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You'd never confess to a crime you didn't commit, right? Out of the first 375 people in the United States cleared by DNA evidence after a conviction, 102 of them had. In this episode of Disturbing History, Brian looks at how an innocent person ends up in an interrogation room saying the words, who built the room, and what it did to a long list of real people whose names belong in the record. The episode opens with Peter Reilly, an 18-year-old in Canaan, Connecticut, who came home from a church meeting in September 1973 and found his mother dead. After roughly 25 hours of questioning and a polygraph he was told he'd failed, Reilly began telling state police that it really looked like he'd done it. The tape of that interrogation survived, and so did the witness statements that put him miles away, which sat undisclosed in a prosecutor's file for four years. From there the story goes back to the 1936 Supreme Court case Brown v. Mississippi, where three Black tenant farmers were whipped into confessing and a deputy testified it wasn't too much for a Negro, and forward to the Chicago polygraph examiner John Reid, whose nine-step technique replaced the third degree and still dominates American police training.  Reid's own signature case, the 1955 confession of Darrel Parker in Lincoln, Nebraska, turned out to be false when a career criminal's deathbed admission came to light decades later. The episode covers Miranda v. Arizona, the 1969 Frazier v. Cupp decision that made it legal for police to lie about evidence in all 50 states, and the research of psychologist Saul Kassin, including the 1996 experiment in which 100 percent of innocent college students signed a confession under the right conditions, and the 2004 study showing that innocent suspects waive their Miranda rights far more often than guilty ones do.Then the cases. The Central Park Five, questioned for up to 30 hours and told they could go home. The Norfolk Four, where a detective later convicted of extortion kept adding sailors to a rape and murder that DNA tied to one man acting alone. The Beatrice Six in Nebraska, where a sheriff's psychologist taught suspects that repressed memories of a murder could surface in dreams, and five of them pleaded guilty to a crime committed by a man who'd been excluded years earlier by a blood-typing error. Earl Washington Jr., with an IQ around 69, who came within nine days of execution in Virginia on a confession that got the victim's race, height, and number of wounds wrong. Christopher Ochoa and Richard Danziger in Austin, Jeffrey Deskovic in Peekskill, 14-year-old Michael Crowe in Escondido, Juan Rivera in Waukegan, Marty Tankleff on Long Island, Damon Thibodeaux on Louisiana's death row, Huwe Burton in the Bronx, the Dixmoor Five, the West Memphis Three, Brendan Dassey, and the torture victims of Chicago's Area Two under Commander Jon Burge. The episode closes with what has changed since: the Illinois recording law sponsored in 2003 by a state senator named Barack Obama, the 2017 decision by one of the country's largest police training firms to stop teaching the Reid Technique, the juvenile deception bans now in ten states, the British PEACE model built after the Guildford Four and Birmingham Six, and the fact that in every state in this country, police may still lie to an adult about the evidence. It ends back in Canaan, where the murder of Barbara Gibbons has been open for 53 years and her son remains the only person ever tried for it. Email Brian Get Brian's Books Leave Us A Voicemail Visit Our Website Have a forgotten historical mystery, disturbing event, unsolved crime, or hidden conspiracy you think deserves investigation? Send your suggestions to [email protected]. 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.

