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.

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#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.

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#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.

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#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

On an October afternoon in eighteen fourteen, the people of one of London's poorest slums heard a sound like cannon fire — and then a fifteen-foot wave of beer came roaring through their streets, smashing down walls and flooding the cellars they lived in. Eight people drowned, in the dark, in beer.

This episode tells the strange and genuinely tragic story of the London Beer Flood: the giant brewery vats, the loose iron hoop no one took seriously, the wall of porter that swept through the St Giles rookery — and how a disaster that sounds almost comical fell hardest on the people who could least afford it, then got written off in court as an "act of God."

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#History #DarkHistory #HistoryPodcast #LondonHistory #TrueHistory / #LondonBeerFlood #GeorgianLondon #StGiles #StrangeHistory #SixFeetOfHistory

London Beer Flood, 1814, Horse Shoe Brewery, Meux brewery, St Giles, rookery, Georgian London, brewery disaster, porter, dark history, history podcast, London history, strange history, act of God, industrial accident, true history, Tottenham Court Road, Victorian poverty, Six Feet of History, flood

It started with two little girls twitching and screaming in a cold New England parlour. Within a year, it had become a panic that hanged twenty innocent people and made the name of a single Massachusetts village a byword for hysteria and injustice forever: Salem.

This episode follows sixteen ninety-two from the first fits to the gallows — the enslaved woman's confession that lit the fuse, the "spectral evidence" no one could disprove, the courtroom theatre, Giles Corey crushed beneath the stones — and what really drove a community to kill its own neighbours. Plus the myth almost everyone gets wrong: no one in Salem was burned at the stake.

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#History #DarkHistory #HistoryPodcast #SalemWitchTrials #TrueHistory / #Salem1692 #WitchHunt #ColonialHistory #MassHysteria #SixFeetOfHistory

Salem witch trials, Salem 1692, witch hunt, spectral evidence, Giles Corey, Tituba, Cotton Mather, mass hysteria, dark history, history podcast, colonial America, Puritans, Rebecca Nurse, ergot theory, injustice, true history, Massachusetts, Court of Oyer and Terminer, Six Feet of History, witchcraft

You could share a meal with a healthy friend at noon and be digging their grave by nightfall. Between thirteen forty-seven and thirteen fifty-one, the Black Death swept across Europe and killed perhaps half its people — the single deadliest catastrophe in human history.

This episode traces the plague from the trade routes of Asia to the harbours of Italy: how it spread, the three terrible forms it took, the scapegoating and flagellants and mass graves it left behind — and the myths we still get wrong, from the plague-doctor mask to "Ring a Ring o' Roses." Then the strangest twist of all: how the greatest dying in history quietly remade the world that survived it.

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#History #DarkHistory #HistoryPodcast #BlackDeath #MedievalHistory / #BubonicPlague #PlagueHistory #PandemicHistory #MedievalEurope #SixFeetOfHistory

Black Death, bubonic plague, Yersinia pestis, medieval plague, pandemic history, fourteenth century, quarantine origin, flagellants, mass graves, dark history, history podcast, medieval Europe, plague doctor, danse macabre, Great Plague, feudalism, true history, Silk Road, Six Feet of History, deadliest pandemic

Snow in June. Frost in July. A dim red sun behind a haze that wouldn't clear. In eighteen sixteen, summer simply didn't come — and the cause was a mountain that had exploded on the far side of the world a year before.

This episode follows the eruption of Tambora and the global winter it triggered: the failed harvests and famine, the disease that followed the hunger, and the strange ripples — from the birth of the bicycle to a dark, rainy holiday that gave Mary Shelley her monster.

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

#History #DarkHistory #HistoryPodcast #Science #TrueHistory / #YearWithoutASummer #Tambora #Frankenstein #Volcano #SixFeetOfHistory

Year Without a Summer, eighteen sixteen, Tambora, volcanic winter, famine, Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, climate history, dark history, history podcast, natural disaster, true history, global cooling, crop failure, Lake Geneva, Byron, eruption, Six Feet of History, eighteen hundred and froze to death, weather