Haunted American History

In January of 1909, strange tracks began appearing in the snow across New Jersey.

They crossed yards. Climbed fences. Appeared on rooftops. Witnesses reported hearing wings outside their homes and seeing something with hooves, glowing eyes, feathers, fur—and occasionally a head like a horse.

Schools reportedly closed. Armed posses went looking for it. Newspapers put it on the front page.

And suddenly, everyone was talking about an old story from deep inside the Pine Barrens.

According to the legend, in 1735 a woman known as Mother Leeds discovered she was pregnant with her thirteenth child and cursed the unborn baby:

Let this one be the Devil.

But buried underneath the familiar monster story is a real colonial family that had been associated with Satan for decades, a feud involving Benjamin Franklin, a massive newspaper-fueled panic—and a Philadelphia showman who decided the best way to capitalize on the hysteria was to paint a kangaroo and give it wings.

Tonight, we're heading into the Pine Barrens for the strange history of New Jersey's most famous monster.

Welcome to Day Eight of 31 Days of Halloween.

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Tales from the Shadows Weekend in Lancaster PA

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In 1776, somewhere in the hills of Westchester County, an American cannonball took the head off a Hessian soldier.

His name was never recorded.

His grave has never been found.

And about twenty years later, a young writer named Washington Irving arrived in the Hudson Valley and eventually gave that forgotten soldier a horse.

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow would become one of America's great ghost stories. But beneath the Headless Horseman are real battlefields, real graves, a captured British spy, a haunted tulip tree, an old Dutch church—and generations of people who slowly began treating Irving's fiction as their own folklore.

Eventually, the Horseman got a grave.

Then Sleepy Hollow became a Halloween destination.

And finally, the town itself took the ghost's name.

Tonight, we're separating Washington Irving's story from the history underneath it—and finding out how a fictional Headless Horseman became one of America's most enduring Halloween legends.

Welcome to Day Seven of 31 Days of Halloween.

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In March of 1892, a group of men entered a cemetery in rural Rhode Island and opened the coffin of nineteen-year-old Mercy Brown.

Then they cut out her heart.

Her family had been dying from tuberculosis, one after another, and some of Mercy's neighbors believed they knew why. Something inside one of the graves was still feeding on the living.

So they burned Mercy's heart and liver beside a rock in the cemetery and prepared the ashes as a cure for her dying brother.

And Mercy Brown wasn't the only one.

For generations, families across New England had been digging up their dead, examining their bodies, burning their organs, and sometimes consuming the ashes in a desperate attempt to stop tuberculosis from moving through their homes.

They rarely called them vampires.

But that's what everyone else would eventually call them.

Tonight, we're digging into the New England vampire panic, the real story of Mercy Brown, a bizarre grave discovered in Connecticut, and how a nineteenth-century medical superstition became part of America's Halloween mythology.

Welcome to Day Six of 31 Days of Halloween

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In 1820, John Bell died on his farm in northern Tennessee.

According to the legend, a ghost killed him.

For years, the Bell family had supposedly been tormented by something they couldn't see. It knocked on walls, pulled blankets from beds, attacked young Betsy Bell, sang hymns, quoted scripture, answered questions from visitors—and eventually learned to speak.

It called itself Kate.

The story would become one of America's most famous hauntings, complete with a mysterious vial of poison, a visit from Andrew Jackson, and the extraordinary claim that the Bell Witch became the only ghost in American history credited with murdering a man.

But there's a problem.

Most of the story wasn't written down until seventy-four years later.

Tonight, we're telling the Bell Witch twice: first, the legend that Tennessee has been telling for two centuries—and then the story hidden in the historical record.

Welcome to Day Five of 31 Days of Halloween.

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On August 4, 1577, a violent storm descended on the English countryside.

Then something entered the church.

Witnesses described an enormous black dog tearing through the congregation, allegedly killing two people before disappearing into the storm. At another church twelve miles away, a remarkably similar story was unfolding.