You'd never confess to a crime you didn't commit, right? Out of the first 375 people in the United States cleared by DNA evidence after a conviction, 102 of them had. In this episode of Disturbing History, Brian looks at how an innocent person ends up in an interrogation room saying the words, who built the room, and what it did to a long list of real people whose names belong in the record. The episode opens with Peter Reilly, an 18-year-old in Canaan, Connecticut, who came home from a church meeting in September 1973 and found his mother dead. After roughly 25 hours of questioning and a polygraph he was told he'd failed, Reilly began telling state police that it really looked like he'd done it. The tape of that interrogation survived, and so did the witness statements that put him miles away, which sat undisclosed in a prosecutor's file for four years. From there the story goes back to the 1936 Supreme Court case Brown v. Mississippi, where three Black tenant farmers were whipped into confessing and a deputy testified it wasn't too much for a Negro, and forward to the Chicago polygraph examiner John Reid, whose nine-step technique replaced the third degree and still dominates American police training.  Reid's own signature case, the 1955 confession of Darrel Parker in Lincoln, Nebraska, turned out to be false when a career criminal's deathbed admission came to light decades later. The episode covers Miranda v. Arizona, the 1969 Frazier v. Cupp decision that made it legal for police to lie about evidence in all 50 states, and the research of psychologist Saul Kassin, including the 1996 experiment in which 100 percent of innocent college students signed a confession under the right conditions, and the 2004 study showing that innocent suspects waive their Miranda rights far more often than guilty ones do.Then the cases. The Central Park Five, questioned for up to 30 hours and told they could go home. The Norfolk Four, where a detective later convicted of extortion kept adding sailors to a rape and murder that DNA tied to one man acting alone. The Beatrice Six in Nebraska, where a sheriff's psychologist taught suspects that repressed memories of a murder could surface in dreams, and five of them pleaded guilty to a crime committed by a man who'd been excluded years earlier by a blood-typing error. Earl Washington Jr., with an IQ around 69, who came within nine days of execution in Virginia on a confession that got the victim's race, height, and number of wounds wrong. Christopher Ochoa and Richard Danziger in Austin, Jeffrey Deskovic in Peekskill, 14-year-old Michael Crowe in Escondido, Juan Rivera in Waukegan, Marty Tankleff on Long Island, Damon Thibodeaux on Louisiana's death row, Huwe Burton in the Bronx, the Dixmoor Five, the West Memphis Three, Brendan Dassey, and the torture victims of Chicago's Area Two under Commander Jon Burge. The episode closes with what has changed since: the Illinois recording law sponsored in 2003 by a state senator named Barack Obama, the 2017 decision by one of the country's largest police training firms to stop teaching the Reid Technique, the juvenile deception bans now in ten states, the British PEACE model built after the Guildford Four and Birmingham Six, and the fact that in every state in this country, police may still lie to an adult about the evidence. It ends back in Canaan, where the murder of Barbara Gibbons has been open for 53 years and her son remains the only person ever tried for it. Email Brian Get Brian's Books Leave Us A Voicemail Visit Our Website

The Hills Have Eyes: The Terrifying Legend Behind the Horror MovieIn episode three of our Spooky Season series exploring the true stories behind Hollywood’s most terrifying horror movies, Brian investigates the disturbing legend that inspired Wes Craven’s 1977 cult classic, The Hills Have Eyes. For nearly 300 years, the story of Sawney Bean and his murderous Scottish cannibal clan has haunted generations. According to legend, Bean and his family lived in a remote coastal cave, ambushing, murdering, and devouring more than 1,000 unsuspecting travelers before being discovered and executed. But did any of it actually happen? Brian traces the legend back to its earliest known publication in 1734, uncovering historical contradictions, missing evidence, and the disturbing political and cultural influences that may have created the entire story. Along the way, he explores documented cases of cannibalism and notorious American murder families whose real crimes rivaled anything Hollywood could imagine. Then, discover how Wes Craven transformed a centuries-old Scottish nightmare into The Hills Have Eyes, moving the horror from a seaside cave to the desolate American desert. Was Sawney Bean history’s most horrifying serial killer, or was the entire legend a carefully constructed fiction? The truth behind The Hills Have Eyes may be more unsettling than the movie itself. Email Brian Get Brian's Books Leave Us A Voicemail Visit Our Website Have a forgotten historical mystery, disturbing event, unsolved crime, or hidden conspiracy you think deserves investigation? Send your suggestions to [email protected]. 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 Hills Have Eyes: The Terrifying Legend Behind the Horror MovieIn episode three of our Spooky Season series exploring the true stories behind Hollywood’s most terrifying horror movies, Brian investigates the disturbing legend that inspired Wes Craven’s 1977 cult classic, The Hills Have Eyes. For nearly 300 years, the story of Sawney Bean and his murderous Scottish cannibal clan has haunted generations. According to legend, Bean and his family lived in a remote coastal cave, ambushing, murdering, and devouring more than 1,000 unsuspecting travelers before being discovered and executed. But did any of it actually happen? Brian traces the legend back to its earliest known publication in 1734, uncovering historical contradictions, missing evidence, and the disturbing political and cultural influences that may have created the entire story. Along the way, he explores documented cases of cannibalism and notorious American murder families whose real crimes rivaled anything Hollywood could imagine. Then, discover how Wes Craven transformed a centuries-old Scottish nightmare into The Hills Have Eyes, moving the horror from a seaside cave to the desolate American desert. Was Sawney Bean history’s most horrifying serial killer, or was the entire legend a carefully constructed fiction? The truth behind The Hills Have Eyes may be more unsettling than the movie itself. Email Brian Get Brian's Books Leave Us A Voicemail Visit Our Website

