Southern Ghost Stories

On June 9, 1912, an unknown killer entered a quiet home in Villisca, Iowa, slaughtering Josiah and Sarah Moore, their four children, and two visiting neighborhood girls with an axe. The bizarre crime scene baffled detectives: every mirror had been shrouded with cloth, sheets covered the victims' faces, and the murderer calmly ate a meal in the kitchen before vanishing into the night. More than a century later—following botched investigations, the sensational trial of an eccentric preacher, and reports of lingering spirits—the massacre remains one of America’s most chilling unsolved mysteries. In this episode of Southern Ghost Stories, Allen Sircy...

Rising sixteen stories above downtown Louisville, the historic Brown Hotel is a monument to Roaring Twenties glamour, catastrophic floods, and enduring legends—built atop the ground of a horrific 1895 artillery explosion. Founded in 1923 by lumber baron James Graham Brown, the grand landmark survived the Great Depression and the 1937 flood, but staff and guests insist Brown never truly checked out after his 1969 death. Phantom footsteps still pace his former 15th-floor penthouse, elevators ride uncalled to the top floor, cigar smoke drifts through non-smoking halls, and the ghost of his beloved dog Weezums barks in empty corridors. In this episode of Southern Gh...

Tucked away near the modern roar of Nashville International Airport, the historic Buchanan Log House is one of Davidson County’s oldest frontier homesteads—a two-century-old cabin where pioneer life and lingering spirits remain deeply rooted. Built in 1809 by James and Lucinda Buchanan, the home remarkably saw all sixteen of their children survive into adulthood before being saved from modern runway expansion. Today, caretakers and investigators swear the family never left: phantom children whisper and move toys, heavy boots pace the floors, and Lucinda herself is still spotted gazing from the upstairs windows. In this episode of Southern Ghost Stories, Alle...

In August 1897, an engineer discovered a dying man named John Bloski beside a Pennsylvania railroad track who used his final breaths to name his killer and utter a chilling prophecy: "You have to follow me soon." What followed was a desperate cross-state manhunt, a bitter self-defense claim, and an execution in the Wilkes-Barre jail yard. But the story didn't end on the gallows—shortly after the trapdoor dropped, midnight screams from a death-row cell convinced terrified inmates that the condemned man had kept his dark appointment. In this episode of Southern Ghost Stories, Allen Sircy explores a brutal coal-country homicide, a f...

For over a century, Nashville’s Central State Hospital stood as a grim fortress on Murfreesboro Pike, marked by barbaric treatments, fatal beatings, deadly fires, and forgotten potter’s fields holding over 1,600 bodies. Though the asylum was demolished to make way for modern industrial hubs, night-shift workers and security guards still report tripping motion sensors, disembodied whispers, and the apparition of a vintage orderly fading into dark hallways. In this classic "From the Vault" episode of Southern Ghost Stories, Allen Sircy unearths the tragic history, shocking abuses, and lingering hauntings of Tennessee’s most notorious mental hospital.

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Perched above Nashville’s Charlotte Pike, Barrow Hill harbored a dark legacy of suffering long before its grand mansion burned. Seized during the Civil War as a Union prison where Confederate captives were reportedly killed and dumped down a well, the property later served as a deadly epidemic pesthouse and a 1916 bootlegger’s brothel where a police sergeant was gunned down. Decades of violence spawned tales of rattling chains, phantom moans, and a headless woman gliding across the dark crest. In this episode of Southern Ghost Stories, Allen Sircy explores the turbulent history and restless specters of Barrow Hill—where modern...

In the summer of 1879, Sarah Nagel’s body was pulled from Brooklyn’s East River, sparking one of the most baffling cases of mistaken identity in 19th-century America. Friends, acquaintances, and a close benefactor wept over her remains at the city morgue, positively identifying the corpse down to her clothing, facial features, and forehead scar—only for a routine coroner's inquest to derail into absolute disbelief when Sarah Nagel walked into the room. In this episode of Southern Ghost Stories, Allen Sircy unearths a bizarre New York mystery where certain death collided with an unbelievable twist, leaving an anonymous soul lost f...

