Haunted American History

On State Street in Madison, Wisconsin, a nearly century-old movie palace has become home to some unusual stories. Employees at the New Orpheum Theatre describe unexplained footsteps, disembodied voices, mysterious figures, and a mischievous ghost named Pete who supposedly haunts the projection booth. But the theater's documented history is almost as strange as its hauntings, involving mysterious fires, bitter ownership disputes, and decades of near-demolition. And then there's a photograph taken just days after the theater opened in 1927, showing a translucent figure standing inside the auditorium.

Tonight, we explore the history and hauntings of Madison's New Orpheum...

Deep in the forests of northern Wisconsin, a once-grand lakeside mansion became the center of one of America's most enduring haunted-house legends. Known as Summerwind, the property was said to harbor shadowy figures, unexplained voices, malfunctioning machinery, and even human remains hidden inside its walls.

But the strangest claim came from a man who believed the house was haunted by the spirit of an eighteenth-century explorer searching for a lost land deed. As the stories spread, Summerwind attracted national attention, curious visitors, and paranormal investigators—until a devastating fire destroyed the mansion in 1988.

Tonight, we ex...

January 31, 1874. The outlaw Jesse James and his gang pull off one of the most infamous crimes in the American Old West with the Gads Hill Train Robbery.

On History Daily, we do history, daily. Every weekday, host Lindsay Graham (American Scandal, American History Tellers) takes you back in time to explore a momentous event that happened ‘on this day’ in history.
Whether it’s to remember the tragedy of December 7th, 1941, the day “that will live in infamy,” or to celebrate that 20th day in July, 1969, when mankind reached the moon, History Daily is there to tell yo...

On Halloween night in 1936, a group of people gathered on the roof of Hollywood's Knickerbocker Hotel.

At the center of the gathering sat Bess Houdini, widow of the legendary escape artist Harry Houdini.

Ten years earlier, Houdini had died on October 31, 1926.

Before his death, he and Bess had agreed upon a secret message. If he could communicate from beyond the grave, she would know it was really him.

For a decade, she waited.

And on that Halloween night in 1936, she made one final attempt to reach her husband.

On Halloween morning in 1984, smoke hung over the city of Detroit.

Over the previous three nights, firefighters had responded to an astonishing 810 fires.

Homes, businesses, and abandoned buildings burned as an annual tradition of Halloween mischief spiraled into something far more dangerous.

Detroit called it Devil's Night.

But the story of Devil's Night began centuries earlier, with a tradition of pranks, stolen garden gates, and one night a year when young people were allowed to get away with things they normally couldn't.

Tonight, we're investigating the dark history of...

Deep in the Appalachian Mountains, families once believed that death could announce itself long before it arrived.

A bird flying into the house. Three mysterious knocks at the door. A dog howling through the night.

And sometimes, hidden inside the feather pillow of a dying person, a tightly woven ring of feathers known as a death crown.

For generations, the people of Appalachia passed down stories of witches, restless spirits, supernatural warnings, and strange rituals meant to protect their homes and families.

Tonight, we're exploring the dark folklore of the Appalachian...

In August 1872, the Chinese community of Los Angeles gathered on a street where, just ten months earlier, a violent mob had murdered approximately eighteen Chinese men and boys.

They weren't there to celebrate.

They were there to feed the dead.

According to traditional Chinese beliefs, those who die violently, far from home, or without proper burial can become restless spirits. Hungry ghosts who wander among the living, searching for food, comfort, and a way home.

And every year, during the seventh month of the Chinese lunar calendar, the gates of the...

On July 10, 1706, a woman named Grace Sherwood was bound and thrown into the Lynnhaven River in colonial Virginia.

Her neighbors had accused her of witchcraft.

According to the beliefs of the time, an innocent woman would sink beneath the water. A witch would float, rejected by the same water used in Christian baptism.

Grace Sherwood floated.

And with that, she became the central figure in one of the strangest witchcraft cases in American colonial history.

Tonight, we're investigating the true story of Grace Sherwood, better known as the Witch...

In February 1855, mysterious hoof-shaped footprints appeared across the snow-covered countryside of Devon, England.

They stretched for miles, seemingly crossing rooftops, walls, and other obstacles no ordinary animal should have been able to navigate.

Terrified residents believed the Devil himself had walked through their villages.

But across the Atlantic, New England had its own stories about the Devil leaving his mark.

Tonight, we're exploring the strange history of the Devil's footprints and the supernatural legends that took root in colonial America.

From a Massachusetts preacher who supposedly threw Satan from...

In the winter of 1879, a Cree hunter named Swift Runner returned from the Canadian wilderness without his family.

He claimed they had starved to death.

But when investigators followed him back into the forest, they discovered something far more disturbing.

Swift Runner had murdered and consumed members of his own family. He claimed an evil spirit had driven him to do it.

For generations, Indigenous communities across the northern forests and Great Lakes had told stories of a terrifying being associated with insatiable hunger, cannibalism, and the darkest months of winter.<...

In February 1927, William Fuld fell to his death from the roof of his factory in Baltimore.

Years earlier, Fuld claimed that a Ouija board had told him to build that very factory, promising him a future of enormous success.

It was a strange ending for the man who helped turn a simple talking board into one of America's most recognizable supernatural objects.

But the Ouija board wasn't originally designed to summon demons.

It was a business.

Tonight, we're tracing the history of the Ouija board from the rise of...

In the winter of 1590, an elderly Scottish healer named Agnes Sampson was brought before King James VI of Scotland.

She had been accused of witchcraft, tortured, and forced to describe an extraordinary gathering that supposedly took place on Halloween night.

