What happens when your death overshadows your life? What if you lived for years in anonymity only to become infamous in the next life? From a Florida housewife whose ghost walked a lonely highway stretch for years waiting to uncover a terrible secret to a Charleston socialite whose grave at Old Stone Church still draws offerings from believers in her witchcraft, these are stories where death is only the beginning.

In this episode, we explore the legends of five women whose ordinary lives gave way to extraordinary, and often chilling, afterlives in Southern Gothic folklore.

These tales include a trip to the Mississippi Delta to uncover the legend of the Yazoo Witch, a woman who made a promise from the depths of a quicksand grave and may have kept it twenty years later in a wall of fire. Then it’s on to a Montgomery college campus, where a lonely New York girl in red never quite checked out of Old Pratt Hall. And finally, the remarkable true story of the Greenbrier Ghost, a murdered West Virginia woman whose spirit may have helped bring her killer to justice from beyond the grave.

These are five women who may have died, but their legends refuse to stay buried.

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.

What are the odds? In the world of true crime, that question can mean everything. Or perhaps nothing at all.

Two women named Mary Morris are murdered four days apart on the same stretch of road. A son gives a stranger a ride home, only to find that stranger may have killed his mother. A machete murder in Saint Augustine leads to a second suspicious death, and a book that someone desperately didn’t want written. A Florida swamp legend and a vanished judge share a web of names that seem too tangled to be accidental. And two young Atlanta women, same bank, same desk, same anonymous bouquet of roses, disappear two years apart under eerily similar circumstances.

Coincidence is everywhere if you look hard enough. But so is conspiracy.

In this episode, we untangle some of the South’s most baffling cold cases, the ones where the clues don’t just point to a killer, they point to each other. The question isn’t whodunit, it’s whether these chilling parallels mean anything at all.

Sometimes the most unsettling answer is “Maybe.”

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.

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.

What if the most dangerous person in the room wasn’t the one you’d ever suspect? History has a way of overlooking women, and for decades, even the FBI refused to acknowledge they could be serial killers at all. This episode of Haunts & Hollows: True Tales of the Gothic South aims to set the record straight.

In this second installment of our Deadly Dames series, we round out our list of twelve lethal women with six more cases that are equal parts fascinating and disturbing. Along the way, we unpack why female killers are so much harder to catch (Need a hint? They tend to know their victims, favor undetectable methods like poison, and often operate in plain sight as trusted caregivers).

The first trio killed not for money, but out of psychological compulsion: a veterans’ hospital nursing assistant who fatally injected elderly patients, a mentally ill nurse who kept a handwritten list of her victims, and a troubled babysitter who suffocated multiple children in her care.

The second trio were coldly profit-driven: Charleston’s legendary 18th-century innkeeper who allegedly poisoned travelers, a churchgoing grandmother who arsenic-poisoned five family members for insurance payouts, and the infamous “Giggling Granny,” Nannie Doss, who killed eleven people across three decades, including four husbands, before anyone thought to look her way.

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.

They baked the pies. They nursed the sick. They wept at the funerals. And, in a handful of cases, they quietly arranged for those funerals to happen in the first place.

In this episode of Haunts & Hollows: True Tales of the Gothic South, we’re pulling back the black lace veil on six women history has branded Brutal Brides and Wicked Widows. From a teenage axe murderer in 1831 Burke County to a Florida poisoner who ran out of luck on death row, these women weaponized the very roles society handed them, whether grieving wife, devoted mother, or doting caregiver, to devastating effect.

Were they cold-blooded predators? Victims of impossible circumstances? Products of a world that gave them no other option? The answers, as always in the South, are complicated. What isn’t complicated is the body count.

Six women. Multiple states. Arsenic, revolvers, a fireplace, and one very suspicious canoe trip. Some were executed. Some walked free to applause. And at least one vanished into the backwoods and was never quite the same again.

Grab something warm. You're going to need it.

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.

Some towns get hit by disaster once and disappear. Others take a hit and keep coming back for more.

From a preacher’s curse that erased an entire county seat to a 30-foot wall of water that swallowed a sleeping Bible college campus, Georgia's past is littered with tiny communities that fate and Mother Nature simply wiped from the map. No place, however, has paid a higher price than Gainesville, Georgia. It’s a city that has survived a devastating downtown fire, two catastrophic tornadoes decades apart, and a deadly industrial accident that killed workers before they even knew what hit them.

In this episode of Haunts & Hollows, we peel back the folk tales to reveal the true stories behind Georgia’s most lethal towns. These stories have now been told for generations, including a mad preacher calling for the wrath of God, more than 100 child workers trapped beneath a burning cotton mill, and entire families who were buried as they died, side by side in unimaginable conditions.

Because sometimes the scariest stories aren’t the ones we make up around a campfire. They’re the ones carved into headstones.

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.

What happens when a body is buried without its head? In the South, you get a ghost. . . and a whole lot of history.

From the fog-drenched lowlands of South Carolina to the blood-soaked battlefields of the Civil War, the Gothic South has always had a complicated relationship with the dead, especially the incomplete dead. In this episode, we trace the folklore of headless and dismembered spirits back to their real-world origins, starting with Washington Irving’s legendary Headless Horseman and the ancient folk tale tradition that inspired it. Along the way, you'll meet Joe Baldwin, a doomed railroad brakeman still swinging his phantom lantern in the Carolina darkness; a Confederate soldier haunting a Greensboro cemetery with half a skull and an empty canteen; and the genuinely bizarre true story of Lewis Powell. A Lincoln assassination conspirator and failed murderer, Powell was a man whose head spent over a century lost in a Smithsonian skull collection before finally coming home to Florida. Part ghost story, part American history, this episode will make you think twice about what (and who) might be buried beneath your feet.

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.

Every small town has one, that stretch of road where the streetlights stop and the rumors start. You probably know a few of the stories: the boyfriend who never came back, the hook on the door handle, and the scraping sound on the roof you were too afraid to explain.

But what if the scariest thing about Lover’s Lane isn’t the legend? What if it’s the true story hiding underneath it all?

In this episode of Haunts & Hollows: True Tales of the Gothic South, we trace the strange evolution of America’s most chilling parking spot folklore, from the postwar teenagers who accidentally invented Lover’s Lane culture to the ghost of a skinned man still prowling the woods of rural Tennessee seeking revenge on cheating hearts. Then things get darker. Behind the campfire tales are the real killers: the Phantom of Texarkana, the Zodiac, the Atlanta Lover's Lane shooter, and the shadowy figure who hunted couples along Virginia’s Colonial Parkway for over a decade, a killer whose crimes went unsolved until DNA evidence finally told the truth thirty years too late.

Romance, murder, folklore, and justice delayed: this one’s got it all.

Roll up the windows, lock the doors, and turn up the volume. And maybe, just maybe, don’t park somewhere too dark tonight.

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.