{"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 Watchers We Invited In","slug":"the-watchers-we-invited-in","published_at":"2026-07-22T04:00:02+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/disturbing-history-7341005/the-watchers-we-invited-in","show_page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/disturbing-history-7341005","url":"https://www.spreaker.com/episode/the-watchers-we-invited-in--73086809","audio_url":"https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/api.spreaker.com/download/episode/73086809/dh_cookies_final.mp3","summary":"How many calls from unknown numbers did you get today? The one about your car's extended warranty, the text about a package that couldn't be delivered, the voice on the line claiming your grandson is in jail and needs bail money right now. In this episode of Disturbing History, I trace how those strangers came to know so much about you, and the answer is a two-hundred-year story that starts long before the internet ever existed. We go back to the eighteen forties, when a sealed letter had stronger legal protection than your email does today and anonymity was as simple as buying a train ticket, then follow the trade decade by decade as every new miracle of communication quietly demanded a piece of your private life in payment. The telegraph put your words in corporate files that Lincoln's government read at will. The Kodak camera sparked America's first privacy panic and inspired Louis Brandeis to name the right to be let alone, a fight he was still losing on the Supreme Court forty years later. Party lines trained a generation to assume the neighbors were listening, and then we forgot the lesson right when it mattered most. Along the way we meet the Atlanta company that built secret moral dossiers on tens of millions of Americans before renaming itself Equifax, the FBI programs that read every telegram leaving the country for thirty years, the twenty-three-year-old engineer whose humble shopping cart cookie became the tracking backbone of the modern web, and the auction house where you're bought and sold in the tenth of a second it takes a page to load. I dig into what those endless user agreements actually say, why the cookie banner exists and what clicking accept really means, how a personality quiz harvested eighty-seven million Facebook profiles, and how supposedly…","meta_description":"How many calls from unknown numbers did you get today? The one about your car's extended warranty, the text about a package that couldn't be delivered, th…","key_points":[],"chapters":[],"topics":[],"duration_seconds":4412,"processing_state":"not_requested","actions":[{"name":"request_transcript","method":"POST","url":"https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/disturbing-history-7341005/episodes/the-watchers-we-invited-in/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-watchers-we-invited-in.md","description":"Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource."}]}}