Disturbing History - Halley's Comet

Episode Date: September 23, 2026

On the night of May 18, 1910, people across the world waited for Halley’s Comet to kill them.Hotels in New York opened their rooftops. Miners in Pennsylvania refused to go underground. A religious sect outside Atlanta reportedly barricaded itself inside a cave.In Chicago, people sealed their doors and windows against a poisonous gas they believed was coming from space.Then Earth passed through the comet’s tail.Nothing happened.In this episode of Disturbing History, Brian explores how a scientific discovery became a worldwide panic. In February 1910, astronomers detected cyanogen in the comet’s tail—a chemical related to cyanide. Newspapers seized on the finding, and alarming comments from famed astronomer Camille Flammarion helped fuel fears that the gas might poison Earth’s atmosphere and wipe out humanity.The result was a strange mixture of science, superstition, opportunism, and outright hysteria .Brian follows the story from Halley’s approach and the unexpected appearance of the Great Daylight Comet, through the deaths of Mark Twain and King Edward VII, and into centuries of older beliefs that treated comets as warnings of war, plague, and death.Then came the profiteers. Businesses sold comet-themed products. Bartenders offered whiskey as protection from cyanogen. A Los Angeles broker reportedly sold comet insurance. Men in Texas marketed sugar-and-quinine “comet pills” and leather gas masks. Farmers refused to plant crops, and one California prospector reportedly nailed himself to a cross in preparation for the end.The episode also investigates one of the most famous stories from the panic: an alleged Oklahoma cult that supposedly planned to sacrifice a teenage girl to stop the comet—a story later researchers found had almost certainly never happened.Finally, the story ends more than a century later inside a cave in Puerto Rico, where researchers discovered a charcoal drawing dated May 23, 1910: a comet descending toward a grave, apparently drawn by a 15-year-old boy who had lived through the fear.This is the story of the night humanity waited for poison from the sky—and the panic that arrived long before the comet ever did.Email BrianJoin Our FREE NewsletterGet Brian's Books Leave Us A VoicemailVisit Our WebsiteHave a forgotten historical mystery, disturbing event, unsolved crime, or hidden conspiracy you think deserves investigation?Send your suggestions to [e-mail] History is a dark history podcast exploring unsolved mysteries, secret societies, historical conspiracies, lost civilizations, and the shadowy stories buried beneath the surface of the past.Follow the show and enable automatic downloads so you never miss a deep dive into history’s most unsettling secrets.Because sometimes the truth is darker than fiction.

Some stories were never meant to be told. Others were buried on purpose. This podcast digs them all up. Disturbing history peels back the layers of the past to uncover the strange, the sinister, and the stories that were never supposed to survive. From shadowy presidential secrets to government experiments that sound more like fiction than fact, this is history they hoped you'd forget. I'm Brian, investigator, author, and your guide through the dark corner.

of our collective memory. Each week I'll narrate some of the most chilling and little-known tales from history that will make you question everything you thought you knew. And here's the twist. Sometimes, the history is disturbing to us. And sometimes, we have to disturb history itself,

just to get to the truth. If you like your facts with the side of fear, if you're not afraid to pull it threads, others leave alone. You're in the right place. History isn't just written by the victors. victors. Sometimes it's rewritten by the disturbed. On the evening of Wednesday, the 18th of May, 1910, the hotels of New York City opened their roofs. They'd been advertising it for days.

The Times had run the notice on the 14th and again on the 17th, hotel roofs being used for comet parties, hotels to prepare for comet watchers. People who could afford a room could go up top with a drink and a borrowed pair of opera glasses and wait. People who could couldn't afford a room, went up onto the tenements, and the fire escapes, and did the same thing for free. The demand for telescopes in New York had nearly exhausted the supply back on the first of the month. By the 18th, there weren't any left to buy. In Boston, the city had arranged to sound the fire alarm if the comet became visible, so that nobody would sleep through it. In Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, thousands of anthracite miners had refused to go down the shafts

that day. The Cleveland Plain dealer reported it the next morning under the headline, Miners forsake shafts. The men had decided that if the tail of the comet was going to destroy the earth, they weren't going to be underground when it happened. In Atlanta, a wire story carried by the Trenton Evening Times said a sect of about 300 people living in the hills outside the city had barricaded themselves in a cave and intended to spend the night in prayer because the world was going to end before morning. The same dispatch reported that the fear had reached the federal penitentiary and that for the first time in the history of that prison, a class of convicts had been confirmed that day by the Catholic bishop of the diocese, with several priests

assisting. In Chicago, according to the New York Times of that same morning, terror had seized hold of a large part of the population, and women were stopping up their doors and windows to keep out the cyanogen. In Kansas City, the star told its readers to hold their breath, shut their eyes and nose, and await the result. The same column went on to say that the earth might already have been tearing through the gas for several hours, and that if a neighbor seemed unusually boisterous that evening, it was probably the comet's tale. Because cyanogen gas, the paper assured everyone, was laughing gas. But cyanogen isn't laughing gas, and the star knew it. And that was the joke. The New York Times of the 18th also reported that some of the more superstitious

residents in the sections of the city, largely inhabited by foreigners, were on the verge of panic. A man named C.B. Harmon had announced he was going up in a balloon to watch the passage from above the city and had invited the deans of the local colleges to come along. At about 10 o'clock that night, Eastern Time, three in the morning at Greenwich. The head of Halley's comet passed directly between the Earth and the Sun. Astronomers in Hawaii had their telescopes trained on the solar disk, watching for the silhouette of a solid nucleus crossing it. They saw nothing cross it at all. 350 American astronomers kept vigil through the night, by the count the times printed the next day. In Greenwich, an astronomer named Andrew Cromwellyn,

noticed strange bands of light in the sky and first put them down to clouds. In Paris, Camille Flammer, Marian would later report that four observers at the observatory had certain olfactory experiences, which they described variously as a smell of burning vegetables, or a marsh, or acetylene. Over England, thunderstorms broke out, and a witness at Leon C. in Essex described the lightning as almost the color of blood. Churches in the United States held services all night, and the Times, alongside its banner headline the next morning, ran a piece recalling the dire prophecies that had gone around during the Great Comet of 1881. The Times reported that in the sections of New York largely inhabited by foreigners,

