Disturbing History

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 Genoa around 1451, the son of a wool weaver named Domenico Colombo who also operated a cheese stand.

Growing up...

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 and resilience. Instead, it became one of the ugliest chapters of organized expl...

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 War.

This episode of Disturbing History follows Doug fr...

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 fear, from his troubled childhood in segregated Washington D.C. where his father's m...

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 story from the bright optimism of their Springfield, Illinois departure to the fatal decision that sealed their fate—the un...

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 from the first organized police force in America to the militarized...

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 Glastenbury was cursed, a place where the winds clashed endlessly and where the living should not linger. They...

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 battlegrounds and war spirits, to the Scotch-Irish settlers who transformed it into the Devil’s personal walking ground — a place where Sa...

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 survived the war and escaped to South America? That haunting question has fueled books, investigations, and consp...

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 explore Booth's transformation from matinee idol to assassin, tracing his path from the stages...

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 desperately sought. From Oswald's fatherless childhood and defection to the Soviet Union to Ruby's connections with organized crime and the Dallas police, we explore how...

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 engaged them in theological debates, revealed devastating secrets about their neighbors, spoke in ancient languages, and accurately predicted future events. It focused its ra...

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 Washington, and the humiliations he endured as Vice President before seizing the presidency after JFK’s assassination.

From crude phone...

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 one of San Francisco's most politically connected power brokers. We follow the People's Temple's journey from Indianapolis to the isolated hills of Northern California's...

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. Louis, and other urban centers into open-air laboratories for biological warfare research.The story centers on two cities that bore the brunt of...

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 in a Tennessee law office on Christmas Eve 1865 to the digital hate networks of to...

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 celebrate Jefferson as the author of the Declaration of Independence and founder of the University of Virginia, they omit how he tracked the menstrual cycles of...

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 enduring mysteries.The Lake Michigan Triangle stretches from Ludington to Manitowoc to Benton Harbor, encompassing nearly four...

On a clear January evening in 1969, future president Jimmy Carter stood with twenty other men outside a Lions Club meeting in Leary, Georgia, and witnessed something that would forever change his perspective on what flies in our skies. The glowing, color-shifting object that hovered, approached, and retreated over the course of ten minutes would make Carter the first and only U.S. president to officially file a UFO report, and lead to his unprecedented campaign promise to reveal everything the government knew about UFOs if elected.

This episode explores not just Carter's extraordinary sighting and his frustrated attempts...

Welcome aboard another captivating episode of Disturbing History, as we touch down at America's strangest airport—Denver International. Since opening in 1995, this massive facility has become ground zero for some of the wildest conspiracy theories on the planet.From the towering blue horse statue with glowing red eyes (nicknamed "Blucifer") to underground tunnels rumored to house alien bases and New World Order bunkers, DIA is more than an airport—it's a modern myth factory.

We’ll dig into the delayed and over-budget construction that kicked off the speculation, explore Leo Tanguma’s apocalyptic murals, and revisit claims by early wh...

In this chilling episode of Disturbing History, we unlock the vault on one of the most unsettling and secretive programs ever run by the United States government: Project MK Ultra.Born from Cold War paranoia and fueled by a race to control not just territory but thought itself, MK Ultra was a covert CIA operation aimed at mastering the art of mind control.

What followed was decades of illegal human experimentation carried out in the shadows. Ordinary Americans were drugged, manipulated, and monitored—most of them never knowing they were part of an experiment at all.We trace th...

On December 21, 1970, the most unlikely meeting in American political history took place when Elvis Presley appeared unannounced at the White House gates, requesting to become a "Federal Agent at Large" in President Nixon's war on drugs.

What followed was a surreal 30-minute encounter in the Oval Office that produced the most requested photograph in National Archives history—more popular than the Constitution itself.This episode explores the extraordinary true story of two deeply troubled American icons whose brief meeting revealed the dysfunction at the heart of 1970s leadership.

 Nixon, paranoid and medicated, was desperate for cultural val...

On this episode of Disturbing History, we dive deep into one of the most extraordinary and suppressed stories connected to the JFK assassination that you've probably never heard of. While millions of Americans can recite the basic facts of November 22, 1963, virtually none know the name Christopher Fulton or the incredible price he paid for possessing physical evidence that could have rewritten history.

Christopher Fulton was a successful construction magnate living the Canadian dream when he acquired what seemed like a simple piece of Kennedy memorabilia—a gold Cartier watch that had belonged to President Kennedy. What he didn't kn...

