Lovelock Giant Legend

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 one of the most stubborn legends in American fringe history: red-haired, cannibal giants, supposedly eight to ten feet tall, dug out of its floor and then hidden away by the authorities.In this episode I take a hard, evidence-first look at where that story actually comes from, and why the truth underneath it is more disturbing than any giant ever was.We trace the legend from Northern Pa...

Published: Jun 26, 2026Duration: 1h 4m 14s

Clinton, Area 51, and the Search for UFO Secrets

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 wanted to know two things: who really killed John Kennedy, and whether the United States was sitting on proof that we aren't alone. He handed the assignment to his friend Webb Hubbell, the third-ranking official at the Justice Department, and Hubbell went looking with the access of a man who reported straight to the President. He came back with a wall.This episode traces that wall across...

Published: Jun 24, 2026Duration: 1h 3m 38s

Walt Disney: The Man Behind The Mouse

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 cardigan, and the warm Missouri voice was a workplace that tore itself apart, a founder who treated a fair-pay dispute as a foreign conspiracy, and a man whose grudges ended up wired into the machinery of the Red Scare. This episode strips off the sanitized image and looks at the documented record of Walter Elias Disney as the complicated, contradictory figure he actually was.W...

Published: Jun 19, 2026Duration: 1h 2m 49s

Did Lyndon B. Johnson Help Kill JFK?

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 stands the man who became president before Air Force One left Texas soil.This episode of Disturbing History takes on the theory that refuses to die, the claim that Lyndon Baines Johnson helped engineer the assassination of the president he served. It is, by design, a different kind of episode. The show deals in facts, but this is one of those rare cases where documented fact and unproven conspiracy run...

Published: Jun 17, 2026Duration: 59m 58s

Ulysses S. Grant: The Curse of Loyal Friends

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 presidency of the nineteenth century.This episode of Disturbing History continues our series on the dark history of presidential politics by walking straight into the Gilded Age and the Whiskey Ring, the federal liquor-tax fraud that siphoned millions of dollars out of the United States Treasury while a depression squeezed ordinary Americans, and traces how the trail of stolen tax money ran all the way to the desk of Grant's...

Published: Jun 14, 2026Duration: 1h 17m 56s

Prohibition: Speakeasy In Chief

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, because the bodies were stacking up in his morgue. In this episode, we tear down the postcard version of Prohibition, the flappers and the jazz and the secret knock at the speakeasy door, and walk through what the thirteen-year war on alcohol actually cost. A federal denaturing program deliberately laced industrial alcohol with methanol and contributed to an estimated 10,000 American deaths, defended by the most powerful lobbyist in the country on...

Published: Jun 12, 2026Duration: 1h 12m 12s

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 over for more than three years. They're where this episode ends, and they're the reason it exists. Before them came the battle. This one goes deep into the fight for a stinking scrap of volcanic ash 650 miles south of Tokyo, and the general who turned it into one of the worst killing grounds of the Pacific war. Tadamichi Kuribayashi knew Japan couldn't win, so he buried his g...

Published: Jun 10, 2026Duration: 1h 0m 33s

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 behind and walk into a restaurant parking lot in suburban Detroit, where on a hot Wednesday afternoon in the summer of 1975, the most powerful labor leader in America climbed into a car and was never seen again. Jimmy Hoffa was a coal miner's son from Brazil, Indiana, who watched the company work his father to death and never forgot the lesson. He clawed his way o...

Published: Jun 7, 2026Duration: 1h 0m 10s