Haunted American History

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. Windows were smashed. False fire alarms were pulled. People were shot. And by the 1930s, some American cities were seriously considering getting rid of Halloween altogether.

Instead, they made a deal with the kids.

Give us something good, and nothing ba...

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 corpse into the night to spectral black sows, fairy armies, divination rituals, sacred fires, and the old legends that eventually crossed the Atlantic and became part of Halloween as we know it, we're...

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. Trucks that mysteriously wouldn't start. A telephone line that had apparently been cut. Strange threats before the fire. And, decades later, a photograph that George and Jennie believed showed one of their missing sons as an adult.

Tonight, we...

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 lower town, a burning woman beside the railroad tracks, soldiers haunting a church, and Dangerfield Newby walking an alley with the wound that killed him. But the oldest accounts tell different stories.

Tonight, we...

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 he'd spoken telepathically with a man from another world. The phenomenon became known as Mothman. Thirteen months later, the Silver Bridge collapsed into the Ohio River, killing forty-six people—and permanently transforming a strange series of sightings into an American legend.

...

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 later, a new owner attempting to resurrect Lake Shawnee discovered something extraordinary beneath the property: human remains and evidence of a much older community.

Today, visitors report children's voices, moving swings, strange figures, and...

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 figures following them through cellblocks and basements, while one famous apparition has been linked to the murder of an inmate named R.D. Wall. But when you compare the legends with the historical record, some details begin to change—in...

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 his girlfriend had been discovered. Suddenly, investigators weren't looking for three victims and a murderer. They were looking at four victims—and a killer who had disappeared without a trace.

Tonight, we...

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 Brian's truck inexplicably started again. The encounter would give the Pacific Northwest a new cryptid: Batsquatch. But somewhere along the way, the story changed, moving the creature to a completely different mountain and su...

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 rooms. But when historians went looking for the deaths behind those hauntings, they found a problem: neither tragedy appears to have happened.

Tonight, we explore the ghosts of Manresa Castle, the history behi...

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 with tales of unexplained figures and strange activity. And deep in the Market's Down Under, a bead shop claimed something was stealing its inventory—until its owners broke through a wall and discovered a room that had supposedly be...

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 occupied the building. There was just one problem: Landes died two thousand miles away. And when people began digging deeper into the theater's other ghost stories, some surprisingly human explanations emerged.

Tonight, we explore the history and haunting of...

On June 28, 2004, two freight trains collided outside San Antonio, rupturing a tank car carrying roughly ninety tons of liquid chlorine. Just a hundred feet away, Wayne and Mary Hale woke to a toxic cloud spreading through their home. They called 911, followed the instructions they were given, and waited for help. But a locked gate, an emergency perimeter, confusion between responding agencies, and well-intentioned advice would leave the family trapped for more than six hours. By the time hazmat crews reached them, two members of the Hale family were dead.

Tonight, we explore the Macdona train disaster—and th...

In February 1959, nine experienced hikers vanished in the frozen wilderness of the Soviet Union. Weeks later, searchers found their tent abandoned on the side of Kholat Syakhl—cut open from the inside, with boots, coats, food, and equipment left behind. Their footprints led nearly a mile into the forest, where their bodies were eventually discovered under circumstances that would fuel decades of theories involving secret weapons, radiation, indigenous attacks, and even the Yeti. But more than sixty years later, modern snow science may finally explain what happened at Dyatlov Pass.

Tonight, we explore one of the world's mo...

Brittany Renee Williams was seven years old when she disappeared from Henrico County, Virginia, in 2000. She was living with the woman who ran Rainbow Kids, a home for children with serious medical conditions, and required ongoing treatment for HIV. But when Brittany vanished, nobody reported her missing.

For more than two years, her Social Security and Medicaid benefits continued to be collected while conflicting stories were told about where she had gone. By the time investigators finally opened a missing-person case, the trail was already years old.

Searches produced no remains, and no one has...

In 1816, a mysterious young woman arrived at Alexandria's finest hotel deathly ill, her face hidden behind a black veil. The man claiming to be her husband demanded absolute secrecy from everyone allowed into her room. Weeks later, the twenty-three-year-old woman was dead, buried beneath an enormous marble monument that revealed everything about her grief—and nothing about her identity. Then her husband disappeared, leaving behind $1,500 in counterfeit money and a mystery that has survived for more than two centuries.

