Disturbing History

What if the terrifying premise behind A Nightmare on Elm Street wasn't entirely fiction? What if people really were going to sleep, experiencing horrifying nightmares, and dying before they could wake up?In the fall of 1980, a Hmong refugee named Vang Xiong endured three terrifying nights in a Chicago apartment. First came a dream of a cat sitting on his chest, suffocating him.

The following night, a massive black dog pinned him to his bed. On the third night, a pale, female spirit emerged from his kitchen, climbed onto his chest, and held him helpless for nearly fifteen minutes. For Xiong, these weren't simply bad dreams. Since 1977, seemingly healthy Hmong men across America had been dying mysteriously in their sleep. They went to bed alive and never woke up. 

Autopsies revealed no obvious cause. Doctors were baffled, families were terrified, and an entire refugee community feared that something was following them into their dreams.Welcome to Part Two of Disturbing History's special series exploring the terrifying true stories behind Hollywood's most iconic horror movies.

This time, we're uncovering the real-life nightmare that inspired Wes Craven's 1984 horror masterpiece, A Nightmare on Elm Street. For decades, Craven openly acknowledged that his inspiration came from newspaper reports about Southeast Asian refugees suffering deadly nightmares. Freddy Krueger, his razor-fingered supernatural killer, was fictional. But the mysterious deaths that inspired him were very real. The Centers for Disease Control ultimately documented 117 cases of what became known as Sudden Unexpected Nocturnal Death Syndrome, or SUNDS. At its peak in 1981, the death rate among Hmong men reached an alarming 92 per 100,000.

 Brian traces this deadly mystery across continents and generations, beginning with medical reports from the Philippines in 1917 describing bangungot, a mysterious phenomenon associated with sudden death during sleep. From Filipino laborers in Hawaii to isolated villages in Thailand and construction workers in Singapore, the same terrifying pattern emerged: healthy young men dying suddenly in the night. But the mystery becomes even darker when Brian explores the CIA's secret war in Laos, the desperate escape of Hmong families across the Mekong River, and the refugee camps where thousands waited for a chance at survival.

After resettlement in America, many found themselves isolated from their communities, stripped of familiar religious protections, and haunted by beliefs surrounding the dab tsog, a terrifying spirit said to sit on a sleeping person's chest and steal their breath.

Was this an ancient supernatural belief colliding with modern medicine? A deadly genetic condition? Or could the extraordinary trauma of war, displacement, and cultural isolation have played a role? The investigation eventually leads to a startling medical discovery. 

Doctors began identifying fatal disturbances in the heart's electrical system, and researchers later connected many unexplained nighttime deaths to Brugada syndrome, an inherited condition capable of triggering deadly heart rhythms during sleep. Yet the scientific explanation leaves disturbing questions unanswered. Why did deaths among Hmong refugees peak so dramatically in 1981? 

Why were men especially vulnerable during their first two years in America? Why did the epidemic eventually fade? And why could a medical condition that exists across populations produce such an extraordinary concentration of deaths within one traumatized refugee community?

Drawing on historical medical investigations, CDC findings, Southeast Asian folklore, and the work of medical anthropologist Shelley Adler, Brian examines the uneasy intersection of science, cultural belief, psychological trauma, and death.

This is the true history behind A Nightmare on Elm Street. A story of war, ancient spirits, unexplained deaths, and a real-life nightmare that medicine still hasn't completely explained.

Because long before Freddy Krueger haunted Elm Street, there were men who were genuinely afraid to fall asleep.

And some of them never woke up.


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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.

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Because sometimes the truth is darker than fiction.

On the night of August 21, 1986, a small crater lake in the highlands of northwest Cameroon released something close to a quarter of a cubic mile of carbon dioxide in a matter of minutes. The gas was heavier than air. It poured over the rim of the crater, ran down the valleys the way water would have, and passed through the villages of Nyos, Cha and Subum while people were finishing supper or already asleep.

The official death toll is one thousand seven hundred and forty-six. That number is an estimate, because soldiers and relatives buried the dead before anyone counted them.

This episode of Disturbing History starts two years earlier and sixty miles south, on a road beside another lake called Monoun, where thirty-seven people died before dawn in August of 1984 and nobody could say why.

