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PODCAST

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 mysteriesSecret societies and hidden power

society & culture

All Episodes

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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74:10

DH Ep:36 The Kennedy Assassination

Disturbing History ·

2025/09/24

On November 22, 1963, three shots in Dealey Plaza shattered America's innocence and sparked the most controversial investigation in our nation's history. This comprehensive episode examines every aspect of President Kennedy's assassination, from the political tensions that brought him to Dallas to the enduring mysteries that remain unsolved six decades later.We trace the complete lives of Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby, two troubled men whose violent intersection would deny America the truth it

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67:41

DH Ep:35 The Bell Witch

Disturbing History ·

2025/09/17

Between 1817 and 1821, the Bell family of Robertson County, Tennessee experienced what would become the most documented poltergeist case in American history. What began as mysterious knocking sounds and strange creature sightings on their prosperous farm escalated into a four-year ordeal of supernatural terror that would claim a human life—the only such death officially attributed to a spirit in American records.The entity, which called itself the Bell Witch, didn't merely haunt the family; it

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64:50

DH Ep:34 Lyndon Johnson's Obsession with Power—and...

Disturbing History ·

2025/09/12

This week on Disturbing History, we dive into the unsettling life of Lyndon B. Johnson, America’s 36th president. Rising from poverty in the Texas Hill Country, Johnson clawed his way to power through manipulation, intimidation, and a relentless drive for control. His legacy remains a paradox: groundbreaking civil rights achievements on one hand, and the catastrophic Vietnam War and bizarre personal behavior on the other.We explore Johnson’s infamous “Johnson Treatment,” his ruthless rise in

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87:09

DH Ep:33 Jonestown: The People's Temple

Disturbing History ·

2025/09/05

On November 18, 1978, over 900 Americans died in the Guyanese jungle in what remains the largest loss of American civilian life in a deliberate act until September 11, 2001. But the story of Jonestown didn't begin in South America. It began decades earlier with a charismatic boy preacher from Depression-era Indiana who promised racial equality, social justice, and heaven on earth.This episode traces Jim Jones's transformation from a small-town outsider conducting funeral services for dead animals to

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44:31

DH Ep:32 Operation Poisoned Skies

Disturbing History ·

2025/09/01

In the early hours of the Cold War, as Americans watched the skies for Soviet bombers, their own military was quietly conducting one of the most extensive human experiments in the nation's history. Between 1950 and 1970, the U.S. Army and Navy released chemical and biological simulants over dozens of American cities, exposing millions of unwitting citizens to substances the military claimed were harmless.This episode explores the secret atmospheric testing programs that turned Minneapolis, St

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76:00

DH Ep:31 The Ku Klux Klan

Disturbing History ·

2025/08/29

In the mid-1980s, in the mountains of rural north Georgia, I watched through my childhood window as robed figures burned a cross in our yard. This wasn't ancient history—this was the Reagan era, the time of MTV and personal computers.Yet there they were, the Ku Klux Klan, making it clear that some Americans would never be safe in their own homes.This deeply personal narrative traces the complete history of America's most enduring terrorist organization, from six bored Confederate veterans gathering

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62:56

DH Ep:30 Jefferson and Monticello's Darker Side

Disturbing History ·

2025/08/26

On a humid Virginia morning in 1796, Thomas Jefferson recorded the death of Jupiter, his enslaved personal attendant of thirty-six years, with exactly seven words in the same ledger where he tracked the weight of newborn lambs. This chilling juxtaposition captures the essence of a story that has been deliberately hidden from American classrooms for generations—the transformation of Monticello into a laboratory where Enlightenment rationalism was weaponized to perfect human bondage.While textbooks

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91:26

DH Ep:29 The Lake Michigan Triangle

Disturbing History ·

2025/08/24

On a warm summer evening in 1950, Betty Donner stood in her Minneapolis backyard, scanning the night sky for her husband's plane. Northwest Flight 2501 was due to pass overhead on its way from New York to Seattle, carrying fifty-eight souls including Robert Donner. Betty waited and watched as storm clouds gathered on the horizon, but the aircraft lights she expected never appeared.Her husband's plane had vanished somewhere over the dark waters of Lake Michigan, becoming part of one of America's most

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88 results

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