On the night of August 21, 1986, a small crater lake in the highlands of northwest Cameroon released something close to a quarter of a cubic mile of carbon dioxide in a matter of minutes. The gas was heavier than air. It poured over the rim of the crater, ran down the valleys the way water would have, and passed through the villages of Nyos, Cha and Subum while people were finishing supper or already asleep.

The official death toll is one thousand seven hundred and forty-six. That number is an estimate, because soldiers and relatives buried the dead before anyone counted them.

This episode of Disturbing History starts two years earlier and sixty miles south, on a road beside another lake called Monoun, where thirty-seven people died before dawn in August of 1984 and nobody could say why.

 A volcanologist named Haraldur Sigurdsson went looking for an eruption, couldn't find one, and hauled up a bottle of deep water that blew its own lid off. He concluded that the lake itself had been storing carbon dioxide and had let it go all at once. According to Smithsonian Magazine, he sent that finding to the journal Science a few months before Nyos, and it was turned down as far-fetched. Brian walks through the night at Lake Nyos using the accounts of the people who lived.

Ephriam Che heard a rumble from his house on the cliff, saw white mist rising off the water, and went to bed feeling sick. Halima Suley woke the next morning among the bodies of her four children, thirty-one other relatives and four hundred cattle. Joseph Nkwain collapsed on his own floor in Subum trying to reach his daughter's bed. A health worker bicycling home found a dead antelope on the road and tied it to his bike before he understood what he was riding into.From there the episode follows what happened once the outside world found out.

The government's first radio announcement put the dead at forty. The army dug mass graves by hand because the bulldozers couldn't get up the mud tracks. Israeli army medics arrived with a prime minister on a state visit, which fed a rumor that still circulates about a secret weapons test. Scientists from half a dozen countries reached the lake within days and split into two camps, one arguing the gas had been stored in the water and one arguing a volcanic blast had come up through the lake bed. Survivors had blistered skin and remembered a smell of gunpowder and rotten eggs, and carbon dioxide isn't supposed to cause either.The last part of the episode covers the decades since.

The lake was refilling with gas. It took fifteen years and a four hundred thousand dollar grant to stand a single pipe in it. The natural dam holding the lake back was eroding toward a flood that would have reached Nigeria. Thousands of survivors were moved into resettlement camps on land too small to farm or graze, and as of the last reporting available they had never been formally allowed home. One of those camps was burned down in 2020. The mass graves from 1986 were lost to the bush within a few seasons, and nobody can say now where they are.



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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.

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