The creature would become known as Black Shuck—a massive phantom hound said to stalk the lonely roads, marshes, and coastlines of East Anglia. Seeing it could mean death. Looking into its eyes could be worse.

But behind the legend is something even stranger: medieval accounts of spectral hounds, smugglers who may have deliberately kept the stories alive, the skeleton of an enormous dog unearthed near the site of the attacks, and a legend that helped inspire one of Sherlock Holmes' most famous cases.

Tonight, we're hunting the Devil's hound.

Welcome to Day Four of 31 Days of Halloween

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Before the jack-o'-lantern was a grinning pumpkin on an American porch, it was something else entirely.

A light over a bog.

For centuries, people in Ireland and Britain told stories about strange flames that appeared in the darkness, drifting just far enough ahead to tempt travelers off the road. In Ireland, one explanation had a name: Jack.

He tricked the Devil. He was rejected by Heaven. Hell wanted nothing to do with him. And according to the legend, Jack was condemned to wander the earth carrying a light until Judgment Day.

But the familiar story of Stingy Jack, his carved turnip, and the Devil's burning coal isn't nearly as ancient—or as straightforward—as it's usually made out to be.

From Irish bogs and grotesque turnip lanterns to American pumpkins and mysterious lights over the mountains of North Carolina, this is the strange history behind the face glowing on your front porch.

Welcome to Day Three of 31 Days of Halloween.

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Before Halloween meant costumes, candy, and smiling jack-o'-lanterns, it meant something considerably more dangerous.

When Irish and Scottish Halloween traditions crossed the Atlantic, they collided with American harvest parties, fortune-telling games, pumpkins, Victorian entertainment—and a growing tradition of October vandalism.

Kids blocked railroad tracks. Wagons ended up on barn roofs. Windows were smashed. False fire alarms were pulled. People were shot. And by the 1930s, some American cities were seriously considering getting rid of Halloween altogether.

Instead, they made a deal with the kids.

Give us something good, and nothing bad happens to your house.

This is the strange, occasionally violent story of how America created the Halloween we know today—and how three little words turned a night of chaos into a national tradition.

Welcome to Day Two of 31 Days of Halloween.

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Before Halloween had pumpkins, candy, costumes, or trick-or-treating, there was Samhain.

At the edge of winter, the cattle came home, the fires burned, and old stories warned that the boundaries between worlds had opened. The dead could return. Fairies came out of the earth. Headless riders crossed the countryside. And sometimes, something followed you home.

From a warrior who carried a talking corpse into the night to spectral black sows, fairy armies, divination rituals, sacred fires, and the old legends that eventually crossed the Atlantic and became part of Halloween as we know it, we're going back to where so much of it began.

Welcome to Day One of 31 Days of Halloween.

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On Christmas Eve 1945, the Sodder family home in Fayetteville, West Virginia, burned to the ground. George and Jennie Sodder escaped with four of their children, but five others were supposedly trapped upstairs. When the ashes cooled, however, investigators found something the family couldn't understand: no identifiable remains of the missing children. Then came the questions. A missing ladder. Trucks that mysteriously wouldn't start. A telephone line that had apparently been cut. Strange threats before the fire. And, decades later, a photograph that George and Jennie believed showed one of their missing sons as an adult.

Tonight, we explore the disappearance of the Sodder children and the mystery that left one West Virginia family asking the same question for the rest of their lives: did five children really die in that fire?

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In October 1859, John Brown and eighteen men descended on Harpers Ferry with a plan to seize the federal arsenal, arm enslaved people, and ignite a war against slavery. Thirty-six hours later, sixteen people were dead, Brown was captured, and Harpers Ferry had begun its transformation into one of America's most mythologized towns. Today, its streets are filled with ghosts: John Brown wandering the lower town, a burning woman beside the railroad tracks, soldiers haunting a church, and Dangerfield Newby walking an alley with the wound that killed him. But the oldest accounts tell different stories.

Tonight, we explore the ghosts of Harpers Ferry—and how generations of storytellers reshaped real deaths, real violence, and real people into the legends visitors hear today. Pasted text

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