As The Raven Dreams Podcast - Dark History Episode 02 - Systemic Failures in Human History (ATRD 229)

Episode Date: June 17, 2026

Today we have 5 Write ups about Societal Collapses - An analysis of Dark History by Tom K. Discover more from him ➤ https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DBVX81W7 🎧 Submit your stories, find my social media pages & Listen to the podcast on other platforms → https://AstheRavenDreams.com Merch & Book Official ATRD Merch ➤ https://teechip.com/stores/astheravendreams Signed Books & More ➤ https://ko-fi.com/AsTheRavenDreams Book is also available (unsigned) on Amazon, just search "The Insomniac's Experiment" Support & Get Early Access Become a YouTube Member ➤ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkW0ihdMHfBUjQrMKjRto6g/join Support on Patreon ➤ https://www.patreon.com/AsTheRavenDreams Gaming Channel ➤ @superNefariousBros Chapters 00:00:00 ➤ Introduction To Dark History Ep 2 00:00:58 ➤ The Lisbon Earthquake 00:18:18 ➤ The Dancing Plague - Europe’s Strangest Phenomenon 00:25:00 ➤ The Persian Famine - When The Institution Failed and Liked It 00:37:14 ➤ The Great Smog of London - When The Air Became Toxic 00:55:22 ➤ The Ill-fated Franklin Expedition (Imperial Hubris) 01:12:26 ➤ Thank you for Listening my friends! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. Hey y'all, it's Kelly Clarkson with Wayfair. Ever order furniture online and wonder what if? Like, what if it doesn't hold up? That sofa was four days old. You should have ordered from Wayfair. With Wayfair, there's no what if. Just style you love and quality you can trust. Visit Wayfair. Wayfair, every style, every home. Hello there, my friends, on both YouTube and the podcast. That's right. We have another special episode with a shared intro, which is not a common thing, but here we are again.

My friends, today we are ready to dive into some of the darkest and most mysterious moments in our history. We're going to run the gamut today. What happens when the earth itself revolts on a sacred holiday? What is it like when the government fails to stop a slow encroaching famine? What could possibly make people break out into dance until they drop dead in the street? Just what is going on through people's head when toxic smog bathes an entire city and kills thousands? Well, well, we may not find the answers. Today we are going to look at some of the darkest moments in history

in this Dark History Episode 2. The Lisbon earthquake. Imagine, if you will, that you're sitting in church. It happens to be all saints' day, and the entire community has flocked to their various religious institutions all across the city, and the churches are packed. The bells toll, the multitude across the urban expanse, creating their own metallic symphony,

beckoning the late comers and trying to entice the non-believer. You sing hymns, listen to the priest as he guides the congregation through the day's sermon, and then as he begins the prayer, the unthinkable happens. The earth skips all pretense, of a tremor and instead violently convulses. The church begins to collapse, with you and the congregation still inside. All across the city, the scene plays out again and again, as churches full of worshippers fall like dominoes.

This is just the beginning of what happened in Lisbon on the morning of November 1st, 1755. With churches and other buildings toppled, the ones who had survived collapse, the lucky ones, the ones that crawled out of the debris, all did what people normally do in this situation. They ran. Fleeing the city, fleeing to open air, fleeing toward the water. The Tagus had always been vital to Lisbon and its livelihood. Commerce flowed along it, as surely as its waves and rain.

ripples. As the fleeing mob approached, they would have watched the waters of their river recede. Ships would have sunk down into the sand with their anchors exposed. Parts of the riverbed they had never seen dry would have been laid bare. Curiously, but cautiously, some of the crowd could have inched forward, unsure of what to think. And that is when the sea returned. Not bit by bit, not even in waves as we think of them, but a wall. one unstoppable force that had only one place to go. Forward. Ships were ripped free from their moorings and hurled inland like toys.

Great Stone Quas vanished entirely. Entire crowds were washed away in seconds. If the earth didn't care, neither did the water. And we've not reached the end of the horrors yet. Lisbon in 1755 was a city, built for devotion, trade, and beauty. It was constructed of great timber beams, wooden floors, wax candles, and oil lamps. Fires in the hearth left untended.

Thousands of them. And when the earthquake hit, those fires didn't go out. They spread. The glowing cool and braziers spilled. Those wax candles fell into rubble. The hearths cracked open and fed the spreading wreckage. Inside the ruins of churches, candles burned along the shattered pews and broken altars. The drapes caught fire, the roofs ignited.

A whole new disaster was breaking out across the city, brought on when the wind came. The scattered fires were suddenly fanned, and what had started as just a few scattered blazes became a completely different kind of beast. It became a firestorm. The superheated air rose into the sky, pulling fresh off. oxygen in its wake. The fire leapt streets, sparks danced in the wind. Entire neighborhoods ignited at once, not because the fire had touched them, but because the very air itself was hot enough to burn. Streets were chimneys for the torrent smoke. The once vibrant plazas were turned into furnaces.

Stone laid long ago cracked from the heat, iron began to warp and contort, and then the lead of the rooftops began to melt. It fell over the city like molten rain. And the city would burn for days, not for hours or even just a night, but full days. When the flames finally died out, the awful truth became apparent. They had expected to find a city in ruin, but what they saw was a city erased. Somewhere between 60 to 85% of the city was lost completely. At first, it was the earth that had struck in a horrible ambush. Then the water betrayed them by wiping away entire crowds of people.

And then the fire came, a blazing finality that told the survivors that their world would never, ever be the same again. Three strikes, three elements. This left them with no enemy to curse and no enemy to lay the blame on. Just the earth reminding us, on a holy day, in a holy city that we are not entitled to any level of permanence on this planet. For days, the survivors watched their city burn. Their dead were piling up, and any search for other survivors was mostly met with heartbreak.

Thousands were dead. There was no question of that even before someone actually started trying to count them. There was no food, there was no clean water, and the tremors rattled everyone for days after the earthquake. There weren't even any screams. Everyone was just too exhausted to do more than silently sob, if they had the strength to even do that. It was quiet.

Quiet in the way that a funeral might be. It was that kind of eerie, oppressive quiet. The kind of quiet that you were scared to disrupt. The churches were gone and piles of just slag and rubble, where homes once stood there was only ruin, smouldering for days, taking the hopes and dreams of the people that once inhabited them into the sky, with the smoke and the ash. Some of the braver folks approached the ruins of their homes once the ash had cooled, just enough to sift through trying to find something, anything, to cling on to, which was very difficult when entire streets had been erased. The bells that had once brought familiar comfort were now melted down and forever silenced.