On September 12, 1952, a fiery object streaked across the West Virginia sky, leading a group of local youths, a mother, and a National Guardsman up Fisher Hill to investigate the suspected crash. Instead of wreckage, their flashlights cut through a noxious, sulfurous mist to reveal a towering, ten-foot entity with glowing orange eyes, a spade-shaped head, and a dark metallic robe that hissed violently and drove them down the hillside in terror. Though skeptics and Air Force investigators later blamed the hysteria on a meteor and a startled barn owl, the witnesses never recanted what they saw on that dark mountain...

In August 1888, a brawl inside a Louisville boardinghouse left two police officers fatally stabbed and local brawler Charles Dilger facing the gallows. After surviving three suicide attempts in his cell, Dilger dropped through the scaffold trapdoor only for the noose to unravel, forcing deputies to haul the barefoot killer back up and hang him a second time. Years later, terrified inmates swore Dilger stalked their cells, while a guard froze in terror beneath a pair of bare feet dangling in the jail yard. In this episode of Southern Ghost Stories, Allen Sircy unearths one of Kentucky’s most gruesome true-crime sa...

Standing in downtown Nashville, St. Mary of the Seven Sorrows is Tennessee’s oldest Catholic church—a historic Gothic cathedral harboring a bloody past as a Civil War hospital where hundreds died. Decades after the church’s towering first bishop, Richard Pius Miles, was buried beneath the floorboards and forgotten until a hidden crypt was breached in 1969, clergy and caretakers began reporting phantom footsteps, self-moving doors, death omens, and the apparition of a tall cleric roaming dark corridors. In this episode of Southern Ghost Stories, Allen Sircy explores the sacred downtown landmark where nearly two centuries of faith, war, and restle...

In the spring of 1972, the city of Lakeland, Florida, was gripped by mass hysteria when residents reported a shaggy beast stalking roadways and leaping into headlights. What began as scattered driver sightings quickly ignited front-page headlines, late-night police searches, armed citizens, and copycat prowlers—spurred on by a prankster who started it all with a souvenir mask from the newly opened Walt Disney World. In this episode of Southern Ghost Stories, Allen Sircy unpacks Florida’s bizarre "Lakeland Werewolf" panic, exploring how a cheap mask and runaway media coverage birthed a full-blown modern urban legend.

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In August 1892, headlines in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat fueled panic with reports of a nocturnal demon stalking the waters of Creve Coeur Lake, thrashing violently and churning the shallows into an eerie boiling foam whenever young lovers approached the shore. According to legend, the creature was the cursed spirit of an 18th-century native princess who threw herself from the towering bluffs after being abandoned by the French governor's son she loved—doomed by her heartbroken chieftain father to spend eternity as a water fiend tormenting couples along the banks. In this episode of Southern Ghost Stories, Allen Sircy dives into the...

In late 19th-century St. Louis, privy cleaner Ernst Doepke built a macabre fortune as the "Prince of Body Snatchers"—getting paid by the city to bury unclaimed paupers, secretly digging them back up to sell to medical schools, and reselling their stolen coffins for extra cash. His brazen operation crossed every line when he exhumed his own dead brother, sliced off his decomposing beard as a parlor keepsake, and later dug up his own mother's grave under the cover of night. In this episode of Southern Ghost Stories, Allen Sircy reveals the shocking true crime saga of a resurrectionist who be...

For over four centuries, Countess Elizabeth Báthory has haunted history as the "Blood Countess"—a ruthless Hungarian noblewoman accused of slaughtering hundreds of servant girls and bathing in virgin blood to preserve her youth. Perched high in the Carpathian Mountains at Csejte Castle, her immense wealth and royal bloodlines made her virtually untouchable until a 1610 raid led to her brutal servants' executions and saw Elizabeth bricked up alive in her own fortress. But was she truly the sadistic monster that fueled modern vampire lore, or was she a powerful widow framed by an indebted king eager to erase his deb...

