Haunted American History

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...

On November 22, 1987, Chicago sportscaster Dan Roan was recapping a Bears game when WGN suddenly went black. Fifteen seconds later, millions of viewers were staring at a man wearing a rubber Max Headroom mask. Twenty-eight seconds later, he vanished. Then, two hours later, he did it again—this time hijacking a Doctor Who broadcast for ninety bizarre seconds of distorted jokes, obscure WGN references, and a woman with a flyswatter. The FCC and FBI investigated, but nearly forty years later, nobody knows who did it.

Tonight, we investigate the Max Headroom signal intrusion: one of the strangest unsolved cr...

In the 1920s, workers clearing a hidden dungeon beneath an Irish castle discovered so many human bones they needed horse carts to remove them. An estimated 150 skeletons had been thrown into the pit—some onto spikes waiting below. Then, near the bottom, they found something that shouldn't have been there: a pocket watch manufactured in the 1800s. Someone had apparently still been using the medieval oubliette centuries after the Middle Ages ended. And that's only the beginning. Murdered priests, poisoned mercenaries, ghostly children, a woman in red, and a grotesque entity whose arrival is supposedly announced by the smell of...

On the morning of April 29, 2003, thirteen-year-old Tabitha Tuders left her East Nashville home carrying a report card filled with straight A's. Her bus stop was only three blocks away. Neighbors watched her walking there, slowly reading the paper she couldn't wait to show her friends. Then, somewhere along a single residential block, she vanished. A young witness reported seeing Tabitha get into a red car. Bloodhounds later followed her scent to almost exactly the same spot—and stopped.

Twenty-three years later, the car has never been identified, the driver has never been found, and neither has Tabitha. To...

Nashville City Cemetery holds roughly 22,000 people—and apparently Nashville has never been particularly good at leaving them where they were buried. Civil War soldiers were dug up and moved. President James K. Polk passed through on his way to multiple graves. An epidemic vault filled with bodies was deliberately burned. And in 2010, construction workers accidentally uncovered the remains of the man Andrew Jackson shot in a duel and sent him there too.

But the cemetery's most famous legend centered on a massive river boulder said to mark the grave of a heartbroken woman who killed herself. For mo...

In 1846, the body of one of America's wealthiest slave traders traveled 800 miles up the Mississippi inside a barrel of whiskey. Waiting for him in Tennessee was his 29-year-old widow, Adelicia Acklen. She inherited an enormous fortune, buried seven of her ten children, negotiated with both sides of the Civil War to save millions in cotton, and built one of the grandest homes in the American South.

Today, visitors claim Adelicia still supervises Belmont Mansion—setting off alarms, rustling across staircases, and apparently objecting when the furniture isn't arranged correctly. But the deeper you look into Belmont's ghosts, th...

In Franklin, Tennessee, a small piece of lead sits behind glass. A surgeon removed it from the skull of Tod Carter, a Confederate soldier who survived imprisonment, escaped from a moving train, traveled hundreds of miles to rejoin his regiment—and then fell just 200 yards from his childhood home during one of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War.

His family found him alive the next morning and carried him into the bedroom where he'd grown up. He died there two days later. For more than a century, visitors have claimed Tod never really left.

To...

For more than a century, people in a dark Tennessee hollow have told stories about something that follows travelers after sunset. You hear soft footsteps padding along behind you. When you stop, they stop. When you start walking again, they're right there on your heels. Locals call it Pitty Pat. But the footsteps are only the beginning.

Doctors, riverboat captains, motorists, farmers, and hunters have reported impossible collisions, headless passengers, women in white, towering shadow figures, and black masses that seem capable of climbing trees.

Tonight, we travel into Sale Creek and Pitty Pat Hollow...

In 1997, underwater microphones operated by the U.S. government detected something extraordinary in the South Pacific: a sound powerful enough to register on sensors more than 3,000 miles apart. Scientists knew the signatures of earthquakes, volcanoes, ships, and whales.

This looked different. It looked biological. The internet quickly supplied an explanation—a colossal sea creature lurking near the most isolated place on Earth, suspiciously close to where H.P. Lovecraft had placed the sunken city of R'lyeh decades earlier.

For fifteen years, the sound remained one of the ocean's greatest mysteries. Tonight, we uncover what really cr...

For fifty years, people across Bristol, England have reported the same impossible sound: a low, relentless drone like a diesel engine idling somewhere in the distance. It gets louder inside their homes, quieter when they step outside, and sometimes only one person in the house can hear it. Factories were blamed. Highways were blamed. Pipelines, the ocean, tinnitus, military transmissions—even 5G.

Yet after half a century of investigation, something strange remains: residents have reportedly recorded a real low-frequency signal inside some of the very houses where the Hum is heard.

Tonight, we investigate the Br...

