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Disturbing History

Disturbing History

By: Disturbing History-True Stories
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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 mysteries
  • Secret societies and hidden power structures
  • Dark folklore and urban legends
  • Lost colonies and vanished civilizations
  • True crime cases buried by time
  • Historical conspiracies and cover-ups
  • Paranormal events rooted in real history
Through 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.© 2025 Paranormal World Productions LLC Social Sciences True Crime World
Episodes
  • The Villisca Axe Murders

    The Villisca Axe Murders
    Jun 28 2026
    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 floor beside the bodies, and the doors were locked from the inside when a neighbor noticed the next morning that the chickens hadn't been let out.In this episode, I walk Villisca the way I'd walk any scene, as a former cop with 16 years behind the badge, and I'll tell you up front that this one has bothered me for a long time.

    We go through the contaminated crime scene that a whole town trampled before anyone secured it, and the suspects who each wore the shadow of this thing and never quite fit it: a powerful Iowa state senator with a business grudge against Joe Moore, a suspected serial killer named Blackie Mansfield, and a strange traveling preacher, Reverend George Kelly, who confessed in detail and then took it all back.

    Then there's the theory I keep circling, the one that ties Villisca to a chain of nearly identical family murders along the railroad lines of 1911 and 1912, from Colorado Springs to Kansas to Illinois, and the idea of a single man riding the rails who came in on the tracks, did his work in the dark, and was three states away before the bodies were even found.

    Eight people. Six of them children. A house that became a nightmare with the doors locked from the inside, and a killer who, by every sign, stayed in that house for hours before he walked out and disappeared. More than a hundred years later, we still don't have his name. This is one of the most disturbing unsolved murders in American history, and this is the closest the evidence lets us get.

    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.
    Show More Show Less
    56 mins
  • The Lovelock Giant Legend

    The Lovelock Giant Legend
    Jun 26 2026
    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 Paiute oral tradition and Sarah Winnemucca's 1883 book, the first ever published in English by a Native American woman, through the 1911 guano-mining operation that first disturbed the cave, and into the careful archaeology of Llewellyn Loud and Mark Harrington, whose work pulled ten thousand artifacts and the famous two-thousand-year-old tule duck decoys out of that floor.

    Then I follow the giants forward, into newspaper sensationalism, tourist-trap hucksterism, the Smithsonian-coverup conspiracy, and finally into my own Bigfoot world, where Lovelock is still passed around as proof of Sasquatch.Along the way we separate what's documented from what's invented. The real six-foot-six mummy at the root of it all. What Sarah Winnemucca did and did not write. Why ancient dark hair turns red in the ground. The cattle bones that got mistaken for giants.

    And the nineteenth-century Mound Builder myth that the whole "giants ruled America" industry was quietly built on. As a longtime cryptid researcher, I make the case that Lovelock isn't evidence for Bigfoot at all, and that citing it does real damage, both to honest research and to the memory of the people whose history got strip-mined to build the legend.Were giants found in Nevada, or did America turn Indigenous history into monster lore?

    Listen, then tell me what you think. Hit reply or reach me directly, because I read everything.For more, you can find my other shows, Sasquatch Odyssey and Backwoods Bigfoot Stories, wherever you listen, and everything we make over at paranormalworldproductions.com.

    You can reach me anytime at brian@paranormalworldproductions.com.

    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.
    Show More Show Less
    1 hr and 4 mins
  • Clinton, Area 51, and the Search for UFO Secrets

    Clinton, Area 51, and the Search for UFO Secrets
    Jun 24 2026
    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 thirty years, from a Justice Department office to the steps of the Capitol this June. Along the way we get into what Area 51 actually is, the dry lakebed at Groom Lake where the U-2 and the F-117 were tested in secret, and the boring true reason the government let people believe in saucers rather than admit what was really flying at sixty thousand feet. We follow the billionaire Laurance Rockefeller as he lobbies the Clinton White House for three years to crack the files open and gets nowhere.

    We sit with the Air Force's own Project Mogul explanation for Roswell, the crash-test dummies, and the detail that should bother you more than any of it, the government records that were simply destroyed before anyone could audit them. We watch Governor Fife Symington defuse the Phoenix Lights with a man in a rubber alien suit, then admit years later that he'd seen the thing himself. And we put the Kennedy files next to the UFO question to show how a law with a deadline and a presumption of disclosure can still take sixty years to pry a secret loose.

    Then we follow the thread into the present, through the 2017 New York Times story that exposed the Pentagon's AATIP program, the Navy's Tic Tac and the East Coast sightings, David Grusch's sworn testimony, the watered-down UAP Disclosure Act, AARO's finding of no verifiable evidence, and the June 2026 press conference where bipartisan lawmakers stood up and said the same thing Hubbell wrote in 1997. They asked, and nobody would tell them.

    This isn't a story about a president shaking hands with an alien. It's a story about compartmentalization, special access programs, and whether the line between elected authority and permanent secrecy runs where the Constitution says it does, or somewhere lower and quieter than we'd like to admit.

    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.
    Show More Show Less
    1 hr and 4 mins
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