The South doesn't forget easily, but some secrets it keeps buried deep. In this episode we uncover three chilling cold cases where predators vanished without a trace, leaving investigators haunted decades later.

First, follow the trail of the so-called Flat-Tire Killer, whose hunting ground stretched from California to the canals of South Florida, perhaps claiming more than 30 lives. Even today, DNA evidence only muddies the waters. Then head to the swamp and scrubs of Charlotte County, where Dan Conahan, the convicted Hog Trail Killer, sits on death row. But a mass grave of eight more victims raises a terrifying question: was he working alone, or is a second killer still out there? Finally, travel to Richmond, Virginia, where the Golden Years Killer targeted elderly women in their own homes for six brutal years, leaving behind a confession so unreliable it may have obscured the truth forever.

Three killers, dozens of victims and zero convictions that fully close the books. Are these predators dead, imprisoned for other crimes, or still walking among us?

Dive Deeper with the Research Folio. Get a full transcript, list of sources, supplemental media, and more for each drop plus early access to new episodes. A special perk for our email subscribers. Get the Newsletter >

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 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.

Dive Deeper with the Research Folio. Get a full transcript, list of sources, supplemental media, and more for each drop plus early access to new episodes. A special perk for our email subscribers. Get the Newsletter >

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 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.

Dive Deeper with the Research Folio. Get a full transcript, list of sources, supplemental media, and more for each drop plus early access to new episodes. A special perk for our email subscribers. Get the Newsletter >

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.