 A volcanologist named Haraldur Sigurdsson went looking for an eruption, couldn't find one, and hauled up a bottle of deep water that blew its own lid off. He concluded that the lake itself had been storing carbon dioxide and had let it go all at once. According to Smithsonian Magazine, he sent that finding to the journal Science a few months before Nyos, and it was turned down as far-fetched. Brian walks through the night at Lake Nyos using the accounts of the people who lived.

Ephriam Che heard a rumble from his house on the cliff, saw white mist rising off the water, and went to bed feeling sick. Halima Suley woke the next morning among the bodies of her four children, thirty-one other relatives and four hundred cattle. Joseph Nkwain collapsed on his own floor in Subum trying to reach his daughter's bed. A health worker bicycling home found a dead antelope on the road and tied it to his bike before he understood what he was riding into.From there the episode follows what happened once the outside world found out.

The government's first radio announcement put the dead at forty. The army dug mass graves by hand because the bulldozers couldn't get up the mud tracks. Israeli army medics arrived with a prime minister on a state visit, which fed a rumor that still circulates about a secret weapons test. Scientists from half a dozen countries reached the lake within days and split into two camps, one arguing the gas had been stored in the water and one arguing a volcanic blast had come up through the lake bed. Survivors had blistered skin and remembered a smell of gunpowder and rotten eggs, and carbon dioxide isn't supposed to cause either.The last part of the episode covers the decades since.

The lake was refilling with gas. It took fifteen years and a four hundred thousand dollar grant to stand a single pipe in it. The natural dam holding the lake back was eroding toward a flood that would have reached Nigeria. Thousands of survivors were moved into resettlement camps on land too small to farm or graze, and as of the last reporting available they had never been formally allowed home. One of those camps was burned down in 2020. The mass graves from 1986 were lost to the bush within a few seasons, and nobody can say now where they are.



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Because sometimes the truth is darker than fiction.

On August 20, 1949, the Washington Post put a story on its front page under the headline "Priest Frees Mt. Rainier Boy Reported Held in Devil's Grip." It said a 14-year-old from the Maryland suburbs had been freed of demonic possession after a Jesuit read the rite of exorcism over him 20 to 30 times, and that the boy had screamed, cursed and spoken Latin he had never been taught.

A Georgetown undergraduate named William Peter Blatty read it. In 1971 he published The Exorcist, and in 1973 the film opened on 30 screens and had theaters keeping ambulances on call.

As spooky season gets underway, Disturbing History is running a series on the true history behind some of the most famous and beloved horror movies of all time, and sometimes the true story is more disturbing than anything Hollywood cooked up. The series opens with The Exorcist, and this episode takes Regan MacNeil out of the picture and goes back to the boy. He was 13 years old and lived at 3807 40th Avenue in Cottage City, a mile or so from the town the Post named.

The rite ended on April 18, a month earlier than the paper reported. And the diary kept by Father Raymond Bishop, one of the Jesuits in the room, says he never once answered the priests in Latin. Brian follows the case in the order it happened, beginning with scratching under the floorboards on January 15, 1949, and an exterminator whose chemicals changed nothing. The family had a spiritualist aunt in St. Louis who had shown the boy a Ouija board. Their Lutheran pastor, Luther Miles Schulze, took the boy home for a night, watched a chair tip over, and later told the story to a parapsychology society for laughs.

 A physician found a healthy child and a psychiatrist said he did not believe any of it. Words came up on the boy's skin, and they said Louis and Saturday. A Maryland priest, Father E. Albert Hughes, is supposed to have had his arm slashed during a first exorcism at Georgetown University Hospital, a story that rests on a 1972 newspaper interview and one dinner conversation, while his parishioners remembered him pitching batting practice that same spring.

The center of the episode is the diary itself, night by night, from March 16 to April 18, 1949. Father William Bowdern read the Roman Ritual in a suburban bedroom with the light on while red welts, the word HELL and a devil figure came up on the boy's skin. It took three and four men to hold a 13-year-old to a mattress, and he broke Walter Halloran's nose with his eyes shut. He sang Swanee and The Blue Danube at five in the morning. He was baptized while fighting it, taken by train to Washington and back, and put in a room with a barred window on the fifth floor of the Alexian Brothers Hospital, where on Easter Monday a voice announced itself as Saint Michael.