many preyed on bended knees in the streets and parks. Nobody died and nobody got sick. The engineer-in-chief of the British General Post Office wrote to the Astronomer Royal afterward to say that no electrical effects of any kind had been noted on the telephone trunk lines while the Earth was inside the tail. Two days later, the Times reported that the calculations now suggested the tale might have missed the Earth altogether by something like 197,000 miles. That's the night everyone remembers. The night the air was supposed to turn to poison and didn't. The fear didn't come out of a cave in Georgia or a mine in Pennsylvania. It came out of an observatory in Wisconsin and a newspaper in New York,

and it was carried across the country by people who found out very quickly that a frightened person, will pay for almost anything. The Yerkes Observatory sits on the shore of Lake Geneva in Williams Bay, Wisconsin. And in the winter of 1910, it held the largest refracting telescope in the world. Teams of astronomers there had been training more than a dozen instruments on the comet for weeks.

One observer compared the array to the guns of a battleship. There were cots and blankets set out near the instruments so the men could sleep in shifts. On the 7th of February, the Yerkes scientists announced what they'd found in the comet's light. The instrument that told them is called a spectrograph. It takes the light from an object and spreads it out into a band, the way a prism does. And every chemical element or compound that's giving off or absorbing that light leaves a signature in the band. A set of bright or dark lines in a pattern that doesn't belong to anything else.

Astronomers had been reading comets that way for decades. In 1908, a comet discovered by a Drake University professor named Daniel Morehouse had shown the same signature, and nobody had panicked about it, because nobody expected the earth to fly through it. Morehouse had found his comet by accident in September of 2008, on a pair of photographic plates taken at Yerkes for another purpose, and a colleague remembered him coming up from the dark room barely able to whisper that he thought he'd discovered a comet. Over the following weeks, its tail-chained shone, almost nightly, breaking apart and reforming in ways nobody could predict, and observers in America and Europe photographed it obsessively. At Yerkes, Edwin Frost and a colleague named Parkhurst

exposed spectrum plates on it for an hour at a time in late October. What the plates carried was the ordinary hydrocarbon signature that comets show, and among the bands was cyanogen. That finding sat in the astronomical journals for 16 months and bothered nobody. The same observatory's Edward Emerson Barnard, who'd been photographing comets since the 1880s, would go on to photograph Halley's comet through the whole of its 1910 passage, and his report on those plates, published in 1914, is still the standard visual record of that return. What the Yerkes plates showed in February of 1910 was the same signature of cyanogen, in the same kind of tail, on a comet whose tail the earth was scheduled to meet.

cyanogen is a gas built from two carbon atoms and two nitrogen atoms. It's a chemical cousin of cyanide. It carries the same almond smell, and it kills the same way, by stopping the cells of the body from using the oxygen in the blood. In 1910, it was already a well-known poison. Hydrogen cyanide, its close relative, was what exterminators pumped into buildings to kill rats. A newspaper reader who'd never heard the word cyanogen had almost served,

heard of cyanide and the papers made sure the two got introduced. The Yerke's announcement itself was modest. The astronomers who made it understood what a comet's tale actually is, which is a thing so thin that it makes a laboratory vacuum look crowded. Their finding was that the cyanogen bands showed plainly in the spectrum and that was the whole of the announcement. The reason it mattered in 1910 and hadn't mattered in 1908 comes down to geometry. A comet's tail doesn't trail behind it the way smoke trails a train. The tail is pushed out by the sun, by sunlight, and by the stream of particles the sun throws off.

So it always points away from the sun, whichever way the comet happens to be moving. On the 19th of May, the head of Halley's comet was going to pass almost exactly between the Earth and the Sun. A tail pointing away from the sun at that moment would be pointing straight at the Earth, and the astronomers had calculated that the tail was long enough to reach. The head itself would come no closer than about 24 million kilometers. The tail was the only part of the comet the Earth would ever touch, and the tail was where the cyanogen was. Some astronomers thought the passage might produce a meteor shower, or an aurora.

Most expected nothing anyone would notice. The next morning the 8th of February, the New York Times ran its story under the headline Comet's Poisonous Tale. The reporter had done what reporters do. He'd called an expert for comment, and the expert he called was the most famous astronomer alive. Camille Flamarian was 67 years old in 1910. He ran his own observatory at Juvisi, outside Paris. He had written popular astronomy books that sold in the hundreds of thousands,

and he had a following that included, according to some art historians, Vincent Van Gogh. He was, for the purpose of a newspaper story, the man a reporter called. He also had a habit of speculating in print about things he had no evidence for. In 1907, he'd written that the inhabitants of Mars had tried to signal the Earth. That same year, he'd believed a seven-tailed comet was on its way. He'd already been writing about Halley's comet for months. In late November of 1909, the Paris edition of the New York Herald had published a long piece by him on what might happen when the Earth passed through the tale.

Sam Keane, writing for the science he said, History Institute, went back and read it. Flamarian opened by saying the tail was sparser than a cloud, and the consequences of passing through it would almost certainly be nothing. Then he spent the rest of the article imagining what might happen anyway. Perhaps the hydrogen in the tail would combine with the oxygen in the atmosphere and leave everyone choking. Perhaps carbonic acid would sear the lungs. Perhaps a change in the balance of nitrogen and oxygen would extinguish the human race, in his words, in a paroxysm of joy and delirium, probably delighted at their fate.

