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PODCAST

Disturbing History

Disturbing History-True Stories

The past isn’t always dead. Sometimes, it’s just been buried... and it’s time to dig it up. Disturbing History is a weekly podcast that dives headfirst into the strange, spooky, and little-known stories that history tried to forget. From secret societies and sinister folklore to lost colonies, unsolved mysteries, and events too dark for your high school textbook — this is where the shadowy corners of the past finally get their time in the spotlight.Hosted by author, investigator, and storyteller

history documentary

All Episodes

58:52

DH Ep:56 Brain Candy

Disturbing History ·

2026/01/09

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 us carry a device more powerful than all the computers used to reach the moon, yet we spend hours a day

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90:01

DH Ep:55 The Cold War

Disturbing History ·

2026/01/04

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.He was right—the alert was triggered by sunlight bouncing off clouds. His quiet defiance may have saved

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93:31

DH Ep:54 The War On Drugs

Disturbing History ·

2026/01/02

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 surpassing 100,000 annually.If the goal was to stop drug use, it’s been an undeniable failure. But what

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67:50

DH Ep:53 American Concentration Camps

Disturbing History ·

2025/12/24

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 by our own government against its own people.In the spring of 1942, more than 120,000 men, women, and

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86:11

DH Ep:52 The Weird Meteor

Disturbing History ·

2025/12/21

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 fall from the heavens.In this episode of Disturbing History, we explore the full story of the Weston

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61:41

DH Ep:51 The Odyssey Project: Kids For Sale

Disturbing History ·

2025/12/17

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, Dallas police raided the apartment. What they uncovered would expose one of the most extensive child

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83:28

DH Ep:50 The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment

Disturbing History ·

2025/12/12

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 syphilis. They observed as the disease destroyed their bodies, attacked their hearts, invaded their brains

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84:00

DH Ep:49 The Civil War

Disturbing History ·

2025/12/07

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 war that reduced entire cities to ash and left a generation of young men rotting in fields from

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81:01

DH Ep:48 The Yuba County Five

Disturbing History ·

2025/12/03

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 earn an all-expenses-paid trip to Los Angeles and tickets to Disneyland. They never made it to that

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95:01

DH Ep:47 The African Slave Trade

Disturbing History ·

2025/11/30

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 explosive growth after the colonization of the Americas. The decimation of Indigenous Caribbean populations

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89:10

DH Ep:46 Christopher Columbus

Disturbing History ·

2025/11/28

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 believing Columbus was simply a brave explorer who proved the Earth was round. Christopher Columbus was born in

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68:06

DH Ep:45 The Dust Bowl Migration

Disturbing History ·

2025/11/23

On April fourteenth, 1935, a wall of darkness seven thousand feet high and two hundred miles wide tore across the Great Plains at sixty miles per hour. Black Sunday wasn’t just a storm—it was the moment the Dust Bowl stopped being a hardship and became a breaking point. For hundreds of thousands of families already living in an apocalyptic landscape of dust, failed crops, and dying livestock, that day crushed whatever hope they had left.What followed should have been a story of American compassion

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74:56

DH Ep:44 The Incredibly Stupid One

Disturbing History ·

2025/11/20

On a sweltering June night in 1967, twenty-year-old sailor Douglas Brent Hegdahl stepped onto the deck of the USS Canberra for a breath of air, unaware that a single blast from the ship’s guns would knock him into the South China Sea and change the course of his life.Rescued hours later by North Vietnamese fishermen, Doug began three and a half years of captivity that would turn an ordinary farm kid from South Dakota into one of the most unlikely and valuable intelligence assets of the Vietnam

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79:16

DH Ep:43 J. Edgar Hoover

Disturbing History ·

2025/11/16

On a humid morning in May nineteen seventy-two, the most powerful man in Washington died naked on his bedroom floor, and he wasn't the president. For forty-eight years, John Edgar Hoover had been the shadow emperor of America, a man who knew every secret, buried every skeleton, and held democracy itself hostage with carefully indexed files that could destroy anyone who opposed him. In this comprehensive deep dive, we explore the complete life of the man who built the FBI into his personal empire of

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44:04

DH Ep:42 The Donner Party

Disturbing History ·

2025/11/09

In the winter of 1846–1847, eighty-seven pioneers set out with dreams of a new life in California—and found themselves trapped in the Sierra Nevada Mountains during one of the worst winters ever recorded. What began as a hopeful journey west became one of the darkest survival stories in American history.The Donner Party, as history would name them, endured starvation, relentless blizzards, and unthinkable choices that would haunt the survivors for the rest of their lives. This episode follows their

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77:17

DH Ep:41 The Thin Blue Line

Disturbing History ·

2025/11/07

This episode isn't going to be easy to hear, but it's necessary. I spent sixteen years in law enforcement, ending my career as an Atlanta police officer in 2016, and I can tell you from experience that the conversations we're having about policing in America are missing the most important piece of the puzzle. We're arguing about reform and training and bad apples, but nobody wants to talk about where the tree was planted in the first place.In this comprehensive deep dive, I trace the direct line

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55:27

DH Ep:40 Where the Mountains Swallow Men Whole

Disturbing History ·

2025/10/29

On a cold November afternoon in 1945, a seasoned hunting guide named Middie Rivers walked into the Vermont wilderness and never came back out. He knew every inch of Glastenbury Mountain, yet he vanished as if the earth had swallowed him whole. That disappearance marked the beginning of one of Vermont’s most enduring mysteries—a five-year wave of strange vanishings that turned this quiet stretch of forest into something far darker: the Bennington Triangle.For centuries, the Abenaki people warned that

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59:14

DH Ep:39 The Devil’s Tramping Ground

Disturbing History ·

2025/10/19

Deep in the pine forests of Chatham County, North Carolina, lies a perfect circle of barren earth where nothing has grown for over three hundred years.Known as The Devil’s Tramping Ground, this mysterious patch of soil has terrified locals, inspired scientists, and baffled investigators since colonial times.Our story begins in 1746, when surveyors first recorded the strange clearing — decades before the founding of the United States. We trace its roots through Native American legends of cursed

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68:18

DH Ep:38 Hunting Hitler

Disturbing History ·

2025/10/14

In this episode of Disturbing History, we step into one of the most chilling and enduring mysteries of the twentieth century: what really happened to Adolf Hitler after the fall of Berlin in 1945? Our episode opens in Buenos Aires, 1959. A local dentist sits across from a quiet man calling himself Ricardo Klement — until he recognizes something he can’t ignore. The man’s dental bridgework matches the records from Hitler’s bunker. Could it be possible that the most notorious dictator in history

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60:50

DH Ep:37 John Wilkes Booth

Disturbing History ·

2025/09/28

On the night of April 14, 1865, John Wilkes Booth stepped into the presidential box at Ford's Theatre and fired a single shot that would echo through American history. But what if the story didn't end twelve days later in a burning Virginia barn? What if the man who died that morning wasn't actually Lincoln's assassin?This episode takes you deep into one of America's most enduring mysteries, beginning with the fateful Good Friday when a celebrated actor became the most wanted man in America. We

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56 results

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