The survivors were completely rudderless. They wandered the ruins of the city, of their homes, the ruins of their very lives. Some searching for family that no longer existed. Others were just wandering in order to keep moving, because stillness brought thought, and thought brought feeling. The ones too shocked to wander just sat in open places staring off into nothing. Others collapsed and just slept where they fell. Some slept on the riverbanks or in the fields.

Some even slept in their overturned boats. They had no choice. There was nowhere left to go. With their city and shambles in their world no longer making sense, the people of Lisbon did their best to carry on. So it was into the ruin of Lisbon that Sebastian, that Sebastio Jose de Cavado and Melo, the king's chief minister came.

The later Marquis of Pommel did not ask questions about God's intent, nor did he care to listen to the church's attempt to explain what had happened. He didn't see a problem of faith. He saw one of imperially pragmatic logistics and damage control. When he first arrived, the dead would have been heaped in the streets, with the smell beginning to even make the most stalwart of survivors turn a little green. Disease didn't care about prayers and neither did Pombal. Barry the dead, feed the living.

The dead were quickly dumped into mass graves, or put on barges and dumped out at sea. Not reverently, not ceremoniously, but hastily. Disease didn't care about morning periods either. Now the second part, feed the living. Grain stores were seized, prices fixed, hoarders, punished. Bread was handed out under guard. Pomba was determined that hunger would not sweep through the survivors the way the fire had. Then martial law was declared. Luters weren't jailed, they were executed, sometimes publicly, sometimes immediately. This wasn't cruelty for its own

sake. It was an attempt to regain control over a situation that had already exceeded most human capacity to control. Buried the dead, feed the living. No defrable. No defrable. reference to God, no mention of mourning, no mention of why, just action and moving forward. At first, no one questioned Pombol's authority. Why would they? Bread was being distributed. The streets once choked with ash and corpse were now a clear and life began to feel something akin to normal. Elizabethan was still wounded, and maybe on one knee, but she wasn't laid out cold anymore. They couldn't argue with his results, and they probably didn't want to argue with them either. But in the weeks that followed the crisis, people began to notice things. The soldiers were not leaving.

The decrees, they weren't softening. The city was not returned to the hands of her people, the church, or even fully to the crown. It remained in the iron grip of the one man who had proven and that he could make chaos evaporate like smoke in a tempest. And to a city that had been thrice pummeled by earth, water, and fire. That promise of order mattered even more than being able to pray at church. And for his part, Pombol did make full use of his, let's say, unilateral authority. He didn't just consolidate his own position and then the loaf around. Absolutely not.

There was work to be done, and so far he was the only one that had brought. proven he had what it took to get the work done. Lisbon needed to be rebuilt, and it would be rebuilt as Pombaw saw it. Not as what it had been before, but as something new, something efficient, that wouldn't bow any time the earth had the temerity to tremble. For Europe, this would mark the first step beyond the medieval period, and into something more enlightened. In the days it followed, a complete sidelining of the church.

church occurred. The Catholic Church had held unfathomable power during the entire medieval period. And now, for the first time in centuries, they weren't in control. Not in Lisbon. And as I said, Pumball would use his power to redesign the very skeleton of Lisbon. It was he that began to implement architecture with anti-seismic properties in mind. Pombol was the one that laid out Lisbon streets in the wide grid pattern that we recognize today. The entire thing was completely unprecedented. For generations and beyond, the land had always been in the hand of an emperor, a king or the church. And now there was this official non-royal strongman who had come in and completely redesigned everything about Lisbon. While it wouldn't be appreciated, except maybe.

in retrospect. What Pombol did was nothing short of astounding, especially given the time period we're talking about. What Pomba had rebuilt wasn't just the city. He had completely redefined the state's relationship with disaster, and kind of made them accountable during situations like this. They were obligated to do something. And everything from that point on was completely revolutionary. Pombol sent out questionnaires across Portugal asking people, did the ground shake, and for how long? This was nothing less than the first ever example of a systematic disaster study. It also opened the door on a completely new science at the time, seismology. For the first time, people weren't asking why did God let this happen.

They were asking, how did this happen? and God wasn't necessarily part of that question anymore. It was the beginning of a more rational style of governance that would extend into surveillance and ultimately planning from this point forward. Lisbon didn't just survive the earthquake. It changed the very relationship to the world around it and showed people new in different ways of viewing the world. It also taught people that thinking differently didn't necessarily mean you were a heritage.

if you were still one of the spiritual sort. The Lisbon earthquake was, for society, a watershed moment. If I had to pick a point in history and say here is where you can see the modern world beginning to emerge, it would likely be during the aftermath of this tragedy. And now I get to do something that I just do not get to do enough of. That's Tom saying that. Not me. and that is talk about Voltaire.

At least not in a reasonable kind of context, but he's a literal actor in this drama, and so I can bring him up, and it does not feel like a huge bit of whiplash. That being said, we've already touched on the beginnings of a kind of societal change. Lisbon had completely changed the way a lot of people thought about the world, namely the people of Lisbon.

But it wasn't long before those ripples radiated out into the greater, wider world, and medieval Europe was finally having to reassess the way it approached everything. For starters, it had to address the timeless old mindset that the universe, while occasionally harsh, was ultimately ordered. There was always some kind of underlying method to the madness, so to speak. Lisbon openly dashed that assumption. No one could say that this was famine brought on by bad governance. It wasn't the work of some marauding enemy force, and it certainly wasn't some sort of targeted punishment leveled at sinners.

It was a triple whammy catastrophe on a holy day, as people were literally in church praying. Of all people, Voltaire took this particularly personal. He couldn't make sense of that kind of warped geometry. In the wake of the disaster, he wrote poem Les Desasteres-Ben. which was less a work of poetry and more outright accusation. Not against God alone, but against the old way of thinking that everything somehow happens for a benevolent reason. He openly rejected the old theological reflex that Lisbon had been punished for its sins,

asking what sins children crushed in church could have possibly committed. More so than just about any other event that I can point to, I would say that the Lisbon earthquake was that first moment you can see the young version of our modern world stepping into its own. And by no means was it the death of faith in Europe or anywhere else. It did, however, change faith from then on. The idea that the world was ordered, fair, and ultimately benevolent, had been challenged, like never before. And it could no longer just be taken for granted. The Earth had made no distinctions.

