What happens when your childhood involves being handed over to a foreign empire as a hostage, your father gets murdered, and your brother is buried alive? You probably don’t grow up with a particularly healthy relationship with trust.

In Part 1 of our series on Vlad the Impaler, Kevin Young and Dan Hourigan explore the making of the man who would become one of the most feared rulers in European history. Before the impaled bodies, the terrifying reputation, and the vampire mythology, there was a young Wallachian prince growing up in a world where family loyalty was optional and the throne was essentially a very dangerous game of musical chairs.

We trace Vlad’s complicated family history, his father’s relationship with the Ottoman Empire, and the years Vlad spent as a hostage alongside his younger brother Radu. When his father is killed and his older brother meets an even worse fate, Vlad’s path back to power becomes a story of political alliances, betrayal, and revenge.

Along the way, we separate what we actually know from what later storytellers invented, including the popular claims about Vlad’s supposedly cruel childhood. And naturally, Kevin and Dan bring their morbid sense of humor to the life of a prince whose family problems make your own awkward holiday gatherings look positively charming.

This is the dark history of the original Dracula, medieval Wallachia, and the making of a ruler whose real life was already horrifying enough without the fangs.

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What's the worst thing you can do with a stick?

In this episode of Torture: A Dark History, Kevin Young and Dan Hourigan explore the brutal history of impalement, a method of execution designed not just to kill, but to make the suffering last as long as possible. From ancient Babylon and Assyria to the Persian Empire, medieval Europe, and colonial Indonesia, impalement was used to punish criminals, crush rebellions, and send a very clear message to anyone thinking about challenging the people in charge.

We begin in 1800 Cairo, where a young theology student named Süleyman al Halabi assassinates a French general and receives one of the most horrifying punishments imaginable. From there, we travel through nearly four thousand years of history, examining Assyrian siege reliefs, Persian royal inscriptions, European criminal codes, the notorious punishments ordered by rulers like Peter the Great, and Dan confusing the Javanese with the Japanese.

Naturally, Kevin and Dan bring their dark sense of humor to a subject that makes even the most uncomfortable historical research feel like a particularly bad day at work. Along the way, we examine the different methods of impalement, why some victims survived for hours or even days, how a gruesome public execution became a powerful tool of terror, the translation issues that cause arguments between historians, and all of it with one GLARING omission.

It’s torture history, brutal executions, ancient empires, and the horrifying lengths rulers have gone to make sure everyone gets the message.

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What happens when a group of doctors decides that the best way to study a sexually transmitted disease is to make absolutely sure their patients have it?

In this episode of Torture: A Dark History, Kevin Young and Dan Hourigan uncover one of the darkest chapters in the history of American medicine: the Guatemalan Syphilis Experiments. Beginning with historian Susan Reverby’s discovery of John Cutler’s research papers in 2003, we trace how a secret medical experiment conducted in Guatemala between 1946 and 1948 deliberately exposed prisoners, soldiers, psychiatric patients, sex workers, and others to syphilis, gonorrhea, and chancroid.

We follow the story from the rise of syphilis as a major public health concern after World War I, through the discovery of penicillin, and into the increasingly disturbing experiments carried out by American researchers who wanted controlled subjects for their research. What began with attempts to study sexual transmission eventually involved deliberate infections, repeated exposures, painful procedures, and subjects who were often never told what was actually being done to them.

We’ll also look at some of the individual victims whose stories survived in the records, including Berta, a psychiatric patient who was deliberately infected with multiple diseases before her death, and the children who were subjected to medical procedures despite never being deliberately infected with syphilis.

And naturally, Kevin and Dan bring their dark sense of humor to a story where the phrase “medical experiment” somehow manages to become more horrifying with every page of documentation.

This is dark history, medical experimentation, true crime, the history of syphilis, and one of the most disturbing chapters in the history of American medicine.

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