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

From a Kansas slaughterhouse hurled by a tornado across a hundred miles of open sky to a Tennessee tobacco field soaked in gore that drew five hundred horrified spectators, the Gothic South has a long, strange relationship with blood that falls from above.

But these aren’t just folklore and tall tales. Ancient Greeks wrote about it, and medieval chroniclers tracked it. Scientists, preachers, and self-proclaimed experts have argued about it for centuries. One team even blamed the butterflies.

And then there’s the Atlanta house that simply started bleeding from the walls and floorboards one quiet September night. There was no known crime and no explanation, just plenty of blood

In this episode, we trace the long, unsettling history of blood falls, from Homer’s Iliad to your own backyard, and asks the question nobody really wants answered: What’s falling out of that red cloud moving toward you right now?

Haunts & Hollows: True Tales of the Gothic South is the podcast for anyone who yearns for stories of haunted plantations, of deals made at midnight crossroads, of creatures lurking in moss-draped cemeteries. But where did these tales actually start? Turns out, the real history behind Southern folklore is wilder, stranger, and a whole lot darker than the stories themselves. With each episode, mystery author Liam Ashe uncovers the true tales hiding underneath the myths of the Gothic South.

Subscribe now and never miss a tale. And whatever you do tonight, be sure to lower the lights, lock the doors, and pull up a rocking chair. . . things are about to get interesting.