The Bystander Effect
Episode Date: September 16, 2026On March 27, 1964, The New York Times published a story that would become one of the most famous examples of human indifference ever told. According t...
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 Brian King-Sharp, each episode is a deep, immersive journey into the stories that disturb us — and the ones we have to disturb to uncover the truth. So if you're drawn to the uncomfortable, obsessed with the unexplained, or just can’t shake the feeling that some things never should’ve been buried…You’re not alone. Follow. Subscribe. Turn on auto-downloads.And get ready to disturb history.
148 episodes transcribedOn March 27, 1964, The New York Times published a story that would become one of the most famous examples of human indifference ever told. According t...
Everybody knows the line: “Don’t trust anyone over thirty.” It became shorthand for an entire generation, even though the man who said it was a 24-yea...
A warning before you press play: this episode contains descriptions of extreme violence and what was done to several victims, including after death.In...
Everybody carries a version of the 1950s around in their head, and the strange thing is that a surprising amount of it is true. For millions of Americ...
On the evening of January 17, 1961, with just three days left in his presidency, Dwight D. Eisenhower delivered a 16-minute farewell address containin...
Everyone knows the voice, the perm, and the happy little trees. Far fewer people know what happened to Bob Ross’s name after the cameras stopped rolli...
On March 28, 1979, at 4:00 a.m., a relief valve at Three Mile Island opened as designed—and then failed to close. For more than two hours, operators b...
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On the night of January 27, 1986, a Morton Thiokol engineer named Allan McDonald refused to sign a document saying it was safe to launch the space shu...
On December 15, 1967, ten days before Christmas, the Silver Bridge at Point Pleasant, West Virginia collapsed into the Ohio River during rush hour, ki...
78 minutes after the front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building came off, an Oklahoma Highway Patrol trooper named Charles Hanger pulled over a ye...
In September 1950, a United States Navy vessel spent eight days off the San Francisco coastline spraying clouds of live bacteria into the wind, and no...
You clicked “I Agree.” You never clicked anything for the camera on the pole outside your kid’s school. On May 9, 2025, a deputy with the Johnson Coun...
On the morning of March 16, 1968, an American helicopter pilot named Hugh Thompson dropped a smoke grenade to mark a wounded Vietnamese woman so a med...
In June of 1780, on a hill outside what's now Lincolnton, North Carolina, more than a thousand men killed each other in fog so thick you couldn't see...
Around 1200 BC, a king named Ammurapi dictated a letter from the port city of Ugarit describing seven enemy ships, burned towns, and an army that was...
Part one left the old man under an obelisk in Cleveland, ninety-seven years old, the richest human being who had ever lived, and remembered by most of...
In February of 1908, a reporter for Joseph Pulitzer's New York World walked into a drugstore in Freeport, Illinois, put a photograph on the counter, a...
A man in Zhengzhou spent eight years living in a $42-a-month rental and sending every spare yuan home to his wife so she'd feel secure. When he finall...
At two minutes past seven on the evening of December 21, 1988, an air traffic controller at Prestwick watched a single radar return break apart into a...