A dead family lays in their cabin while the agitated father sits outside. A young girl wakes to the smell of smoke and the grisly sight of her parents’ mutilated corpses. All nine members of a frontier Florida family lay hacked to pieces while their rural home burns to the ground.

What do these three true crime tales from the Gothic South have in common? There’s a shimmering thread running through each: entire families wiped out in a single night by an axe-wielding killer.

In this episode:

• The crimes and execution of Abel Clemmons who killed his entire family with an axe in their home near Clarksburg, Virginia
• The 1906 slaughter of the Lyerly Family in Rowan County, North Carolina and the brutal aftermath that stained the town forever
• The extinction of the Acreman Family in Allentown, Florida that may be the work of America's most prolific serial killer

 
Listener discretion advised for graphic true crime content.

Dive Deeper with the Research Folio. Get a full transcript, list of sources, supplemental media, and more for each drop plus early access to new episodes. A special perk for our email subscribers. Get the Newsletter >

Haunts & Hollows: True Tales Of The Gothic South is where true crime meets Southern folklore. Every other week, mystery author Liam Ashe digs past the haunted plantations, urban legends, and moss-draped cemeteries to uncover the real, often much darker history behind them. Lower the lights, lock the doors, and settle in. Tonight, the truth may just be stranger than the legend.

Subscribe and you’ll get an intro to every episode, including early access and an exclusive Research Folio.

Music courtesy of Geoff Harvey, Pixabay.

The Monster of Mayport, who turned a long simmering family feud into a vengeful bloodbath. A future serial killer who got his first taste of death at age 17. And a brutal psychopath with more than a dozen kills to his credit, who took out another inmate in a way so outlandish no one could ever have predicted it.

This collection of true crime tales from the Gothic South has a single thread running through each: a serial killer who was caught, locked up, and kept right on killing while behind bars.

In this episode:

• The sad story of William "Billy" Wells also known as the Monster of Mayport who killed five in just a few days after a family argument
• The crimes and death of Walter Hill in Alabama, a man who killed several and led police on a multi-state carjacking chase
• The brutal crimes of Pee Wee Gaskins in Sumter, Georgia, who claimed to have more than 100 kills to his credit

 
Listener discretion advised for graphic true crime content.

Dive Deeper with the Research Folio. Get a full transcript, list of sources, supplemental media, and more for each drop plus early access to new episodes. A special perk for our email subscribers. Get the Newsletter >

Haunts & Hollows: True Tales Of The Gothic South is where true crime meets Southern folklore. Every other week, mystery author Liam Ashe digs past the haunted plantations, urban legends, and moss-draped cemeteries to uncover the real, often much darker history behind them. Lower the lights, lock the doors, and settle in. Tonight, the truth may just be stranger than the legend.

Subscribe and you’ll get an intro to every episode, including early access and an exclusive Research Folio.

Music courtesy of Geoff Harvey, Pixabay.

An elderly St. Petersburg woman disappears in an unexplainable ball of fire. A corpse in a rural Alabama creek is found without its head, hands, heart, or its spleen. A young volunteer vanishes in the Carolina mountains, only to turn up hogtied and strangled in the backseat of an abandoned car. And a wealthy Georgia couple dies grisly deaths, his headless body dumped in their garage and her body at the bottom of a lake.

This collection of true tales from the Gothic South has a single thread running through each: bizarre death scenes that, even decades later, left investigators scratching their heads with more questions than answers.

In this episode:

• The fiery death of Mary Reeser in 1951, one of the best documented cases of spontaneous human combustion
• The bizarre death of Jefferey Douglas Kimzey in Arab, Alabama, a still-unsolved cold case that left a baffling crime scene with very few clues
• The 50-year-old murder of volunteer Nancy Morgan whose case remains unsolved despite evidence of a local coverup
• The brutal execution of Russell and Shirley Dermond in their Georgia home that has left investigators with nothing but dead ends

 
Listener discretion advised for graphic true crime content.