What do Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, and Amy Winehouse have in common? They all died at 27, becoming part of one of music history's most haunting legends: The 27 Club. But is there really a deadly curse, or does the truth reveal something far more disturbing? In this episode of Disturbing History, Brian  investigates the mysterious deaths, unanswered questions, and decades of controversy surrounding rock music's most infamous club. From Brian Jones's suspicious drowning and Jimi Hendrix's disputed final hours to Jim Morrison's death in Paris without an autopsy, each case reveals a different tragedy. Brian also examines Kurt Cobain's controversial death, Amy Winehouse's fatal relapse, and the mysterious circumstances surrounding blues legend Robert Johnson. Finally, Brian explores two major scientific studies that investigated whether musicians really face a greater risk of dying at 27.  Their findings challenge the legend while exposing a troubling reality about fame, addiction, mental health, and premature death in the music industry. Is the 27 Club a supernatural curse, a statistical coincidence, or a self-fulfilling prophecy?  The answer may be more disturbing than the legend itself. Email Brian Get Brian's Books Leave Us A Voicemail Visit Our Website Have a forgotten historical mystery, disturbing event, unsolved crime, or hidden conspiracy you think deserves investigation? Send your suggestions to [email protected]. 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.

What do Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, and Amy Winehouse have in common? They all died at 27, becoming part of one of music history's most haunting legends: The 27 Club. But is there really a deadly curse, or does the truth reveal something far more disturbing? In this episode of Disturbing History, Brian  investigates the mysterious deaths, unanswered questions, and decades of controversy surrounding rock music's most infamous club. From Brian Jones's suspicious drowning and Jimi Hendrix's disputed final hours to Jim Morrison's death in Paris without an autopsy, each case reveals a different tragedy. Brian also examines Kurt Cobain's controversial death, Amy Winehouse's fatal relapse, and the mysterious circumstances surrounding blues legend Robert Johnson. Finally, Brian explores two major scientific studies that investigated whether musicians really face a greater risk of dying at 27.  Their findings challenge the legend while exposing a troubling reality about fame, addiction, mental health, and premature death in the music industry. Is the 27 Club a supernatural curse, a statistical coincidence, or a self-fulfilling prophecy?  The answer may be more disturbing than the legend itself. Email Brian Get Brian's Books Leave Us A Voicemail Visit Our Website

In 2013, Time branded millennials “The Me Me Me Generation.” The accusations were familiar: lazy, entitled, and obsessed with themselves. Yet teenage drinking, smoking, pregnancy, and fighting were all declining, while young adults faced rising student debt and a difficult path to homeownership. The complaints about the next generation were nothing new. The world they were inheriting deserved a closer look. In the seventh installment of Disturbing History’s journey through American life, Brian revisits the 2010s—the decade when his own generation became the adults doing the complaining. The economy recovered, smartphones transformed everyday life, and scientific discoveries pushed the boundaries of human knowledge. But prosperity and progress shared the headlines with addiction, corporate deception, and warnings that went unanswered. This episode follows the opioid epidemic from prescription pills to fentanyl, examines Flint’s water crisis, and revisits disasters from Deepwater Horizon to Hurricane Maria and the destruction of Paradise, California. Along the way, Theranos, Wells Fargo, and Boeing raise an unsettling question: what happens when protecting an institution becomes more important than protecting the people who trust it? Then there’s the device in everyone’s pocket. Instagram and viral fundraising showed what connection could accomplish. Cambridge Analytica, data breaches, and conspiracy theories revealed its costs. From surveillance disclosures to Pizzagate and the harassment of Sandy Hook families, the decade exposed how quickly information—and misinformation—could change lives. There were also extraordinary reasons to look up: the Higgs boson, gravitational waves, Pluto in startling detail, and the first image of a black hole. Rescuers brought Chilean miners and a Thai youth soccer team home alive. Violent crime remained far below its early-1990s peak. Even the Cubs finally won. The decade closes with avocado toast, “snowflake” accusations, and the reply “okay, boomer.”  By then, the millennials on that magazine cover were approaching middle age—and the first complaints about the generation behind them were already appearing in the same magazines. Email Brian Get Brian's Books Leave Us A Voicemail Visit Our Website Have a forgotten historical mystery, disturbing event, unsolved crime, or hidden conspiracy you think deserves investigation? Send your suggestions to [email protected]. 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.