The faithful were crushed, burned, and washed away alongside the faithless. Holy relics and humble homes were not spared the flames. What arose from the ashes of that terrible tragedy was an entirely new way of thinking. It was the birth of a world where disasters are studied instead of just explained away. It started a system where authority was expected to act. Suffering now demanded a response. Not just interpretation. But at the end of the day, the most unsettling truth that was laid bare was the idea that the world was obliged to make sense.

The far more terrifying truth is that the Earth doesn't hate us. It doesn't judge us. It doesn't even notice us. Spotify, it's Jay Shetty. Are you one of those media strategy people? scrolling through spreadsheets, searching for an audience that pays twice as much attention to your ads than they do on social, let me introduce you to fans. And they're here with me on Spotify. Trust me, I know fans.

They don't skip, they stay for hours. They don't move on, they manifest. They're not a demographic group, they're fans. Spotify advertising. You're among fans. The Dancing Plague. July of 1518, a woman later documented as Frau Trafier stepped into the streets and began, well, moving. You could call it dancing, I suppose, but there was no music. There was no festival. It wasn't a holy day.

And nor was Frot Trafier ecstatic or crying out in rapture. She was just dancing. At first, Strasbourg tried not to pay her any mind. They weren't looking to make a spectacle of what was likely someone else's grief or madness. But Frou Chaffier danced the entire day and in to the night. The next morning, the citizens couldn't help but be a little curious and a lot worried about Fra Chaffier, and so people began to check on her, only to find her still dancing in the street. She was exhausted and dehydrated. Her feet were bleeding and her legs were swollen, but she was still unable to make herself stop.

The thinking became, well, she danced through the night. Surely she'll wind down soon. But she didn't wind down. Frauchafier continued to dance beyond the point she could have consciously chosen to do so. passed the point where her body says, Dancing, yeah, but hear me out, limits. By the time the third day had come around, people were actively trying to help Fra Trafier.

They brought her water and food. Some people tried to restrain her to help her stop. None of their efforts had any real payoff, sadly. Frou continued to dance for days, without stopping. The citizens of Strasbourg watched her collapse, only to pull herself back to her bloodied feet and continued dancing. And on the fourth day, Frouchefier was no longer a curiosity. She'd escalated, in the minds of the city folk, into a problem.

People no longer checked on her out of concern, but out of dread. Something about her inability to stop, disturbed the citizens of Strasbourg, in a way that famine, disease, and even war couldn't. Those things were very external, and all had very clear causes. Fraut Trafier's involuntary movement, however, well, that was just a huge unknown. After passing her street, children were dragged indoors by worried parents. Merchants would cross themselves and quicken their pace.

Others would mumble prayers, not for her, but because of her. Was it grief? Was it madness? Or was this some sort of punishment? Those things Strasbourg could understand. Could have just made sense. But this? It behaved like none of those things. It seemed more like encroaching inevitability. And then, one person joined her. And then another. Not together, not in unison.

not in some kind of shared step or choreography. Their bodies just began to move the way hers did. Compulsively, relentlessly. With no joy or intent, there was no smiling or laughing. Not even acknowledgement between them, they just simply danced. By the end of the week, there were dozens of people dancing. By the end of the month, there were hundreds dancing. Strasbourg became a city with the streets full of bodies, all in motion, all beyond their ability to control.

Some of them were fresh, others had been dancing for days or maybe weeks, and were already beginning to break down. Feet split open, muscles seized. There were screams of pain and cries of exhaustion. This wasn't a party, this wasn't a festival. These weren't blist out revelers. These were people suffering some kind of unseen, unexplainable crisis. And now the city needed to make some very important decisions. Intervene or just let it continue unchecked.

The authorities responded the best way they knew how, at the time. The city consulted physicians who thought it was overheated blood, which was believed to cause involuntary movements. In their minds and eyes, the district, dancing wasn't so much a symptom of the illness as it was a sign of the illness leaving the body. It was believed that if they tried to force the dancers to stop, they would die. And so in trying to do the right thing, the city made things so very much worse. Dance halls were built, musicians were hired, and the dancing became encouraged.

And that's when the first person collapsed and did not get up. more people began to drop dead strokes hearts giving out dehydration more people were suffering so the system did what systems do when they get it wrong and they overcorrected music was banned the dance halls all closed the new measures didn't show any more signs of success than the previous ones but by early september the dancing plague was slowing and fizzling out the people who died were quietly removed the survivors gradually regained control of their bodies. The dancing plague ended as quietly and as disturbingly as it had begun. If anything, I think the dancing plague teaches us some very important things about people and how we deal with suffering. When there's some kind of explanation of it, we can survive it. When suffering has no explanation behind it and there's no understanding to be had,

people can endure it. But when suffering is tolerated, managed, or even administered, well, that, that's an entirely different plague. The Persian famine when the institution failed and liked it. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, Persia was in a strange state of existence. It was largely a vassal state for the state. the imperial powers, predominantly Russia and Great Britain. The Quar dynasty held power and administered the state. In 1907, the Anglo-Russian Convention carved the state into spheres of influence,

with the Russians occupying the north of the country while the British occupied the south, and the antagonistic Ottoman Empire loomed to the west. Now, with so many imperial fingers in the pie, and with the travesty looming in 1914, of the outbreak of the First World War, I think we can all appreciate just what kind of precarious position the Persian people existed in. The rural people

of the country's existence were somewhere around the just existing level, with them achieving subsinence on a so-called good year. Persia's existence was tenuous at best even when things were at their best. Imperial presence

naturally caused a stabilization in the region. And sadly for Persia, that meant that when Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated in Serbia in June of 1914, and war began to spread throughout Europe, it wasn't long before things would get much, much worse. When the conflict broke out, Persia declared its neutrality. However, since there were already multiple imperial presences in the country, everyone decided this didn't matter, and Persia was turned into a corridor for the forces of the Empire, because it was convenient. That was Persia's biggest sin. Convenience. When armies march, they do much more than just move from here to there. One of the biggest things they do is eat. The allies that moved

through Persia, requisitioned everything. Wagons, fuel, grain, livestock, pack animals, all paid with promissory notes, if at all. Immediately, Persia's markets began to distort. The scariest thing about famine is that food doesn't just vanish overnight. In fact, it often breaks out right next to food. The transportation systems in Persia, namely the rail systems, were prioritized for the use of the British and Russian militaries. Grain sat in villages but was unable to be transported because the train system had been, for all intents and purposes, hijacked by foreign powers. Well, that is, the grain that wasn't seized by the armies that would be gone in a matter of days that were just passing through. They left in their wake a string of empty storehouses and receipts that no one would ever have the decency to honor.

