Haunted American History

In 1949, a thirteen-year-old boy living outside Washington, D.C., began experiencing something his family couldn't explain. Scratching sounds came from inside the walls. Furniture reportedly moved on its own. Strange marks appeared on the boy's skin. His family believed something supernatural was happening. Eventually, they turned to the Catholic Church. What followed was a series of exorcisms con...

On Halloween night in 1974, eight-year-old Timothy O'Bryan came home from trick-or-treating in Pasadena, Texas, with a giant Pixy Stix. His father helped him open it. Timothy complained that the candy tasted strange. Within an hour, he was dead. Investigators discovered that the candy contained a lethal dose of cyanide. Four other children had received identical poisoned treats, and police raced t...

In November of 1960, a teenage girl wrote a letter to Dear Abby warning other teenagers about something she'd heard. A young couple had been parked on a deserted road when their radio interrupted the music with a frightening announcement. A dangerous man had escaped from custody. And where his right hand should have been, he had a hook. The couple fled, but when they reached home, they discovered...

In 1888, a woman named Maggie Fox stood before two thousand people in a New York theater, removed her shoe, and demonstrated how she had spent decades convincing Americans she could communicate with the dead. She cracked her toe joints. Forty years of séances, spirit messages, and mysterious knocking sounds had helped create a nationwide obsession with the supernatural. But the story didn't end wh...

In 1899, Halloween was so destructive in parts of America that grown men sat outside their homes with shotguns, waiting for the pranksters to arrive. People stole gates, overturned outhouses, tore up sidewalks, and sometimes set property on fire. Halloween wasn't the family-friendly celebration we recognize today. And in Hiawatha, Kansas, one woman had finally had enough. Her name was Elizabeth Kr...

On Halloween night in 1991, eighteen-year-old Doris Gipson was driving along a rural road outside Elkhorn, Wisconsin, when she struck something with her car. She stopped to investigate. There was nothing in the road. Then she saw something running toward her on two legs. Within months, reports of a strange, upright, wolf-like creature had turned an ordinary Wisconsin farm road into the center of o...

In 1612, a young woman named Alizon Device asked a traveling peddler for some pins. He refused. A short distance down the road, the man collapsed. Today, a doctor would probably call it a stroke. Alizon believed she'd done it with witchcraft. And she confessed. Within months, accusations had spread through two feuding families living beneath Pendle Hill. Elderly women described spirits that appear...

In January of 1909, strange tracks began appearing in the snow across New Jersey. They crossed yards. Climbed fences. Appeared on rooftops. Witnesses reported hearing wings outside their homes and seeing something with hooves, glowing eyes, feathers, fur—and occasionally a head like a horse. Schools reportedly closed. Armed posses went looking for it. Newspapers put it on the front page. And sudde...

In 1776, somewhere in the hills of Westchester County, an American cannonball took the head off a Hessian soldier. His name was never recorded. His grave has never been found. And about twenty years later, a young writer named Washington Irving arrived in the Hudson Valley and eventually gave that forgotten soldier a horse. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow would become one of America's great ghost stor...

In March of 1892, a group of men entered a cemetery in rural Rhode Island and opened the coffin of nineteen-year-old Mercy Brown. Then they cut out her heart. Her family had been dying from tuberculosis, one after another, and some of Mercy's neighbors believed they knew why. Something inside one of the graves was still feeding on the living. So they burned Mercy's heart and liver beside a rock in...

In 1820, John Bell died on his farm in northern Tennessee. According to the legend, a ghost killed him. For years, the Bell family had supposedly been tormented by something they couldn't see. It knocked on walls, pulled blankets from beds, attacked young Betsy Bell, sang hymns, quoted scripture, answered questions from visitors—and eventually learned to speak. It called itself Kate. The story wou...

On August 4, 1577, a violent storm descended on the English countryside. Then something entered the church. Witnesses described an enormous black dog tearing through the congregation, allegedly killing two people before disappearing into the storm. At another church twelve miles away, a remarkably similar story was unfolding. The creature would become known as Black Shuck—a massive phantom hound s...

Before the jack-o'-lantern was a grinning pumpkin on an American porch, it was something else entirely. A light over a bog. For centuries, people in Ireland and Britain told stories about strange flames that appeared in the darkness, drifting just far enough ahead to tempt travelers off the road. In Ireland, one explanation had a name: Jack. He tricked the Devil. He was rejected by Heaven. Hell wa...

