Some of the most terrifying stories ever told are true.
The Sinister Past uncovers real events from history that read like horror fiction — vanished lighthouse keepers, blood-soaked countesses, plagues that made people dance until they died, and murders that were never solved.
Every episode is a journey into a real moment in time when something went terribly, inexplicably wrong. No theories. No speculation. J
New episodes every Tuesday and Thursday at 9:00 PM EDT.
If you thought the past was boring, you haven't been reading the right pages.
The Villisca Axe Murders — Eight Bodies, Zero Convictions
On the morning of June 10, 1912, a neighbor found the Moore family's Villisca, Iowa farmhouse locked and silent. Inside: eight bodies — six family members and two young houseguests — all killed in their beds with an axe taken from the family's own woodshed.
Every mirror in the house had been covered. Every door was locked from the inside. Two men stood trial and both walked free. Decades later, researchers linked the murders to a string of near-identical axe killings across the American Midwest — and the case remains, over a century later, one of America's oldest unsolved mass murders.
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🔔 New episodes every Tuesday and Thursday at 9:00 PM EDT.
21 Oct 2026
Pripyat — The City That Died in One Night
At 1:23 AM on April 26, 1986, a routine safety test inside Reactor Four of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant went catastrophically wrong — and thirty-six hours later, a purpose-built Soviet city of fifty thousand people was emptied in under four hours, never to be permanently lived in again.
This episode covers the disaster hour by hour: the flawed test, the firefighters who climbed onto an exposed radioactive core with no protective gear, the Soviet cover-up that only broke because of radiation alarms in Sweden, the liquidators nicknamed 'bio-robots', and the ghost city — Ferris wheel and all — still standing exactly as it was left.
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🔔 New episodes every Tuesday and Thursday at 9:00 PM EDT.
16 Oct 2026
The Enfield Poltergeist — The Case That Divided Experts
In August of 1977, a police constable in a quiet North London council house watched an armchair slide across the carpet with no one near it — and put her name to a signed statement saying so.
Over the next thirteen months, the Hodgson family's ordinary home became one of the most exhaustively documented poltergeist cases in British history: thirty hours of tape, a voice that wasn't a child's, a photograph that still divides believers and skeptics, and an investigator who never stopped looking for proof his own grief could be answered. Some of it was later proven fake. Most of it never was.
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🔔 New episodes every Tuesday and Thursday at 9:00 PM EDT.
Reach and audience
Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.
Apple Podcasts (US)
4.0 / 5
1 ratings
Spotify
5.0 / 5
2 ratings
Podcast Authority Score: 21 / 100
A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.
Quality
43
Social presence
0
YouTube
0
Engagement
0
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