On a freezing Sunday morning in 2019, nine-year-old Serenity Dennard ran out of a children's treatment facility in South Dakota's Black Hills. A witness watched her turn north along a rural road without a coat until the trees swallowed her from view. Three to five minutes later, that same road was empty. What followed became one of the largest missing-person searches in South Dakota history: more than 1,500 searchers, 66 agencies, hundreds of K-9 deployments, and 6,000 miles covered on foot.

They found nothing. Not a boot print. Not a piece of clothing. Not a single confirmed track.

Tonight...

For more than 140 years, a pink quartzite fortress known simply as The Hill has loomed over Sioux Falls. Its walls have witnessed riots, murders, executions, deadly escape attempts—and one innocent man who had to be hanged three times before the state finally killed him. But the prison's strangest story comes from its chapel, where generations of guards reported a mysterious woman, unexplained cold spots, moving objects, and even a locked door seemingly opening by itself. Nobody knew who she was. Then, buried in the archives, investigators found the forgotten story of a woman murdered on that exact stage in...

Spearfish Canyon has a habit of swallowing things. In 1887, a farmer discovered a stone supposedly containing the final words of a prospector who vanished into the Black Hills more than fifty years earlier. Since then, the canyon has erased an entire mining town, destroyed a railroad, hidden missing hikers from search teams... and, for nearly ninety years, even lost a waterfall.

Add sacred Lakota traditions, unsolved murders, modern Missing 411 mythology, and a landscape almost perfectly designed to make people disappear, and it's easy to understand why generations have believed something is wrong inside this gorge.

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Deadwood, South Dakota, was never supposed to exist. Built illegally on land guaranteed to the Lakota, the gold-rush town exploded into a lawless maze of saloons, brothels, gambling halls, violence, disease, and sudden death. Wild Bill Hickok was murdered at a poker table. Women trapped in the Badlands died violently. And more than a century later, visitors claim the people who built Deadwood are still there.

Tonight, we explore the bloody history and enduring ghost stories of a town that seems determined to keep its dead exactly where they fell.

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For nearly a century, the Hotel Alex Johnson has towered over downtown Rapid City, hosting presidents, Hollywood stars, and generations of travelers. But some guests apparently never checked out. Employees report phantom high heels crossing empty floors, elevators moving without passengers, and the apparition of the hotel's long-dead founder still watching over his lobby.

Then there's Room 812—where a young bride plunged eight stories to her death and guests now claim something opens the windows, crawls into their beds, and wanders the hallway dressed in white.

Tonight, we check into one of South Dakota's most en...

In 2011, a pair of Swedish treasure hunters scanned the floor of the Baltic Sea with a $1,900 sonar system—and accidentally ignited one of the biggest archaeological mysteries of the internet age. The blurry image appeared to show a massive circular object with a dome, strange geometric features, and a 300-meter skid mark trailing behind it. 

Within days, the world was calling it a crashed UFO, an ancient monument, and even the Millennium Falcon. But what happened when scientists finally examined the evidence? Tonight, we separate viral mythology from underwater geology and uncover the surprising truth behind the Bal...

Stretching across the Peruvian desert are thousands of enormous lines, geometric shapes, and animal figures so vast they can only truly be appreciated from the sky. For decades, they inspired theories about ancient astronauts, lost civilizations, and mysterious messages to the stars. But the truth is even more extraordinary.

Tonight, we uncover the real story of the Nazca Lines—a civilization that turned one of the driest places on Earth into a permanent canvas, creating giant rituals, hidden maps to underground water, and messages that have survived for nearly two thousand years.

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In 1807, a woman stood laughing on the courthouse steps in Edgefield, South Carolina. Moments later, her own brother walked across the square, picked up a stone, and killed her in broad daylight. No one arrested him. No one charged him. The town simply let him walk away.

To understand why, we have to unravel the extraordinary story of Rebecca "Becky" Cotton—a woman who murdered her husband with an axe, charmed a jury into acquitting her, married one of the jurors, and became the inspiration for one of the South's darkest legends: The Devil in Petticoats.

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For more than 300 years, Charleston has whispered the same warning: don't look into the rainwater on Water Street after dark. They say the flooded gutters sometimes reveal pale, waterlogged faces staring back from beneath the surface. According to local legend, they're the ghosts of pirates whose bodies were never buried after the infamous hanging season of 1718.

Tonight, we uncover the true story of Blackbeard's blockade, the disastrous career of the Gentleman Pirate Stede Bonnet, and the executions that transformed Charleston Harbor into one of America's most haunted waterfronts.

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Charleston's Battery is one of the most photographed streets in America, lined with elegant mansions overlooking the harbor. But hidden behind one of those grand homes is a carriage house where guests have spent decades reporting encounters they can't explain. A headless Civil War soldier that growls when touched. A lonely Victorian gentleman who slips into bed beside sleeping women. Floating orbs, phantom footsteps, and rooms with reputations so infamous that visitors request them by number. Tonight, we uncover the haunted history of 20 South Battery and explore the centuries of war, execution, heartbreak, and folklore that may still linger...