Haunts & Hollows: True Tales of the Gothic South

The South doesn't forget easily, but some secrets it keeps buried deep. In this episode we uncover three chilling cold cases where predators vanished without a trace, leaving investigators haunted decades later. First, follow the trail of the so-called Flat-Tire Killer, whose hunting ground stretched from California to the canals of South Florida, perhaps claiming more than 30 lives. Even tod...

Every town has its secrets. Some of them happen to end at the end of a rope. In the summer of 1895, three young sisters took a Sunday stroll through the mountains of Rabun County, Georgia. Only one came home. The man responsible was their neighbor and cousin. He was a man who, by most accounts, had never caused a lick of trouble in his life... until something in his head began to rattle. William S...

What happens when your death overshadows your life? What if you lived for years in anonymity only to become infamous in the next life? From a Florida housewife whose ghost walked a lonely highway stretch for years waiting to uncover a terrible secret to a Charleston socialite whose grave at Old Stone Church still draws offerings from believers in her witchcraft, these are stories where death is on...

What are the odds? In the world of true crime, that question can mean everything. Or perhaps nothing at all. Two women named Mary Morris are murdered four days apart on the same stretch of road. A son gives a stranger a ride home, only to find that stranger may have killed his mother. A machete murder in Saint Augustine leads to a second suspicious death, and a book that someone desperately didn’t...

What falls from the sky in the American South? Sometimes it’s rain or snakes or eels. And sometimes it’s blood. From a Kansas slaughterhouse hurled by a tornado across a hundred miles of open sky to a Tennessee tobacco field soaked in gore that drew five hundred horrified spectators, the Gothic South has a long, strange relationship with blood that falls from above. But these aren’t just folklore...

What if the most dangerous person in the room wasn’t the one you’d ever suspect? History has a way of overlooking women, and for decades, even the FBI refused to acknowledge they could be serial killers at all. This episode of Haunts & Hollows: True Tales of the Gothic South aims to set the record straight. In this second installment of our Deadly Dames series, we round out our list of twelve...

They baked the pies. They nursed the sick. They wept at the funerals. And, in a handful of cases, they quietly arranged for those funerals to happen in the first place.  In this episode of Haunts & Hollows: True Tales of the Gothic South, we’re pulling back the black lace veil on six women history has branded Brutal Brides and Wicked Widows. From a teenage axe murderer in 1831 Burke County to...

Some towns get hit by disaster once and disappear. Others take a hit and keep coming back for more. From a preacher’s curse that erased an entire county seat to a 30-foot wall of water that swallowed a sleeping Bible college campus, Georgia's past is littered with tiny communities that fate and Mother Nature simply wiped from the map. No place, however, has paid a higher price than Gainesvill...

What happens when a body is buried without its head? In the South, you get a ghost. . . and a whole lot of history. From the fog-drenched lowlands of South Carolina to the blood-soaked battlefields of the Civil War, the Gothic South has always had a complicated relationship with the dead, especially the incomplete dead. In this episode, we trace the folklore of headless and dismembered spirits bac...

Every small town has one, that stretch of road where the streetlights stop and the rumors start. You probably know a few of the stories: the boyfriend who never came back, the hook on the door handle, and the scraping sound on the roof you were too afraid to explain. But what if the scariest thing about Lover’s Lane isn’t the legend? What if it’s the true story hiding underneath it all? In this ep...