The second half of the episode is the investigation. In 1960 Bowdern told a young Jesuit scholar, Henry Ansgar Kelly, that there had been no signs of possession at all before the exorcisms began, that the boy knew exactly one word of Latin, and that he had caught his own memory making the story more impressive. Another Jesuit who was present, William Van Roo, told Kelly he saw a sick child. In the late 1990s Mark Opsasnick taped 102 interviews in Cottage City, found the boy's best friend, and asked Halloran the question nobody asked in 1949, which was whether anyone had checked the boy's fingernails. The diary's own entry for April 7 records him writing on his chest with one.

The episode also covers what Blatty changed and what he kept, the letter in which Bowdern told him the case was "the real thing," the production that ran from 85 scheduled days to more than 200, the so-called curse and where it actually came from, and the second layer of folklore the film created, including a vacant lot in Mount Rainier where teenagers gathered for years at the wrong address.The boy grew up, worked about 40 years for NASA, and died in Maryland in 2020.

He never gave an interview. The only account ever attributed to him is six words, reported secondhand after his death.

Disturbing History is a Paranormal World Productions podcast, hosted, researched, written, narrated, and produced by Brian King-Sharp. If this episode was worth your time, rate and review the show and share it with somebody who loves the movie.

If there's a story you think belongs on the show, write to [email protected].



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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.

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Because sometimes the truth is darker than fiction.

In September 2024 a documentary filmmaker named Ky Dickens released the first episode of a podcast called The Telepathy Tapes. By the first week of January 2025 it had passed Joe Rogan on Spotify's U.S. chart. Its claim is that children and young adults who can't speak, most of them diagnosed with autism, are reading the minds of their parents and teachers and meeting each other in a place they call the hill.

In this episode of Disturbing History, Brian  explains why he pressed play. Several guests on Sasquatch Odyssey have told him they experienced what they call mind speak with a Sasquatch. He also talks about Daniel Lee Barnett, a young Bigfoot researcher from Somerset, England, who is autistic and spent most of his childhood nonverbal.

Daniel began speaking again after his grandfather introduced him to Bigfoot and he and his Nan, Jill, started getting out into the forest near their home. Brian met Daniel at 13 through researcher Amy Bue, has visited the family in England several times, and counts them as his own family. After hearing the series, he asked Daniel whether he'd ever had a telepathic connection with anyone. Daniel said he hadn't.

From there the episode covers 140 years of attempts to prove telepathy, from the Cambridge scholar who coined the word in 1882 to Mark Twain's crossed letters, Upton Sinclair's drawings, J. B. Rhine's card decks at Duke, and a U.S. government program that cost around 20 million dollars before it was shut down in 1995.Then Brian goes family by family.

Mia, a 12-year-old from Monterrey, Mexico, typed 3-digit numbers her mother had seen while she sat blindfolded behind a partition in a rented house in Glendale.

Akhil, a college student in New Jersey, typed the answer to an 8-digit multiplication problem off a calculator he couldn't see, with nobody touching him.

Houston, in Georgia, spoke to his mother for the first time at 17, spelled his first sentence at 21, and then told her he'd been hearing her thoughts his whole life.

 His friend John Paul, 16 years old and 6 foot 8, lay under a stack of pillows to visit the hill and wanted to marry a girl named Lily.

 Amelia, a 10-year-old near Milwaukee, typed her aide's computer password and told her mother that her best friend was a girl the school could never find.John Paul never saw the series released. He died on September 24, 2023, at 17, after a seizure in the hot tub at his home.

Brian tells what his mother Libby has said about that day, and what the families say happened next. Houston spelled that John Paul was free before his mother says she'd told him anything. A boy named Zaharia, who knew John Paul almost entirely from the hill, typed a message for Libby before his own mother had seen the news. And after the death was posted online, other parents wrote to say their kids were spelling that John Paul had told them he was leaving and had said goodbye.

 Brian also puts the hard question on the table, the one a critic asked afterward: if his friends knew, why didn't anyone tell his mother?

The episode also covers Dr. Diane Hennacy Powell, the Johns Hopkins trained neuropsychiatrist whose research started the series, the teachers who say they kept quiet for 30 years, and the critics. 