Today, she's remembered simply as the Female Stranger, and some believe she never really left Room 8. Tonight, we ex...

Hollywood Cemetery is the final resting place of presidents, Confederate soldiers, Richmond's elite—and, according to local legend, a vampire. The story begins with the catastrophic 1925 collapse of the Church Hill Tunnel, when witnesses reportedly saw a bloody, badly injured figure emerge from the wreckage. Over the decades, that tragedy became tangled with the tomb of William Wortham Pool, an otherwise ordinary Richmond bookkeeper who died years before the collapse.

But the Richmond Vampire isn't Hollywood Cemetery's only strange story. There's also a cast-iron dog guarding a child's grave, a ninety-foot granite pyramid, and generations of reported vo...

Jamestown is remembered as the first permanent English settlement in America. What's remembered less often is how close it came to becoming a mass grave. During the winter of 1609–1610, hundreds died from starvation, disease, siege, and violence—and archaeological evidence eventually confirmed something historians had debated for centuries: some survivors resorted to cannibalism.

Today, the island has its own collection of ghost stories, from footsteps inside an empty church to figures among the ruins and strange sounds drifting across the marsh. But beneath the folklore are the remains of very real people, including a fourteen-year-old girl archaeologists call...

The Peyton Randolph House stands at the heart of Colonial Williamsburg, once home to the first president of the Continental Congress and generations of one of Virginia's most powerful families. Today, it's also called one of Williamsburg's most haunted buildings. Visitors report children running through empty rooms, apparitions beside beds, and unexplained activity in the basement—including a security guard who claimed something physically grabbed his legs in the dark. But beneath those stories is a history far more unsettling than the legends: epidemic disease, slavery, attempted escapes, and people who disappear from the historical record after fighting for th...

For decades, the Ancient Ram Inn has been called one of the most haunted buildings in England—a medieval labyrinth supposedly plagued by demons, witches, phantom soldiers, and violent unseen forces. Its longtime owner, John Humphries, claimed something dragged him from bed on his very first night inside. Years later, investigators digging beneath that same room uncovered the bones of a woman and child. But the deeper you dig into the Ram's history, the stranger the story becomes—not because its most famous legends are true, but because many of them aren't. 

Tonight, we separate five centuries of ge...

For generations of Vermonters, the Dog Team Tavern was the kind of restaurant people remembered for the rest of their lives: enormous prime rib, a spinning “relish wheel,” rationed sticky buns, and a history that began with an Arctic medical mission. Then, early on September 1, 2006, the restaurant burned to the ground. Owner Christopher Hesslink's pickup was found behind the building with his two dogs safely inside. Hesslink himself was later discovered dead in the ruins beside a shotgun. His death was ruled a suicide—but investigators classified the fire as suspicious, and its cause was never publicly reconciled with that r...

On March 20, 2004, a Vermont State Police trooper found a car backed into the side of an abandoned farmhouse along Route 118. The doors were closed. The keys were missing. Loose change, a broken necklace, and an unsmoked cigarette lay outside. Inside were two uncashed paychecks belonging to seventeen-year-old Brianna Maitland. The scene was initially treated as a drunk-driving accident, and the car was towed before anyone realized Brianna was missing. More than twenty years later, she still hasn't been found.

Tonight, we examine Brianna's final day, the investigation that lost precious time before it even began, the theories...

On an August evening in 1968, two employees at a Vermont summer camp watched a strange light descend over Lake Champlain. Sixteen-year-old “Michael” and nineteen-year-old “Janet” claimed they saw smaller objects emerge from a glowing craft, one of them hovering close enough to reveal two child-sized figures inside. Then came a beam of light—and a blank space in their memories. Ten years later, recurring nightmares drove Michael to UFO investigator Walter Webb, who tracked Janet down and began an investigation that would consume five years. Under separate hypnosis, both witnesses described something far stranger than what they consciously remembered.

Tonig...

In 1823, Mercie Dale lay dying in a Vermont farmhouse convinced that her son-in-law had been poisoning her. Before she died, she supposedly left the Hayden family with a curse: their name would end within three generations, and the last Hayden would die in poverty. For decades, that prediction seemed ridiculous. Mercie's grandson built a railroad fortune and erected one of the grandest mansions in Vermont, complete with an enormous ballroom and a spring-loaded dance floor. Then the children began dying. The money disappeared. The mansion was abandoned. And eventually, the final Hayden died penniless and obscure.

