{"podcast":{"title":"Disturbing History","slug":"disturbing-history-7341005","podcast_index_feed_id":7341005,"rss_url":"https://www.spreaker.com/show/6628223/episodes/feed","website_url":"https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/disturbing-history--6628223","image_url":"https://d3wo5wojvuv7l.cloudfront.net/t_rss_itunes_square_1400/images.spreaker.com/original/f42011dc1c8c8130e84fb37f20a9046e.jpg","author":"Paranormal World Productions LLC","episode_count":145,"summary":"Disturbing History is a dark history podcast uncovering the strange, sinister, and little-known stories the past tried to bury. Each week, we explore unsolved mysteries, secret societies, forgotten crimes, eerie folklore, lost civilizations, historical conspiracies, and disturbing events that never made it into your high school textbook .Hosted by author, investigator, and storyteller Brian King-Sharp, Disturbing History dives deep into: Unsolved historical mysteries Secret societies and hidden power structures Dark folklore and urban legends Lost colonies and vanished civilizations True crime cases buried by time Historical conspiracies and cover-ups Paranormal events rooted in real history Through immersive storytelling and investigative research, we uncover the shadowy corners of the past — the uncomfortable truths, forgotten tragedies, and disturbing secrets that shaped our world.If you’re fascinated by dark history, obsessed with unexplained events, or drawn to stories that blur the line between fact and legend, this podcast is for you. Because the past isn’t always dead. Sometimes it’s just been buried. Follow Disturbing History and turn on automatic downloads for weekly dee…","last_synced_at":"2026-09-07T04:18:26.325177+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/disturbing-history-7341005"},"episode":{"title":"The Silver Bridge Collapse","slug":"the-silver-bridge-collapse","published_at":"2026-08-23T18:50:01+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/disturbing-history-7341005/the-silver-bridge-collapse","show_page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/disturbing-history-7341005","url":"https://www.spreaker.com/episode/the-silver-bridge-collapse--74594107","audio_url":"https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/api.spreaker.com/download/episode/74594107/dh_moth_final.mp3","summary":"On December 15, 1967, ten days before Christmas, the Silver Bridge at Point Pleasant, West Virginia collapsed into the Ohio River during rush hour, killing 46 people. Federal investigators traced the disaster to a single cracked steel bar, eyebar 330, with a hidden flaw about one tenth of an inch deep that had been growing for four decades inside a joint no inspector could see. That's the documented story. The other story says a winged creature with red eyes had been warning the town for thirteen months.In this episode, Brian takes apart the Mothman legend and puts the real history back in the middle. Drawing on his sixteen years in law enforcement, he walks through the original November 1966 sighting by the Scarberry and Mallette couples, the deputy who vouched for their sincerity, and the newspaper headline that couldn't decide what to call the thing. He follows the story through the abandoned World War II munitions plant known as the TNT area, the armed crowds that nearly turned a monster hunt into a tragedy, the sandhill crane and owl explanations, and the national UFO hysteria of 1966 that primed the whole country for a mystery in West Virginia. Then the episode turns to the two writers who welded the monster to the disaster years after the fact. Gray Barker, a documented hoaxer from Clarksburg who invented much of the men in black mythology, published the first book connecting the creature to the collapse in 1970. John Keel followed in 1975 with The Mothman Prophecies, built around a prediction that, by his own account, foretold the wrong disaster entirely. Brian examines why the prophecy fails as evidence, what the engineering record actually shows about why the bridge fell, how the collapse rewrote bridge inspection law for the entire country, and how a grievin…","meta_description":"On December 15, 1967, ten days before Christmas, the Silver Bridge at Point Pleasant, West Virginia collapsed into the Ohio River during rush hour, killin…","key_points":[],"chapters":[],"topics":[],"duration_seconds":3604,"processing_state":"not_requested","actions":[{"name":"request_transcript","method":"POST","url":"https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/disturbing-history-7341005/episodes/the-silver-bridge-collapse/transcription-requests","description":"Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode."},{"name":"read_markdown","method":"GET","url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/disturbing-history-7341005/the-silver-bridge-collapse.md","description":"Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource."}]}}