Brian lays out the history of facilitated communication, the picture tests of the early 1990s, a horse in Berlin called Clever Hans, the position of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, and Powell's own complaints about how the show presented her results.

He says where the skeptical explanation works for him, where it runs short, and why he still came away believing.



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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.

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Because sometimes the truth is darker than fiction.

This episode asks a simple question: if someone really discovered a cure for cancer, would the medical industry suppress it? Brian begins with a clear disclaimer that he is not a doctor and is making no medical claims, then looks at the history behind one of the most persistent conspiracy theories in modern medicine.

The episode briefly examines Brown’s Gas, Yull Brown’s 1977 welding patent, and early research involving hydrogen and oxygen inhalation before turning to the larger claim of medical suppression. It starts with the infamous 2018 Goldman Sachs report that asked whether curing patients was a sustainable business model, using Gilead’s hepatitis C treatment as an example of what happens when a highly effective therapy eventually reduces its own customer base.

From there, Brian traces more than a century of controversial cancer treatments and alleged suppressed cures, including William Coley, Royal Rife, Harry Hoxsey, Max Gerson, Krebiozen, Laetrile, Linus Pauling’s vitamin C research, Stanislaw Burzynski, and several alternative cancer clinics. Some were dismissed too quickly, others became major scientific disputes, and many ultimately failed when tested under controlled conditions.

The episode also examines cases where powerful industries really did hide dangerous information, including the tobacco industry’s decades-long campaign to obscure the health risks of smoking, asbestos companies suppressing evidence, the sugar industry abandoning research that produced troubling results, and DuPont’s history with C8 contamination.

Then Brian looks at what successful cancer treatments actually look like when evidence holds up. Cisplatin transformed survival for testicular cancer. Childhood leukemia went from nearly hopeless to highly treatable. Taxol emerged from a federal plant-screening program. Gleevec revolutionized treatment for chronic myeloid leukemia, and modern checkpoint inhibitors grew from ideas about using the immune system to attack cancer.

The episode closes by asking where the line should be drawn between skepticism of powerful institutions and claims that cannot survive scientific testing.

History shows that corporations and medical institutions have sometimes hidden inconvenient truths. It also shows that when a treatment truly works, repeated evidence has a way of becoming impossible to ignore.



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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.

On July 16, 1990, Time magazine put a group of young adults on its cover beneath the word “twentysomething” and asked whether they were laid back, late blooming, or simply lost. The story said they struggled to make decisions, would rather hike the Himalayas than climb the corporate ladder, and had no anthems, no heroes, and an attention span as short as one click of the remote. Those young adults were the same kids who had been labeled “at risk” in the 1980s. 

Now they were entering adulthood under a new set of warnings. This is the fifth episode in the Disturbing History series on the American decades, and this time Brian looks back at the 1990s, the decade he grew up in.

The story begins just before the decade officially started, on November 9, 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down. From there, the episode follows the same path as the rest of the series: beginning with the version of the decade America remembers, then digging into the stories it often forgot. And there was plenty to celebrate. Unemployment fell from 7.8 percent in 1992 to 4 percent by the end of 1999. The Dow climbed from 2,753 to 11,497. The federal government recorded its first budget surplus since 1969. Homicides dropped dramatically. 

Teen birth rates declined. Juvenile murder arrests fell by roughly two-thirds.And the generation supposedly unable to make decisions helped build the internet. Then the story moves beneath the surface. Brian examines the 1990s panic over so-called juvenile “super-predators,” a prediction that helped reshape laws across the country even as youth violence was already falling. 

He follows that fear into a string of school shootings in Pearl, West Paducah, Jonesboro, and Springfield before arriving at Columbine on April 20, 1999.The episode looks at the propane bombs that were intended to be the real centerpiece of the Columbine attack, the music and video games blamed afterward, and a search warrant affidavit drafted against one of the shooters more than a year earlier that was never presented to a judge. The decade’s fear of the internet gets similar treatment.

A 1995 Time cover story warning about cyberporn relied heavily on a flawed undergraduate study. The panic helped fuel the Communications Decency Act. Most of that law was struck down by the Supreme Court in 1997, but 26 words survived and became Section 230.Brian also follows the internet boom itself, from Netscape’s 1995 IPO to the rise of Amazon, eBay, Google, and Napster. Then comes the money underneath it all: the 1998 collapse of Long-Term Capital Management, the emergency meetings in New York, and the 1999 repeal of Glass-Steagall.From there, the episode turns to what the government was not saying.