More than three centuries after terrorizing the Atlantic, the towering specter of Edward Teach—better known as Blackbeard—refuses to abandon the mist-shrouded waters of the North Carolina coast. Armed with smoking fuses braided into his beard and a fearsome reputation designed to freeze merchant crews with sheer dread, Teach transformed from a wartime privateer into the most notorious pirate captain in American history, culminating in a daring naval showdown against Royal Navy Lieutenant Robert Maynard at Ocracoke Inlet. In this episode of Southern Ghost Stories, Allen Sircy separates flesh-and-blood history from enduring coastal folklore, exploring the lost wreckage of the...

When convicted murderer William Van Dalsen walked calmly to the Louisville gallows in 1905, his eerie lack of fear stunned guards and doctors alike—a quiet composure fueled by a sudden, eleventh-hour conversion to Catholicism. But the real horror began days after his execution. Past midnight, a young Baptist woman named Ethel Gentry—who had visited him shortly before he died—woke to find a glowing, luminescent figure standing beside her bed, tugging at her blankets and speaking in a cold, unnatural whisper. Night after night, the apparition returned with a relentless supernatural ultimatum: she must convert to the Catholic faith, or he...

For nearly a century, stepping into the sacred circle of the Grand Ole Opry has meant reaching the pinnacle of country music success—yet behind the applause lies an unsettling legacy of sudden, violent deaths that sparked rumors of a sinister curse. In this episode of Southern Ghost Stories, Allen Sircy examines the tragic pattern that stalked the show's biggest stars: the untimely demise of Hank Williams at twenty-nine, the fatal plane crashes that claimed Patsy Cline and Jim Reeves, and the brutal double murder of Stringbean Akeman just hours after stepping off the Ryman stage. Even after moving across Na...

On August 12, 1901, a daylight shooting in a Pittsburgh saloon sparked one of the most chilling manhunts in Pennsylvania history—led not by police, but by the phantom of the victim. After gunning down Edward Sewell, steelworker Henry Taylor fled, only to find the dead man matching him stride for stride beside speeding streetcars, along midnight rail lines, and even inside the deafening roar of a steel mill. Driven to near-madness by sleepless exhaustion and terror, Taylor finally welcomed arrest just to seek sanctuary behind prison bars, only to discover that locked doors could not keep the dead away. In this ep...

In this "From the Vault" episode, Allen Sircy enters the shadowy world of late 19th-century Chicago, where Dr. Mabel Jackman became a commanding force in the city's spiritualist movement. From her North Clark Street boardinghouse, the self-proclaimed "Shepherdess of Paradise" hosted mystical gatherings and séances for a devoted flock—until prominent physician Dr. Alfred J. Cole became entangled in a ruinous financial scheme led by two shadowy grifters. Facing scandalous accusations of hypnotic manipulation and spiritual coercion, Dr. Jackman's empire began to unravel, igniting decades of legal battles that reached from opulent drawing rooms to the eerie confines of the...

In the post–Civil War mining camps of Missouri, desperate souls facing ruin, jail time, or tragic misfortune often bypassed courts and doctors to seek help from the supernatural: the ancient folk magic of conjure. In this episode of Southern Ghost Stories, Allen Sircy explores the legendary exploits of "Blue Jacket," an enigmatic, green-spectacled root doctor revered for breaking hoodoo curses across Macon County. From unearthing buried iron charms outside prison walls to neutralizing deadly hexes laid by feared rivals, Blue Jacket walked the thin line between folk magic, human psychology, and spiritual showmanship. Tune in as we uncover the fo...

