Hello, listeners. I apologize in advance for mispronouncing many of the words and names in this episode.

I researched how to say them, but I still probably won't get them quite right,

as I'm not a native speaker of Hindi or any of the many other languages spoken in India,

nor of Persian, which was spoken by the Mughal Court during the time period we are going to talk about.

Thank you for understanding.

Humans are fascinated by gore and violence, but even more so the mysterious and unsolved.

Interest in these disturbing and unpleasant subjects is called morbid curiosity,

and it has gripped hundreds of people throughout the ages.

I am one of those people.

My name is Halley, and this is the Morbid Curiosity

podcast. Tales of tragedy are often repeated over and over again in the press, especially when the tragedy involves

the deaths of many people.

Humans can't seem to look away, as most of us here in the creepy community know.

Some humans, however, try to take advantage of tragedy, try to bend the story in some

way that benefits them. The history of colonialism is full of this type of exploitation, and in this episode,

I want to talk about one such incident that was used by some in power to justify British rule in India during the mid-1800s.

The popular version of the story holds that after the British East India Company was defeated at Fort William by the Nawab,

or ruler of Bengal, on the 20th of June 1756, a catastrophic number of people died while imprisoned.

That night, it said that the survivors of the battle, all 146 of them,

were crammed into a small dungeon in the fort called the Black Hole. This dungeon is said to

have been only 18 feet by 14 feet 10 inches, with a square footage of around 270 feet. That's 4.3 by 5.5 meters and 25 square meters.

The prisoners were left in the dungeon for the entirety of a warm night with only two windows

...