In March 1991, U.S. forces demolished an Iraqi nerve agent depot at Khamisiyah. Nearly 100,000 American troops may have been downwind. The Pentagon denied the exposure for years.In Albuquerque, reporter Eileen Welsome uncovered the story of people secretly injected with plutonium during the early Cold War. Once government files were opened, investigators found thousands of radiation experiments, including radioactive oatmeal fed to schoolboys and radioactive iron given to pregnant women.

President Bill Clinton formally apologized in 1995.Then there was Waco. Federal authorities denied for years that incendiary tear gas rounds had been used during the final assault on April 19, 1993. That admission did not come until 1999.And in December 1995, the FDA approved a new painkiller called OxyContin with language on its label that would later become central to one of the largest pharmaceutical scandals in American history.

The episode also revisits the seven tobacco executives who raised their hands before Congress in 1994 and denied that nicotine was addictive, followed by the $206 billion tobacco settlement four years later.It covers the deadly Chicago heat wave of 1995, when hundreds died in a single week. It examines the mislabeled oxygen generators that contributed to the crash of ValuJet Flight 592 in the Everglades in 1996.

Brian also looks at the West Memphis Three, the Y2K panic, the satellites that really did experience problems at midnight, and the customs inspector in Port Angeles, Washington, who stopped a rental car in December 1999 and discovered explosives intended for Los Angeles International Airport.

The decade ends where it began: with Time magazine judging a new generation.On May 20, 2013, the magazine ran another cover story asking what was wrong with young adults.

This time, one of the people doing the judging belonged to the very generation Time had questioned back in 1990.

Different decade. Different generation.



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Have a forgotten historical mystery, disturbing event, unsolved crime, or hidden conspiracy you think deserves investigation?

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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.

Listener discretion is advised. This episode contains descriptions of real-life violence and death, including the shooting deaths of a fourteen-year-old boy, his mother, and a federal law enforcement officer. It also includes direct quotations expressing racist and extremist beliefs. Some listeners may find this material disturbing or offensive.

On August 22, 1992, an FBI sniper positioned roughly two hundred yards above a remote cabin in northern Idaho fired two shots. The first struck Randy Weaver as he moved near the shed where the body of his fourteen-year-old son, Sammy, had been placed after being killed the previous day. The second bullet passed through the curtained window of the cabin door and killed Weaver’s wife, Vicki, as she stood inside holding their ten-month-old daughter.

At the time, no one had formally told the family who surrounded the cabin or ordered them to surrender. Federal authorities would not learn that Vicki Weaver had been killed until days later.

This episode of Disturbing History takes a deep look at Ruby Ridge—not the simplified version that became a political slogan, but the complicated chain of decisions, mistakes, intelligence failures, disputed gunfire, and deadly consequences documented in the government’s own investigations.

Brian traces the story back years before the siege, beginning with Randy and Vicki Weaver’s decision to leave Iowa and move their family into the mountains of Idaho. From there, the episode follows the growing interest of federal authorities, allegations made by a neighbor, Weaver’s contact with white separatist circles, and an undercover ATF investigation involving two illegally shortened shotguns. Government investigators would later question parts of that operation and acknowledge they could not completely rule out whether Weaver had been improperly encouraged into committing the offense.

Then came the bureaucratic mistake that helped transform a firearms case into a federal fugitive operation.A probation officer sent Weaver a letter listing the wrong trial date—March 20 instead of February 20. By the time the mistake was discovered, a bench warrant had already been issued. Despite knowing Weaver had received incorrect information, the warrant remained active, and prosecutors later indicted him for failure to appear before the erroneous date he had been given had even arrived.

The Justice Department would later describe the situation as creating an “appearance of governmental overreaching.” The episode also examines how letters written by Vicki Weaver and references to extremist figures helped shape the government’s threat assessment of the family, eventually contributing to comparisons between Weaver and violent white supremacist organizations.

