American Hauntings Podcast

John Torrio was finally exactly where he wanted to be.  With his uncle, Big Jim Colosimo out of the way, his business expanding across the South Side of the city and into the suburbs, and his trustworthy young right-hand man, Al Capone, at his side, he was ready to start dividing up the Chicago into territories. With all the various gangs that already existed in the city eager to jump into the liq...

A mother. A bathtub. A death ruled suspicious. In 2012, Lisa Cutler was found drowned in her Mount Zion, Illinois home while her children slept upstairs. At first, it looked like an accident. But more than 20 bruises… a failing marriage… and over a million dollars in life insurance told a different story. Was it a tragic fall— or something far more deliberate? Check out our new American Hauntings...

John Torrio was ready when the new Prohibition law went into effect, but he seemed to be the only one. He was waiting impatiently for everyone else to catch up. He’d been predicting Prohibition to his friends and business associates for months and knew it would be how organized crime could amass untold amounts of wealth. To take something that had always been legal, and make it illegal, especially...

The strange and sometimes sinister world of America’s homegrown religions, faith movements, and cults is filled with bizarre characters. There are many that most listeners have undoubtedly heard of, but what about the cult leader who actually became a king? In 1847, the only man ever crowned king within the continental United States began his rule from a secluded island in Lake Michigan. James Jes...

She was only a few feet from safety. On a freezing December night in 1975, Carol Ann Rofstad never made it inside her sorority house. Instead, she was found beaten and dying beside the building the next morning. Her murder shocked the Illinois State University campus — and may have been connected to a series of disturbing attacks on college women. Nearly half a century later, the case remains unso...

The date when a shaft of divine light came down from the heavens and transformed Franz Edmund Creffield from an obscure, backwater evangelist into Prophet Joshua the Second remains a mystery. We also don’t know the exact spot where the spiritual ordination occurred but – we do know that it occurred in 1903 in Corvallis, Oregon. History has shown us that trouble tends to follow in the wake of moder...

John Torrio was 31 years old when he first came to Chicago to free his uncle by marriage – Big Jim Colosimo – from threats by Black Hand gangsters. But Torrio’s service went beyond that. He was soon reorganizing and expanding Big Jim’s vice rackets and while they continued to thrive for a short time, trouble was on the way. On the other side of the city's powerful people, William Thompson ran...

On Easter Sunday, April 13, 1895, parishioners at the Emmanuel Baptist Church in San Francisco were shocked when a closet was opened that contained the mutilated body of a young woman. Police detectives who were summoned to the church expected the corpse to belong to a 20-year-old woman named Blanche Lamont, a member of the church’s congregation who had gone missing 10 days earlier. But it wasn’t...

How well do you really know your neighbor? In Decatur, Illinois, 1964, evil didn’t break in—it lived inside the house. On a cold February night, a family argument ended with a hatchet, a triple killing, and a manhunt that stretched from Illinois to Florida. This is  The Hatchet House —a story of blood, silence, and a terrifying truth: sometimes the monster isn’t out there… …it’s already home. Chec...

James “Big Jim” Colosimo ruled the Chicago underworld longer than any man in the city's history. The money he raked in from the many enterprises that he controlled was conservatively estimated at $50,000 a month for about eight years. Colosimo was a strange character and a man who helped usher in Chicago's organized crime era – although he’d never actually live to see it.  Check out our ne...

In 1908, a Pentecostal minister announced to his followers that the Devil was alive and well and interfered with every aspect of human life. And he wasn’t alone in this belief. Others described demons as swarming around the human soul and living off them “like ticks on cattle.” The Pentecostal belief about the Devil interfering with our everyday lives was just one example of how the twentieth cent...

In the early 1980s, Springfield, Illinois learned there was no safe hour. On this episode of  American Dread , we examine  two unconnected crimes  that unfolded just one year apart — one in broad daylight, the other in the dead of night — and how both shattered a city’s sense of safety. In 1981, an axe attack inside Lauterbach Cottage Hardware left one man dead and a killer who vanished without a...

