James “Big Jim” Colosimo ruled the Chicago underworld longer than any man in the city's history. The money he raked in from the many enterprises that he controlled was conservatively estimated at $50,000 a month for about eight years. Colosimo was a strange character and a man who helped usher in Chicago's organized crime era – although he’d never actually live to see it. 

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In 1908, a Pentecostal minister announced to his followers that the Devil was alive and well and interfered with every aspect of human life. And he wasn’t alone in this belief. Others described demons as swarming around the human soul and living off them “like ticks on cattle.”

The Pentecostal belief about the Devil interfering with our everyday lives was just one example of how the twentieth century became the “Satanic Century” for both American religion and popular culture. More than at any other time since the seventeenth century, American religion became obsessed with the Devil and all his works. The was largely due to the rise of two powerful religious movements at the time – Pentecostalism and Fundamentalism. Each gave the Devil a special role in both their view of the world and their personal spiritual experience.

But they were not the only ones – Roman Catholicism remained convinced of how the Devil’s influence continued to represent a threat to the lives and souls of its followers. In fact, it was during this same time that the Catholic Church revealed the horrors of a demonic possession that would shock the nation. 

The exorcism that followed would become known as one of the first to make national news in modern American history.

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In the early 1980s, Springfield, Illinois learned there was no safe hour.

On this episode of American Dread, we examine two unconnected crimes that unfolded just one year apart — one in broad daylight, the other in the dead of night — and how both shattered a city’s sense of safety.

In 1981, an axe attack inside Lauterbach Cottage Hardware left one man dead and a killer who vanished without a trace.

In 1982, a brutal double murder inside a family home was solved — but its consequences would resurface decades later in a devastating way.

These cases aren’t linked by suspects or motive.

They’re linked by place, time, and a chilling truth: violence doesn’t wait for darkness.

American Dread is part of the American Hauntings Podcast Network.

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Nineteenth century America was awash with diabolical imagery. It was everywhere. It was used to link the Devil to everything from immigrants to abortion, the Catholic Church, Native Americans, and even outspoken women, so it can’t be a surprise to learn that it was also used to describe some of the most bloodthirsty killers of the day. 

For anyone who might think that deviant sex murderers and serial killers are monsters of modern times, then let me introduce you to the Joseph Lapage, one of the most depraved killers that you’ve likely never heard of. 

Lapage was a sexual psychopath and fit the modern definition of the classic lust killer, but his contemporaries described him in less clinical terms. They called him a “fiend incarnate” and more commonly, a “demon of the bottomless pit.”

For the people of the era, it was nearly impossible to believe that a human being could be capable of the things that Lapage did. Such acts, they insisted, could only be carried out by a servant of the Devil -- a monster that could have come only from hell. 

And perhaps they were right. 

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Young Brooklyn thug Al Capone took a cab to Coney Island. As he traveled down Ocean Parkway, he wasn’t surprised to see people practically living on the sidewalks, trying to get a breath of fresh air. He sat in the back seat, enjoying the light breeze from the open windows, on his way to the Harvard Inn, a club that belonged to Capone’s employer, gangster Frankie Yale. It wasn’t much of a job – just a glorified bouncer – but he saw it as a way to work himself up to someday making dough for himself. “SCARFACE” they called him, but they never used the moniker in front of him. No matter who you were, if Capone heard it, there was a good chance that you’d end up dead. 

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When the headless body of a pregnant young woman was found across the Ohio River from Cincinnati in 1896, the shock of the discovery was felt far beyond the region. As the story of the young woman was revealed, it became a crime that was tailor-made for the popular culture of the era. The horror of the crime, its characters, and its cause created a melodrama that could only be found in pulp novels -– a villain deflowers a pretty young girl and then murders her to cover up her unplanned pregnancy so that he can continue to live a life of debauchery.

Such a tragedy understandably resonated with the public, prompting stories, legends, and even a folk ballad. You see, this tale became a warning to young women of the era to practice chastity and to avoid the mortal sin of abortion, a crime so heinous, religious figures claimed, that the Devil himself had a hand in in its continued existence.

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Season 10- Murder City, is here.

In this season, we'll be taking a trip back in time, to the years of prohibition and telling the story of a city where the streets ran red with blood, accompanied by the clink of liquor bottles, jazz music and rattling machine guns. And we will take you behind the scenes of the world of some of the most notorious gangsters to ever hit the mean streets of the Windy City. These episodes will be filled with crime and corruption, deadly shootings, one-way rides, assassinations and suicides and other blood soaked events that left ghosts behind.

So, buckle up. It's gonna be a bloody ride.

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The nineteenth century marked a great change in American history – it was the age of the Industrial Revolution, the Civil War, and a time when science and reason were supposed to erase the myths and fears of the past. And yet, the Devil still managed to rear his ugly head, continuing to serve as a symbol of all the things that Americans hated and feared the most. 

Social reformers used the Devil to discourage the evils of alcohol and Protestants and Nativists used the Devil as a warning about the evils of foreigners and Catholics. Those immigrants used the Devil for their own devices, creating cautionary tales of the supernatural – like the Devil Baby that shocked Chicago in 1913, creating a mythology that still exists today.

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America’s first settlers were afraid of a lot of things and when they were afraid of something they reflexively connected it to the Devil – whether it was places like forests and woods or people, like the Native Americans who had predated their arrival on these shores by hundreds of years. In other words, whatever they didn’t understand, they feared, and whatever they feared, it must be the work of the Devil. 

But it wasn’t just the indigenous people they feared and disliked – it was also the Africans. Small groups of them began arriving in the British colonies as early as 1619. They weren’t immigrants, though. They had been kidnapped from their homeland and transported to America against their will. Their numbers grew at a gradual pace throughout the seventeenth century, before increasing dramatically in the century that followed. Nearly every African in America at that time was held in bondage by white settlers, who, while perhaps not terrified by the slaves themselves, were terrified by their persistence in upholding the traditions and beliefs they brought to the country with them.

At home, magical practices had been central to the supernatural beliefs of the slaves. When they were brought to American in chains, their beliefs may have changed somewhat but they still included a legion of spirits who influenced their daily lives. And not all those spirits were benevolent ones – especially toward the white slave owners.

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