Before Halloween meant costumes, candy, and smiling jack-o'-lanterns, it meant something considerably more dangerous. When Irish and Scottish Halloween traditions crossed the Atlantic, they collided with American harvest parties, fortune-telling games, pumpkins, Victorian entertainment—and a growing tradition of October vandalism. Kids blocked railroad tracks. Wagons ended up on barn roofs. Window...

Before Halloween had pumpkins, candy, costumes, or trick-or-treating, there was Samhain. At the edge of winter, the cattle came home, the fires burned, and old stories warned that the boundaries between worlds had opened. The dead could return. Fairies came out of the earth. Headless riders crossed the countryside. And sometimes, something followed you home. From a warrior who carried a talking co...

On Christmas Eve 1945, the Sodder family home in Fayetteville, West Virginia, burned to the ground. George and Jennie Sodder escaped with four of their children, but five others were supposedly trapped upstairs. When the ashes cooled, however, investigators found something the family couldn't understand: no identifiable remains of the missing children. Then came the questions. A missing ladder. Tr...

In October 1859, John Brown and eighteen men descended on Harpers Ferry with a plan to seize the federal arsenal, arm enslaved people, and ignite a war against slavery. Thirty-six hours later, sixteen people were dead, Brown was captured, and Harpers Ferry had begun its transformation into one of America's most mythologized towns. Today, its streets are filled with ghosts: John Brown wandering the...

In November 1966, two young couples driving through an abandoned World War II explosives facility outside Point Pleasant, West Virginia, encountered something they couldn't explain: a towering humanoid figure with enormous wings and glowing red eyes. Within days, others claimed to see it. Then came strange electrical disturbances, UFO reports, mysterious visitors, and a traveling salesman who said...

Deep in Mercer County, West Virginia, the rusting remains of Lake Shawnee Amusement Park are slowly being reclaimed by the forest. Long before the rides arrived, the land was the site of frontier violence and an Indigenous settlement stretching back centuries. Then came the amusement park, where a series of accidents—including the deaths of two children—became part of its dark reputation. Decades...

For more than a century, the West Virginia Penitentiary at Moundsville held thousands of prisoners behind the walls of a Gothic stone fortress. Ninety-four men were executed there. Riots left inmates dead. Conditions became so brutal that West Virginia's highest court eventually ordered the prison closed. Today, Moundsville is better known for something else: ghosts. Visitors report shadowy figure...

In 1985, two couples were murdered months apart in the forests surrounding Mount Rainier. In both cases, a woman was found with a white athletic tube sock tied around her neck using the same distinctive knot. For twenty-five years, investigators believed one of the victims, trapper Mike Riemer, may actually have been the killer. Then, in 2011, a hiker found his remains less than a mile from where...

In 1994, eighteen-year-old Brian Canfield was driving along a dark road in the foothills of Washington when his pickup suddenly died. Then something dropped out of the sky. He described a nine-foot creature covered in blue fur, with yellow eyes, a wolf-like face, clawed feet, and enormous leathery wings. For several minutes, the two simply stared at each other before the creature took flight—and B...

High above Port Townsend, Washington, stands Manresa Castle, a Victorian mansion with two famous ghosts. One is said to be a Jesuit priest who hanged himself in the attic. The other is “English Kate,” a pregnant young woman who supposedly leapt from a third-floor window after learning her lover had died at sea. Guests still report footsteps, weeping, strange odors, and figures appearing in their r...

Pike Place Market is one of Seattle's most recognizable landmarks, but beneath the flying fish and crowded produce stalls is a maze of old corridors, sealed rooms, forgotten businesses, and more than a century of folklore. Workers have reported seeing the apparition of Princess Angeline climbing stairs that didn't exist during her lifetime. A former mortuary beneath Post Alley became associated wi...

For nearly fifty years, Seattle's Harvard Exit Theatre carried a reputation for being haunted. Employees reported lights turning on by themselves, doors fighting back, strange voices, falling objects, and a mysterious woman appearing beside the lobby fireplace. Some believed she was Bertha Knight Landes, Seattle's first female mayor and a former president of the women's club that originally occupi...