In this searing episode of Disturbing History, we uncover the devastating truth behind the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre—one of the deadliest and most systematically buried atrocities in American history.

 This isn't just a story about racial violence. It's about the rise and deliberate destruction of Black Wall Street, a thriving African American community in Tulsa’s Greenwood District, built from the ground up by formerly enslaved people and their descendants. We explore how Greenwood became an extraordinary economic powerhouse, home to hundreds of Black-owned businesses, luxury homes, and professional services. But its success drew deadly envy.

On Ma...

In this episode, we uncover the remarkable true story of Ward Hill Lamon, the rough-edged Virginia lawyer who became Abraham Lincoln’s closest friend and self-declared bodyguard. Lamon wasn’t just a loyal companion—he helped shape the very idea of presidential security in America long before it became an institution.

From their unlikely bond as law partners traveling the Illinois circuit to the life-threatening Baltimore Plot of 1861, this episode traces Lamon’s obsessive commitment to protecting Lincoln at all costs—and how his absence on one critical night changed everything.We explore the conspiracy that nearly ended Lincoln’s...

In this episode of Disturbing History, we dive into the staggering, stranger-than-fiction life of America's most ferocious leader—the one and only Theodore Roosevelt. He wasn’t just a president. He was a warrior, a naturalist, a writer, a boxer, a conservationist, and, quite possibly, the first U.S. president to publish a serious account of a Sasquatch encounter.Born a sickly child with severe asthma, Roosevelt seemed destined for a quiet, fragile life—until sheer willpower turned him into a force of nature.

As a young boy, he stood along the streets of New York City watching Abraha...

In this episode of Disturbing History, we take you deep into the shadows of one of America’s most controversial and misunderstood conflicts: the Vietnam War. But this isn't just a retelling of battles and timelines—this is the story behind the war. The one laced with deception, hidden agendas, political manipulation, and secret operations that spanned decades and cost millions of lives.

We trace the war's dark roots all the way back to the Eisenhower administration, revealing how every U.S. president who followed—Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon—made decisions that pushed the conflict deeper into chaos. Some of those...

In this hard-hitting episode, we unravel the hidden history behind one of humanity’s proudest achievements: landing on the moon. Beneath the surface of scientific triumph lies a story of moral compromise, wartime secrets, and human suffering. We trace the incredible arc from the Wright brothers’ first flight in 1903 to Neil Armstrong’s giant leap in 1969—a leap made possible not just by innovation, but by deals with former Nazi scientists through Operation Paperclip.

 The American space program’s celebrated heroes include men directly tied to slave labor and war crimes, whose pasts were buried in the rush to beat the...

On a hot August night in 1955, in the quiet rural stretch between Kelly and Hopkinsville, Kentucky, something strange lit up the sky. What happened next would become one of the most bizarre and chilling close encounter cases in American history. That evening, a family arrived at the local police station in a panic, claiming their farmhouse had been under siege—not by people, but by creatures. Small, glowing-eyed beings with long arms, talon-like claws, and ears that pointed straight back like bat wings.

They said the creatures emerged from the woods, peeked through windows, clawed at doors, and se...

One if by land, two if by sea.
We all know the legend of Paul Revere’s midnight ride — but what if I told you he wasn’t the only one?In this episode of Disturbing History, Brian King-Sharp shines a light on the forgotten riders of America’s revolution — the men and women who risked everything in the dead of night to spread word of British troop movements.At the center of this lost chapter is Sybil Ludington, a 16-year-old girl who rode twice as far as Revere — alone, through stormy woods, warning militia forces in New York. And she wasn...

It started with a phone call....

In 1997, a man named Mel Waters called into Coast to Coast AM, the legendary late-night radio show dedicated to the unexplained. What he shared was bizarre, chilling, and completely unforgettable—a tale of a bottomless hole on his property in rural Washington State that defied the laws of physics… and maybe reality itself.

In this episode of Disturbing History, Brian unpacks the legend of Mel’s Hole—a seemingly endless pit that swallowed fishing lines by the mile, resurrected dead animals, and attracted the interest of mysterious government agents who may have...

In the early 1830s, the U.S. government signed into law one of the most devastating policies in its history—The Indian Removal Act, forcing tens of thousands of Native Americans from their ancestral homelands.What followed was a harrowing journey of betrayal, suffering, and death known as The Trail of Tears.

