Disturbing History

In this episode, we travel to a tiny, hundred-and-forty-acre island off the coast of Nova Scotia, Canada, where a mystery first uncovered by three teenagers in 1795 has consumed fortunes, destroyed lives, and killed six men over the course of more than two hundred and thirty years.

We start with sixteen-year-old Daniel McGinnis and his discovery of a mysterious depression on Oak Island, complete with oak log platforms buried every ten feet underground.

From there, we trace the full history of the Money Pit — the Onslow Company's excavation and the catastrophic flooding at ninety feet, the Truro Company's discovery of the ingenious flood tunnel system at Smith's Cove, and the parade of treasure hunters who followed, from Frederick Blair's sixty-year obsession to a young Franklin Delano Roosevelt's involvement as an investor in 1909.We cover the darkest chapter in Oak Island's history — the Restall Tragedy of August 17, 1965, when former daredevil Robert Restall, his twenty-four-year-old son Bobby, and two coworkers were killed by toxic gas in a shaft on the island. 

We talk about Robert Dunfield's destructive brute-force excavation, Dan Blankenship's fifty-year obsession and his terrifying near-death experience inside Borehole 10-X, and the decades of legal battles that nearly killed the treasure hunt entirely.Then we bring it into the modern era with Rick and Marty Lagina, two brothers from Michigan who purchased most of the island in 2006 and turned the search into a global phenomenon through the History Channel's The Curse of Oak Island, now in its thirteenth season.

We examine the key artifacts recovered over the years — a medieval lead cross, human bones with Middle Eastern DNA, a five-hundred-year-old gemstone, coconut fiber that has no business being in Canada, and stone pathways in the swamp dating back centuries. We also break down the major theories about what's buried on the island, from pirate treasure and the French Crown Jewels to Knights Templar relics and the skeptic's argument that the whole thing is a natural sinkhole. 

And we talk about the curse — the legend that seven men must die before the treasure can be found. Six have. The seventh hasn't. Yet. As of February 2026, the treasure has not been found. The digging continues.This is Disturbing History.

In July of 1969, while the world watched Apollo 11 head for the Moon, a speech sat folded in a White House desk drawer. Written by Nixon speechwriter William Safire, the memo titled "In Event of Moon Disaster" was a contingency address prepared for the very real possibility that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin would never leave the lunar surface. 

The ascent engine that had to fire to bring them home had no backup and had never been tested under actual lunar conditions. If it failed, two men would die on the Moon while the world listened.

This episode breaks down Safire's memo line by line, examining the rhetoric, the political strategy, and the emotional weight behind every word. We explore the grim contingency planning happening simultaneously in Houston, where young flight controllers faced the unbearable question of how long to maintain communication with a stranded crew. 

We talk about the Cold War stakes that made failure not just a tragedy but a potential strategic defeat for the United States, and how Nixon's political survival was tangled up in the outcome of a single rocket engine. We also dig into the moments that nearly made the speech necessary, from the computer alarms during descent to the broken circuit breaker switch that Aldrin fixed with a felt-tip pen. We discuss Michael Collins, the often-forgotten third astronaut who would have had to fly home alone, and what that journey would have meant for the rest of his life.

The episode covers the memo's discovery in 1999 by journalist James Mann in the National Archives, the way it reframed the Apollo 11 story for a generation that had only known the triumph, and the unsettling 2020 MIT deepfake project that used AI to show Nixon delivering the speech that was never given.

This is the story of the speech that was written to never be read, and what it reveals about courage, fear, and the impossibly thin line between humanity's greatest achievement and its greatest disaster.

Something happened the other night that got me thinking. I sat down to watch the Grammy Awards, expecting a celebration of music. What I got instead felt more like a political rally than an awards show.

And it made me ask a question I think a lot of us have been asking quietly. When did everything become political? When did we lose the ability to just enjoy things together?

This episode is different from our usual content. No serial killers. No mass graves. No presidents with dark secrets. But the most disturbing changes in history aren't always the obvious ones. Sometimes they're the ones that seep in slowly, so gradually you don't notice until you wake up one day and the world doesn't feel like the world you remember.I want to be clear from the start. This isn't a political rant. I'm not trying to change your mind or tell you how to vote. I'm not saying the issues people care about don't matter. They do.

What I am saying is that something has shifted in our culture over the past two decades, and I think it's worth talking about honestly. The way entertainment became activism. The way corporations discovered that appearing virtuous was good for business. The way social media algorithms learned that outrage keeps us engaged. The way we lost the shared spaces that used to bring us together despite our differences. This is a conversation I've been wanting to have for a long time. I hope you'll stick with me through it.

This episode takes you through the full, unflinching story of the Holocaust — from the ancient roots of antisemitism that made it possible, to the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party in a broken and humiliated post-World War One Germany, and into the systematic, industrialized murder of six million Jews and millions of others deemed unworthy of life. We walk through the ghettos of Warsaw, where hundreds of thousands were starved behind walls and barbed wire. We follow the Einsatzgruppen death squads across Eastern Europe, where entire Jewish communities were marched to ravines and shot. We step inside the machinery of the death camps — Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec — where human beings were gassed by the thousands and their bodies burned in crematorium ovens running around the clock.

But this episode is not only about death. It's about resistance — the fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the Sonderkommando revolt at Auschwitz, and the countless small acts of defiance that kept the human spirit alive in the darkest of places. It's about the Righteous Among the Nations — people like Oskar Schindler, Raoul Wallenberg, Irena Sendler, and Chiune Sugihara — who risked everything to save lives when most of the world looked the other way.We cover the liberation of the camps by Allied forces, the Nuremberg trials, the hunt for escaped war criminals, and the founding of the State of Israel in the shadow of genocide.

We address Holocaust denial head-on, dismantling the lies with the overwhelming mountain of evidence left behind by the Nazis themselves, by survivors, by perpetrators who confessed, and by the Allied soldiers who walked through the gates of hell and documented what they found.

And we examine the generational trauma that continues to shape the descendants of survivors — the silence, the anxiety, the emerging science of epigenetic inheritance that suggests the wounds of the Holocaust may be written into the very biology of those who came after. 

This is one of the most important episodes we've ever produced. It is not easy to listen to. But it is necessary. Because the last survivors are dying, and when they're gone, it falls to us to carry this memory forward.

Listener discretion is strongly advised. This episode contains graphic descriptions of violence, genocide, and human suffering. Never forget.

We all know where we were that morning. The clear blue sky. The impossible images on our television screens. The moment when time itself seemed to split into before and after.

In this episode of Disturbing History, we go back to September eleventh, two thousand and one, and tell the complete story of the deadliest terrorist attack on American soil. 

From the years of planning in Afghan caves and Hamburg apartments to the final desperate moments aboard four hijacked aircraft, this is the full account of how nineteen men murdered nearly three thousand innocent people and changed the course of history. We trace the origins of al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden's obsession with striking America. We examine the intelligence failures that allowed the hijackers to train at American flight schools and move freely through the country in the months before the attack. 

We relive the horror of that Tuesday morning as two planes struck the World Trade Center, a third hit the Pentagon, and a fourth was brought down by its own passengers in a Pennsylvania field.

This episode honors the victims, the first responders who climbed toward certain death, and the ordinary people who became heroes when their moment came. We follow the aftermath through the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the transformation of American security and society, and the long shadow that September eleventh continues to cast more than two decades later.