HistorySociety & CultureTrue Crime

Southern Ghost Stories

American Hauntstorian Allen Sircy explores America’s haunted past — unearthing true ghost stories, graveyard legends, and forgotten folklore. Join him as he gives voice to haunted history and chilling tales that blur the line between fact and myth from every corner of the country.

Play

Open in

69 episodes
daily
Avg 21 min
English

Episodes 69

Newest Oldest Longest

All20 Unplayed20 In progress0 Played0

Counted on this page — what you have heard stays on this device, so it is not something the list can be paged by.

Yesterday · 1 hr 1 min
My Favorite Grave Robber
In the late 19th century, the growing demand for medical dissection fuel sparked a macabre, highly lucrative underground industry where no cemetery was sacred and no grave was safe. From the legendary resurrection man "Old Man Dead" William Cunningham...
- Transcript
Friday · 19 min
Buried Alive in the French Quarter
Standing in the heart of the French Quarter, the Gardette-LePretre House is the setting for one of New Orleans’ most gruesome legends: the massacre at the Sultan’s Palace. Following the Civil War, an impoverished planter reportedly leased the grand...
- Transcript
Thursday · 26 min
The Axe Murders of Villisca, Iowa
On June 9, 1912, an unknown killer entered a quiet home in Villisca, Iowa, slaughtering Josiah and Sarah Moore, their four children, and two visiting neighborhood girls with an axe. The bizarre crime scene baffled detectives: every mirror had been...
- Transcript
Wednesday · 18 min
The Ghost of the Brown Hotel
Rising sixteen stories above downtown Louisville, the historic Brown Hotel is a monument to Roaring Twenties glamour, catastrophic floods, and enduring legends—built atop the ground of a horrific 1895 artillery explosion. Founded in 1923 by lumber...
- Transcript
Tuesday · 18 min
The Woman in the Window: The Buchanan Log House
Tucked away near the modern roar of Nashville International Airport, the historic Buchanan Log House is one of Davidson County’s oldest frontier homesteads—a two-century-old cabin where pioneer life and lingering spirits remain deeply rooted. Built in...
- Transcript
Monday · 27 min
John Bloski's Deathbed Curse
In August 1897, an engineer discovered a dying man named John Bloski beside a Pennsylvania railroad track who used his final breaths to name his killer and utter a chilling prophecy: "You have to follow me soon." What followed was a desperate...
- Transcript
October 18 · 16 min
From the Vault: Central State Hospital — Nashville’s Asylum of Horrors
For over a century, Nashville’s Central State Hospital stood as a grim fortress on Murfreesboro Pike, marked by barbaric treatments, fatal beatings, deadly fires, and forgotten potter’s fields holding over 1,600 bodies. Though the asylum was...
- Transcript
October 17 · 17 min
From the Vault — Barrow Hill: The Bodies in the Well
Perched above Nashville’s Charlotte Pike, Barrow Hill harbored a dark legacy of suffering long before its grand mansion burned. Seized during the Civil War as a Union prison where Confederate captives were reportedly killed and dumped down a well, the...
- Transcript
October 16 · 14 min
Sarah Nagel and the Brooklyn Morgue Mystery
In the summer of 1879, Sarah Nagel’s body was pulled from Brooklyn’s East River, sparking one of the most baffling cases of mistaken identity in 19th-century America. Friends, acquaintances, and a close benefactor wept over her remains at the city...
- Transcript
October 15 · 21 min
West Virginia's Flatwoods Monster
On September 12, 1952, a fiery object streaked across the West Virginia sky, leading a group of local youths, a mother, and a National Guardsman up Fisher Hill to investigate the suspected crash. Instead of wreckage, their flashlights cut through a...
- Transcript
October 14 · 25 min
Hanged Twice: The Ballad of Charles Dilger
In August 1888, a brawl inside a Louisville boardinghouse left two police officers fatally stabbed and local brawler Charles Dilger facing the gallows. After surviving three suicide attempts in his cell, Dilger dropped through the scaffold trapdoor...
- Transcript
October 13 · 19 min
Nashville's Most Haunted Church
Standing in downtown Nashville, St. Mary of the Seven Sorrows is Tennessee’s oldest Catholic church—a historic Gothic cathedral harboring a bloody past as a Civil War hospital where hundreds died. Decades after the church’s towering first bishop,...
- Transcript
October 12 · 21 min
The Florida Werewolf Panic
In the spring of 1972, the city of Lakeland, Florida, was gripped by mass hysteria when residents reported a shaggy beast stalking roadways and leaping into headlights. What began as scattered driver sightings quickly ignited front-page headlines,...
- Transcript
October 11 · 13 min
From the Vault: The Creve Coeur Lake Demon
In August 1892, headlines in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat fueled panic with reports of a nocturnal demon stalking the waters of Creve Coeur Lake, thrashing violently and churning the shallows into an eerie boiling foam whenever young lovers approached...
- Transcript
October 10 · 15 min
From the Vault : Ernst Doepke — The Prince of Body Snatchers
In late 19th-century St. Louis, privy cleaner Ernst Doepke built a macabre fortune as the "Prince of Body Snatchers"—getting paid by the city to bury unclaimed paupers, secretly digging them back up to sell to medical schools, and reselling their...
- Transcript
October 9 · 22 min
The Blood Countess Conspiracy
For over four centuries, Countess Elizabeth Báthory has haunted history as the "Blood Countess"—a ruthless Hungarian noblewoman accused of slaughtering hundreds of servant girls and bathing in virgin blood to preserve her youth. Perched high in the...
- Transcript
October 8 · 25 min
Blackbeard: The Pirate, the Legend, and the Ghost
More than three centuries after terrorizing the Atlantic, the towering specter of Edward Teach—better known as Blackbeard—refuses to abandon the mist-shrouded waters of the North Carolina coast. Armed with smoking fuses braided into his beard and a...
- Transcript
October 7 · 20 min
The Dead Man’s Ultimatum
When convicted murderer William Van Dalsen walked calmly to the Louisville gallows in 1905, his eerie lack of fear stunned guards and doctors alike—a quiet composure fueled by a sudden, eleventh-hour conversion to Catholicism. But the real horror...
- Transcript
October 6 · 24 min
Is the Grand Ole Opry Cursed?
For nearly a century, stepping into the sacred circle of the Grand Ole Opry has meant reaching the pinnacle of country music success—yet behind the applause lies an unsettling legacy of sudden, violent deaths that sparked rumors of a sinister curse....
- Transcript
October 5 · 23 min
Stalked by a Ghost: The Strange Case of Edward Sewell
On August 12, 1901, a daylight shooting in a Pittsburgh saloon sparked one of the most chilling manhunts in Pennsylvania history—led not by police, but by the phantom of the victim. After gunning down Edward Sewell, steelworker Henry Taylor fled, only...
- Transcript

Showing 1–20 of 69 episodes