Haunted American History is a daily campfire-style podcast blending American history, folklore, and original ghost stories.

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In the fall of 1880, a Tennessee farmer named David Lang was said to have vanished in broad daylight, in the middle of his own pasture, with his wife, children, and two visiting men watching from only yards away. No trees. No brush. No place to hide. One moment he was standing there, waving, and the next he was simply gone. The story has become one of the most infamous disappearances in American folklore, tied to phantom voices calling from the field, a strange circle where grass refused to grow, and a family left behind with no explanation and no body.

Over the years, the disappearance of David Lang has been retold in newspapers, paranormal magazines, and books on unexplained phenomena, securing its place among America’s most unsettling unsolved mysteries. The legend has been linked to nineteenth-century Tennessee, early investigations into the supernatural, and even the work of American gothic writer Ambrose Bierce, whose fiction explored eerily similar themes of sudden erasure and fractured reality. Whether rooted in history, folklore, or something far stranger, the story endures because it asks an impossible question: how can a man vanish in the open air, in front of witnesses, and leave nothing behind?

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Rising above the hills of Weston, West Virginia, the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum stands as one of the most infamous psychiatric hospitals in American history. Originally opened in the mid-19th century as part of a nationwide mental health reform movement inspired by Dorothea Dix and the Kirkbride Plan, the asylum was meant to represent progress and compassion in the treatment of mental illness. Instead, it became a symbol of systemic failure—marked by extreme overcrowding, neglect, experimental treatments like lobotomies and electroshock therapy, and the quiet disappearance of thousands of patients whose stories were never fully recorded. What began as a hopeful institution slowly transformed into a place of suffering, secrecy, and irreversible trauma.

Today, the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum is widely regarded as one of the most haunted locations in the United States, drawing paranormal investigators, historians, and dark tourism enthusiasts from around the world. Visitors report shadow figures in abandoned wards, disembodied voices echoing through miles of empty hallways, and an overwhelming sense of dread tied to the building’s violent past. Beneath the gothic architecture and decaying stone lies a chilling legacy of 19th- and 20th-century psychiatric care, unmarked graves, and unanswered questions—making this asylum not just a haunted place, but a grim monument to how society once treated its most vulnerable people.

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Just north of downtown Walton, Kentucky, along an old turnpike that once carried stagecoaches between Lexington and Cincinnati, stands a two-hundred-year-old brick building with a reputation that has never quite faded. Known today as Gaines Tavern, the structure has been called many things over the years: a frontier inn, a family home, a community gathering place—and, for more than a century, the Kentucky Horror House. From the outside, it looks like a well-preserved piece of early American history. But beneath that calm, symmetrical façade lies a past marked by suicide, murder, racial violence, and sudden death, events so numerous and so tightly clustered that locals began to wonder whether the house itself was somehow cursed.

For generations, stories have followed Gaines Tavern: travelers who never made it out alive, a room long whispered about for its connection to self-inflicted death, a brutal killing that ended a grand social ball in an instant, and acts of mob violence carried out in the shadow of the house during Reconstruction. Add to that decades of reported hauntings—apparitions in upstairs windows, unexplained footsteps, voices, lights, and the persistent figure of a headless man—and the line between documented history and lingering legend becomes dangerously thin. In this episode of Southern Gothic, we trace the full, unsettling history of Gaines Tavern in Walton, Kentucky, exploring how a vital stop along a nineteenth-century road became one of the most infamous haunted locations in the state—and why, even today, those who know its story say the house may not be finished with us yet.

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The Longfellow House in Pascagoula, Mississippi is an elegant antebellum mansion overlooking the Gulf of Mexico—symmetrical, refined, and seemingly untouched by time. But beneath its pristine façade lies a reputation shaped by violence, exploitation, and stories that refuse to fade. For generations, locals have whispered that the house was built on suffering tied to the domestic slave trade, and that whatever happened inside its walls left more than just historical scars behind.

Over the years, people who lived, worked, or passed through the Longfellow House have reported unsettling encounters: unexplained sounds in empty rooms, figures appearing on staircases, objects moving without cause, and the persistent feeling of being watched. These experiences have followed the house through every phase of its long life—from private residence to school, museum, hotel, and beyond—suggesting that some histories don’t stay buried, no matter how carefully a place is restored.