This caused prices to spike, drastically. The food a family could afford for a week now suddenly costs a month's wages. It wasn't long until people were bartering instead of buying, and then barter broke down as well, as things continued to spiral. This was followed by the total collapse of the rest of the transportation system. Rail lines were already prioritizing military movement over civilian need. The roads were choked by military traffic for transporting equipment and more troops. The caravans that had once delivered food to other regions were confiscated outright, or rendered impossible by insecurity and banditry.

Food sat in one region, while the neighboring region starved. Separated not by distance, but by empire. The most crucial part of all of this, no one was responsible for fixing it. While the Quahara government technically existed, they had no jurisdiction over the occupying soldiers. They couldn't stop the requisitions. It couldn't compel redistribution. They were barely able to collect taxes, much less offer any kind of meaningful relief. Persia was being expected to function like a state, while not being allowed to act like one. Meanwhile, as speculation thrived, the people suffered. More,

and more. Grain was being hoarded, prices manipulated. Merchants that had access to imperial supply lines survived. The rural farmers starved to death. The countryside began to empty as people flocked to major cities looking for food that didn't exist there either. By 1916, hunger was no longer an isolated problem. It had become systemic. By 1917, it was fatal. This wasn't an instant. of a single massive failing. It was an entire cascade of failures. Any and every institution that should have at least slowed the collapse had already been stripped of any real power by imperial necessity.

Persia had been reduced to a thoroughfare. It was no longer a homeland. And once an entire population is reduced to nothing more than a supply line, then those people that live within that population have been deemed expendable. By the time nature itself had turned on Persia, there wasn't a single institution left that could absorb the blow. Everything had already been hollowed out.

So when drought began to ravage crop yields, it made an already deadly crisis nothing more than a fatal one. Distorted markets, hollow institutions, and now regional drought and poor harvests all worked together, not to create a crisis, but to expose one that had been quietly running in the background for years. The fields that had once barely sustained families in good years now produced nothing at all. With all the livestock already sold or having been requisitioned by the Imperial armies, there was nothing left to liquidate. There was nothing left to eat, except grain seed itself,

which, of course, destroyed the possibility not only of the next harvest, but the one after that, In sheer desperation, people only erased their own futures more quickly. And then came the Spanish influenza. Influenza itself was not a stranger to the people of Persia, nor anywhere else in the world. But I think most of us know just how far reaching and ravaging the Spanish flu was to the healthy population. And when it arrived in Persia near the end of the war, it didn't find a flush and thriving population. It found one that was already malnourished, displaced, and immunocompromised.

The children and the elderly as ever were the first to begin dying. Quietly, at first, and then in rapidly growing numbers. By the winter of 1918, death in Persia had stopped being remarkable. It was no longer a singular event that drew attention or demanded a response. It was just simply part of the environment now. Something that happened on the day. day to day, one that people stepped around if they could, stepped over when they had to. Eventually, everyone just kind of stopped reacting altogether. Families shrank quietly. A child didn't wake up. The elder never got up off their mat. There was just no energy left to mourn, no strength to observe ritual. Burial was rushed and shallow in some areas.

while in other places burial didn't happen at all. Bodies were left at home or carried to the edges of the villages and just left. No one had the strength or the will to even try and do more. The famine wasn't some terrible wave that crashed into the populace and then retreated. It was the slow creep and linger of a toxic gas, the fingers of death slowly crawling up the back of the populace. First, one village emptied. than the next. The roads weren't full of some epic column of fleeing refugees. It was dotted

by hollowed out individuals chasing rumors of food that had already been eaten, seized, or priced beyond their reach. Cities offered no relief. They merely concentrated the suffering. The thing that really makes this entire moment harder to reconcile, even now over a century later, isn't just the scale of the dying but the sheer absence of any interference by, well, any of the people that should have interfered. There was no acknowledgments of what was going on. There was no rushed redistribution to try and curb the mass starvation. And while the machinery of empire continued to run just fine, it wasn't running in support of the people that lived there. There was never a single triumphant moment that marked the end of the famine in the early 1920.

its grip just lessened bit by bit. No convoy arrived just in time to save those that were left. There was no victorious announcement, and there certainly was never a reckoning. The war ended, and foreign troops went home or were stationed elsewhere, and the markets slowly unstuck themselves and gained some sense of fairness. The crops even eventually started to grow again. It can't really be said that Persia ever recovered. covered so much as Persia endured.

Endured until the pressures on it finally relented, even if it was slowly and gradually. The estimates of how many died during the famine and the fallouts are, well, to put it lightly, wide-ranging. Not because the number was small, but because the people that should have been keeping count simply didn't. The fairest and most accurate number would be to say that it's known that millions died. and within those millions, millions of them were uncounted and largely unacknowledged at all. It's also incredibly safe to say that the famine ended, not because the institutions began to work

suddenly or dramatically, but because the forces applying those pressure had finally moved on. Maybe that's what makes this story, this period of our history so unsettling. There was no big villain to point at. There was no sudden heroic change of policy that came down. It was all silence, absence and a population learning in the most painful ways possible that survival doesn't necessarily require intervention. It merely required being unnoticed long enough to be left alone again. I'm sure from here, our audience is wondering just what connects something like famine and Persia to the smog smothering of the city of London. And that answer, dear listener, isn't Geography era?

or even intent. It's something far more delicious to the human brain, and that is pattern. A system working exactly as it was designed, even as the people existing inside of its suffocate. In Persia, hunger crept in silently and lingered, even as food existed nearby, but just out of reach. Decades later, death would roll in on London,

slow, visible, but just as inevitable. So moving on from Persia, Take a breath, my friends, and step with me into the fog. The great smog of London, when the air became toxic. By the middle of the 20th century, London was not a city that was unaccustomed to smoke. In fact, life in the city kind of ran on smoke. The king producer of smoke was coal. You see, coal was warmth.