Then, on August 21, 1992, six deputy U.S. marshals conducting surveillance encountered the Weaver family’s dog, Striker. What followed at a trail junction known as “the Y” remains one of the most disputed moments of the entire case.Within seconds, Deputy U.S. Marshal William Degan and fourteen-year-old Sammy Weaver were dead. Investigators were ultimately unable to conclusively determine who fired the first shot.

The next day, the FBI arrived.Special rules of engagement were drafted during the flight to Idaho—rules that would later become one of the most controversial aspects of the operation. Within hours, FBI sniper Lon Horiuchi fired the shots that wounded Randy Weaver and killed Vicki Weaver.

From there, the episode reconstructs the extraordinary details of the siege: failed communications, surrender announcements broadcast after Vicki was already dead, FBI snipers suffering from exposure because they were not equipped for the mountain weather, armored vehicles approaching the cabin, negotiations conducted over loudspeakers, and the eventual arrival of former Green Beret and presidential candidate Bo Gritz, who helped establish direct contact with the family.

The final portion of the episode examines what happened when Ruby Ridge reached the courtroom and eventually Congress. The forty-two-day criminal trial resulted in acquittals on most of the major charges.

 A Justice Department task force concluded that the sniper’s second shot did not meet constitutional standards. An FBI official later went to prison for destroying an internal report related to the case. The Weaver family received a $3.1 million civil settlement from the federal government.

Years later, FBI sniper Lon Horiuchi would face a state manslaughter charge over Vicki Weaver’s death, leading to a lengthy legal fight in the federal courts before the case was ultimately dropped.

And in 1995, Randy Weaver appeared before the United States Senate carrying the cabin door through which the bullet that killed his wife had passed.



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Have a forgotten historical mystery, disturbing event, unsolved crime, or hidden conspiracy you think deserves investigation?

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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 1980s began with 52 Americans still being held hostage in Tehran and ended with crowds tearing open the Berlin Wall. Between those two moments came one of the most turbulent, contradictory decades in modern American history.

In this fourth episode of the Disturbing History decades series, Brian looks back at the decade he grew up in—beyond the neon, MTV, blockbuster movies, and nostalgia. The episode moves through the moments everyone remembers: the Miracle on Ice, Mount St. Helens, the shooting of John Lennon, the launch of MTV, the Macintosh, Live Aid, the MAS*H finale, Reagan’s presidency, and the Challenger disaster. Then it turns the decade over.Behind the economic recovery were recession, mass unemployment, the firing of 11,359 air traffic controllers, a frozen minimum wage, the farm crisis, a soaring national debt, and the savings-and-loan collapse. 

The decade also saw deadly failures at the Hyatt Regency, Air Florida Flight 90, and Challenger—disasters where warnings, design changes, or ignored risks became part of the story.Fear shaped the culture as much as prosperity did. The Tylenol murders changed product safety forever. Missing children appeared on milk cartons. The McMartin preschool case fed the satanic panic. Dungeons & Dragons, heavy metal, and supposed occult networks became national anxieties. At the same time, Cold War tensions pushed the United States and Soviet Union dangerously close to catastrophe.

The episode also revisits stories the decade nearly forgot: Lawnchair Larry, the buried E.T. cartridges, the Titanic discovery’s secret Navy connection, Al Capone’s empty vault, Cleveland’s disastrous balloon release, Baby Jessica, cold fusion, and a garbage barge that became a national spectacle. Then come the scandals and secrets: Iran-Contra, presidential astrology, Iran Air Flight 655, the USS Iowa explosion, and other moments where the official story raised as many questions as it answered.

Beneath all of it were the quieter death tolls that rarely defined the decade on television: heart disease, cigarettes, drunk driving, gun violence, the crack epidemic, the early AIDS crisis, and tens of thousands of suicides every year.

The 1980s also handed the future some of its foundations—the early internet, the World Wide Web proposal, cellular phones, modern talk radio, sentencing laws that reshaped American prisons, major environmental agreements, and early warnings about climate change.


And once again, the episode ends with the same recurring pattern: the generation everyone complained about grew up and started complaining about its own children. Four decades in a row.



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Have a forgotten historical mystery, disturbing event, unsolved crime, or hidden conspiracy you think deserves investigation?

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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.

On the night of May 18, 1910, people across the world waited for Halley’s Comet to kill them.Hotels in New York opened their rooftops. Miners in Pennsylvania refused to go underground. A religious sect outside Atlanta reportedly barricaded itself inside a cave.