He closed by comparing the tale to a fog that a locomotive dashes through at full speed. The Boston Sunday Herald reprinted a version of that in January under the headline, Earth has little to fear in Comet, and the headline was accurate, and the body of the story was a list of ways to die. In the Boston version, Flamarian also wrote that spectrum analysis did not yet show which elements prevailed in the tail of the comet. He'd listed his catalog of ways to die without knowing what the tale was made of. Two weeks later, Yerkes told him,

in between on the 1st of February, the Seattle Daily Times ran him under the headline, Comet's tail cracks over Earth May 19. He said the Earth would be immersed for several hours in what he called the gaseous caudal appendage, whose chemical constitution was still little known, that the comet would pass between the sun and the world at two in the morning on the 19th Paris time, and that little danger was to be expected because the tail would probably be so rarefied as to be inoffensive. Two days after that, the same paper reported that he predicted no disasters,

but expected some interesting developments, and that the passage would be an opportunity for the dwellers upon the earth to shake hands with the residents of another sphere that was just passing through. Then the cyanogen news came in from Wisconsin, and the Times reporter got him on the line. What the Times printed on the 8th of February was that Professor Flamarian was of the opinion that the cyanogen gas would impregnate the atmosphere, and possibly snuff out all life on the planet. The same article quoted other astronomers who said that was nonsense, and it went on to explain the almost inconceivable rarifaction of the tale, and to note that whatever cyanogen was in it, would probably be broken down in the upper atmosphere before it got anywhere near the ground. Kean's judgment after reading the whole thing was that the reassurance was there for anyone who kept reading.

Most people didn't keep reading that far. The Riverside Daily Press in California ran the wire version the same day under the headline, Comet Gas is Poison, and its version dropped the reassurance entirely. It said the cyanogen bands had been established at Yerkes, that the fact had been made known to Camille Flamarian. and that he'd ventured the opinion that the gas was colorless, poisonous, of an almond-like odor, and might possibly destroy all life on the earth. Flamarian's defenders have argued since that the Times distorted a hedge speculation into a prediction.

The record I could find is even more tangled than that. By the 12th of April, the Idaho Register in Idaho Falls was running a statement attributed to him, under the headline Death Lurks and Tale of the Comet, with a subhead about predictions weird and wild drawn forth by the advent of the celestial visitor that had no hedge left in it at all. The tale of Halley's comet, so the spectroscope shows us, contains cyanogen gas in immense quantities. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages.

Cyanogen is a very deadly poison. A grain of its potassium salt touched to the tongue is enough to cause instant death. Should our earth have to pass through the comet's tail, the cyanogen gas in it will impregnate our atmosphere. All human life on our planet will then be snuffed out. Whether he wrote that paragraph or whether an editor in Idaho assembled it from pieces of what he'd said, I can't tell from the sources available to me. What's not in dispute is that it ran under his name in April. Two months after the rest of the profession had said it was wrong.

Flamarian wasn't the only one talking. Another French astronomer, unnamed in the accounts, speculated that the tail might produce a barrage of x-rays and cause all the water vapor in the atmosphere to condense at once in the largest flood since Noah. That one got picked up too. The Times ran three separate reports about cyanogen in February and an editorial on the subject on the 11th.

The editorial was calm and measured. The reports had already gone out on the wires. The New York Times had run its first serious story on the 25th of August, 1909, eight months before Perihelian, under a headline about observatories around the world, scanning the skies for a first sighting. On the 13th of September, the paper reported that the comet had been picked up on a photographic plate at Heidelberg, when it was still far too faint for any eye. Through the fall and winter, the observatories tracked it in,

and the Times printed their sightings, five stories in September, four dates in October, four in November, a full illustrated feature in the Sunday paper on the 5th of December, and 11 separate reports in January alone, along with two editorials. Then in the middle of January, something else showed up that nobody had predicted. Diamond miners in the Transvaal coming off the night shift saw a bright object low in the dawn sky. It turned out to be a second comet entirely, one that had never been seen, before. And for a few days, it was bright enough to see in daylight. The first person to study it

properly was Robert Ennis at the Transvaal Observatory in Johannesburg, who'd been tipped off by a newspaper editor. Because of what one account calls a telephonic error, it was reported for a while as Drake's comet, and when nobody could establish who Drake was, or whether the name had ever belonged to anyone, the papers settled on the daylight comet. Newspapers in several cities reported that people had been scared by it, and a paper in Camden, New Jersey, pointed out that the same thing had happened with comets before. It was, by most accounts, the more beautiful of the two. When Halleys came back in 1986 and old people were interviewed about what they remembered from

childhood, a fair number of them were describing the daylight comet without knowing it. The daylight comet faded by spring. Halley's comet became visible to the naked eye around the 10th of April, and an observer in Akra on the west coast of Africa described it as looking like a flaming sword with a jeweled hilt. Over the following weeks, the tail lengthened until it stood up from the horizon like a searchlight beam. On the 22nd of April, an English astronomer named John Evershed,

working at Kodakanaal in the mountains of southern India, photographed a break in the tail, a place where the tail had been disconnected from the head, and it took decades for anyone to understand that a gust in the gust the solar wind had done it. The comet reached perihelian, its closest approach to the sun, on the 20th of April, which was a Wednesday. Mark Twain died the next day on Thursday. He'd been born in November of 1835, two weeks after the comet's previous perihelian. When the times went looking in May of 1910 for people still living who remembered that visit, it found a few, and Twain wasn't one of them,

since he'd been two weeks old. But he'd said out loud, more than once, that he intended to leave with it. His biographer Albert Bigelow Paine recorded the version most people know from 1909. I came in with Halley's Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it.

It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don't go out with Halley's Comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt, now here are these two unaccountable freaks. They came in together. They must go out together. He died at his house in Connecticut on the 21st of April, 1910, of a heart condition at 74. A reader wrote to the Times two days later pointing out the coincidence.

It was a good story then, and it's a good story now. And I don't think anybody in 1910 read it as an omen. It got read as Twain's own showmanship. The other news that week was harder to laugh at. On the 23rd of April, the Times reported that a darkness had come over Chicago. and that women and foreigners in the city had attributed it to the comet and that some had become hysterical. The Times didn't say what the darkness actually was.