It was light. And most importantly, of all, it was industry. Coal kept the gears of the empire turning at home and abroad. London burned coal the way our lungs burn oxygen. That is to say, without thought. For generations, London had kind of existed under a stale gray veil. Most people didn't even really notice it anymore. Fog was by no means a strange new phenomenon.

London fog had its own reputation. To many, it was romantic, mysterious in its ways. Painters loved the fog. The writers mythologized it. In a city with so many sharp edges, it kind of doled things, softened them. It helped London hide its scars, and who could deny that it gave the grimy streets of London its own kind of character. To people of the city, a foggy morning wasn't a warning sign.

It wasn't a red flag, it was just another morning in London. But that level of comfort, that level of familiarity, it wasn't exactly a good thing, as the citizens were about to learn. By 1952, the very systems that powered life in London had already become stacked against the people that lived inside of it. Britain was still recovering from World War II. Fuel was cheap and regulation was lax, which led to a drastic decline in the quality of the coal that was now being burned in homes and by factories. Homes burned dirtier fuel while the smoke clouds that belched from the power stations were thicker and darker. The factories exhaled without restraint, and all of it rose into the same shared air. The city didn't even realize that something was wrong.

Smoke was smoke was smoke. It was nothing new. Just a bit thicker, maybe. Then, in December, once more, nature betrayed man. Not through malice, just by doing what it always does. There was a very intense cold snap, and with it came a temperature inversion, a natural atmospheric phenomenon that trapped cold air close to the ground below a layer of warm air above it. Under normal conditions, the smoke and pollutants rise up into the air.

Not so much under an inversion. They accumulate. As millions of fireplaces were lit against the cold, the smoke had absolutely nowhere to go. And so it pulled, thickened. It began to press down in the streets, the homes, and yes, even the lungs of the people below. But what was forming wasn't just a fog anymore. It was a dense, top. toxic soup of soot, industrial exhaust, and sulfur dioxide.

In the beginning, it was just unpleasant. Visibility was limited. The buses slowed, and people walked from memory rather than sight. People just joked about it, as Londoners had always joked about the fog. But this fog was different. It was wrong. This fog didn't go away when the sun rose. This fog wasn't thinning as the wind. blew across the city. This fog never stopped getting worse.

By the end of that first day, the city was already trapped deep inside a crisis that it didn't even understand yet. It wasn't a sudden disaster or a violent explosion, or even a dramatic collapse. It was just a system that had been working, continuing to work, under all of the wrong conditions. And this fog was just clinging on stubbornly, right? Surely it would break by tomorrow. London went to bed, expecting relief the next day.

They lived their life to this rhythm. Ducks quacked, dogs barked, and fog rolled over London during the night. It made the morning commute a bit annoying, and then it broke by midday once the city had warmed. It was inconvenient, but it was something to grumble about, as politely as possible, of course. But it wasn't really something to fear. But they were disappointed. This fog was not breaking. It was clinging to the streets, to the alleyways, the courtyards and doors were pulling with it.

Visibility dropped to a mere few feet in places. People were unable to see across the street, and sometimes not even to the end of their arms. Bus drivers abandoned their routes due to not being able to see. the curbs. London's traffic slowed first to a crawl and then came to a stop altogether. People were abandoning cars and trying to walk home with their arms stretched out before them like they were blind. Public transport had given up. Ambulances couldn't navigate the streets. Fire engines couldn't find their way through the fog either. Even inside the buildings, the fog seeped under doors. It found the cracks in the windows and turned hallways into a yellow, gray gloom.

Even still, nobody was calling it an emergency. People improvised. They memorized the number of steps between landmarks. They followed the walls and listened for footsteps ahead of them. They adapted as Londoners always had, through stubbornness and gallows humor. The newspapers were running jokes. The radio host warned people that it was just a bit thicker than usual. But even if no one had said it yet, something was significant.

significantly different. Breathing was harder. It wasn't painful, not at first, just heavier. Every breath had some resistance to it, like trying to pull air through a wet cloth. And there was a taste, a bitter taste to the air, metallic even. It coated the back of the throat and lingered as stubbornly as the haze itself. People were coughing more. Chests were tight and eyes burned. People with chronic bronchitis and asthma noticed it immediately. Well, to everyone else, it was still just another irritation on a growing list of them. The hospitals were beginning to fill.

Not with trauma patients, not even with injuries. More people were coming in that couldn't quite catch their breath. Elderly people first, followed by the young children, as always. Doctors treated as best they could. Oxygen, rest, and reassurance. No alarms were raised, no bulletins were issued. After all, it was winter, so it's not like respiratory issues were uncommon.

Outside, those coal fires, they never stopped burning. Houses were burning more to keep warm. The power plants never shut down. Factories were carrying on as used. All that smoke and the soot and the sulfur were still trapped low over the city. Unable to rise, unable to disperse, the murk was still growing worse. By the second night, London wasn't just waiting for the fog to rise. It was waiting for a moment to catch its breath.

Just like so many other disasters, this one hadn't arrived with resounding sirens, sirens and front-loaded warnings. It crept in in slow motion. It accumulated, settling deep into the lungs of the city. A city that had long ago decided that this was just normal enough to endure. And that system just carried on functioning, all the while failing to keep people alive. By day three, it wasn't just an inconvenience anymore. It had made Londoners stumble through the streets a bit sure, but now, now it was something different and measurable. People were no longer coughing and complaining about a tight chest. They were wheezing and sitting up in bed at night,

because lying down made breathing feel like they were drowning. It was the elderly that started fading at first, not all at once and not all in some great dramatic collapse, but in small domestic tragedies that were easy to overlook. The pensioners that's unable to catch his breath, the elderly woman who went to bed with a cough and never properly awoke again, a child whose fever had spiked in the night whose lungs just couldn't keep up with the strain of living. The hospitals weren't filling quietly anymore. The waiting rooms were a list of symptoms on repeat. Breathlessness, raw throat, painful fits of coughing, eyes streaming.

but no matter how much faster than nurses and doctors work, the line just kept growing. The painful irony was that London still couldn't move. No ambulances were bringing in patients. They were arriving on foot, guided by relatives holding their elbows. Some arrived in taxis that were crawling through the streets at a walking pace. Many didn't go at all. They sat at home by the windows that didn't open quite right and just tried to endure the way London always had. And even then, it still didn't feel like an emergency, not in the official capacity.

