Haunted American History

In 1891, a jeweler in Salem, Massachusetts, began selling a silver souvenir spoon decorated with a witch on a broomstick. Beneath the witch were three small pins. Those pins were modeled after evidence used two centuries earlier, when frightened girls accused their neighbors of being attacked by invisible spirits. The accusations helped send innocent people to their deaths. And now their story was being sold as a souvenir. In 1692, Salem Village became the center of one of the most infamous witch hunts in American history. Nineteen people were hanged, one man was crushed beneath stones, and five others died in jail. More than 170 people were accused. But the history of Salem didn't end when the executions stopped. Over the following centuries, stories of curses, restless spirits, and haunted buildings grew alongside a very different kind of tradition: turning the town's darkest history into a Halloween destination. Tonight, we're returning to Salem to examine what actually happened during the witch trials, the people who suffered, the legends that followed, and how a town once ashamed of its past became America's Halloween capital. Welcome to Day Eighteen of 31 Days of Halloween.

On October 30, 1938, a radio reporter broadcasting from a farm field in New Jersey suddenly stopped speaking. Moments earlier, he had described a terrifying scene: a strange metal cylinder, creatures emerging from inside it, and a mysterious weapon burning everything in its path. Then came silence. And somewhere in a New York studio, a piano began to play. The broadcast was Orson Welles's adaptation of The War of the Worlds, a fictional account of a Martian invasion presented through realistic news bulletins. According to newspaper headlines the following morning, America had descended into chaos. Families fled their homes. People barricaded themselves indoors. Some reportedly believed the world was ending. But how much of that actually happened? Tonight, we're revisiting one of the most famous broadcasts in American history, examining the evidence behind the legendary nationwide panic, and uncovering what really happened when another radio station staged its own Martian invasion eleven years later. It's a story about fear, sensational headlines, the power of radio, and how a Halloween prank became a piece of American mythology. Welcome to Day Sixteen of **31 Days of Halloween**.

On Halloween night in 1974, eight-year-old Timothy O'Bryan came home from trick-or-treating in Pasadena, Texas, with a giant Pixy Stix. His father helped him open it. Timothy complained that the candy tasted strange. Within an hour, he was dead. Investigators discovered that the candy contained a lethal dose of cyanide. Four other children had received identical poisoned treats, and police raced to find them before anyone else could be hurt. The case seemed to confirm one of America's greatest Halloween fears: that a stranger might deliberately poison the candy handed to innocent children. But the stranger didn't exist. The killer was Timothy's own father, Ronald Clark O'Bryan, a church deacon drowning in debt who had secretly purchased life insurance policies on his children. And the story didn't end with his conviction. Tonight, we're examining the murder that helped transform Halloween, the nationwide panic over poisoned candy and razor blades, and the surprising truth about how often children have actually been harmed by contaminated trick-or-treat candy. Welcome to Day Fourteen of 31 Days of Halloween.

In 1888, a woman named Maggie Fox stood before two thousand people in a New York theater, removed her shoe, and demonstrated how she had spent decades convincing Americans she could communicate with the dead. She cracked her toe joints. Forty years of séances, spirit messages, and mysterious knocking sounds had helped create a nationwide obsession with the supernatural. But the story didn't end when the trick was exposed. Instead, Americans found increasingly elaborate ways to pay for the experience of being frightened. Spirit cabinets. Optical illusions. Ghosts appearing on theater stages. Amusement park rides that carried passengers into complete darkness. Midnight horror shows where monsters wandered through the audience. Eventually, those traditions would come together in the haunted attractions we recognize today. Tonight, we're tracing the strange history of America's haunted houses, from the Fox sisters and P.T. Barnum to a New Jersey invention called the Pretzel, Disneyland's Haunted Mansion, and the tragedy that changed haunted attraction safety forever. Welcome to Day Twelve of 31 Days of Halloween.

On Halloween night in 1991, eighteen-year-old Doris Gipson was driving along a rural road outside Elkhorn, Wisconsin, when she struck something with her car. She stopped to investigate. There was nothing in the road. Then she saw something running toward her on two legs. Within months, reports of a strange, upright, wolf-like creature had turned an ordinary Wisconsin farm road into the center of one of America's most famous cryptid mysteries. They called it the Beast of Bray Road. But America's werewolf stories didn't begin in Wisconsin. From the rougarou of Louisiana's bayous to the mysterious Michigan Dogman, a creature whose legend began as an April Fools' Day radio prank, stories of people becoming wolves have followed Americans for centuries. And somewhere along the way, Hollywood helped convince us what a werewolf was supposed to look like. Tonight, we're following the strange history of America's werewolves, the witnesses who claimed to encounter them, and the Halloween night that put Bray Road on the map. Welcome to Day Ten of 31 Days of Halloween.

In January of 1909, strange tracks began appearing in the snow across New Jersey. They crossed yards. Climbed fences. Appeared on rooftops. Witnesses reported hearing wings outside their homes and seeing something with hooves, glowing eyes, feathers, fur—and occasionally a head like a horse. Schools reportedly closed. Armed posses went looking for it. Newspapers put it on the front page. And suddenly, everyone was talking about an old story from deep inside the Pine Barrens. According to the legend, in 1735 a woman known as Mother Leeds discovered she was pregnant with her thirteenth child and cursed the unborn baby: Let this one be the Devil. But buried underneath the familiar monster story is a real colonial family that had been associated with Satan for decades, a feud involving Benjamin Franklin, a massive newspaper-fueled panic—and a Philadelphia showman who decided the best way to capitalize on the hysteria was to paint a kangaroo and give it wings. Tonight, we're heading into the Pine Barrens for the strange history of New Jersey's most famous monster. Welcome to Day Eight of 31 Days of Halloween.

