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 Brian

Join Our FREE Newsletter

Get Brian's Books

Leave Us A Voicemail

Visit Our Website

Have a forgotten historical mystery, disturbing event, unsolved crime, or hidden conspiracy you think deserves investigation?

Send your suggestions to brian@paranormalworldproductions.com.

Disturbing 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.