Nothing about the deaths really screamed something new. It was winter. People always died of things like chronic bronchitis in the winter. Pneumonia and complications aren't far removed either. A city's paperwork always has neat little. ways of sanding the edges of a crisis. On paper, it's never the air that's killing you. No, it's always something polite. Something that can sit neatly on a form and not look so damning as toxic air as a cause of

deathbox. But numbers, as they do, began to tell the truth. Undertakers were overwhelmed. The morgues were full. Even the animals were telling tales. Cattle at Smithfield were choked. The birds vanished from the sky. In places you could run your finger along a window and it looked like you had just wiped the inside

of a chimney. The fog wasn't just outside anymore, it was inside everything. On clothing, inside curtains, even inside the cups just left sitting. And obviously, it was inside the lungs of the people too. Still, the coal fires burned. Homes continued to feed their hearths because it was bitterly cold and the alternative was freezing. Of course, the power stations continued to produce electricity. Factories continued work because production schedules don't care about atmosphere, only the deadline.

The engine of the machine continued to do exactly what it was meant to do. Systems continued to work, but the bodies of the people began to fail. and those numbers, they climbed. It wasn't that London didn't know what was happening. No, the cruelest part of it all was London did know. It had been living under clouds of smoke and soot for decades. The city had decided that it was the price worth paying in order to keep warm, to be an industrial powerhouse, and to keep the lights on.

The biggest difference was now that, in that fateful December of 1950, nature took that familiar poison and refused to allow it to leave. And the system did what systems are meant to do. It carried on. It kept feeding that very fog that was now feeding on the people of London. When the fog eventually began to lift, it wasn't a huge ceremonious moment when the city realized they could see the sky again. It was a very gradual loosening of the grip the haze held.

Gradually, buildings regained their outlines. The streets drifted back into focus. The city blinked and found itself still standing. What the fog left in its wake, however, that was much harder to reconcile. Windows were still stained black. The abandoned cars in the streets looked as if they'd been dipped in soot. Perhaps worse was inside homes where a thin, greasy film coated everything. everything, furniture, drapes, clothing, and the dishes were all lathered in it.

When people opened up their homes to air them out, they realized the smell had remained, soaking into everything it had touched. And then, those numbers. Hospital admissions were down, but deaths were not. They rose. The people who had held on through the worst of it were now dying from complications their bodies simply could not recover from. Chronic bronchitis, asthma, heart failure, all the old and polite methods of death, but now in numbers higher than ever. By the time the city finally began to count,

the scope of what had happened was no longer avoidable. The officials spoke very, very carefully at first. They kept the estimates conservative. Maybe a few thousand excess deaths. It was a It was tragic, certainly, but not wholly unprecedented. Winter was always hard on London's elderly and infirm. That explanation could very well be convenient, but it did not hold. As records were compared and mortality rates laid side by side to records of other years, the pattern became undeniable. This wasn't a bad flu season, it wasn't just chance, and it certainly was not a coincidence. It had been the very air itself, air that Londoners had breathed breathed for decades.

Only this time the air had been concentrated, trapped, and weaponized by circumstance. And just to say, really quick, as I pulled away from Tom's script, doing some quick research, the number of deaths estimated from this fog sit between four to 12,000 people directly killed during this situation. However, the more modern estimates of people that died. from the fog and complications caused by it sits closer to a hundred thousand. In the most quietly damning part of it all, nothing about the great smog nor the consequences were a mystery.

The dangers of coal smoke were known factors. Medical journals had been publishing for years warning against respiratory illnesses. Researchers had linked pollution with premature death long before 1952. existed. Recommendations had been made and regulations had been proposed. And they were shelved or delayed, often deemed impractical. Clean air? Well, that was expensive. No, London needed warmth. It needed industry. It needed to keep the lights on. The system had made its choice long before the fog had ever rolled in. It was finally during the aftermath that public outrage began to break through that typically polite restraint. First, the newspapers stopped printing jokes. Hard questions were

asked in front of Parliament. Committees were formed and investigations were launched, not because people had suddenly become more compassionate, but because evidence was no longer able to be filed under normal. The Clean Air Acts would follow, and the regulations would come. smokeless fuels were introduced and the system would eventually adjust. But only after the damage had been done. I don't think you can say that the great smog revealed flaws in the system so much as it laid the system's priorities bare. It showed how much harm could be tolerated before action became unavoidable.

Thousands had to die before the air itself was deemed unacceptable. And even then, actions didn't come from a place of grief so much as one of embarrassment. A modern city had nearly suffocated itself in plain sight. That just would not do. In the end, as the smog broke and the sun started to shine upon the entire city of London, the people could finally see what they had been breathing in all along. Brought to you by L'Oreal Group. Beauty is a powerful force that moves us.

That's why L'Oreal Group has built a business that is inclusive at its heart with 100% of its brands, championing diversity. With 25,000 professional opportunities for people under 30 worldwide and 54% of leading positions held by women, diversity is a strength that helps L'Oreal Group create the best beauty products for all people. Visit L'Oreal.com to learn more. The ill-fated Franklin Expedition. With this write-up, we're going to do something that I think is incredibly important,

and we're going to do it for a couple of reasons. First of all, I want to push back on this really annoying thing where people think and act like ancient people were stupid. Clearly, they were not. If you want proof, answer me this question. Are you breathing? That's what I thought. You see, ancient people were in a lot.

incredibly clever, often more so than us at different points because they were carrying entire civilizations that spanned continents. They built pyramid without power tools. They filled libraries with stories and knowledge without the internet for research. They lived long enough to populate cities without advanced medicine. Folklore is very often discounted, mostly because a lot of people fail to see folklore for what it truly is. If we are living testimony that our ancestors were clever, then folklore is the oral memory that has survived through countless generations and carries more truth in history than we like to think sometimes.