In 2013, Time branded millennials “The Me Me Me Generation.” The accusations were familiar: lazy, entitled, and obsessed with themselves. Yet teenage drinking, smoking, pregnancy, and fighting were all declining, while young adults faced rising student debt and a difficult path to homeownership. The complaints about the next generation were nothing new. The world they were inheriting deserved a closer look. In the seventh installment of Disturbing History’s journey through American life, Brian revisits the 2010s—the decade when his own generation became the adults doing the complaining. The economy recovered, smartphones transformed everyday life, and scientific discoveries pushed the boundaries of human knowledge. But prosperity and progress shared the headlines with addiction, corporate deception, and warnings that went unanswered. This episode follows the opioid epidemic from prescription pills to fentanyl, examines Flint’s water crisis, and revisits disasters from Deepwater Horizon to Hurricane Maria and the destruction of Paradise, California. Along the way, Theranos, Wells Fargo, and Boeing raise an unsettling question: what happens when protecting an institution becomes more important than protecting the people who trust it? Then there’s the device in everyone’s pocket. Instagram and viral fundraising showed what connection could accomplish. Cambridge Analytica, data breaches, and conspiracy theories revealed its costs. From surveillance disclosures to Pizzagate and the harassment of Sandy Hook families, the decade exposed how quickly information—and misinformation—could change lives. There were also extraordinary reasons to look up: the Higgs boson, gravitational waves, Pluto in startling detail, and the first image of a black hole. Rescuers brought Chilean miners and a Thai youth soccer team home alive. Violent crime remained far below its early-1990s peak. Even the Cubs finally won. The decade closes with avocado toast, “snowflake” accusations, and the reply “okay, boomer.”  By then, the millennials on that magazine cover were approaching middle age—and the first complaints about the generation behind them were already appearing in the same magazines. Email Brian Get Brian's Books Leave Us A Voicemail Visit Our Website

What if our universe contains entire dimensions of space that we cannot see, touch, or detect? What if those hidden dimensions exist all around us, occupying the very rooms we live in? And could they explain some of humanity's greatest mysteries, from unexplained disappearances and paranormal encounters to UFOs, Sasquatch, and even telepathy? In this episode of Disturbing History, Brian takes a deep dive into one of the most fascinating and controversial ideas in theoretical physics: the seven hidden dimensions of M-theory. Modern physics describes a universe with three dimensions of space and one of time. But M-theory proposes eleven dimensions in total, including seven additional spatial dimensions that may be concealed within the fabric of reality itself.  Brian traces the remarkable history of this idea, from Einstein's groundbreaking work on spacetime to the forgotten physicists who first proposed invisible dimensions, the strange geometry of string theory, and the revolutionary discoveries that gave rise to M-theory. But this isn't just a journey through theoretical physics. Brian explores the unsettling possibility that hidden dimensions could help explain phenomena that have puzzled humanity for centuries.  Could ghosts, apparitions, and other unexplained encounters involve something beyond our familiar three-dimensional world? What about the theories suggesting UFOs and UAPs originate from another dimension rather than another planet? Could the mysterious behavior sometimes attributed to Sasquatch point toward something far stranger than an undiscovered primate? The investigation also revisits The Telepathy Tapes, examining extraordinary claims involving consciousness, unexplained communication, and quantum entanglement. Brian explores what science actually tells us about these phenomena, including the groundbreaking experiments that earned the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics, and why quantum entanglement cannot be used to transmit information. Along the way, we examine the real experiments searching for hidden dimensions, from precision gravity measurements to the Large Hadron Collider and the ATLAS Collaboration's September 2026 search for microscopic black holes.  So far, the results have revealed no evidence of additional spatial dimensions.Where does established science end and speculation begin? And if seven invisible dimensions really do surround us, what might that mean for our understanding of reality, consciousness, and the unexplained? The science is extraordinary. The possibilities are mind-bending. But the biggest mystery remains unanswered. Are we experiencing all of reality, or only the tiny fraction our senses allow us to perceive? Email Brian Get Brian's Books Leave Us A Voicemail Visit Our Website Have a forgotten historical mystery, disturbing event, unsolved crime, or hidden conspiracy you think deserves investigation? Send your suggestions to [email protected]. 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.