Chicago in 1910 burned soft coal in every stove and furnace, and a dark afternoon in April isn't a mystery. A weather event was being read through the comet, and the paper found that worth printing. The demand for telescopes in New York climbed through the last week of April, and by the 1st of May the supply was nearly gone. On the fifth, a Columbia professor named Harold Jacoby gave a speech, reported in the Times, saying the Earth was in no danger of collision. Around the same time, the paper assigned a special correspondent to the story.

A woman named Mary Proctor, whose father, Richard Proctor, had been one of the best-known popular astronomers of the previous century, and who'd made her own name as a lecturer and writer on the same subject. She'd file on the comet nearly every day for the rest of May. Then, on Friday the 6th of May, the King of England died. Edward the 7th was 68 years old. He'd caught a cold at Sandringham, ignored his doctors, developed bronchitis and then pneumonia, and was gone by the end of the week. The comet at that moment was near its brightest, sitting close to Venus in the morning sky.

And Ian Ridpath, the British astronomy writer whose history of the comet I've leaned on throughout this episode, records that superstitious Englishmen marked the coincidence. Three days later, the Times ran a dispatch from Bermuda saying observers there reported the comet acting strangely following the king's death. What a comet acting strangely would even look like, the dispatch didn't say. Up to the 6th of May, the fear in the papers was about chemistry, about a gas with a name and a formula, and a known effect on the body. After the 6th of May, the comet was doing what comets had done for as long as anyone had been writing things down, which was announcing the death of a king.

The two kinds of fear were now stacked on top of each other, and the second one had roots that went back a very long way. The Roman writer Marcus Manilius, 2,000 years ago, summed up what most people believed about comets in one line. Heaven and pity ascending earth tokens of impending doom. His list of what a comet could bring included blighted, crops, plague, war, insurrection, and family feuds. Ian Ridpath's summary of that list is that anything could be blamed on a comet, and usually was.

Pliny the Elder in 77 AD offered a more specific reading guide. A comet shaped like a pair of flutes was a portent for the art of music. A comet in the private parts of a constellation portended immorality. One in the head of the serpent constellations brought poisonings. In China, the officials of the Imperial Astronomical Bureau called them broom stars, and they'd been recording them for centuries before Rome. A silk scroll recovered from a tomb at Maoongdui, sealed in 168 BC, is essentially a field guide, a set of painted comet shapes with the events each shape was said to foretell,

which were mostly wars, famine, and death. The earliest reliable record of the comet we now call Halleys is a Chinese note from 240 BC. During this year, a broom star was seen at the north direction and then at the west direction. The next sentence in the record says that during the summer, the Empress Dowager died. That's the pattern in almost every one of these. A bright thing appears in the sky. Somebody important dies, or an army loses, or a harvest fails. Because in any given year, somebody important dies, and an army loses and a harvest fails. The comic gets the credit every time. Aristotle had decided in the 4th century BC that comets were burning vapors in the upper air,

not objects in the heavens at all, because in his cosmos the heavens were perfect, and a comet was a blemish. That view held in the west for nearly 2,000 years. Ptolemy, in the 2nd century AD, laid out how to read them. The part of the sky where the head appeared showed which region the misfortune would fall on. The direction of the tale showed which way it was headed. The shape of the head showed what kind of disaster to expect. The Roman philosopher Seneca argued the opposite,

that comets were bodies moving on orbits like the planets and might come back given time, and Ridpath notes he was ignored in his phrase, as a killjoy out to ruin a good business for the soothsayers. It took 17 centuries for anyone to prove him right. The Chinese weren't the only ones keeping the books. The Babylonians kept astronomical diaries pressed into clay, and when the astronomers Donald Yeomans and Tao Kien ran the comet's orbit backward through the centuries in the 1980s.

It was the Kunei formed tablets in the British Museum that confirmed the appearances of 164 BC and 87 BC. Years the Chinese records had skipped or barely mentioned. An observation scratched into wet clay by a temple scribe 2,000 years earlier was still good enough to check a computer against. In 684, the comet's appearance was followed, according to the Nuremberg Chronicle, by three months of rain and storms and then plague. The Chronicle wasn't printed until 1493, and its woodcut of the comet is an artist's guess made 800 years after the fact.

In 837, the same comet made the closest approach to Earth it's ever recorded, about 5 million kilometers, and the Chinese court described a tail 60 degrees long that branched in two. The emperor summoned the astronomer royal and asked him the reason for these changes in the stars. Ridpath notes the tradition that two Chinese court astronomers who'd once been caught napping by an eclipse were beheaded, so the astronomer royal presumably had an answer ready. In 1066, it hung over England in the spring, and that autumn, William of Normandy killed King Harold at Hastings. The Bayou tapestry, stitched within living memory of the battle, shows a crowd of men pointing up at, it with the words Isti Mirant Stella. They marvel at the star, and off to the right sits Harold

on his throne, shifting on his seat while an aide leans in to tell him. That panel is probably the most famous picture of a comet ever made. In 1145, a monk at Canterbury named Edwine sketched the comet at the bottom of a page in a book of Psalms he was copying. In 1301, the painter Giado saw it over Italy and put it into his adoration of the Magi and Padua. as the star of Bethlehem. In 1456, it came back while the armies of Sultan Mimit II were marching on Belgrade.

Pope Callixtus I issued a bull on the 29th of June calling on every priest in Christendom to say a prayer against the pagans at Mass and ordering church bells rung daily at noon, so the faithful would stop and pray for the defenders. The comet was visible for weeks that summer.