Maybe because some of the notions conveyed seem silly, disturbing or too complex to people so far removed from the social circumstances that gave birth to this oral tradition. A huge part of the reason folklore is so incredibly priceless to us is because when the Great Empires inevitably fell, so greedy were they that they took most of their official recorded history into the ash heap of history with them, leaving us very little truly valuable official sources. Libraries, cities, parchments, they all burned leaving little evidence they once existed. But what did survive the collapse, the flaming and the chaos, were the people that dwelt within these vast imperial structures,

and their memories survived as well. That folklore, that history without documentation, was left to the only people that were still standing when the scribes and scholars had perished, or fled, and abandoned their duties because war. And these people would try to communicate what they thought, saw, what they experienced or remembered in the best possible way. And when what you're recounting was something as enormous as the collapse of an entire civilization that once ruled a huge chunk

of the known world, well, what could bring down such a monolith but an angry god or voracious and merciless monster? And today, we have this perfect little story for you, lovely and wonderful people, that will show you that sometimes folklore isn't just some weird campfire story. Sometimes, it's the only thing in the room that knows what happened at all. I'm sure that everyone here enjoys a good mystery. It's probably like catnip to most of us. But there are some mysteries that really shouldn't be framed as mysteries. The Lost Colony of Roanoke, for example.

Not really a mystery, but peddled as one to boost tourism. Another example of a mystery that is really not a mystery, and has a mystery. hasn't been for quite some time, yet was still conveyed as one, is the subject of this ride-up, the Franklin Expedition. By the middle of the 19th century, the Empire of Great Britain was convinced that it had solved the problems of the world. They were the empire the sun never sat on. A huge chunk of the world flew Union Jacks, and Great Britain was on the trajectory

that would take them to their pinnacle, when fully one quarter of the world would exist under the butcher's apron. This frankly grotesque level of success that empire building convinced Britain that everything they were doing was right. If they were doing something wrong, well, then how could they be the largest and richest empire on the planet? And once the age of sailing had unironically drifted over that horizon, and the age of the steam engine had fully arrived, the entire game changed again, in profound ways that

nobody thought was possible. The age of building boats out of solid wood, a practice dating all the way back to the Phoenicians, was over. Iron holes replaced the once rich wooden ones. The trusty compass was still there, but now with a companion in the chronometer. Food was now sealed inside tins. All the old implacable threats had now been reduced to logistical challenges. Well, that's what they liked.

to let themselves think. By this point, the British Empire had filled a lot of the world map and driven the so-called fog of war up to a tiny little spot all the way up in the far north of the map, the Arctic. But it was more than just the offensive blank spot on the map. There was a rumor of a northwest passage, and if it did exist, then whoever found and exploited it first would rewrite world trade history. So with the air of inevitability that every great British undertaking seemed to possess, the Franklin expedition was prepared. The two ships set out, not convinced that this was some kind of massive gamble.

To them it was manifest destiny. The last great unknown in the road to the east that everyone had been seeking for at least 400 years. By every imaginable metric, Sir John Franklin was the man for this job. at least as far as the British admiralty was concerned. He was both resilient and successful. Where other men had perished in the line of their duties, Franklin had survived, and for many in the admiralty, that was enough. And just to increase his value to the admiralty further,

he had always come back with maps, notes, and a reassuring narrative. You see, part of why this duty was placed upon Franklin was that he was already the veteran of a fledgling age of Arctic expedition. Not only that, but according to him, the Arctic was a harsh place. Of course, but manageable. Now, as you know I love to do, I'm going to just pause for a moment and frame this time for you. Britain wasn't at her peak yet. She was a far more dangerous creature,

but in her own eyes, it had become clear that that was where her trajectory was taking her. so Britain was still hungry. It still had work to be done. Her destiny was preordained but had not quite yet been fulfilled. And it was with this mindset that Sir John Franklin would give the Empire her last great victory. He set out with his two ironclad steamships, the HMS Arabis and the HMS Terror in 1845. Now, empires at heart, understand. in something vital to their continued existence.

Patience. When you send expeditions off to uncharted corners of the world, things take time. Weather changes, ice closes in, men are late. So after months of hearing nothing, the Admiralty didn't really think much of it. Perhaps there were harsh conditions in the Arctic and Franklin had been delayed. Then suddenly it was 1847, and the Admiralty. and there was still nothing. No resupply requests,

no icy corpse with a union jack stitched to his coat had washed ashore, not even a carrier pigeon. And now we're in 1848, and there has still been absolutely no word from the empire's favorite son. They had chosen Franklin specifically, because he always sent things back.

He always gained useful information, and most importantly he always came back. Sir John Franklin and his expedition had completely vanished. Vanished or not, the Admiralty's legendary patience only extended so far. The Empire had given him a task, and the Empire expected something. They didn't panic, though. Empires don't panic. They have vassals to do that for them.

What the Empire did do was assign another expedition to go in search of the original expedition. the only sane thing to do, I suppose. When the expedition left in search of Sir John Franklin, the Empire was forced to acknowledge something that they didn't really like to talk about. The Arctic wasn't empty. There was wildlife, obviously, but wildlife doesn't pay taxes, so the Empire certainly wasn't concerned about that. But there were other people living in this frigid and inhospitable land.

and they had been there for more generations than even their own oral history could count. The Empire had officially encountered the Inuit people of the Canadian Arctic. In between 1848 and 1854, across 15 to 20 expeditions, the Inuit had told them many times that they had seen ships that were stuck in and then crushed by the ice. They told them they saw white men dragging sledges to the south stacked with boats, equipment and bones. The Empire nodded politely and rode everything down. They had to bring something back to the Admiralty, regardless.

And then they quietly dismissed the stories. By 1845, though it was no longer just the British searching for Franklin and his men, the Hudson Bay Company had joined the hunt led up by the explorer John Ray. Now, John Ray was not a naval officer or a sailor. He traveled light, he survived off what the land could provide, and in the imperial mindset, most damningly of all, he listened to the very locals that he seemed to dress like. And those locals, they had a lot to tell John Ray. Of course, it really wasn't much different than what they had been telling the British for years.

Crucially, though, Ray was able to purchase artifacts from the Inuit that were identifiable as property of the expedition. Just a few simple things. Silverware, tools, buttons. With a pack full of evidence and a book full of notes, John Ray headed to Great Britain to report his findings. And the British were outraged. You see, Ray brought with him Inuit accounts of the expedition survivors trudging south, dragging those sledges.

