American Horror Nights

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.

The Hotel Monte Vista has welcomed travelers to downtown Flagstaff since nineteen twenty-seven, and according to its guests, some of them never checked out. The Lady in Red dances on the third floor, a bellboy still knocks on fourth-floor doors in the middle of the night, and a baby cries in a room where no baby has slept for decades, in one of the most haunted working hotels in the American West.

Saint Louis Cemetery Number One, opened in seventeen eighty-nine, is the oldest cemetery in New Orleans, a walled city of above-ground tombs holding generations of the dead, from yellow fever victims to the legendary Marie Laveau. Its narrow paths, whitewashed tombs, and wall vaults are said to be walked by figures in nineteenth-century clothing, a sailor knocking on his family's former tomb, and the Voodoo Queen herself.

On a hillside east of Boise, the Old Idaho Penitentiary held more than thirteen thousand prisoners between eighteen seventy and nineteen seventy-three, and its sandstone walls, built by the prisoners themselves, are said to hold more than history. From the gallows in the rose garden to the oppressive cells of Cell House Number Five, staff and visitors report footsteps, slamming doors, and whispers in a prison that has never truly emptied.

On November 10, 1975, a violent storm on Lake Superior swallowed the 729-foot freighter Edmund Fitzgerald so fast that no distress call was ever sent and all 29 men aboard were lost. This episode tells the story of the ship, the storm, the wreck lying broken on the lake floor, and the bell that still rings 29 times every November 10.

For more than a century and a half, presidents, first ladies, staff and guests have reported the same figure in the White House: a tall, sad man in a black suit, standing by a window or pacing the halls at night. This episode traces the sightings from Grace Coolidge to Winston Churchill and asks why Abraham Lincoln, of all presidents, is the one who never left.