Check out our new American Hauntings Podcast Network for even more spooky shows. Have a question or comment? Text us on the Haunt Line @ 217-791-7859 New Facebook page -  https://www.facebook.com/troytayloroddities Check out our updated website and sign up for our newsletter at  AmericanHauntingsPodcast.com Want an episode every week, plus other awesome perks and discounts? Check out our  Patreon...

Nineteenth century America was awash with diabolical imagery. It was everywhere. It was used to link the Devil to everything from immigrants to abortion, the Catholic Church, Native Americans, and even outspoken women, so it can’t be a surprise to learn that it was also used to describe some of the most bloodthirsty killers of the day.  For anyone who might think that deviant sex murderers and ser...

Young Brooklyn thug Al Capone took a cab to Coney Island. As he traveled down Ocean Parkway, he wasn’t surprised to see people practically living on the sidewalks, trying to get a breath of fresh air. He sat in the back seat, enjoying the light breeze from the open windows, on his way to the Harvard Inn, a club that belonged to Capone’s employer, gangster Frankie Yale. It wasn’t much of a job – ju...

When the headless body of a pregnant young woman was found across the Ohio River from Cincinnati in 1896, the shock of the discovery was felt far beyond the region. As the story of the young woman was revealed, it became a crime that was tailor-made for the popular culture of the era. The horror of the crime, its characters, and its cause created a melodrama that could only be found in pulp novels...

Season 10- Murder City, is here. In this season, we'll be taking a trip back in time, to the years of prohibition and telling the story of a city where the streets ran red with blood, accompanied by the clink of liquor bottles, jazz music and rattling machine guns. And we will take you behind the scenes of the world of some of the most notorious gangsters to ever hit the mean streets of the Wi...

The nineteenth century marked a great change in American history – it was the age of the Industrial Revolution, the Civil War, and a time when science and reason were supposed to erase the myths and fears of the past. And yet, the Devil still managed to rear his ugly head, continuing to serve as a symbol of all the things that Americans hated and feared the most.  Social reformers used the Devil t...

America’s first settlers were afraid of a lot of things and when they were afraid of something they reflexively connected it to the Devil – whether it was places like forests and woods or people, like the Native Americans who had predated their arrival on these shores by hundreds of years. In other words, whatever they didn’t understand, they feared, and whatever they feared, it must be the work o...

The Puritans and the early colonists found more monsters in America than just witches. The Devil had birthed a variety of what were often called “monstrous births” and they became signs and omens for the believers in an angry god. Spectral, shape-shifting dogs, along with demonic, giant black bears, haunted the woods around the settlements. They believed they were surrounded by evil spirits in the...

A special “Very Scary Christmas” Episode!  Traditional Christmas celebrations in colonial American were much different than they are today. It was a public celebration in the streets and the pubs. Few people celebrated in church and even fewer celebrated with family at home. And for good reason. The winter nights were cold and dark. It was a time of snow, ice, and being trapped indoors with that f...

It's that time of year again! Join us as we attempt to avoid going off on wil tangents while we discuss our favorite Horror films of the year. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

The Devil didn’t confine his shenanigans to Salem Village or even the Massachusetts Bay colony in the 1600s. A penchant for hanging and persecuting those believed to be in league with him swept through the colonies in those days, leading to many tragedies and deaths. But the madness the Puritans introduced in that period drained America of its lust for religions mania and fanaticism for many years...

The terrible incident at Salem was not the last American witch hunt. It was also not the end of Puritan oppression in the region. They would leave a last impact on both New England and American history. And no aspect of the Puritan experience remains as vivid in American memory as their fear of monsters, specifically the fear of witches that led to the trials of hundreds of settlers during the 160...

In the past on this podcast, we have often asked the question of whether a monster is born or are they made? This might be the episode that finally answers that question. The story that follows suggests that monsters are NOT born; they’re made – often by the very people who should protect them. Have a question or comment? Text us on the Haunt Line @ 217-791-7859 New Facebook page -  https://www.fa...