Sledges that, if you recall, had bones piled on them. The Inuit account stated that those bones showed signs of marrow extraction, and other obvious signs that the survivors had in fact ate the dead to keep from starving. And cannibalism was the peak of unthinkable for men of the Royal Navy. The Admiralty didn't just reject Ray's findings. They attacked his character. They accused him of going native. They questioned his methods, his credibility,

and most importantly his trust in the Inuit testimonies. The outrage wasn't isolated to the admiral. morality either. Charles Dickens took to his magazine, Household Worlds, and in a two-part essay, where, among some incredibly racially charged comments implied that Ray was a liar, and that the Inuit were liars and worse, murderers that had invented the cannibalism stories as some kind of macabre alibi. No retractions or alibis were issued. Vindication is an incredibly powerful thing. It rarely arrives, quickly and almost never arrives loudly.

No pomp and circumstance. No contrite empire waiting with a wreath of roses and an apology. It tends to arrive in pieces over the course of years. A note found somewhere it was never meant to be found. Bones found where no one ever wanted to look. In the growing inescapable realization that the people who had been ignored, talked down, and dismissed, had been right all along.

And by no means did the British Empire suddenly decide that John Ray was right, nor were the Inuits offered any kinds of absolution. It was the ice itself that finally gave up the receipts. In 1859, an expedition funded by Lady Franklin and headed up by Francis Leopold McClintlock landed on King William Island. A place most people would never have stopped at unless they were desperate. There, in a cairn they stood where, in 1848, a member of Franklin's team once had and wrote a note. It was two notes and one.

The earlier piece, written in 1847, was pretty unremarkable. But in the margins, a year later, more damning things were added. Franklin had died in 1847, and afterwards the remaining crew finally abandoned the ice-locked ship and began to travel south. The Empire loved ceremony. The Arctic, however, didn't give a damn what they loved. It had stripped all of that away. Not in malice just in the indifferent way nature treats all things. Vidally, the note confirmed what the Inuit had been saying for over a decade.

The ships were trapped and then abandoned. The men were starving. And they began a march south through terrain that they did not know and were not prepared for. Later discoveries made the grim truth even more clear. Bones in the ice. Signs of extreme malnutrition. And to the empire's chagrin, cut marks on the bones. And clear signs and out of sheer desperation, the men had resorted to the unthinkable. Cannibalism.

Not as a moral failing, not in a moment of savagery, but out of pure survival. instinct. The story the Inuit had been telling for decades, and the empire had been denying couldn't be denied anymore. It had been vindicated. The Inuit had been forthright, and honest about what they had witnessed, telling of the exhausted white men trudging through the wilds, collapsing, discarding possessions, and dying slowly in a land that forgave neither ignorance nor hubris. The note does not acute. It does not explain it simply exists. And that was the moment the official story unraveled.

It didn't unravel loudly or dramatically, but with the truth written in English, it could no longer be ignored. For more than a century after the discovery of the victory point note, the ice held the last of its secrets close. Aribus and terror remained right where they had been abandoned, encased under black water and silk. preserved, not by intention, but by frigid indifference. When they were finally found in the 2010s, they were not ruins in the way empires think of ruins. They were intact. Shelves still stood and plates were still stacked. Tools lay where they had been sat down over a century before.

It was less like discovering a shipwreck, and more like walking into a ruin. where everyone had just stepped away. In some cases, the men were still there, as if frozen in time as much as just frozen. Features still discernible, even as they were slack in death. It was as if the Arctic had chosen to remember them. Not triumphant heroes, just humans. Frozen mid-sentence in a story that would never reach the ending the long dead empire had intended. Meanwhile, the Inuit story never changed.

It was in no need of revision or rediscovery. Folklore doesn't vanish. It doesn't panic. And it refuses to disappear just because empires and people refuse to listen. So that my friends was this episode, the second episode of Dark History. Um, thematically, I would say this one felt more like systemic failures. Situations where the system itself failed or fell apart when affected by external forces. From major natural disasters to strange plagues, um, it caused dancing to the Persian famines.

to moments in time where the air of London started killing its own citizens, all the way to an expedition that fell apart immediately. All of these highlight situations where, again, the system didn't react properly. And really, I think that's a good theme for these. Hopefully, you enjoyed this collection of dark history. Thank you to Tom, as always, for writing these. Tom, good friend, fantastic man. His link for his Amazon page is in the description below,

so please do check that out, show him some love. Working with Tom is always a pleasure. I absolutely enjoy doing these. Not going to lie to you on that. I know some people have issues with me doing things outside of the scary story niche. And to that, I say, too bad. I'm sorry if you don't like these.

I'm sorry if you're not into doing into the research pieces. I try to mark them as clearly as possible. so if you don't like them, wait for the next episode. You guys know I post way too much, both on YouTube and the podcast. So, yeah. Doing these helps break up the consistency of the true scary stories. These are all true scary stories, just not in the way that you guys sometimes kind of expect or anticipate.

So anyway. If you did enjoy it and you're on YouTube, please do it that like button. If you're on the podcast side, consider leaving a comment down below with your thoughts. and giving the podcast a rating. If you're on YouTube, please consider subscribing to the channel

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which is also a dollar a month. month, it's the same thing. Not as many good things as Patreon, but you still get early access. Both sides again, if you have a story you want to send in, a true scary story, go to as the Raven Dreams.com or email it to as the Raven Dreams at gmail.com. Both are acceptable. If you go to the site and you have any trouble, please let me know in an email. I would like to get that fixed.

But on the site, you can also find accolades for the podcast and show, accolates for the channel, my social media links, fiction stories I've written, and other things. If you just scroll around on the page for a while, some cool stuff. Last thing to mention here really quick, again to both sides. If you're free on a Saturday night, come on over to my YouTube channel. I do live streams at 6 p.m. Central on Saturdays and some Fridays. Just come say hi. I'd love to see you guys, especially the podcast listeners.

I don't get to have direct conversations with you guys as much because it's, a little more limited in how things work, and I can't stream over there, so. Come on over to the YouTube side and just say hi at a live stream. I'd love to see you, guys. You know, it's a good time. We've played bingo before, if you guys didn't know that. Just saying.

Anyways, friends, thank you so much for listening. I hope I see you again here soon, but until then, please remember that you are loved. You are valid. You are important. You are the best you that you can be, and the world is a better place with you in it. Until next time, my friends, much love.

and sleep well.