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 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 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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  1. 1d ago

    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 to the phone in your pocket, and I separate what's actually documented from the conspiracy version of the story, because the truth turns out to be stranger and better supported than the myth. We start in ancient Rome, where the grain dole and the games were openly accounted for as instruments of rule, and where a courtier explained the whole mechanism in writing to the imperial family. From there we move to Victorian Britain, where churches and factory owners founded soccer clubs that are now worth billions, and wrote down exactly why they were doing it. We visit Henry Ford's Sociological Department, where two hundred investigators inspected workers' homes to decide who deserved the five dollar day, and we walk through America's first government propaganda agency, which put seventy-five thousand trained speakers into movie theaters during the First World War. Longtime listeners know Edward Bernays has come up on this show before, and he's unavoidable here, from the soap carving contests that turned millions of schoolchildren into product consumers, to the global holiday he manufactured for a light bulb, to the press campaign that helped prepare Americans to accept the overthrow of a foreign government. We look at the Hays Code era, when Hollywood censored itself into a compliance document, then cross into fascist Europe, where Mussolini nationalized after-work leisure and the Nazis built the largest tour operator on Earth, sold a people's car that no customer ever received, and staged an Olympics that fooled the watching world. The Cold War brings the CIA's secret funding of magazines, orchestras, and possibly modern art, confirmed in print by the man who ran the program, along with the jazz ambassadors who took the government's stage and talked back. And we end in the present, inside the laboratories where the machinery of your attention was engineered using techniques borrowed from the casino industry, by designers who have since gone on record to say they're sorry. No hidden cabal required. Just a permanent incentive, a trail of confessions, and a machine that keeps escaping its owners. This is the history of the distraction machine, and you're soaking in it. Email Brian Join Our FREE Newsletter Get Brian's Books Leave Us A Voicemail Visit Our Website Have a forgotten historical mystery, disturbing event, unsolved crime, or hidden conspiracy you think deserves investigation? Send your suggestions to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com. Disturbing History is a dark history podcast exploring unsolved mysteries, secret societies, historical conspiracies, lost civilizations, and the shadowy stories buried beneath the surface of the past. Follow the show and enable automatic downloads so you never miss a deep dive into history’s most unsettling secrets. Because sometimes the truth is darker than fiction.

    The Distraction Machine

  2. 1d ago • Subscribers Only

    The Distraction Machine-Ad Free Vault Access

    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 to the phone in your pocket, and I separate what's actually documented from the conspiracy version of the story, because the truth turns out to be stranger and better supported than the myth. We start in ancient Rome, where the grain dole and the games were openly accounted for as instruments of rule, and where a courtier explained the whole mechanism in writing to the imperial family. From there we move to Victorian Britain, where churches and factory owners founded soccer clubs that are now worth billions, and wrote down exactly why they were doing it. We visit Henry Ford's Sociological Department, where two hundred investigators inspected workers' homes to decide who deserved the five dollar day, and we walk through America's first government propaganda agency, which put seventy-five thousand trained speakers into movie theaters during the First World War. Longtime listeners know Edward Bernays has come up on this show before, and he's unavoidable here, from the soap carving contests that turned millions of schoolchildren into product consumers, to the global holiday he manufactured for a light bulb, to the press campaign that helped prepare Americans to accept the overthrow of a foreign government. We look at the Hays Code era, when Hollywood censored itself into a compliance document, then cross into fascist Europe, where Mussolini nationalized after-work leisure and the Nazis built the largest tour operator on Earth, sold a people's car that no customer ever received, and staged an Olympics that fooled the watching world. The Cold War brings the CIA's secret funding of magazines, orchestras, and possibly modern art, confirmed in print by the man who ran the program, along with the jazz ambassadors who took the government's stage and talked back. And we end in the present, inside the laboratories where the machinery of your attention was engineered using techniques borrowed from the casino industry, by designers who have since gone on record to say they're sorry. No hidden cabal required. Just a permanent incentive, a trail of confessions, and a machine that keeps escaping its owners. This is the history of the distraction machine, and you're soaking in it. Email Brian Join Our FREE Newsletter Get Brian's Books Leave Us A Voicemail Visit Our Website