What if our universe contains entire dimensions of space that we cannot see, touch, or detect? What if those hidden dimensions exist all around us, occupying the very rooms we live in? And could they explain some of humanity's greatest mysteries, from unexplained disappearances and paranormal encounters to UFOs, Sasquatch, and even telepathy? In this episode of Disturbing History, Brian takes a deep dive into one of the most fascinating and controversial ideas in theoretical physics: the seven hidden dimensions of M-theory. Modern physics describes a universe with three dimensions of space and one of time. But M-theory proposes eleven dimensions in total, including seven additional spatial dimensions that may be concealed within the fabric of reality itself.  Brian traces the remarkable history of this idea, from Einstein's groundbreaking work on spacetime to the forgotten physicists who first proposed invisible dimensions, the strange geometry of string theory, and the revolutionary discoveries that gave rise to M-theory. But this isn't just a journey through theoretical physics. Brian explores the unsettling possibility that hidden dimensions could help explain phenomena that have puzzled humanity for centuries.  Could ghosts, apparitions, and other unexplained encounters involve something beyond our familiar three-dimensional world? What about the theories suggesting UFOs and UAPs originate from another dimension rather than another planet? Could the mysterious behavior sometimes attributed to Sasquatch point toward something far stranger than an undiscovered primate? The investigation also revisits The Telepathy Tapes, examining extraordinary claims involving consciousness, unexplained communication, and quantum entanglement. Brian explores what science actually tells us about these phenomena, including the groundbreaking experiments that earned the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics, and why quantum entanglement cannot be used to transmit information. Along the way, we examine the real experiments searching for hidden dimensions, from precision gravity measurements to the Large Hadron Collider and the ATLAS Collaboration's September 2026 search for microscopic black holes.  So far, the results have revealed no evidence of additional spatial dimensions.Where does established science end and speculation begin? And if seven invisible dimensions really do surround us, what might that mean for our understanding of reality, consciousness, and the unexplained? The science is extraordinary. The possibilities are mind-bending. But the biggest mystery remains unanswered. Are we experiencing all of reality, or only the tiny fraction our senses allow us to perceive? Email Brian Get Brian's Books Leave Us A Voicemail Visit Our Website

The 2000s began with America preparing for a disaster that never happened: Y2K. But while the country worried about computer failures, a far more dangerous threat was already taking shape. What followed was a decade of extraordinary technological breakthroughs, devastating national tragedies, government failures, economic collapse, and a generation blamed for problems it didn't create. In this sixth installment of Disturbing History's journey through American life from the 1950s to the present, we revisit the decade that changed everything.  From the dot-com bubble and the disputed 2000 presidential election to September 11, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, and the 2008 financial meltdown, we uncover the stories behind the headlines and the warnings that went ignored. We also explore the disasters, scandals, and forgotten events that defined the era: the Columbia shuttle tragedy, the Northeast blackout, the opioid epidemic, corporate corruption, government surveillance, and the catastrophic failures that cost thousands of Americans their lives.But the 2000s weren't all darkness. The Human Genome Project, Mars exploration, the internet revolution, and remarkable advances in technology transformed everyday life, even as the national debt soared and millions of Americans watched their financial security disappear. Finally, we examine the generation labeled The Dumbest Generation—young Americans who grew up under unprecedented scrutiny, only to inherit an economy in ruins, crushing student debt, and an uncertain future. The 2000s were supposed to usher in a brighter future. Instead, they exposed just how fragile the American dream had become. Email Brian Join Our FREE Newsletter Get Brian's Books Leave Us A Voicemail Visit Our Website Have a forgotten historical mystery, disturbing event, unsolved crime, or hidden conspiracy you think deserves investigation? Send your suggestions to [email protected]. 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 2000s began with America preparing for a disaster that never happened: Y2K. But while the country worried about computer failures, a far more dangerous threat was already taking shape. What followed was a decade of extraordinary technological breakthroughs, devastating national tragedies, government failures, economic collapse, and a generation blamed for problems it didn't create. In this sixth installment of Disturbing History's journey through American life from the 1950s to the present, we revisit the decade that changed everything.  From the dot-com bubble and the disputed 2000 presidential election to September 11, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, and the 2008 financial meltdown, we uncover the stories behind the headlines and the warnings that went ignored. We also explore the disasters, scandals, and forgotten events that defined the era: the Columbia shuttle tragedy, the Northeast blackout, the opioid epidemic, corporate corruption, government surveillance, and the catastrophic failures that cost thousands of Americans their lives.But the 2000s weren't all darkness. The Human Genome Project, Mars exploration, the internet revolution, and remarkable advances in technology transformed everyday life, even as the national debt soared and millions of Americans watched their financial security disappear. Finally, we examine the generation labeled The Dumbest Generation—young Americans who grew up under unprecedented scrutiny, only to inherit an economy in ruins, crushing student debt, and an uncertain future. The 2000s were supposed to usher in a brighter future. Instead, they exposed just how fragile the American dream had become. Email Brian Join Our FREE Newsletter Get Brian's Books Leave Us A Voicemail Visit Our Website

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. Email Brian Join Our FREE Newsletter Get Brian's Books Leave Us A Voicemail Visit Our Website Have a forgotten historical mystery, disturbing event, unsolved crime, or hidden conspiracy you think deserves investigation? Send your suggestions to [email protected]. 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.

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 l

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. Email Brian Get Brian's Books Leave Us A Voicemail Visit Our Website Have a forgotten historical mystery, disturbing event, unsolved crime, or hidden conspiracy you think deserves investigation? Send your suggestions to [email protected]. 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.