In Chicago, people sealed their doors and windows against a poisonous gas they believed was coming from space.Then Earth passed through the comet’s tail.Nothing happened.

In this episode of Disturbing History, Brian explores how a scientific discovery became a worldwide panic. In February 1910, astronomers detected cyanogen in the comet’s tail—a chemical related to cyanide. Newspapers seized on the finding, and alarming comments from famed astronomer Camille Flammarion helped fuel fears that the gas might poison Earth’s atmosphere and wipe out humanity.

The result was a strange mixture of science, superstition, opportunism, and outright hysteria .Brian follows the story from Halley’s approach and the unexpected appearance of the Great Daylight Comet, through the deaths of Mark Twain and King Edward VII, and into centuries of older beliefs that treated comets as warnings of war, plague, and death.

Then came the profiteers. Businesses sold comet-themed products. Bartenders offered whiskey as protection from cyanogen.

 A Los Angeles broker reportedly sold comet insurance. Men in Texas marketed sugar-and-quinine “comet pills” and leather gas masks. Farmers refused to plant crops, and one California prospector reportedly nailed himself to a cross in preparation for the end.

The episode also investigates one of the most famous stories from the panic: an alleged Oklahoma cult that supposedly planned to sacrifice a teenage girl to stop the comet—a story later researchers found had almost certainly never happened.

Finally, the story ends more than a century later inside a cave in Puerto Rico, where researchers discovered a charcoal drawing dated May 23, 1910: a comet descending toward a grave, apparently drawn by a 15-year-old boy who had lived through the fear.

This is the story of the night humanity waited for poison from the sky—and the panic that arrived long before the comet ever did.


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Have a forgotten historical mystery, disturbing event, unsolved crime, or hidden conspiracy you think deserves investigation?

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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.

This episode discusses sexual violence against children and teenagers, torture, and murder and is not suitable for younger audiences. Listener discretion is strongly advised. 

On the night of June 11, 1980, plainclothes officers who had been following a Ford Econoline van through Hollywood watched its driver approach a series of young men along Santa Monica Boulevard. 

Five refused to get inside. The sixth was a 15-year-old runaway.When the van eventually stopped in a vacant lot and officers heard screams coming from inside, they moved in. Behind the door they found 33-year-old truck driver William Bonin assaulting a bound teenager. 

The arrest ended one of the most brutal murder sprees in Southern California history.

In this episode of Disturbing History, Brian examines the complete story of the man the press dubbed the Freeway Killer, using court opinions, federal appeals records, corrections documents, contemporary reporting, and testimony from the people who survived him.

The story begins decades before the murders, with Bonin's deeply troubled childhood, institutionalization, military service in Vietnam, and a disturbing pattern of sexual violence that began almost immediately after his 1968 discharge.Authorities had multiple opportunities to see what he was becoming.

After attacking several teenage boys, Bonin was committed to Atascadero State Hospital, where records documented sexual sadism, antisocial behavior, and his own warning that future victims might not be left alive. Released in 1974, he attacked again the following year. After another conviction, he was paroled in October 1978.

Within months, boys and young men began disappearing.From 13-year-old Thomas Lundgren in May 1979 to 18-year-old Steven Wells in June 1980, Bonin would later describe the murders of 21 victims. Bodies were abandoned beside freeways, dumped along roads, and left in isolated areas across Southern California.

The episode reconstructs the murder spree in chronological order while examining the evidence that eventually connected Bonin to the crimes, including distinctive carpet fibers from his van, witness testimony, physical evidence, confessions, and the investigation led by LAPD homicide detective John St. John.

It also examines the four younger men drawn into Bonin's orbit—Vernon Butts, Gregory Miley, William Pugh, and James Munro—and the very different roles they played in the murders and in the case that eventually brought Bonin down.


Then came two murder trials, controversial defense decisions, disputes over confessions and plea negotiations, death sentences, and nearly fourteen years of appeals.On February 23, 1996, William Bonin became the first person executed by lethal injection in California.But one part of the story remains unfinished. Among the victims Bonin admitted killing was a young man whose body was discovered beside Route 99 south of Bakersfield in November 1979.


More than four decades later, his identity remains unknown. 



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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.

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