About 20 years later, a papal biographer named Platina, who'd been jailed by a later pope and had reasons of his own to make the papacy look foolish, wrote up the two events as one, and said the pope had ordered prayers to turn away the wrath of God carried by the comet. The siege of Belgrade was broken in a series of fights between the 21st and 23rd of July, about a month after the comet had faded from view. And the documents Stein later dug up showed that at least some people at the time read the comet

as a sign that the Turks would lose, which is the trouble with an omen. since it covers whatever happens next. In the early 1800s, the French mathematician Laplice picked up Platina's account and wrote that the Pope had sought to exercise the comet. Writers after Laplice swapped exercise for excommunicate, and by the 1840s and 50s the story was being retold, with new details every few years,

and it had grown into the version that Callixtus had excommunicated Halley's comet as an agent of the devil. Carl Sagan repeated it in his own book on comets. A NASA press release repeated it as late as 1997. A Dutch Jesuit astronomer named Johann Stein went through the Chronicles and the eyewitness accounts of 1456 and published in 1909 that the story was false. An American Jesuit named William Rigg, who taught astronomy at Crichton in Omaha, took the shorter route and read every document that Pope ever issued,

which he said was an easy task because Calyxtus hadn't issued many, and reported that there wasn't a bull, or a paragraph, or a phrase, or a word about a comet in any of them. A British journal printed a summary of Stein's work in February of 1910. The same month the cyanogen story broke, and the author closed by saying the myth had at last been laid to rest. It hadn't been laid to rest at all. In 1985, it was printed on the label of a novelty bottle of comet pills

sold by a museum in Michigan, and the editor of a newsletter for comet watchers admitted that year, that it had crept into his own publications product listings too, because a freelance writer had been given a little too much literary freedom. In 1528, the French surgeon Ambrois Parade described a comet that was, in his words, so horrible, so frightful, and produced such great terror that some died of fear and others fell sick. It appeared to be of extreme length and was the color of blood.

A pamphlet on comets published in 1619 by a Bohemia, a teamian physician named Jan Marik Marcy carries an engraving that shows the great comet of the year before over a burning city and a battlefield, with death standing in the foreground. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. That comet came at the start of the 30 years' war, and for a generation afterward, the two were talked about together. In New England, in the winter of 1680, a great comet stood over Boston with a tail that stretched most of the way across the sky. Increase Mather, the most powerful minister in the colony, preached a sermon on it that he published under the title Heaven's Alarm to the World, and followed it two years later with a whole book on comets as divine warnings. And then, in 1705, an Englishman named Edmund Halley took the orbits of three bright comets, one from 1531, one from 1607, and one he'd seen himself in 1682, and noticed that they were the same orbit.

it. He'd worked it out with the mathematics his friend Isaac Newton had published in the Principia. A book Halley had badgered Newton into finishing and paid to have printed when the Royal Society ran out of money. Newton's laws said that a body under the sun's gravity would follow an ellipse and come back around. Hallie had the observations to test it on, including his own, and he ran the numbers on 24 comets before he found three that fit the same track. His conclusion was that the Three comets were one comet, coming around every 75 or 76 years, and that it would come again in 1758. Holly died in 1742, 16 years short of finding out. On Christmas night, 1758, a farmer named Johann Georg Palach, who taught himself astronomy from books in a village outside

Dresden, found a faint smudge of light in the right part of the sky. It was the first time in history that anything other than a planet had been shown to travel on a predictable orbit around the sun. And it was the first time a comet had ever arrived when somebody said it would. Seneca, 1700 years earlier, had written that men would someday be able to demonstrate in what regions comets have their paths and why they move so far from the planets. A farmer in Saxony had just done the demonstrating. The French astronomer Le Cay put Halle's name on it the following year. That should have been the end of the omen, a comet that keeps a schedule is a clock. Sam Kean's reading of the 1910 panic in his piece for the Science History Institute is that

science had spent two centuries taking the fear out of comets, and that in 1910 it was science, the spectrograph and the observatory and the expert on the telephone that put the fear back in. The comet came around on schedule in 1835, and Twain was born, and it came around to again in 1910. This time the Earth was going to pass through the tail, or close to it, and the astronomers knew it months in advance. The market for the comet opened early in the spring of 1910, and it had a top end and a bottom end. The legitimate end of it was advertising. Pierce Soap ran a slogan. Pierce Soap is visible day and night all over the world. Birds Custard worked the comet into its campaign. Tin Pan Alley produced a rag

number called Halley's Comet Rag. And the sheet music with the comet on the cover sits today in a music collection at Johns Hopkins. Postcard printers in Paris and in American cities sold doctored photographs of their skylines with a comet hanging over them. There's one of Duluth, Minnesota in the Library of Congress. The comet in the picture is painted on. In Mexico City, the printmaker Jose Guadalupe Posada, who made his living on cheap illustrated broadsense. reissued a sheet he'd first drawn years earlier, a comic dialogue between Mother Earth and Mr. Halley's Comet, with the Comet drawn as a bug-eyed thing barreling down on a town full of fleeing people.

In Paris, the restaurants prepared Comet suppers, and the fashionable set sent out printed invitations requesting the honor of your presence to spend the night of May 18th on the occasion of Halle's Comet passing the earth. According to a Pennsylvania paper, the Tamaqua Courier, men were asked to wear pale blue evening dress and women to wear gowns the color of the firmament. In Brooklyn in early May, a socialite threw a comet party and deliberately invited 13 guests. It started at 2 in the morning.

The walls were hung with skeletons and spider webs. Everyone came masked, and after a game of pin the tail on the comet, they went up to the roof to look at it through her telescope. Clouds covered the sky that night. Keen reports the fad spread to other cities anyway. Somebody in Los Angeles figured out that a frightened person will insure against anything. A broker there began selling Comet insurance, $500 cash to the family of anyone killed by the Comet's passage at a premium of a quarter a week. At least 50 people bought it. Nobody seems to have asked how a beneficiary was supposed to collect $500 after the end of the world,

or what the money would be good for. In Washington, D.C., where people had more of it, agents charged a dollar a week for the money. the same coverage. Bartenders in several cities sold protection by the glass. The line, as Keene records it, was that enough whiskey or scotch in the bloodstream would keep the cyanogen from taking hold. Comet pills turned up in New York, in Georgia, in Texas, and in Haiti, according to the secondary accounts.