In this bizarre episode, host Allen Sircy journeys to St. Joseph Cemetery in Cincinnati, Ohio, to uncover the grotesque 1881 exhumation of Vital Nagel, a woman who had been buried directly in the earth without a coffin five years earlier. When gravediggers attempted to relocate her remains to a unified family plot, their shovels struck not rot or bone, but a corpse that had mysteriously transformed into solid, statue-like stone. As horrified family members looked on, an initial team of four couldn't budge the petrified woman, prompting a desperate sexton to swing a pickaxe at her limbs in vain before nearly...

In this episode of Southern Ghost Stories, host Allen Sircy merges football history with the paranormal to explore the "Curse of the Tequesta," a legendary hex believed to have haunted South Florida football for over four decades. After dominating the 1970s at the Orange Bowl with an undefeated season and back-to-back championships, the Miami Dolphins’ fortunes vanished following the 1985 groundbreaking of Joe Robbie Stadium (now Hard Rock Stadium), which unearthed and disturbed a centuries-old Native American burial ground. From the heartbreaking postseason collapses that denied Dan Marino a return to the Super Bowl to modern playoff miseries, Miami Hurricanes heartbreaks, an...

In this bizarre chapter of nineteenth-century medical history, host Allen Sircy uncovers the macabre battle over the severed skull of Dr. William Byrd Powell, a prominent eclectic physician and devoted phrenologist who spent his life mapping human character through bone. Convinced his own cranium was the ultimate scientific specimen, Powell legally bequeathed his head to his favored student, pioneering female physician Dr. Temperance Kinsey, and her skull-collecting doctor husband, Adolphus Keckeler. Following an open-air decapitation on the grounds of Linden Grove Cemetery in Covington, Kentucky, the severed head was spirited across the river to Ohio, igniting a fierce courtroom war...

Here's a fun one for Tennessee Tales Tuesday! Tucked away on Old Douglas Lane in Gallatin, Tennessee, the 1820s Douglass Cemetery—better known as Bay Raven—is legendary not just for restless spirits, but for a bizarre, evolving monster. In the 1950s, tales of an insatiable, bull-sized, gorilla-like creature devouring livestock, dried apples, and allegedly thirty-six dogs in one night drew a reporter from The Tennessean out to investigate. Over the decades, the folklore transformed the beast into a terrifying half-man, half-raven hybrid linked to a local dare: walk three times around a certain cemetery tree to summon it. Balancing eerie...

In this episode of Southern Ghost Stories, host Allen Sircy announces the return of the 2026 Ghosts of Gallatin Haunted Tour and introduces his two new books: Fear and Folklore: Vampires, which details the nineteenth-century New England Vampire Panic—where desperate, grief-stricken families, ravaged by the unseen devastation of tuberculosis, exhumed suspected relatives like Mercy Brown in 1892 to burn their organs under the belief that the dead were consuming the living—and Ghost Stories and Graveyard Tales: Indiana, which chronicles the enduring, century-long hauntings of Evansville’s Victorian Gothic Willard Library and its elusive apparition, the Grey Lady.

The books a...

In this "From the Vault" episode of Southern Ghost Stories, host Allen Sircy charts the wild history and intense paranormal lore of the Thomas House in Red Boiling Springs, Tennessee—tracing its roots from a premier early 20th-century mineral springs resort built by the Cloyd family, through a bizarre 1970s stint under WWF wrestler Lester Morgan and his wrestling bear, to a near-disastrous takeover by a cult in the late 1980s. Rebranded by the Cole family in 1993, the historic landmark is now celebrated as one of Tennessee’s most actively haunted hotspots, teeming with restless spirits that range from young Sara...

For nearly two centuries in Nelson County, Kentucky, locals have whispered the chilling tale of Nancy Hays—a frontier beauty found brutally murdered and decapitated along Rowan Creek in the 1820s. When suspicion fell upon her heartbroken suitor, Amos Molloy, an angry mob hanged him from a tree, ignoring his desperate cries that an axe-wielding madman had ambushed them both. But the tragedy didn't end at the gallows: years later, a dying stranger delivered a shocking deathbed confession. In this episode of Southern Ghost Stories, Allen Sircy explores the bloody folklore of Pottershop Hill, where mob violence spawned a generational cur...