    The Distraction Machine-Ad Free Vault Access

  3. 3d ago

    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 of 1815, killed on the order of 100,000 people, and threw a veil of sulfur into the stratosphere that dimmed the sun over the entire planet. I walk through the eyewitness accounts collected by Stamford Raffles, the science of how a single eruption starves a hemisphere, and the American year that followed, the dead sheared sheep, the sunspot panic, the mackerel dinners, the seed corn crisis of 1817, and the preachers who read the failed summer as divine judgment. The cold pushed thousands of families out of New England and helped fill Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, and it carried one Vermont farm family to Palmyra, New York, where their 10-year-old son Joseph Smith would grow up to found an American religion. Across the Atlantic the same volcanic winter brought famine to Switzerland, typhus to Ireland, and bread riots to England, and it trapped Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, and John Polidori in a rain-locked villa on Lake Geneva, where a ghost story contest produced Frankenstein and the modern vampire in the same month. From the buried kingdom of Tambora to the frost-killed cornfields of Vermont, this is the story of the Year Without a Summer, told through the diaries, ledgers, and letters of people who lived through a climate disaster no one on earth could explain. Have a forgotten historical mystery, disturbing event, unsolved crime, or hidden conspiracy you think deserves investigation? Send your suggestions to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com. Disturbing History is a dark history podcast exploring unsolved mysteries, secret societies, historical conspiracies, lost civilizations, and the shadowy stories buried beneath the surface of the past. Follow the show and enable automatic downloads so you never miss a deep dive into history’s most unsettling secrets. Because sometimes the truth is darker than fiction.

    The Year Without a Summer

  4. 3d ago • Subscribers Only

    The Year Without a Summer-Ad Free Vault Access

    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 of 1815, killed on the order of 100,000 people, and threw a veil of sulfur into the stratosphere that dimmed the sun over the entire planet. I walk through the eyewitness accounts collected by Stamford Raffles, the science of how a single eruption starves a hemisphere, and the American year that followed, the dead sheared sheep, the sunspot panic, the mackerel dinners, the seed corn crisis of 1817, and the preachers who read the failed summer as divine judgment. The cold pushed thousands of families out of New England and helped fill Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, and it carried one Vermont farm family to Palmyra, New York, where their 10-year-old son Joseph Smith would grow up to found an American religion. Across the Atlantic the same volcanic winter brought famine to Switzerland, typhus to Ireland, and bread riots to England, and it trapped Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, and John Polidori in a rain-locked villa on Lake Geneva, where a ghost story contest produced Frankenstein and the modern vampire in the same month. From the buried kingdom of Tambora to the frost-killed cornfields of Vermont, this is the story of the Year Without a Summer, told through the diaries, ledgers, and letters of people who lived through a climate disaster no one on earth could explain.

    The Year Without a Summer-Ad Free Vault Access

  5. 5d ago

    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 was as simple as buying a train ticket, then follow the trade decade by decade as every new miracle of communication quietly demanded a piece of your private life in payment. The telegraph put your words in corporate files that Lincoln's government read at will. The Kodak camera sparked America's first privacy panic and inspired Louis Brandeis to name the right to be let alone, a fight he was still losing on the Supreme Court forty years later. Party lines trained a generation to assume the neighbors were listening, and then we forgot the lesson right when it mattered most. Along the way we meet the Atlanta company that built secret moral dossiers on tens of millions of Americans before renaming itself Equifax, the FBI programs that read every telegram leaving the country for thirty years, the twenty-three-year-old engineer whose humble shopping cart cookie became the tracking backbone of the modern web, and the auction house where you're bought and sold in the tenth of a second it takes a page to load. I dig into what those endless user agreements actually say, why the cookie banner exists and what clicking accept really means, how a personality quiz harvested eighty-seven million Facebook profiles, and how supposedly anonymous phone data unmasked a priest, mapped secret military bases, and told a Minneapolis father his teenage daughter was pregnant before she did.  And I take on the question everyone asks me, whether the phone in your pocket is actually listening to your conversations, with an evidence-first answer that I promise is more disturbing than a hidden microphone. From the Spanish Prisoner con of the eighteen hundreds to AI voice cloning scams targeting grandparents today, this is the history of the biggest trade America ever made, the one where we sold our privacy one convenience at a time and never once asked the price. If you've ever wondered what you really gave up for that tiny supercomputer you carry everywhere, this episode is for you. Email Brian Join Our FREE Newsletter Get Brian's Books Leave Us A Voicemail Visit Our Website Have a forgotten historical mystery, disturbing event, unsolved crime, or hidden conspiracy you think deserves investigation? Send your suggestions to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com. Disturbing History is a dark history podcast exploring unsolved mysteries, secret societies, historical conspiracies, lost civilizations, and the shadowy stories buried beneath the surface of the past. Follow the show and enable automatic downloads so you never miss a deep dive into history’s most unsettling secrets. Because sometimes the truth is darker than fiction.