Tonight...

High above Bennington, Vermont, sits a stone mansion that has been a millionaire's private castle, a Catholic seminary, a college, and even a COVID vaccination site. But through every incarnation, stories have followed it. Students at Southern Vermont College reported phantom piano music, unexplained voices, a Woman in White, and a hooded figure wandering the grounds. One security guard supposedly found a 200-pound desk pushed against the inside of a locked, empty room.

Tonight, we explore the Everett Mansion—and how more than a century of changing occupants transformed one eccentric Gilded Age estate into one of Ve...

For generations of students at Bennington College, Jennings Hall has been the building you don't want to be inside after midnight. Phantom piano music drifts from locked practice rooms. Footsteps pace empty corridors. Doors slam without wind. And one story claims a terrified professor once fled into the Vermont snow as violent knocking traveled through the mansion toward him. But Jennings has another claim to fame: that the imposing granite estate inspired Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House. It's a perfect story. It's also almost certainly wrong.

Tonight, we explore the genuine hauntings of Jennings Hall...

Between 1979 and 1980, three young women connected to the same troubled corner of Fall River, Massachusetts were murdered. Doreen Levesque was found beneath high-school bleachers. Barbara Raposa was discovered frozen in the woods. Karen Marsden vanished shortly after telling police she believed she was going to be killed. Then investigators began hearing about Satan worship, secret rituals, blood ceremonies, and a supposed cult operating inside the city's drug and sex trade. The resulting trial sent Carl Drew to prison for life—but the prosecution's central witness later recanted, other witnesses followed, and questions surrounding the convictions never disappeared.

To...

In September 1972, a dog emerged from the woods of Springfield, New Jersey carrying a decomposed human arm. The remains belonged to sixteen-year-old Jeannette DePalma, who had disappeared 43 days earlier. Almost immediately, her death became something else. Newspapers reported a coffin made from branches, wooden crosses, a pentagram, mutilated animals, and whispers that Jeannette had been sacrificed by a Satanic cult. For nearly fifty years, those stories became inseparable from her name. But when the original case photographs were finally released, the alleged ritual scene disappeared.

Tonight, we examine the unsolved death of Jeannette DePalma, the predators hunting...

On September 1, 2015, seventeen-year-old Macin Smith apparently left his home in St. George, Utah, to catch the school bus. He never arrived. His wallet, cash, identification, passport, backpack, phone, and laptop were all left behind. More than a decade later, his online accounts remain untouched, extensive searches of the surrounding desert have found nothing, and investigators have never established what happened after the garage door opened that morning. A hidden handwritten note pointed toward one possibility. Unconfirmed sightings hundreds of miles away suggested another. And search warrants reveal that detectives eventually examined whether Macin ever left home at all.

In Tooele, Utah, there's a haunted attraction that never had to pretend it was an abandoned hospital...because it actually was one. Asylum 49 occupies the former Tooele Valley Hospital, built on land that had previously served as the county poor farm. For years, its full-contact haunted house operated on one side of a wall while elderly residents lived in an active care facility on the other. But employees soon began reporting things no actor was responsible for: slamming doors, shadow figures, children in empty hospital rooms, and a little girl in a white nightgown who supposedly frightened the people...

At three in the morning on April Fools’ Day, 1893, the alarm bells at Utah’s Granite Paper Mill began ringing. The people living nearby heard them, checked the date—and went back to sleep. By sunrise, the mill’s wooden interior and machinery were gone, leaving behind a roofless fortress of granite that somehow refused to disappear.

Over the next 130 years, the ruin became a Jazz Age ballroom, a counterculture rock club, a Halloween attraction, a Hollywood filming location, and eventually one of Utah’s most notorious haunted landmarks. But many of its ghosts have histories almost as strange...

For decades, employees and visitors at Salt Lake City’s Rio Grande Depot told stories about the Purple Lady—a young woman supposedly killed by a train after a disastrous reunion with her returning fiancé. People claimed to see her reflection in the women’s restroom, hear her singing after hours, and feel her presence moving through the building’s basement corridors. But when Utah historians finally dug into the story, they found something unexpected: there was no dead woman, no train accident, no newspaper coverage, and no Purple Lady before the state moved into the building in the 1980s.

