In eighteen ninety-seven, three men climbed into a hydrogen balloon and set off to float over the North Pole. The balloon came down on the ice two days later. They vanished — and for thirty-three years, nobody knew what happened to them. Then a boot was found in the snow on a remote island, beside cameras with the film still inside.

August Mercer tells the story of a doomed dream, and the photographs developed from a dead man's camera. This is Six Feet of History — five minutes of the past they'd rather you forget.

Follow for a new story every day. A Dark Whisper Studios production.

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A gold-rush town of ten thousand people, high in the California mountains — sixty saloons, a killing a day, and roaring wealth. And then the gold ran low, and one by one, everybody left. The dishes are still in the cupboards. The goods still sit on the store shelves. Nobody has lived there in a very long time.

August Mercer walks through a town frozen in the exact moment of its abandonment — and asks what it says about your own street. This is Six Feet of History — five minutes of the past they'd rather you forget.

Follow for a new story every day. A Dark Whisper Studios production.

In nineteen fifty-one, a poor young mother went to hospital with cancer, and a doctor took a sample of her tumour without telling her. She died months later and was buried in an unmarked grave. But her cells never died. They are alive today in labs all over the world, and helped build modern medicine — and for twenty years, her own family had no idea.

August Mercer tells the story of the stolen cells that changed the world, and the family left in the dark. This is Six Feet of History — five minutes of the past they'd rather you forget.

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It was one of the tallest dams in the world, and it never failed — it is still standing today. But on a night in October nineteen sixty-three, a mountain slid into the reservoir behind it, and a wall of water a hundred and fifty metres high came over the top and erased the towns below. Nearly two thousand people died.

August Mercer tells the story of a catastrophe that everyone saw coming — measured, in writing, for years — and pressed ahead with anyway. This is Six Feet of History — five minutes of the past they'd rather you forget.

Follow for a new story every day. A Dark Whisper Studios production.

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On the night before Halloween, nineteen thirty-eight, Orson Welles broadcast an alien invasion as a series of fake news bulletins — and, so the story goes, threw America into mass panic. Millions fled. It is one of the most famous events in media history. And it is almost entirely a myth.

August Mercer reveals who really invented the panic, and why the true deception wasn't the radio play — it was the news reporting about it. This is Six Feet of History — five minutes of the past they'd rather you forget.

Follow for a new story every day. A Dark Whisper Studios production.

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Four saturation divers lived sealed inside a pressurised chamber at the bottom of the North Sea, their bodies saturated with gas at nine times normal pressure. On a cold night in nineteen eighty-three, a clamp was released a few seconds too early — and five men died in an instant, in one of the most extreme accidents ever recorded.

August Mercer explains the physics, the cover-up that blamed the workers, and the real lesson: why "human error" is almost always a system that let the error be fatal. This is Six Feet of History — five minutes of the past they'd rather you forget.

Follow for a new story every day. A Dark Whisper Studios production.

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In eighteen ninety-eight, two lions began dragging railway workers from their tents in East Africa, night after night, through fire and thorn and gunfire. They stopped the construction of an entire railway. And more than a century later, science finally worked out what was actually wrong with them.

August Mercer tells the true story behind the legend — and the injured jaw that turned two animals into a nightmare. This is Six Feet of History — five minutes of the past they'd rather you forget.

Follow for a new story every day. A Dark Whisper Studios production.

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In seventeen seventy, a machine sat down to play chess — a carved wooden figure in a turban that beat courtiers, diplomats, and, it is said, Napoleon himself. For eighty-four years the greatest minds in Europe and America tried to work out how it thought. It didn't. There was a person folded up in the box.

August Mercer reveals the beautiful, cruel secret of the automaton that fooled the world. This is Six Feet of History — five minutes of the past they'd rather you forget.

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On a Saturday afternoon in nineteen eleven, a fire tore through a New York garment factory packed with young immigrant women. The fire escape buckled. The ladders were too short. And the stairwell door was locked — deliberately, to stop the girls stealing cloth. A hundred and forty-six people died. The youngest were fourteen.

August Mercer tells how their deaths were written into the safety laws that protect us today. This is Six Feet of History — five minutes of the past they'd rather you forget.

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A sixteen-year-old girl was told she was Queen of England. She wept, and refused, and said the crown was not hers. They made her take it anyway. Nine days later, the men who had used her abandoned her — and she was left kneeling, blindfolded, on a scaffold, groping for the block she could not find.

August Mercer tells the story of a pawn in a game she never asked to play. This is Six Feet of History — five minutes of the past they'd rather you forget.

Follow for a new story every day. A Dark Whisper Studios production.

#history #truehistory #truestories