In this episode of Southern Ghost Stories, Allen Sircy steps inside the labyrinthine corridors of San Jose’s legendary Winchester Mystery House, where documented history collides with chilling folklore. Following the tragic loss of her infant daughter and husband William—heir to the vast Winchester rifle fortune—Sarah Winchester inherited unimaginable wealth stained by blood and tragedy. Legend says a medium warned her that the spirits killed by Winchester firearms had cursed her family, driving her to build an endless architectural maze of staircases to nowhere, blind doors, and rooms dominated by the number thirteen to confuse the dead. But was Sa...

In June 1948, the grand estate on Cemetery Road just outside Bowling Green, Kentucky, became the site of a brutal Southern Gothic tragedy when eighty-year-old Dr. Charles B. Martin and his wife Martha were gunned down and bludgeoned in their bedroom while their newlywed son was away on his honeymoon. The killer was Harry Edward Kilgore—a brilliant, heartbroken college student driven to savage violence after the eighteen-year-old woman he expected to marry wed into the wealthy Martin family instead. His swift confession soon unraveled into a nationwide media sensation when Kilgore claimed a prominent music professor masterminded the plot, sparking a...

On December 16, 1864, twenty-six-year-old Confederate Colonel William Shy was killed during a desperate last stand at the Battle of Nashville, forever lending his name to Shy’s Hill. Sealed in a heavy cast-iron coffin near Franklin, Tennessee, his resting place remained undisturbed for over a century—until December 1977, when police discovered a torn-open grave and a headless corpse propped atop the broken vault. Fearing a modern murder victim had been dumped in an antique tomb, investigators called in renowned forensic anthropologist Dr. William Bass, who uncovered the startling truth: the body was Shy himself, desecrated and decapitated by grave robbers hunting for...

Towering 350 feet over the Las Vegas Strip, the Luxor’s black glass pyramid and ten-story Sphinx make it one of the desert’s most iconic landmarks—and, according to local lore, one of its most cursed. Plagued by tragedy from the start, the resort has witnessed fatal construction accidents, horrific falls into the towering atrium, a deadly parking garage bombing, and whispers of an old mob burial ground beneath its foundations. With thousands of preserved human remains in the Bodies exhibit and phantom Edwardian figures reported around recovered wreckage in the Titanic gallery, the hotel has become a hotbed of parano...

Along the dark, winding waters below New Orleans, generations of Mississippi riverboat captains warned their crews never to tie up near Cypress Bend after sunset, where a ruined, moss-draped plantation house stood rotting along the shoreline. In this haunting episode of Southern Ghost Stories, Allen Sircy shares the legendary river lore of First Mate Jim Bryson, a hardened riverman whose hair turned snow-white with fright during a midnight trip ashore—a terrifying encounter that left him muttering that he had "seen it all over again." Listen in as we explore the tragic confession behind the Mississippi's most enduring haunted bend.

In the fall of 1941, seventy-three-year-old retired railroader Philip Peters began hearing strange noises in his house and noticing food vanishing from his Denver home, leading him to wonder if the quiet old house had a ghost—never suspecting that a gaunt, desperate drifter was secretly living inside a cramped cubbyhole right above his ceiling. When an unexpected kitchen encounter ended in Peters’ brutal murder, detectives were completely baffled by a crime committed behind bolted doors and shuttered windows, entirely unaware that the killer was still lying silently in the attic rafters directly over their heads. Even as neighbors whispered about Denv...

