American Horror Nights

Before she was famous, Marilyn Monroe lived for two years in a poolside suite at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, the grand old hotel that hosted the first Academy Awards. This episode tells the story of room 1200, the mirror said to show her face, and why the most famous woman in the world is said to have never checked out.

On the seventeenth of September, eighteen sixty-two, more than twenty-two thousand men fell at Antietam, the bloodiest single day in American history. Visitors to the preserved battlefield report distant artillery, figures in the cornfield, and a heavy quiet on Bloody Lane, where the dead have never quite left the field.

The USS Yorktown, the Fighting Lady, earned eleven battle stars across three wars before becoming a museum in Charleston Harbor. Staff and visitors report a young sailor in a nineteen forties uniform still standing watch, footsteps on empty decks, and voices in the engine rooms of a ship that has not sailed in fifty years.

Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary in Petros, Tennessee, held the state's most dangerous men for more than a century, including James Earl Ray, who escaped into the mountains in nineteen seventy-seven. Now a museum, its cell blocks still echo with slamming doors, voices in the shower room, and footsteps on the tiers.

For three centuries, Detroit folklore has blamed the Nain Rouge, the little red dwarf, for appearing before every disaster, from the great fire of eighteen oh five to the riots of nineteen sixty-seven. Today the city fights back with an annual parade that chases him out, turning its worst luck into a celebration of survival.

On a bluff above the Mississippi in Alton, Illinois, the McPike Mansion has stood empty more often than it has been lived in since its builder's death in nineteen eleven. Visitors report a woman in white on the grounds, footsteps on empty stairs, and doors that open by themselves in one of America's most haunted houses.

Built on a mountainside honeycombed with mine shafts, Jerome was once the wickedest town in the West, then a ghost town, then an artists' haven that never forgot its dead. This episode explores the sliding jail, the haunted Jerome Grand Hotel, and the mine that still moves the ground beneath the town.

In the summer of 1943, legend says, the USS Eldridge vanished from the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard in a flash of electromagnetic fog, reappeared in Norfolk, Virginia, and returned with its crew driven mad. This episode separates the real wartime science from the legend and asks why the story refuses to die.

In fourteen months in eighteen sixty-four and eighteen sixty-five, nearly thirteen thousand Union prisoners died at Andersonville, the Confederate prison camp in southwestern Georgia, of starvation, disease, and exposure. Today the field is quiet, but visitors report moans and whispers where the stockade stood, figures at the deadline, the drumming of a boy in the pines, and the restless presence of the camp's commander, Henry Wirz.

The battleship North Carolina earned fifteen battle stars in the Pacific in the Second World War, and she lost ten men to a Japanese torpedo in September nineteen forty-two. Today she rests on the Cape Fear River in Wilmington as a museum, but staff and visitors report footsteps on empty decks, hatches closing by themselves, voices in the engine rooms, and a young sailor in a nineteen forties uniform who is still standing his watch.