Dive Deeper with the Research Folio. Get a full transcript, list of sources, supplemental media, and more for each drop plus early access to new episodes. A special perk for our email subscribers. Get the Newsletter >

Haunts & Hollows: True Tales Of The Gothic South is where true crime meets Southern folklore. Every other week, mystery author Liam Ashe digs past the haunted plantations, urban legends, and moss-draped cemeteries to uncover the real, often much darker history behind them. Lower the lights, lock the doors, and settle in. Tonight, the truth may just be stranger than the legend.

Subscribe and you’ll get an intro to every episode, including early access and an exclusive Research Folio.

Music courtesy of Geoff Harvey, Pixabay.

A Southern oak with a history of bizarre deaths. A 400 year old Savannah hanging tree. The Devil’s Tree that bears the scars of one serial killer’s twisted game of torture and murder.

Three true tales from the Gothic South with a single thread running through: ancient trees that have witnessed the worst, most grievous evil mankind has to offer.

In this episode:

• The Fairchild Oak in Ormond Beach, Florida, where two plantation owners, both fleeing their own shady pasts, were found dead beneath its limbs, decades apart and with no confirmed cause of death

• Savannah’s Candler Oak, a 300-year-old giant beside the city’s old hospital, whose reputation as a “hanging tree” blurs the line between documented history and ghost-tour legend

• The case of Florida serial killer Gerard John Schaefer, Jr. whose twisted fantasies gave the Devil’s Tree of Port St. Lucie both its name and its reputation as a site of unspeakable depravity

Some of these stories are documented fact. Some may be only folklore. All of them ask the same question: what happens when a death’s only witness is a tree?

Listener discretion advised for graphic true crime content.

Dive Deeper with the Research Folio. Get a full transcript, list of sources, supplemental media, and more for each drop plus early access to new episodes. A special perk for our email subscribers. Get the Newsletter >

Haunts & Hollows: True Tales Of The Gothic South is where true crime meets Southern folklore. Every other week, mystery author Liam Ashe digs past the haunted plantations, urban legends, and moss-draped cemeteries to uncover the real, often much darker history behind them. Lower the lights, lock the doors, and settle in. Tonight, the truth may just be stranger than the legend.

Subscribe and you’ll get an intro to every episode, including early access and an exclusive Research Folio.

Music courtesy of Geoff Harvey, Pixabay.

A 31-year-old construction worker told friends and family that someone was trying to kill him. They thought he was imagining things. Until he turned up dead, 3,000 miles away, naked and surrounded by gold and cash in a Knoxville parking lot.

A true tale from the Gothic South that asks more questions than it answers: what would drive a man to flee his life only for it to end two days later?

In this episode:

• The cold case murder of Robert Dennis Blair Adams (December 28, 1964 – July 11, 1996) in Knoxville, Tennessee

Listener discretion advised for graphic true crime content.

Dive Deeper with the Research Folio. Get a full transcript, list of sources, supplemental media, and more for each drop plus early access to new episodes. A special perk for our email subscribers. Get the Newsletter >

Haunts & Hollows: True Tales Of The Gothic South is where true crime meets Southern folklore. Every other week, mystery author Liam Ashe digs past the haunted plantations, urban legends, and moss-draped cemeteries to uncover the real, often much darker history behind them. Lower the lights, lock the doors, and settle in. Tonight, the truth may just be stranger than the legend.

Subscribe and you’ll get an intro to every episode, including early access and an exclusive Research Folio.

Music courtesy of Geoff Harvey, Pixabay.

A prolific serial killer preying the Florida canals. A killer who they thought was behind bars, then eight more bodies surfaced. A vicious, mentally unbalanced monster preying on the elderly in their own homes.

Three true tales from the Gothic South with a single thread running through: prolific and still uncaught serial killers with dozens of victims between them. 