In March of 1892, a group of men entered a cemetery in rural Rhode Island and opened the coffin of nineteen-year-old Mercy Brown. Then they cut out her heart. Her family had been dying from tuberculosis, one after another, and some of Mercy's neighbors believed they knew why. Something inside one of the graves was still feeding on the living. So they burned Mercy's heart and liver beside a rock in the cemetery and prepared the ashes as a cure for her dying brother. And Mercy Brown wasn't the only one. For generations, families across New England had been digging up their dead, examining their bodies, burning their organs, and sometimes consuming the ashes in a desperate attempt to stop tuberculosis from moving through their homes. They rarely called them vampires. But that's what everyone else would eventually call them. Tonight, we're digging into the New England vampire panic, the real story of Mercy Brown, a bizarre grave discovered in Connecticut, and how a nineteenth-century medical superstition became part of America's Halloween mythology. Welcome to Day Six of 31 Days of Halloween

On August 4, 1577, a violent storm descended on the English countryside. Then something entered the church. Witnesses described an enormous black dog tearing through the congregation, allegedly killing two people before disappearing into the storm. At another church twelve miles away, a remarkably similar story was unfolding. The creature would become known as Black Shuck—a massive phantom hound said to stalk the lonely roads, marshes, and coastlines of East Anglia. Seeing it could mean death. Looking into its eyes could be worse. But behind the legend is something even stranger: medieval accounts of spectral hounds, smugglers who may have deliberately kept the stories alive, the skeleton of an enormous dog unearthed near the site of the attacks, and a legend that helped inspire one of Sherlock Holmes' most famous cases. Tonight, we're hunting the Devil's hound. Welcome to Day Four of 31 Days of Halloween

Before Halloween meant costumes, candy, and smiling jack-o'-lanterns, it meant something considerably more dangerous. When Irish and Scottish Halloween traditions crossed the Atlantic, they collided with American harvest parties, fortune-telling games, pumpkins, Victorian entertainment—and a growing tradition of October vandalism. Kids blocked railroad tracks. Wagons ended up on barn roofs. Windows were smashed. False fire alarms were pulled. People were shot. And by the 1930s, some American cities were seriously considering getting rid of Halloween altogether. Instead, they made a deal with the kids. Give us something good, and nothing bad happens to your house. This is the strange, occasionally violent story of how America created the Halloween we know today—and how three little words turned a night of chaos into a national tradition. Welcome to Day Two of 31 Days of Halloween

On Christmas Eve 1945, the Sodder family home in Fayetteville, West Virginia, burned to the ground. George and Jennie Sodder escaped with four of their children, but five others were supposedly trapped upstairs. When the ashes cooled, however, investigators found something the family couldn't understand: no identifiable remains of the missing children. Then came the questions. A missing ladder. Trucks that mysteriously wouldn't start. A telephone line that had apparently been cut. Strange threats before the fire. And, decades later, a photograph that George and Jennie believed showed one of their missing sons as an adult. Tonight, we explore the disappearance of the Sodder children and the mystery that left one West Virginia family asking the same question for the rest of their lives: did five children really die in that fire?

In November 1966, two young couples driving through an abandoned World War II explosives facility outside Point Pleasant, West Virginia, encountered something they couldn't explain: a towering humanoid figure with enormous wings and glowing red eyes. Within days, others claimed to see it. Then came strange electrical disturbances, UFO reports, mysterious visitors, and a traveling salesman who said he'd spoken telepathically with a man from another world. The phenomenon became known as Mothman. Thirteen months later, the Silver Bridge collapsed into the Ohio River, killing forty-six people—and permanently transforming a strange series of sightings into an American legend. Tonight, we explore the original Mothman encounters, the high strangeness that surrounded Point Pleasant, and how a catastrophic bridge failure turned a mysterious creature into a supposed harbinger of disaster.

For more than a century, the West Virginia Penitentiary at Moundsville held thousands of prisoners behind the walls of a Gothic stone fortress. Ninety-four men were executed there. Riots left inmates dead. Conditions became so brutal that West Virginia's highest court eventually ordered the prison closed. Today, Moundsville is better known for something else: ghosts. Visitors report shadowy figures following them through cellblocks and basements, while one famous apparition has been linked to the murder of an inmate named R.D. Wall. But when you compare the legends with the historical record, some details begin to change—including a murder that ghost stories have placed in the wrong year for decades. Tonight, we explore the history, violence, legends, and ghosts of the West Virginia Penitentiary.

In 1994, eighteen-year-old Brian Canfield was driving along a dark road in the foothills of Washington when his pickup suddenly died. Then something dropped out of the sky. He described a nine-foot creature covered in blue fur, with yellow eyes, a wolf-like face, clawed feet, and enormous leathery wings. For several minutes, the two simply stared at each other before the creature took flight—and Brian's truck inexplicably started again. The encounter would give the Pacific Northwest a new cryptid: Batsquatch. But somewhere along the way, the story changed, moving the creature to a completely different mountain and surrounding it with a mythology that wasn't there in 1994. Tonight, we go looking for the real story behind Batsquatch.