The Morbid History Podcast
A nonfiction podcast focused on the darker, stranger, and more mysterious aspects of history.
Episodes
In 1861, Alabama seceded from the United States.
Not everyone went along with it.
Deep in the hill country of northwest Alabama sat Winston County—a place of shallow soil, steep ridges, and small farmers who had no slaves, no plantations, and no interest in dying for a cause that wasn't theirs. When the state sent a delegate to the secession convention, Winston County sent a 21-year-old schoolteacher named Christopher Sheats...
Progress has a price tag.
And in Victorian America, it was usually fifty cents.
In this episode, we pull back the ornate wallpaper of the nineteenth century and look at what was underneath. From the snake oil industry that dosed ...
She just wanted to run. That's all.
Twenty years old, bib number 261, tucked into the middle of the pack on a cold, rainy morning in Hopkinton, Massachusetts. She had trained over a thousand miles for this. She was ready.
The men in charge had other ideas. She finished anyway.
Some crimes have consequences.
Others have currency.
In this episode, we examine history's untouchables—the scientists, executives, kings, and killers whose genius, wealth, or stra...
They called it the New Deal.
A promise. A lifeline. It was the most ambitious expansion of federal protection for working Americans in the nation's history, and was designed to pull a broken country back from the edge of collapse.
Every utopia has a founder.
Every founder has a vision.
And someone always pays for it.
In this episode, we examine the dark history of intentional communities — promised lands built on someone else's labor, someone else's body, or someone else's silence. From a New York commune that ran America's first eugenics program and pivoted to silverware, to a 64,000-acre Oregon ranch whose vision of enlightened community ended in t...
He was just going to the corner store.
In 1981, Michael Donald never made it home.
Two members of the Ku Klux Klan had been driving the streets of Mobile, Alabama with a gun and a rope &mdas...
Some stories are too strange for fiction.
Others are just too inconvenient for runtime.
In this episode, we go behind the screen — examining the true events Hollywood borrowed, pol...
They were small enough to fit.
That’s why they chose them.
In 18th- and 19th-century England, thousands of young boys were forced to climb inside narrow chimneys to scrape away soot. They were underfed to keep them small. Burned if they hesitated. Suffocated if they slipped.
But the worst horror didn’t come in childhood.
Years later, many of these...
Some crimes are chaotic.
Others are calculated.
In this episode, we examine history’s most notorious heists—beginning with the 1990 robbery at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, where thieves walked out with priceless masterpieces that have never been recovered. From there, we trace legendary robberies across trains, sewers, skies, and vaults—culminating in the audaciou...
For centuries, mental illness wasn’t treated… it was controlled.
In this episode, we step inside the brutal history of insane asylums and early psychiatric “care,” beginning with Bethlem Royal Hospital, where madness became public spectacle.
From there, we trace the rise of lobotomies in the United States and examine the therapies that promised healing while delivering silence: insulin comas, ice baths...
He didn’t die on the Senate floor.
But a part of him never left it.
In this episode, we examine the life and legacy of Charles Sumner—an abolitionist senator who stood against slavery, demanded Black equality, and bled in the halls of Congress after a brutal caning by Representative Preston Brooks in 1856.
The attack left him with brain trauma and what we now cal...
Ghost stories used to be whispered around campfires.
Now they’re printed on mugs.
In this episode, we explore how ghost lore in America went from local legends to full-fledged tourism industry... complete with haunted hotels, cemetery tours, and “spirit weekend packages.” From Victorian mourning rituals to Stephen King’s night at the Stanley Hotel, from Salem to Sa...
Hollywood loves a good curse.
But what if the real horror isn’t supernatural at all?
In this episode of Morbid History, we step behind the camera to examine the films said to be “cursed”—from The Twilight Zone: The Movie, where a fatal on-set disaster changed Hollywood forever, to The Omen, a production haunted by a trail of eerie coincidences and tragedy.
Along the way, we explore the chaos surrounding Th...
It started with a flooded house and a dolphin named Peter. It ended in LSD, obsession, and death.
In the 1960s, a young woman named Margaret Howe Lovatt moved into a house filled with water to teach a dolphin how to speak. Backed by NASA and fueled by fringe science, the experiment soon spiraled into something far more disturbing.
LSD got involved, and what followed was a bizarre and trag...
The sea is beautiful... until it isn’t.
In this episode, we plunge into the darkest waters of maritime history: the doomed Franklin Expedition, frozen in the Arctic and driven to madness and cannibalism, and the Batavia, where a shipwreck unraveled into a brutal cult of murder and terror on a barren island.
Along the way, we examine ghost ships drifting without crews, lighthouse kee...
She didn’t die because of the cold.
She died because no one fixed the door.
In 2023, 63-year-old Nguyet Le was found dead inside the walk-in freezer of an Arby’s restaurant in Louisiana.
In this episode, we examine a horrifying case of corporate neglect, corner-cutting, and quiet cruelty... and how it led to one of the most preventable workplace deaths in recent...
Every October, the air grows colder, the nights stretch longer, and the boundary between the living and the dead begins to fade.
In this Halloween special, we'll trace the haunting origins of the holiday. From the fires of ancient Samhain and the prayers of All Hallows’ Eve, to poisoned candy panics, witch trials, and the worldwide traditions that still honor the dead today.
It&rsqu...
In 1857, over 120 emigrants were slaughtered in the Utah desert under a white flag of peace. The killers? Mormon militia. The blame? Pinned on Native tribes.
In this episode, we uncover the dark and deliberate horror of the Mountain Meadows Massacre. It was an ambush cloaked in religious fear and racial scapegoating.
We explore how a brutal execution of men, women, and children was careful...
Samurai dramas paint feudal Japan in gleaming armor and noble duels.
But the truth was far darker.
In this episode, we descend into the Sengoku era, which was a century of civil war, betrayal, and blood. From Oda Nobunaga, the self-styled “Demon King of the Sixth Heaven” who burned monks alive on a mountain, to Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the peasant who rose to power only to fall to ...
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