In this episode:

• The Flat-Tire Killer from South Florida who may have claimed as many as 30 lives across nearly a dozen states in the 1970s

• The case of serial killer Dan Conahan who was convicted as The Hog Trail Killer but may not be responsible for the eight anonymous bodies found in a mass grave in Charlotte County, Florida

• The mystery of convicted killer Leslie Burchart in Richmond, Virginia, who claimed responsibility for the string of Golden Years Murders but whose confessions have been called into question

The gruesome deaths may have stopped, but are the predators still walking among us?

Listener discretion advised for graphic true crime content.

Dive Deeper with the Research Folio. Get a full transcript, list of sources, supplemental media, and more for each drop plus early access to new episodes. A special perk for our email subscribers. Get the Newsletter >

Haunts & Hollows: True Tales Of The Gothic South is where true crime meets Southern folklore. Every other week, mystery author Liam Ashe digs past the haunted plantations, urban legends, and moss-draped cemeteries to uncover the real, often much darker history behind them. Lower the lights, lock the doors, and settle in. Tonight, the truth may just be stranger than the legend.

Subscribe and you’ll get an intro to every episode, including early access and an exclusive Research Folio.

Music courtesy of Geoff Harvey, Pixabay.

A young farmer lay in ambush of his three young cousins. A short time later, two were dead, both shot at close range. What followed was a sensational murder trial, a failed lunacy plea, a jailhouse confession, and an execution that legend says made the church bells ring 500 times.

A true tale from the Gothic South that asks one very important question: what would drive a man kill the girl of his dreams?

In this episode:

• The bizarre, historic true crimes and execution of William Seymour Keener in rural Rabun County, Georgia for the murders of Arizona and Leona Moore

That person next door might be your friend, even your kin, but how well do you really know them?

Listener discretion advised for graphic true crime content.

Dive Deeper with the Research Folio. Get a full transcript, list of sources, supplemental media, and more for each drop plus early access to new episodes. A special perk for our email subscribers. Get the Newsletter >

Haunts & Hollows: True Tales Of The Gothic South is where true crime meets Southern folklore. Every other week, mystery author Liam Ashe digs past the haunted plantations, urban legends, and moss-draped cemeteries to uncover the real, often much darker history behind them. Lower the lights, lock the doors, and settle in. Tonight, the truth may just be stranger than the legend.

Subscribe and you’ll get an intro to every episode, including early access and an exclusive Research Folio.

Music courtesy of Geoff Harvey, Pixabay.

A lonely girl in red haunts the place of her death. The grave of a Charleston socialite draws favors for help from a witch. A young West Virginia woman’s ghost testifies at her own murder trial.

Five tales from the Gothic South, some true and some perhaps not, with a single thread running through: independent-minded woman who died before their time and became Southern legends in the afterlife.

In this episode:

• The true tale of missing Florida housewife Nellie VanZant Olford who some say reappeared to lead authorities to her corpse

• The South Carolina story of young, impetuous Eliza Huger who, after death, became known as the Witch Queen of Clemson

• The legendary Yazoo Witch, a Mississippi malcontent who leveled an entire town with one fiery curse

• The story of Margaret Transom, a young college student who took her own life and refused to leave as Alabama’s infamous Red Lady of Huntingdon College

• The true tale of Elva Zona Heaster, a new bride murdered by her husband and whose mother claimed returned to testify at his trial as the Greenbrier Ghost

Each of these five women led ordinary lives that gave way to extraordinary, and often chilling, afterlives in Southern Gothic folklore.

Dive Deeper with the Research Folio. Get a full transcript, list of sources, supplemental media, and more for each drop plus early access to new episodes. A special perk for our email subscribers. Get the Newsletter >

Haunts & Hollows: True Tales Of The Gothic South is where true crime meets Southern folklore. Every other week, mystery author Liam Ashe digs past the haunted plantations, urban legends, and moss-draped cemeteries to uncover the real, often much darker history behind them. Lower the lights, lock the doors, and settle in. Tonight, the truth may just be stranger than the legend.