According to her confession, hundreds of witches had sailed across the sea in sieves, gathered at a church in North Berwick, and met the Devil himself.

Their purpose was to bring about the death of the king.

James initially dismissed the accusations. But then Agnes whispered something into his ear, repeating...

In 1967, the RMS Queen Mary arrived in Long Beach, California, after more than three decades crossing the Atlantic.

Not long afterward, a marine engineer working deep inside the ship claimed to hear the sounds of tearing metal, rushing water, and screaming men.

He would later connect those sounds to a terrible wartime disaster.

On October 2, 1942, the Queen Mary collided with HMS Curacoa, a British warship escorting her through dangerous waters. The massive ocean liner sliced through the smaller vessel, sending hundreds of sailors into the North Atlantic.

The Queen Mary never...

In Savannah, Georgia, ghost stories are everywhere.

In Wright Square, a woman is said to wander the night asking strangers if they've seen her baby. Her name was Alice Riley, and nearly three hundred years ago, she was executed in the very square where her ghost supposedly appears.

But Alice Riley is only the beginning.

Tonight, we're exploring the history and hauntings of Savannah, the city famously dubbed America's Most Haunted City.

From the devastating yellow fever epidemic of 1820 and the graves of Colonial Park Cemetery to the haunted halls of...

On November 13, 1974, a young man ran into a bar in Amityville, New York, shouting that his parents had been shot.

When police arrived at his family's waterfront home, they discovered six bodies.

Ronald DeFeo Jr. had murdered his parents and four younger siblings while they slept.

Just over a year later, another family moved into the house.

George and Kathy Lutz knew about the murders, but they believed they could make a new life there. Within twenty-eight days, they had abandoned the property, claiming something terrifying had happened inside.

...

In 1907, a wealthy Boston businessman named Thomas Lawson published a novel called Friday, the Thirteenth.

It told the story of a stockbroker who exploited people's fear of an unlucky date to trigger a financial panic.

That same year, a seven-masted schooner bearing Lawson's name sank in the Atlantic.

In Boston, where Lawson lived, the date was Friday, December 13th.

Only two men survived.

For generations, Friday the 13th has been associated with terrible luck, mysterious curses, and the fear that something awful is waiting to happen.

But...

In 1891, a jeweler in Salem, Massachusetts, began selling a silver souvenir spoon decorated with a witch on a broomstick.

Beneath the witch were three small pins.

Those pins were modeled after evidence used two centuries earlier, when frightened girls accused their neighbors of being attacked by invisible spirits.

The accusations helped send innocent people to their deaths.

And now their story was being sold as a souvenir.

In 1692, Salem Village became the center of one of the most infamous witch hunts in American history. Nineteen people were hanged, one...

In 1845, a strange fossil bone appeared in the Australian town of Geelong.

When an Aboriginal man was shown the remains, he reportedly identified the creature immediately.

It was a bunyip.

According to the newspaper account, the animal stood more than twelve feet tall, had the head of an emu, the body of an alligator, and claws capable of killing a person.

Within two years, a supposed bunyip skull was on display in a Sydney museum, and reports of mysterious creatures were spreading across colonial Australia.

But the bunyip's history...

On October 30, 1938, a radio reporter broadcasting from a farm field in New Jersey suddenly stopped speaking.

Moments earlier, he had described a terrifying scene: a strange metal cylinder, creatures emerging from inside it, and a mysterious weapon burning everything in its path.

Then came silence.

And somewhere in a New York studio, a piano began to play.

The broadcast was Orson Welles's adaptation of The War of the Worlds, a fictional account of a Martian invasion presented through realistic news bulletins.

According to newspaper headlines the following morning, America...

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 conducted by Jesuit priests in St. Louis, Missouri, and documented in a diary that would remain largely hidden for decades.

The boy became known to the public as Roland Doe.

...

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 to find them before anyone else could be hurt.

The case seemed to confirm one of America's greatest Halloween fears: that a stranger might deliberately poison the candy handed...

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 something hanging from the passenger-side door handle.

For generations, Americans have told some version of this story around campfires, at sleepovers...

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 when the trick was exposed.

Instead, Americans found increasingly elaborate ways to pay for the experience of being frightened.

Spirit cabinets. Optical illusions. Ghosts appearing o...

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 Krebs. She was a Swiss immigrant, a gardener, and a mother who had buried three of her four children. After years of watching Halloween vandals destroy the flowers she cared for...

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 one of America's most famous cryptid mysteries.

They called it the Beast of Bray Road.

But America's werewolf stories didn't begin in Wisconsin.

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 appeared as dogs and hares. Neighbors accused neighbors. Family members turned on one another.

And when the trials finally began, one of the prosecution's most...

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 suddenly, everyone was talking about an old story from deep inside the Pine Barrens.

According to the legend, in 1735 a woman known as Mother Leeds discovered she was pregnant with he...

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 stories. But beneath the Headless Horseman are real battlefields, real graves, a captured British spy, a haunted tulip tree, an old Dutch church—and generations of pe...

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 the cemetery and prepared the ashes as a cure for her dying brother.

And Mercy Brown wasn't the only one.

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 would become one of America's most famous hauntings, complete with a mysterious vial of poison, a visit from Andrew Jackson, and the extraordinary claim that the Bell Witch be...

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 said to stalk the lonely roads, marshes, and coastlines of East Anglia. Seeing it could mean death. Looking into its eyes could be worse.

But behind the legend is something even stranger: medieval ac...

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 wanted nothing to do with him. And according to the legend, Jack was condemned to wander the earth carrying a light until Judgment Day.

...

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...