In a single year, an invisible killer circled the globe and killed more people than the First World War — perhaps fifty million or more. It could take a healthy young adult in a matter of hours. And then the world did something stranger than the pandemic itself: it almost completely forgot.

This episode unpacks the nineteen eighteen influenza pandemic: why the name is a lie born of wartime censorship, why it hunted the young and the strong instead of the weak, the waves and the masks and the mass graves — and why a plague that touched nearly every family on Earth slipped so quietly out of our collective memory.

New dark story every day. Follow Six Feet of History wherever you listen.

#History #DarkHistory #HistoryPodcast #SpanishFlu #PandemicHistory / #1918Flu #MedicalHistory #ForgottenPandemic #WW1History #SixFeetOfHistory

Spanish Flu, 1918 flu, influenza pandemic, forgotten pandemic, World War One, pandemic history, censorship, mass graves, dark history, history podcast, medical history, cytokine storm, public health, masks, true history, fifty million deaths, viral pandemic, Camp Funston, Six Feet of History, disease

Just before midnight in nineteen twenty-eight, a concrete dam holding back twelve billion gallons of water gave way north of Los Angeles. A wall of water as tall as a twelve-storey building roared fifty-four miles through the dark, and by morning more than four hundred people were dead. And the brilliant engineer whose name was on the dam had inspected it that very morning — and declared it safe.

This episode tells the story of the St. Francis Dam disaster: William Mulholland, the self-taught genius who built modern Los Angeles, the unstable ground no one checked, the muddy leaks he waved away, and the deadliest civil-engineering failure in American history — a monument to the most dangerous kind of confidence.

New dark story every day. Follow Six Feet of History wherever you listen.

#History #DarkHistory #HistoryPodcast #TrueHistory #Disaster / #StFrancisDam #Mulholland #LosAngeles #EngineeringDisaster #SixFeetOfHistory

St. Francis Dam, William Mulholland, dam disaster, dam collapse, Los Angeles, 1928, San Francisquito Canyon, engineering failure, flood, dark history, history podcast, California history, disaster history, true history, dam safety, hubris, Los Angeles Aqueduct, man-made disaster, Six Feet of History, catastrophe

In eighteenth-century France there lived a man who could not stop eating. Not wouldn't — couldn't. He devoured quantities that should have killed him, was never once full, and baffled the greatest doctors of his age. And the truth of what was wrong with him is still, more than two centuries later, a genuine medical mystery.

This episode tells the strange, sad story of Tarrare: the boy cast out by his starving family, the sideshow performer, the failed spy used to smuggle messages inside his own body, the hospital patient driven out in disgrace — and the bottomless hunger that ruled and ruined his short, lonely life, and that no one has ever been able to explain.

New dark story every day. Follow Six Feet of History wherever you listen.

#History #DarkHistory #HistoryPodcast #MedicalHistory #TrueHistory / #Tarrare #MedicalMystery #StrangeHistory #FrenchHistory #SixFeetOfHistory

Tarrare, insatiable hunger, polyphagia, medical mystery, eighteenth century France, French Revolutionary Wars, sideshow, Dr Percy, dark history, history podcast, medical history, strange history, unexplained, metabolism, hypothalamus, true history, human curiosity, French history, Six Feet of History, eating disorder mystery