In this episode of Disturbing History, Brian traces the brutal expulsion of the Cherokee and other Southeastern tribes at the hands of the American government. Under President Andrew Jackson’s directive, entire communities were marched west at gunpoint—across freezing rivers, through disease-ridden camps, and along miles...

In 1974, a family exploring the aftermath of a wildfire on their Florida property stumbled upon something strange: a perfectly smooth, polished metal sphere, about the size of a bowling ball.They brought it home.

That’s when the weirdness began.The sphere rolled on its own. It reacted to music. It moved without being touched, stopping and starting as if it had a mind of its own. Doors slammed. Guitars vibrated. And a quiet family suddenly found themselves at the center of one of the most bizarre scientific mysteries of the 20th century.

In this episode of...

July 8, 1947. The U.S. military made a stunning announcement: they had recovered a “flying disc” from a ranch near Roswell, New Mexico. Hours later, they walked it back. Just a weather balloon, they said. Case closed. But what really happened in those 24 hours? 

In this episode of Disturbing History, Brian dives deep into the origins of America’s most enduring UFO mystery—beginning with rancher Mac Brazel, who discovered strange debris scattered across his land after a violent storm. 

When he reported it, the story quickly escalated to the highest levels of the military. Major Jesse Marcel, Co...

Long before the skyscrapers and shipping lanes, the Delaware River carried something else—a ghost story whispered across centuries.For generations, sailors, fishermen, and riverfront families have spoken of a phantom vessel drifting silently through the mists—its sails tattered, its deck empty, and its arrival a grim omen. Wherever it was seen, sickness followed. Death lingered. And no one who tried to reach it ever returned with answers.


In this episode of Disturbing History, Brian sails into the chilling legend of the Death Ship of the Delaware, a story that straddles folklore, maritime mystery, and historical plag...

A man in a suit.
A briefcase bomb.
A ransom demand for $200,000.
And then—he vanished into the storm.

On November 24, 1971, a man calling himself Dan Cooper boarded Northwest Orient Flight 305 from Portland to Seattle. Calm, composed, and oddly polite, he would soon become the center of the only unsolved airplane hijacking in U.S. history.

In this episode of Disturbing History, Brian walks through every twist and contradiction in the D.B. Cooper mystery—from the dramatic mid-air jump into darkness, to the strange discoveries in the wilderness, to the endless stream of s...

Beneath the chaos of Manhattan’s streets lies another city—silent, forgotten, and carved in brick and stone. A labyrinth of hidden tunnels snakes beneath old New York, built for subways, smugglers, secret societies, and stories no one was supposed to find.

In this episode of Disturbing History, Brian takes us deep under the surface to explore the eerie and often overlooked world beneath the Big Apple. From Prohibition-era escape routes and underground speakeasies to sealed-off subway stations and Masonic passageways, these tunnels have carried more than just trains—they’ve carried whispers, rumors, and secrets.Who built them?

In 1826, a man named William Morgan vanished from upstate New York. Days earlier, he had announced plans to publish a book revealing the secret rituals of the Freemasons—a move that would ignite national outrage, spark riots, and give birth to America’s first third political party: the Anti-Masonic Party.

But Morgan never lived to see the book hit the shelves.In this episode of Disturbing History, Brian explores the chilling disappearance of William Morgan and the shadowy world of early 19th-century Freemasonry, where power, loyalty, and secrecy were everything.

Was Morgan silenced for betraying the brot...

Decades before the infamous hysteria gripped Salem, Massachusetts, another colony was already burning witches. In the quiet Puritan towns of Connecticut, from 1647 to 1663, women—and even men—were accused, imprisoned, and executed for crimes that existed only in the minds of their accusers. 

No spectral evidence. No headlines. Just a dark chapter buried beneath centuries of silence.In this episode of Disturbing History, Brian unearths the overlooked and unsettling story of America’s first witch trials, where fear took root not in folklore, but in law. With community paranoia, religious extremism, and the collapse of rational justice, Connecticut laid th...

Every July, in the deep redwood forests of Northern California, some of the most powerful men in the world gather in secret. Politicians, CEOs, generals, media moguls—all drawn to a place shrouded in myth and ritual: Bohemian Grove. But what happens beyond the gates?

What’s the meaning behind the robed ceremonies, the 40-foot stone owl, and the burning effigies beneath the trees?In this episode of Disturbing History, Brian peels back the layers of one of America’s most elite and mysterious gatherings—and follows a surprising thread straight to Richard Nixon, who once called the Grove “t...