And I'll say that for New York and Georgia, I couldn't trace the claim back to a 1910 newspaper. The Texas and Haiti reports are the ones that show up in the standard histories. The Haitian story reached the American papers as a voodoo doctor selling pills to ward off the evil influence of the comet, as fast as he could make them. And I'll note that the American press of 1910 described anything Haitian in the most lurid terms it could find. So how much of that dispatch is reporting and how much is decoration? I can't say. The Texas story is better documented. Two men there sold pills that were advertised as protection against the gases of the comet's tail.

and did a good trade in leather gas masks on the side. Ridpath gives the recipe for the pills. The pills were sugar and quinine. One secondary account puts the price at a dollar a pill, which was most of a day's wages for a laborer in 1910. Police in Texas arrested the two men. Then the customers who'd bought the pills came to the jail and campaigned for their release,

and the police let them go. I spent 16 years in law enforcement, and I've seen a version of that more than, once. An officer arrests the man who took the money, and the people he took it from show up at the jail to defend him, because the alternative is admitting what they paid for.

The pills didn't work, and couldn't have, but they were sold to people who had read in the newspaper that the air was about to kill them. And a sugar pill that costs a dollar is at least something to hold. Nobody was ever going to testify against that. Another product

advertised itself as an elixir for escaping the wrath of the heavens. There were cartoons of comet-proof umbrellas. Puck Magazine drew the comet as a heavenly porter, sweeping across the earth with one of them. A Paris print from the same season, now in the Musei Carnivalet, shows a mob of Parisians clawing their way aboard an overloaded airship,

bound for the moon. On the 18th of May, the San Francisco Examiner ran a cartoon by Oscar Chopin of the Earth as a nervous little man clutching a rabbit's foot and a horseshoe and every other lucky charm he could carry. with his fingers crossed. Whether anyone actually manufactured an anti-common umbrella, or whether the umbrella lived only in the cartoons and in the retellings since,

I couldn't establish. I'd lean toward the cartoons on that one. Gas masks and pills at least. Address the fear that was actually in the papers. The people buying those pills weren't fools. That's the part of this that I keep coming back to. They were reading the largest newspaper in the country, and the largest newspaper in the country.

and the largest newspaper in the country had printed, on its front page, over the name of the most famous astronomer alive, that a gas in the comet's tail was a deadly poison and might snuff out all life on the planet. It had printed the reassurance, too, lower down. Most people in 1910 worked 10 hours a day. They read the headline and went to work. Some farmers in Germany declined to plant that spring on the grounds that they'd be dead before the harvest. Keene reports people defaulting on bank loans and spending the money instead, on the same reasoning. Somebody had to be selling them the drinks.

In England, the letters went to the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, and the observatory kept them. Even before the comet could be seen without a telescope, people had been writing in to report that they'd seen it and what they'd seen on inspection. Turned out to be Venus or Jupiter, or in one case, the Andromeda Galaxy. A family planning a sea voyage wrote to ask whether the comet would cause storms and gales or other violent atmospheric disturbances, and were told it would not. Another correspondent wrote to say he suspected the tale, on contact with the atmosphere, would cause the Pacific to change basins with the Atlantic, and sweep the primeval forests of North and South America over the sands of the Sahara,

tumbling over and over with houses, ships, sharks, whales, and all sorts of living things, in one heterogeneous mass of chaotic confusion. Somebody at the observatory wrote two words across the top of that one. No reply. In Washington State, a shepherd was reported to have gone insane with worry over the comet. In California, a prospector nailed his own feet and one of his hands to a cross. And when people found him and tried to take him down, he pleaded with them to leave him where he was.

Keen reports that suicide deaths in at least four countries were attributed to the comet in the press. People lowered themselves into wells to wait it out. People sealed their houses and papered over the keyholes. And in Puerto Rico, a family walked six miles across a landscape of thorn scrub and crawled into a limestone cave. On Saturday the 14th of May, the comet moved to the top of the front page of the New York Times and stayed there for nine days. That same day, A Columbia astronomer named Samuel Mitchell gave a speech in New York on the superstition surrounding comets through the ages. The times covered it in full. The idea, I think, was to talk people down by showing them how old and how silly the fear was.

What the speech did in practice was put every one of those old stories, the dead kings and the lost battles and the plagues, into the paper on the same page as the comet. Sunday the 15th, the paper speculated on the, the probability that the Earth would pass through the tail at all, and ran a piece interviewing people still living, who remembered the visit of 1835. Monday the 16th, the headline was that European and American astronomers agreed the Earth would not suffer from passing through the tail. Tuesday the 17th, the paper ran the figure

everyone would repeat, that the tail was 24 million miles long, and the Earth would pass through it on the 18th, and reported that Boston would sound the fire alarm if the comet was visible, and that the hotels were preparing. Wednesday the 18th, the day of, the estimate was six hours inside the tail, and a man named C.B. Harmon announced he was going up in a balloon to watch and invited the deans of the city's colleges to join him. That's the same week the Wire Stories came in from Chicago, and Wilkes Bar and Atlanta. It's also the week that a few ordinary people wrote down what it felt like, and those are the accounts I trust most, because nobody was selling them.

At the Shaker community at South Union, Kentucky, a woman named Lucilla Booker kept a diary. On the 18th of May, she wrote that people in the country were all excited about the comet, all this year, fearing it would do harm to some of them. Nine days later, she wrote that the moon shone bright and people were seeing Halley's comet with a new tail on it, and that's the whole of what she had to say about it. Over in Floyd County, Kentucky, a girl named Sarah Copeland was called outside by her mother, who hollered at the family to come out and see what she'd seen. Copeland told the story decades later to an interviewer collecting oral histories.

It looked, she said, like an airplane, with a great long tail, and they watched it as far as they could. Later she heard a rumor that the thing they'd seen in the sky had fallen in Italy and burnt up a lot of the place where it landed. That rumor was going around the Kentucky Hills in 1910, and it wasn't true, and there's no telling now where it started. On the 19th of May, the Washington Post ran a dispatch marked special to the post from Alene, Oklahoma. It said that on the evening of the 18th, the sheriff of Alfalfa County and a posse had fought hand-to-hand with a band of religious fanatics,

led by a man named Henry Heineman, who called themselves the select followers, and had rescued a 19-year-old farm girl named Jane Warfield, at the moment she was about to be stabbed to death as a blood sacrifice to keep the comet from destroying the earth. The Oklahoma City Times ran it on the 20th. The Washington Star ran it the same day as the Post, folded into a long round-up headlined earth-dwellers hunt caves, pray and try to evade comet. The subheads under that headline read like a table of contents for the whole panic.

