On January 13, 1996, nine-year-old Amber Hagerman was riding her pink bicycle through an abandoned grocery-store parking lot in Arlington, Texas, when a black pickup pulled in. A witness watched a man grab her, force her into the truck, and drive away. Four days later, Amber was found murdered. Investigators would eventually learn something even more devastating: she may have remained alive for as long as two days after she was abducted. At the time, police had no way to instantly warn every driver, television viewer, and radio listener in North Texas what vehicle to look for.

Ten days after Amber vanished, one woman called a radio station with a simple question: why not use the emergency broadcast system for missing children?

Tonight, we tell the story of Amber Hagerman, the unsolved murder that still haunts Arlington, and how one black pickup truck changed the way the world searches for abducted children.

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In 1897, a mysterious silver airship allegedly limped across the sky above Aurora, Texas, smashed into a judge's windmill, and exploded. Townspeople searching the wreckage claimed they found something even stranger: the burned body of a pilot they believed wasn't human. They gave the stranger a Christian funeral and buried him in the local cemetery. Decades later, UFO investigators came looking for the body—and found metal beneath the grave, a missing headstone, a sealed well allegedly contaminated by wreckage, and a town willing to guard its cemetery with shotguns.

Tonight, we investigate the Aurora UFO crash, the strange physical evidence left behind, and the practical joker who may have invented the entire thing to save a dying Texas town.

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In September 1900, ten nuns and ninety-three children were trapped inside an orphanage on the exposed western edge of Galveston Island as a Category 4 hurricane swallowed the city. With one dormitory already gone and the Gulf rising through the remaining building, the Sisters made a decision. They cut down the clotheslines, tied groups of children to themselves, and waited for the water. When the orphanage collapsed, ninety children and all ten Sisters died. Days later, recovery crews found them scattered along the coast—still tied together. The knots had held.

Tonight, we tell the story of St. Mary's Orphan Asylum, the three boys who somehow survived, and a decision made in the final minutes before the deadliest natural disaster in American history destroyed almost everything around them.

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For generations, San Antonio teenagers have driven to an old bridge after dark, killed their headlights, and honked into the trees. According to legend, something eventually answers: pounding hooves, a woman's scream, the bray of an animal—and sometimes hoof-shaped dents discovered on the car when they finally make it home. They call her the Donkey Lady. But ask who she was and the story begins to change. A murdered farm wife. An abused mother. A woman drowned beside her donkey. A victim of Satanists.

Different decades created different monsters, but every version preserved the same basic story: a woman suffers a catastrophe she didn't cause, and somehow she becomes the thing everyone fears.

Tonight, we cross the Donkey Lady Bridge and explore one of San Antonio's strangest and most enduring urban legends.

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Two hundred feet from the Alamo stands a hotel that has never closed its doors. Presidents slept there. Theodore Roosevelt recruited the Rough Riders from its bar. Gunmen died beside its mahogany counters. And for more than a century, guests and employees have reported that some of the Menger Hotel's former occupants never actually left. A murdered chambermaid still carries towels through the third floor. A cattle baron walks through a wall where his bedroom door once stood. Roosevelt apparently still enjoys the occasional drink. And a man in buckskin has one question for guests unfortunate enough to encounter him alone: Are you gonna stay, or are you gonna go? T

onight, we check into the Menger Hotel...where somewhere between thirty and forty-five ghosts are said to have already answered.

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On November 22, 1987, Chicago sportscaster Dan Roan was recapping a Bears game when WGN suddenly went black. Fifteen seconds later, millions of viewers were staring at a man wearing a rubber Max Headroom mask. Twenty-eight seconds later, he vanished. Then, two hours later, he did it again—this time hijacking a Doctor Who broadcast for ninety bizarre seconds of distorted jokes, obscure WGN references, and a woman with a flyswatter. The FCC and FBI investigated, but nearly forty years later, nobody knows who did it.

Tonight, we investigate the Max Headroom signal intrusion: one of the strangest unsolved crimes in television history, committed by someone who may have known far more about WGN than he should have.

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In the 1920s, workers clearing a hidden dungeon beneath an Irish castle discovered so many human bones they needed horse carts to remove them. An estimated 150 skeletons had been thrown into the pit—some onto spikes waiting below. Then, near the bottom, they found something that shouldn't have been there: a pocket watch manufactured in the 1800s. Someone had apparently still been using the medieval oubliette centuries after the Middle Ages ended. And that's only the beginning. Murdered priests, poisoned mercenaries, ghostly children, a woman in red, and a grotesque entity whose arrival is supposedly announced by the smell of a rotting corpse all belong to the history and folklore of Leap Castle.

Tonight, we enter the fortress often called Ireland's most haunted castle... and meet the family that decided to make it their home.

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On the morning of April 29, 2003, thirteen-year-old Tabitha Tuders left her East Nashville home carrying a report card filled with straight A's. Her bus stop was only three blocks away. Neighbors watched her walking there, slowly reading the paper she couldn't wait to show her friends. Then, somewhere along a single residential block, she vanished. A young witness reported seeing Tabitha get into a red car. Bloodhounds later followed her scent to almost exactly the same spot—and stopped.

Twenty-three years later, the car has never been identified, the driver has never been found, and neither has Tabitha. Tonight, we examine the disappearance of Tabitha Tuders, the nine-and-a-half-hour delay before police knew she was missing, and the terrifying possibility that the person she got into that car with wasn't a stranger at all.

MNPD Cold Case Unit: 615-862-7803

Nashville Crime Stoppers (anonymous): 615-742-7463

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Nashville City Cemetery holds roughly 22,000 people—and apparently Nashville has never been particularly good at leaving them where they were buried. Civil War soldiers were dug up and moved. President James K. Polk passed through on his way to multiple graves. An epidemic vault filled with bodies was deliberately burned. And in 2010, construction workers accidentally uncovered the remains of the man Andrew Jackson shot in a duel and sent him there too.

But the cemetery's most famous legend centered on a massive river boulder said to mark the grave of a heartbroken woman who killed herself. For more than a century, people reported ghostly lights and a woman in white around "Suicide Rock." Then preservationists cut away the ivy...and discovered the ghost story belonged to the wrong woman.

Tonight, we enter Nashville's oldest cemetery, where even the dead have a difficult time keeping their identities straight.

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In 1846, the body of one of America's wealthiest slave traders traveled 800 miles up the Mississippi inside a barrel of whiskey. Waiting for him in Tennessee was his 29-year-old widow, Adelicia Acklen. She inherited an enormous fortune, buried seven of her ten children, negotiated with both sides of the Civil War to save millions in cotton, and built one of the grandest homes in the American South.

Today, visitors claim Adelicia still supervises Belmont Mansion—setting off alarms, rustling across staircases, and apparently objecting when the furniture isn't arranged correctly. But the deeper you look into Belmont's ghosts, the stranger the story becomes. Because perhaps Adelicia isn't haunting the South at all. Perhaps the South is haunting her.

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