Subscribe and you’ll get an intro to every episode, including early access and an exclusive Research Folio.

Music courtesy of Geoff Harvey, Pixabay.

Two women with the same name are murdered in the same spot, just days apart. A machete murder in Saint Augustine leads to another suspicious death and a book that someone desperately didn’t want written. Two young Atlanta women at the same bank and same desk disappear two years apart under eerily similar circumstances.

Five true tales from the Gothic South with a single thread running through: each has an unbelievable connection to an entirely different cold case. Is it coincidence or something more sinister?

In this episode:

• The unsolved cold case executions of Mary Lou Morris and Mary McGinnis Morris in Texas, October 2000

• The 1991 murder of Dorothy Donovan and the bizarre coincidence that moved her son, Charles Holden, from suspect to innocent victim

• The 1974 cold case machete death of former model Athalia Ponsell Lindsley in St. Augustine, Florida, and its possible connection to another baffling murder only a few months later

• The brutal 1955 execution-style murders of Judge Curtis Chillingworth and Marjorie Chillingworth and the Judge’s connection to Trapper Nelson, a South Florida legend who died of a suspicious shotgun blast

• The disappearances of Mary Shotwell Little and Diane Shields in 1965 and 1967 and the chilling links between their Atlanta employers, friends, and even roommates

Chance is everywhere if you look hard enough, but so is conspiracy. So, is it just coincidence? Sometimes the most unsettling answer is “Maybe.”

Listener discretion advised for graphic true crime content.

Dive Deeper with the Research Folio. Get a full transcript, list of sources, supplemental media, and more for each drop plus early access to new episodes. A special perk for our email subscribers. Get the Newsletter >

Haunts & Hollows: True Tales Of The Gothic South is where true crime meets Southern folklore. Every other week, mystery author Liam Ashe digs past the haunted plantations, urban legends, and moss-draped cemeteries to uncover the real, often much darker history behind them. Lower the lights, lock the doors, and settle in. Tonight, the truth may just be stranger than the legend.

Subscribe and you’ll get an intro to every episode, including early access and an exclusive Research Folio.

Music courtesy of Geoff Harvey, Pixabay.

A thundershower of gore rains down on a Tennessee tobacco field. Biblical stories tell of frogs, eels, blood and more falling from the skies. Raw meat and gristle blanket a South Carolina cotton farm and foretell the end of days.

A collection of true tales from the Gothic South with a single thread running through: the undeniable presence of blood—in unbelievable quantities—where it simply shouldn’t be. 

In this episode:

• The tiny town of Coalburg, Alabama, where dark clouds rained down millions of slithering eels on a warm evening in 1892

• The Macon, Georgia, blood fall of 1842 that included chunks of meat, gristle, and organs that weighed up to 25 pounds

• The 1843 blood fall in Laurens, South Carolina, that one popular preacher identified at a deadly omen portending the Book of Revelations

• The infamous Atlanta Blood House that seeped gallons of type O blood from the walls, floorboards and crawl spaces in September 1987

• The Lebanon, Tennessee, blood fall of 1841 that spread gore for more than 800 yards across a field of terrified farm hands 

What falls from the sky in the American South? Sometimes it’s rain or snakes or eels. And sometimes it’s blood.

Dive Deeper with the Research Folio. Get a full transcript, list of sources, supplemental media, and more for each drop plus early access to new episodes. A special perk for our email subscribers. Get the Newsletter >

Haunts & Hollows: True Tales Of The Gothic South is where true crime meets Southern folklore. Every other week, mystery author Liam Ashe digs past the haunted plantations, urban legends, and moss-draped cemeteries to uncover the real, often much darker history behind them. Lower the lights, lock the doors, and settle in. Tonight, the truth may just be stranger than the legend.

Subscribe and you’ll get an intro to every episode, including early access and an exclusive Research Folio.

Music courtesy of Geoff Harvey, Pixabay.