In January 1870, ten thousand spectators packed the streets of Louisville, Kentucky, to watch the public hanging of William Kriel—a violent butcher who had murdered his ailing wife in front of her mother and somehow survived pumping multiple bullets into his own skull during a botched suicide attempt. Yet, the drop of the gallows trap proved to be only the opening chapter of Kentucky’s most shocking resurrection legend. In this episode of Southern Ghost Stories, Allen Sircy untangles the macabre aftermath of Kriel's execution: dark rumors of midnight body-snatchers raiding Cave Hill Cemetery, a controversial Cincinnati physician obsessed with huma...

At 533 Beale Street in Memphis stands the Hunt-Phelan House, an antebellum red-brick mansion that has weathered nearly two centuries of turbulent history—serving as a Confederate headquarters, Ulysses S. Grant’s Union command post, a Civil War hospital where thousands suffered, and one of the city's earliest schools for newly freed African Americans. Yet beneath its storied walls and legendary escape tunnels lies a lingering mystery born from the devastating yellow fever epidemics of the 1870s: the lost family gold. In this episode of Southern Ghost Stories, Allen Sircy explores the  legend of Nathan Wilson on Tennessee Tales Tuesday. Wilson was t...

In this special From the Vault episode of Southern Ghost Stories, Allen Sircy takes you inside New Orleans’ opulent Le Pavillon Hotel, a historic landmark famous for its crystal chandeliers, late-night peanut butter and jelly tradition—and a staggering population of restless spirits. While management prefers to keep the hauntings quiet, guests and staff alike tell a far more active story: phantom elevators that open onto empty corridors, items hurled off shelves by unseen hands, and an eerie shadow presence stalking the hallways. From a girl in a white dress skipping rope on the seventh floor and spectral figures hovering over...

In August 1879, a bloody love triangle in Perry County, Pennsylvania, ended when outlaw Samuel Albright gunned down his romantic rival, William Miller, before vanishing into the rugged wilderness along the Juniata River. Eleven days into the massive manhunt, two locals exploring the dark, damp recesses of the legendary Girty’s Cave stumbled upon a horrifying sight: a badly decomposed corpse wedged among the rocks, bearing a bullet wound to the back of the head and pockets filled with Albright’s personal letters. While the coroner’s jury declared justice served on the fugitive killer, doubts immediately took root—the face was unid...

In December 1897, Pike County, Pennsylvania, carried out its very first hanging behind the Milford courthouse, sending German immigrant Herman Paul Schultz to the gallows for the gunshot murder of his estranged wife, Lizzie. Yet the hanging itself was only the prelude to a far stranger nightmare: Schultz’s dying request to be buried alongside his wife’s severed skull was ignored, his body was sold to medical students for fifteen dollars, and severed scraps of the noose were hawked across town as macabre souvenirs. Exactly one year later, a stonecutter locked overnight inside Schultz’s old cell awoke to an icy dr...

In this episode of Southern Ghost Stories, host Allen Sircy delves into the chilling true story behind his new book, Arsenic Anna, uncovering the rise and fall of Depression-era Cincinnati’s most notorious serial poisoner, Anna Marie Hahn. Driven by crushing gambling debts and sheer desperation, Anna charmed, swindled, and poisoned a succession of vulnerable, elderly men with lethal doses of arsenic, ultimately becoming the first woman in Ohio history executed in the electric chair. From poisoned oysters and forged wills to courtroom curses, exhumations, and a dramatic posthumous confession admitting to four murders, discover how a charming German immigrant tu...

Deep in the shadow of Tennessee’s Cumberland Plateau, where thick woods and steep ridges swallow sound, an unsettling cry shattered the winter silence of 1903. In this episode of Southern Ghost Stories for Tennessee Tales Tuesday, Allen Sircy tracks the chilling legend of "Whistling Jack"—a sleek, shadowy predator larger than any hound, with burning red eyes and an unnatural, whistling exhalation that sounded like escaping steam turning into a human hiss. What began as an eerie mountain echo soon erupted into widespread panic across the coal mining towns of Victoria and Whitwell, leaving livestock mauled, armed posses empty-handed despite a fiv...