Black workers abandoning their jobs and keeping to the churches. Miners staying underground. The blood sacrifice of a girl averted. A joker making a shooting star. I'll point out that the stars miners were staying underground on the same day the plane dealers miners and Wilkes Bar were refusing to go down. And both papers may have been right about different mines, or one of them may have been wrong, and there's no way now to sort it out. The select followers, the story said, had burned their possessions weeks earlier because the world was going to end. The versions didn't agree with each other. In one, the girl was 16, and in one, she was 19.

In one she was naked and in one she wore a white gown with roses in her hair. In one, it happened in Alfalfa County and in one it happened in Dewey County, which is two counties away. And the site named, in the Glass Mountains, is in neither. It's in Major County. The editor of the Cherokee Republican, a man named Walter Ferguson, ran the story and told his readers that not a word of it was true and named the man he believed had written it and Ed Marchant.

Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. In 1985, when the comet was coming back, a historian named Guy W. Moore went looking for the select followers. He wrote it up in a newsletter for comet watchers. There was no Henry Heineman in the 1910 Oklahoma Census. There was no Jane Warfield in the Alfalfa County census. The sheriff of Alfalfa County in 1910 was a man named D.A. Huey,

and his son George had never heard the story from his father or from any of the old-timers who told him about his father's other exploits. The Sheriff of Dewey County had left no record of it either. The Washington Post's own library searched its files and found nothing on the story except the words special to the post. And Edgar B. Marchant, the man Ferguson named, turned out to have been the editor and publisher of the Align Chronoscope, a lawyer, a delegate to the Oklahoma Constitutional Convention. a man remembered by people who knew him as inventive and fond of a joke.

He'd listed his occupation on the census as general laborer. His wife Ellen handset the type at the chronoscope and did reporting of her own and was remembered as the more reserved of the two. He never ran the story in his own paper, and Moore allowed himself one guess about why, which was that Ellen might have kept it out. Moore's conclusion was that Marchant made it up as an amusement, sent it out on the wire, and forgot about it.

The story is still going around. An Ohio newspaper retold it in 2020 as a piece of local history, because Heinemann was supposed to have come from Leesburg, Ohio. It appears in books published since. It's the first thing most people mention when Halley's Comet and 1910 come up together. And as far as anybody has been able to determine, there was never a girl, never a cult, and never a sheriff on a horse. What there was was a country editor who understood

exactly what the Eastern papers wanted that week, and gave it to them. Neither the Post nor the Star checked it. They ran it next to the cave in Georgia and the miners in Pennsylvania, and the reader had no way to know which of those was reporting, and which was a joke from Oklahoma. For that matter, I've got no way to know it about the cave in Georgia. I've got a wire story and a Trenton paper. That's what a lot of 1910 looks like once the wire stories get pulled on.

The comet crossed the sun about 10 o'clock and Eastern time on the night of the 18th, and the earth was inside the tail, or near it, for the rest of that night. In Melbourne, where it was already the afternoon of the 19th, the morning paper had printed the schedule to the minute. The transit of Halley's comet across the sun takes place today, it said, with first contact of the comet with the solar disk at 22 minutes past 12. What actually happened is a short list. In Hawaii, nobody saw a nucleus cross the solar disc, which told the astronomers that if there was a solid body at the heart of the comet, it was less than a hundred kilometers across. At Greenwich, Cromwellyn saw his bands of light

and wondered afterward whether they'd been the comet. In Paris, Flamarian's four observers reported their smells. The telephone lines in Britain carried nothing unusual. The Times on the 20th announced that its own observers had found the tail in the eastern sky rather than the west, and that the leading observatories had confirmed the discovery. And on the 21st, the paper reported that the calculations now suggested the tail had passed the earth at a distance of 197,000 miles. Riddpath's judgment, looking back with the benefit of everything learned since, is that the earth passed through the outskirts of the tail, rather than the center. Even at the center, it wouldn't have mattered. The atmosphere would have stopped the comet's gas about 100 kilometers up,

and the Earth had done this before. In June of 1861, it had passed through the tale of a comet named for the Australian who found it, John Tebott, and nobody on the ground had noticed a thing. The plane dealer in Cleveland ran its verdict on the 20th. Cyanogen gas, it observed, seems to bear a close resemblance to ordinary hot air. And then, in print, to the most famous astronomer in the world. What's your next scare, Mr. Flamarian? On the 20th of May the day after the tail, King Edward was buried at Windsor with nine reigning monarchs walking in the procession.

And in Melbourne, on the other side of the world, the government of Australia marked the funeral with its own ceremony the same day. The papers there carried the king's funeral and the comet's passage on the same page. One Melbourne column, headed tailbrushes the earth, opened by saying that nobody except densely ignorant persons had expected the passage to produce any effect. at all. The comet stayed in the evening sky through June, fading, and was gone to the naked eye by July. President Taft went out to the Naval Observatory to look at it on the 24th of May. On the 29th, Pope Pius X was quoted, saying the comet did not seem to justify the commotion it had caused. Mary Proctor kept filing for the times through the end of May and wrote a long summing up in July with photographs. Telescopes followed the comet for another year.

out past the orbit of Jupiter, and then it was gone. It came back in 1986 when the European Space Agency sent a probe to meet it and named the probe Giotto, after the painter who'd put the comet into a fresco in 1301. Geoto flew close enough to photograph the nucleus. The thing the astronomers in Hawaii had looked for against the sun in 1910 and couldn't find, and it turned out to be a lump of ice and dust about 15 kilometers long and as dark as coal. The comet is due again in 2016. There's no record of anyone getting a refund on a comet pill or an insurance premium.