    The Watchers We Invited In

  6. 6d ago • Subscribers Only

    The Watchers We Invited In- Ad Free/Early Vault Access

    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 was as simple as buying a train ticket, then follow the trade decade by decade as every new miracle of communication quietly demanded a piece of your private life in payment. The telegraph put your words in corporate files that Lincoln's government read at will. The Kodak camera sparked America's first privacy panic and inspired Louis Brandeis to name the right to be let alone, a fight he was still losing on the Supreme Court forty years later. Party lines trained a generation to assume the neighbors were listening, and then we forgot the lesson right when it mattered most. Along the way we meet the Atlanta company that built secret moral dossiers on tens of millions of Americans before renaming itself Equifax, the FBI programs that read every telegram leaving the country for thirty years, the twenty-three-year-old engineer whose humble shopping cart cookie became the tracking backbone of the modern web, and the auction house where you're bought and sold in the tenth of a second it takes a page to load. I dig into what those endless user agreements actually say, why the cookie banner exists and what clicking accept really means, how a personality quiz harvested eighty-seven million Facebook profiles, and how supposedly anonymous phone data unmasked a priest, mapped secret military bases, and told a Minneapolis father his teenage daughter was pregnant before she did.  And I take on the question everyone asks me, whether the phone in your pocket is actually listening to your conversations, with an evidence-first answer that I promise is more disturbing than a hidden microphone. From the Spanish Prisoner con of the eighteen hundreds to AI voice cloning scams targeting grandparents today, this is the history of the biggest trade America ever made, the one where we sold our privacy one convenience at a time and never once asked the price. If you've ever wondered what you really gave up for that tiny supercomputer you carry everywhere, this episode is for you. Email Brian Join Our FREE Newsletter Get Brian's Books Leave Us A Voicemail Visit Our Website

    The Watchers We Invited In- Ad Free/Early Vault Access

  7. Jul 19

    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 from another world.In this episode, I take the entire story apart with the evidence in hand. The dental records that nobody opened until 1991 and what they actually show about that famous tooth. The occultist whose 1954 letter started it all, and the announcement he promised that never came. The radar targets over Washington that put the whole country on edge, and the classified CIA panel that decided Americans should be talked out of looking up. The Majestic Twelve papers, the FBI file stamped with a single word, and the forged White House memo that appears to have been built from a real civil defense meeting with the year quietly shifted. William Cooper, the Greada Treaty, the Nordics, the Greys, and how a Cold War security state's genuine sins got condensed into folklore about a deal signed in a desert hangar. And then the part that actually keeps me up at night, because the government really was hiding things in the sky over the Mojave in the 1950s. The U-2, Groom Lake, and the CIA's own published admission that it knowingly fed false explanations to the American public for decades to protect its spy planes. The treaty is a myth. The lying is documented. This is the story of how one built the other, from a Palm Springs dinner table to the Pentagon's UAP reports of today, told the way I'd work any case: follow the paper, name the sources, and never round plausible up to true. Have a forgotten historical mystery, disturbing event, unsolved crime, or hidden conspiracy you think deserves investigation? Send your suggestions to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com. Disturbing History is a dark history podcast exploring unsolved mysteries, secret societies, historical conspiracies, lost civilizations, and the shadowy stories buried beneath the surface of the past. Follow the show and enable automatic downloads so you never miss a deep dive into history’s most unsettling secrets. Because sometimes the truth is darker than fiction.

    Ike And The Alien Treaty

  8. Jul 18 • Subscribers Only

    Ike And The Alien Treaty- Ad Free/Early Vault Access

    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 from another world.In this episode, I take the entire story apart with the evidence in hand. The dental records that nobody opened until 1991 and what they actually show about that famous tooth. The occultist whose 1954 letter started it all, and the announcement he promised that never came. The radar targets over Washington that put the whole country on edge, and the classified CIA panel that decided Americans should be talked out of looking up. The Majestic Twelve papers, the FBI file stamped with a single word, and the forged White House memo that appears to have been built from a real civil defense meeting with the year quietly shifted. William Cooper, the Greada Treaty, the Nordics, the Greys, and how a Cold War security state's genuine sins got condensed into folklore about a deal signed in a desert hangar. And then the part that actually keeps me up at night, because the government really was hiding things in the sky over the Mojave in the 1950s. The U-2, Groom Lake, and the CIA's own published admission that it knowingly fed false explanations to the American public for decades to protect its spy planes. The treaty is a myth. The lying is documented. This is the story of how one built the other, from a Palm Springs dinner table to the Pentagon's UAP reports of today, told the way I'd work any case: follow the paper, name the sources, and never round plausible up to true.

    Ike And The Alien Treaty- Ad Free/Early Vault Access
See All (252)

4.9
out of 5
39 Ratings

About

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 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.

Information

  • Creator
    Disturbing History-True Stories
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    252
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2025 Paranormal World Productions LLC
  • Show Website
    Disturbing History
  • Provider
    Brian King-Sharp

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