Haunts & Hollows: True Tales of the Gothic South

Rattling in His Head | Ep 9 | The Crimes & Execution of William Seymour Keener, the First Man Hung in Rabun County, Georgia

Every town has its secrets. Some of them happen to end at the end of a rope. In the summer of 1895, three young sisters took a Sunday stroll through the mountains of Rabun County, Georgia. Only one came home. The man responsible was their neighbor and cousin. He was a man who, by most accounts, had never caused a lick of trouble in his life... until something in his head began to rattle. William Seymour Keener described it himself as something that had torn loose, a strange noise at the top of his skull that caused him constant pain. Was he a cold-blooded killer? A man lost to madness? How had his love for one girl turned into an obsession that festered for years in the shadows of the Appalachian foothills The newspapers of the day couldn’t agree. Neither could the courts. In this episode, we unearth a story buried in century-old newsprint: a murder trial, a failed lunacy plea, a jailhouse confession, and an execution that local legend says was marked by church bells ringing five hundred times. This is the true story of the first man legally hanged in Rabun County, and why his ghost still lingers. 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.

Infamous in Death | Ep 8 | The Southern Gothic Tales of Five Women Whose Haunting Legends Refuse To Stay Buried

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.

No Such Thing as Coincidence | Ep 7 | The Bizarre Connections Between Different True Crime Cold Cases in the Gothic South

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.

Blood Fell Like Rain | Ep 6 | The Bizarre, Unexplained History of Blood Falls in the Gothic South

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.

Deadly Dames, Part 2 | Ep 5 | Six More Lethal Southern Ladies with a Mind for Murder

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.