American Horror Nights

In 2018 a grotesque face began appearing in parents' warnings across the world: Momo, the monster in the phone, daring children toward darkness. Police issued alerts on four continents. There was only one problem — she never existed. The true story of the hoax that haunted the planet, and the sculpture behind the face.

Every clear night, strangers gather on a gravel turnout in Michigan's Upper Peninsula to watch a light rise over the treeline where no light should be. Science says it is headlights, magnified by the dark. The locals say it is the lantern of a brakeman killed on the tracks a century ago, still walking his line.

For four months in 1977, the fishing villages of Colares, Brazil were attacked by lights that burned, punctured, and drained their victims — the 'chupa-chupa.' The Air Force team sent to debunk it filmed the objects instead, and its commander took the secret to a grave that came two months after he finally spoke.

A retired police officer crossing Ilkley Moor in 1987 met a small green figure in the mist, raised his camera, and took its picture. Then he lost an hour of his life, and his compass never worked again. The photograph still exists. So does the question of what raised its arm to warn him back.

In April 1966, more than three hundred students and teachers at a Melbourne school watched a silver craft descend behind the pines, leave a scorched circle, and vanish. Then the men arrived, the assembly was called, and the children were ordered to forget. Sixty years on, Australia has never explained Westall.

Embedded in the streets of more than twenty American states, hundreds of tiles carry the same four-line sermon: TOYNBEE IDEA. IN MOVIE 2001. RESURRECT DEAD. ON PLANET JUPITER. For forty years no one was ever caught laying them — until investigators found a recluse, and a car with a hole in its floor.

Since 2007, human feet in running shoes have been washing ashore along the coasts of British Columbia and Washington State — more than twenty of them, severed by no blade. The search for a serial killer ended with a colder answer: the sea itself, a weak ankle joint, and a shoe built to float.

For seventy years, dogs have been hurling themselves from the same few yards of a Victorian bridge in Dumbarton, Scotland — some six hundred leaps, around fifty deaths, and survivors who climbed back up to jump again. Scent, scenery, or something waiting in a thin place? The mystery of the Dog Suicide Bridge.

On Halloween night 1974, eight-year-old Timothy O'Bryan ate a Pixy Stix laced with cyanide and died within the hour. The neighbourhood hunted a phantom poisoner, but the killer was the boy's own father, who had insured his children's lives and invented America's greatest Halloween nightmare to hide a murder.

Found delirious in a Baltimore gutter in 1849, wearing another man's clothes and crying out a stranger's name, Edgar Allan Poe died four days later without ever explaining his missing week. No autopsy, no death certificate, no answer. Tonight: the cooping gangs, the rabies theory, and the mysterious Poe Toaster who visited his grave for sixty years.