On the shore of Utah's Great Salt Lake sits a concert venue with a strange problem: it seems to have inherited more than a century of history that didn't actually happen there. The original Saltair burned. Its replacement burned, burned again, and was eventually destroyed by arson. The third Saltair was built a mile away—then the lake rose and flooded it.

Today, employees report phantom footsteps, children laughing in empty rooms, a woman staring across the salt flats, and a uniformed man watching from an upper railing. But Saltair's strangest story belongs to a twenty-year-old woman wh...

For centuries, people living along South Africa's Orange River warned of something enormous beneath the water: a serpent capable of taking livestock, controlling floods, and guarding unimaginable riches in the deep places of the desert. Prospectors called it the Grootslang—the Great Snake. One terrified explorer claimed he watched it rise twelve feet from the river. Another supposedly disappeared while searching for its diamonds. And in 1910, British prospector Fred Cornell became concerned enough to throw dynamite into one of its alleged lairs. But the strangest thing about the Grootslang isn't whether the monster ever existed. It's that the elephant-headed cr...

In March 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 departed Kuala Lumpur carrying 239 people and disappeared. But the aircraft didn't simply vanish. Military radar showed it reversing course and crossing Malaysia. A forgotten satellite terminal continued quietly answering automated signals for hours. Investigators eventually determined the Boeing 777 had flown deep into the Southern Indian Ocean until its fuel was exhausted. More than a decade later, pieces of the aircraft have washed ashore thousands of miles away, but the main wreckage, black boxes, and definitive explanation remain missing.

Tonight, we reconstruct the final seven hours of MH370—and examine how a quarter-million-pound ai...

On January 13, 1996, nine-year-old Amber Hagerman was riding her pink bicycle through an abandoned grocery-store parking lot in Arlington, Texas, when a black pickup pulled in. A witness watched a man grab her, force her into the truck, and drive away. Four days later, Amber was found murdered. Investigators would eventually learn something even more devastating: she may have remained alive for as long as two days after she was abducted. At the time, police had no way to instantly warn every driver, television viewer, and radio listener in North Texas what vehicle to look for.

Ten days...

In 1897, a mysterious silver airship allegedly limped across the sky above Aurora, Texas, smashed into a judge's windmill, and exploded. Townspeople searching the wreckage claimed they found something even stranger: the burned body of a pilot they believed wasn't human. They gave the stranger a Christian funeral and buried him in the local cemetery. Decades later, UFO investigators came looking for the body—and found metal beneath the grave, a missing headstone, a sealed well allegedly contaminated by wreckage, and a town willing to guard its cemetery with shotguns.

Tonight, we investigate the Aurora UFO crash, the st...

In September 1900, ten nuns and ninety-three children were trapped inside an orphanage on the exposed western edge of Galveston Island as a Category 4 hurricane swallowed the city. With one dormitory already gone and the Gulf rising through the remaining building, the Sisters made a decision. They cut down the clotheslines, tied groups of children to themselves, and waited for the water. When the orphanage collapsed, ninety children and all ten Sisters died. Days later, recovery crews found them scattered along the coast—still tied together. The knots had held.

Tonight, we tell the story of St. Mary's Or...

For generations, San Antonio teenagers have driven to an old bridge after dark, killed their headlights, and honked into the trees. According to legend, something eventually answers: pounding hooves, a woman's scream, the bray of an animal—and sometimes hoof-shaped dents discovered on the car when they finally make it home. They call her the Donkey Lady. But ask who she was and the story begins to change. A murdered farm wife. An abused mother. A woman drowned beside her donkey. A victim of Satanists.

Different decades created different monsters, but every version preserved the same basic st...

Two hundred feet from the Alamo stands a hotel that has never closed its doors. Presidents slept there. Theodore Roosevelt recruited the Rough Riders from its bar. Gunmen died beside its mahogany counters. And for more than a century, guests and employees have reported that some of the Menger Hotel's former occupants never actually left. A murdered chambermaid still carries towels through the third floor. A cattle baron walks through a wall where his bedroom door once stood. Roosevelt apparently still enjoys the occasional drink. And a man in buckskin has one question for guests unfortunate enough to encounter...