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Do you like your spooky stories with some historical context? Do you like your history with a pinch of the paranormal? Then Weird in the Wade is the podcast for you. Weird in the Wade is about all that’s weird, wonderful and a little off kilter in a small English town called Biggleswade and its surrounding area. Each episode we explore a story that will make you pause and ponder, whether its a haunting, flying saucers, witches, poisoners or body snatchers. Social history meets the unexplained in Weird in the Wade.

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On a storm-soaked night in June of 1900, just outside McDonough, Georgia, a Southern Railway passenger train plunged into the flooded waters of Camp Creek, triggering one of the deadliest train disasters in Georgia history. Weeks of relentless rain, a washed-out trestle, and a fateful decision made under impossible conditions combined to turn a routine run toward Atlanta into a mass casualty event that would forever alter a small Southern town. In the hours that followed, Camp Creek became a scene of fire, flood, and unimaginable loss—while the courthouse square in downtown McDonough was transformed into a place of mourning, identification, and reckoning.

More than a century later, the wreck still casts a long shadow. The tragedy left behind unmarked graves, unresolved questions, and a legacy of local lore that continues to cling to the courthouse square and the historic buildings surrounding it. From contemporary newspaper accounts to the quiet persistence of ghost stories, this episode of Southern Gothic explores how a single night of disaster reshaped a community—and why some places never quite let go of the past.

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For nearly three centuries, New Orleans has carried a reputation as a city where sin, superstition, and the supernatural collide. Long before ghost tours and vampire legends, early residents were already whispering that the Devil himself had claimed a foothold in the Crescent City. By the early 1800s, those whispers centered on a single mansion along St. Charles Avenue—a grand, unsettling house that seemed to appear without explanation and refused to behave like any normal home. Locals claimed the Devil lived there, watched the street from its upper gable, and vanished into its walls at dusk.

Families who tried to live inside the mansion rarely lasted long. Night after night, something played out in its dining room—something violent, ritualistic, and impossible to ignore. Yet despite the fear it inspired, the address was real, its residents traceable, and its existence documented in period newspapers, even as photographs, building records, and architectural details remain strangely elusive. In this episode, Southern Gothic traces the legend of the Devil’s Mansion through New Orleans folklore, historical records, and firsthand accounts to explore why this vanished house still lingers in the city’s memory—and why some stories refuse to stay buried.

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Along a quiet stretch of US 301 in coastal Georgia stands a lonely white farmhouse, the last surviving remnant of a place that once claimed to be a thriving frontier town. Locals say it is all that remains of Jacksonboro, Georgia, a community that rose with promise and then collapsed into nothing, leaving only the Seaborn Goodall House behind. For nearly two hundred years, the reason for Jacksonboro’s disappearance has been the subject of whispered stories, old newspaper columns, and roadside folklore. Most roads lead back to one man: the fiery evangelist Lorenzo Dow, a preacher whose wild appearance and thunderous sermons drew enormous crowds across the early American South.

According to legend, Jacksonboro was already notorious for violence, whiskey, and frontier lawlessness when Dow arrived in 1820 to deliver a sermon that the town wanted no part of. What happened next became one of the most enduring supernatural tales in Georgia history, a story involving a mob, a dramatic act of defiance, and a curse said to have doomed the entire settlement. In the years that followed, fires, storms, economic collapse, and unexplained disasters seemed to swallow Jacksonboro whole until nothing remained but the Goodall home and a memory of what used to stand there.

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In the summer of 1833, the tiny mountain town of Morganton, North Carolina became the stage for one of the most shocking events in early Appalachian history: the execution of nineteen-year-old Frankie Stewart Silver, a young mother condemned for the brutal murder of her husband, Charlie Silver, in their remote cabin above the Toe River Valley. What happened inside that one-room home has fueled nearly two centuries of debate, folklore, and ghostly speculation — from whispered tales of domestic terror to the now-famous “ballad” said to be her final words on the gallows.

But behind the legend lies one of the most contested true crime cases in the North Carolina mountains, a story tangled with frontier justice, family loyalties, and a community that never agreed on whether Frankie was a cold-blooded killer or a desperate young woman trapped in a violent marriage. Court records, petitions, old newspaper accounts, and oral history all tell wildly different versions of what happened — and none of them line up neatly with the folklore that overshadowed the truth.

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