The two men in Texas were already out of jail. The farmers in Germany who hadn't planted had a bad year, and the miners in Wilkes Bar went back down the shafts. And in the hills of southern Puerto Rico, on the 23rd of May, four days after the world had failed to end, a boy in a cave wrote his name on the wall. The cave was found again in 2018. by a Puerto Rican speleologist named Angelo Costa Colon.

He'd gone into it for the old art. The cave itself is ordinary limestone, stalactites, and stalagmites, in a hillside in the dry southern half of the island, in a district that was being mined for bat guano in the early 1900s. The two scientists have kept its name and location out of their publications to protect it. The walls carry taino carvings and painted figures and radiocarbon dating of the pigment puts the paintings between about 1230 and 1380,

a couple of centuries before Columbus. There are later drawings of horses and ships from the colonial centuries. There's a figure that may be a lion, which Acosta Cologne suggests, could have been drawn by an enslaved African who'd seen one. The pictures in that cave run through the whole history of the island.

To reach the deepest chamber, he crawled on his hands and knees for a dozen minutes through a low-passed. In a recess of that chamber, he found a drawing that didn't match the rest. Three small steps leading up to a thick block with a cross on top, which he took for a tomb. Above it, or coming down onto it, a five-pointed star with a long sweeping tail. Beneath it, in careful cursive, with the accents and the commas in the right places. A caption.

Requerdos de Fernando Colon, May 23, 1910. The month was written in English, in the middle of a Spanish sentence. Memories of Fernando Colon, May 23, 1910. Acosta Coulon photographed it and moved on to the older material, which he and a colleague eventually published. The drawing stayed with him anyway. In 2023, he showed the photograph to an astronomer at the University of Puerto Rico, named Abel Mendez, who declined the invitation to crawl into the cave himself,

on the grounds that he doesn't like in closed spaces, but who recognized the month and the year immediately. Mendez went into the 1910 census. Puerto Rico had been an American possession for 12 years by then, and the United States had counted everyone on the island that year, and the count asked each person whether they could read and write in Spanish and in English. There were four men named Fernando Colon living near the cave. The captions punctuation, and the Englishman,

month and the fact that the date was written American style month first, all suggested somebody with an American style education. In 1910, only about a third of Puerto Ricans over the age of 10 could read and write at all. Only one of the four Fernandos could read and write in both languages, and that one lived on the main street of the town rather than out in the country, which is where the newspapers were. His full name was Fernando Colon Vasquez. In May of 1910, he was 15 years old. His father was dead, and his mother was raising five children on her own, and the census shows the children in school and literate in two languages, which says something about her. Mendez said afterward that once he knew, it seemed obvious it had been a kid, because kids are the

ones who write on everything. On a return trip to the chamber, Acosta Cologne found a second drawing of the same tomb, signed by Fernando's brother, Montserrat. The family lived in a small town about six miles from the cave. The two scientists estimated the walk at a minimum of two hours through dry country full of thorned plants, carrying whatever food and water and lamp fuel they'd need. And then the crawl. Their paper, published in 2024, concludes that a family doesn't make that trip for a party. The two of them describe the drawings as a record of the mix of fear and fascination that a thing in the sky can produce, and as one more entry in a tradition of Puerto Rico. and cave art that runs from the Taino to now. There's no record of what the Cologne Vasquez family

had read, been told, or believed. There's no record of who decided they'd go, or how long they stayed, or what they said to each other in there. The drawing is dated four days after the night of the tale, which means that either the family went in before the 18th and stayed, or the boy went back afterward to leave his mark on the place where he'd waited, or the date is a memorial written on some later trip entirely. Mendez and Acosta Cologne raise all three and don't claim to know which. What they do know from the newspapers is that the island's press had been added since January, when La Correspondencia de Puerto Rico ran a piece on the comet's lethal consequences, and that by March, a magazine called Puerto Rico Illustrato, was joking about whether anyone would

be around after May. Fernando Colon Vasquez served in the military as a young man, and his selective service registration card survives with his signature on it. He spent his working life in jobs that needed a careful hand, transcription and typeset, and later worked for the island's state insurance fund and died in 1950 at 54. Two of his children were believed to be alive when the paper came out, and the scientists were trying to find them to ask whether their father had ever mentioned a cave. Acosta Cologne, for his part, doesn't think the family was doing anything, strange. People in Puerto Rico have sheltered in caves for as long as there have been people in Puerto Rico, he says, and they still do it when the hurricanes come. He's the one person in this

entire story who can be placed by name and by his own hand inside the fear. He was a 15-year-old who could write in two languages, and he left his name in a chamber that can only be reached on hands and knees, six miles from his home. The shape of the thing hasn't changed much since. An observatory finds something true. A reporter calls an expert. The expert says the word possibly, and the headline drops the word. Somewhere between the headline and the day the world doesn't end, somebody sets up a table and starts selling. In 1985, when the comet was inbound and the country was gearing up for it, a museum in Grand Rapids, Michigan, sold a souvenir bottle of comet pills as a joke. The label carried the story of the Pope who excommunicated howly

Comet, which never happened, and which a Jesuit had proven never happened in the same month the cyanogen scare began. 75 years on, the fear was a novelty item, and the novelty item still had the myth printed on the side. The comet is due back in the summer of 20161. Somebody will point a better instrument at it than Yerka's had. Somebody will call an expert. The word possibly will be in the answer and out of the headline. And somewhere between the headline and the morning after, somebody will probably set up a table. That part I'd bet money on. In 1910, the table held sugar pills in Texas, insurance in Los Angeles, whiskey in the bars, and a girl in Oklahoma who never existed. None of that survived. A charcoal drawing did, in a chamber in Puerto Rico that can only

be reached on hands and knees, made by a boy who'd read the papers and walked six miles with his family to get away from the sky. Memories of Fernando Colon, May the 23rd, 1910. Your skin of ghosts for my child. Your bedroom is out.