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Every story in American Dark, Volume I. Fifty haunted places and fifty vanishings, from 1587 to the present day. Search by name, town or state, or just pick one and start reading.
The Villisca Axe Murder House
The last good evening the Moore family ever had ended with applause. It was Sunday, June 9, 1912, and the Presbyterian church in Villisca, Iowa, was holding its Children’s Day program — a…
Read case No. 001 · 8 minThe Winchester Mystery House
There is a staircase in San Jose that climbs seven steps and ends at the ceiling. There is a door on the second floor that opens onto nothing — a sheer drop to the garden below.
Read case No. 002 · 7 minWaverly Hills Sanatorium
The tunnel begins in the basement and goes down. It runs for roughly five hundred feet beneath the hillside, a long concrete throat with a set of stairs on one side and a sloped track on…
Read case No. 003 · 7 minThe Bell Witch
It started with an animal in the corn. One day in 1817, a farmer named John Bell was walking his rows along the Red River in northern Tennessee when he saw something sitting among the…
Read case No. 004 · 7 minThe Lizzie Borden House
Almost every word of that playground rhyme is wrong. It wasn’t an axe; it was almost certainly a hatchet. Abby Borden wasn’t Lizzie’s mother; she was her stepmother.
Read case No. 005 · 8 minEastern State Penitentiary
The first prisoner walked through the gates of Eastern State Penitentiary on October 25, 1829, with a hood over his head.
Read case No. 006 · 6 minThe LaLaurie Mansion
On April 10, 1834, fire broke out in a mansion on Royal Street in New Orleans. What the people who rushed inside found in the attic made Delphine LaLaurie the most notorious woman in the city’s history.
Read case No. 007 · 6 minThe Stanley Hotel
On the night of October 30, 1974, a young writer and his wife checked into a grand white hotel in the Rocky Mountains on the last night before it closed for the winter.
Read case No. 008 · 6 minRMS Queen Mary
There is a door in the engine room of the Queen Mary that the crew still call Door Thirteen. It is a heavy steel watertight door, the kind designed to slam shut in an emergency and seal…
Read case No. 009 · 6 minTrans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum
The building is a quarter of a mile long. You see it first from the highway, rising above the little town of Weston, West Virginia: a vast Gothic Revival fortress of blue-gray sandstone…
Read case No. 010 · 6 minThe Amityville House
Some houses are haunted because of what happened inside them. The Dutch Colonial on Ocean Avenue in Amityville, Long Island, may be the only house in America that became world-famous for…
Read case No. 011 · 7 minThe Lemp Mansion
Before there was Anheuser-Busch, the beer of St. Louis was Lemp. In the 1890s, the William J. Lemp Brewing Company was one of the largest breweries in the United States.
Read case No. 012 · 6 minThe Whaley House
In 1852, in the dusty Mexican-era town that would become Old Town San Diego, a sailor named James Robinson was hanged for stealing a rowboat.
Read case No. 013 · 5 minOhio State Reformatory
If you’ve seen The Shawshank Redemption, you’ve seen it. The towering stone castle at the end of a long approach road; the turrets and gables and arched windows; the vast cell block where…
Read case No. 014 · 6 minWest Virginia Penitentiary
Across the street from the West Virginia Penitentiary, there is a hill that isn’t a hill. It rises about sixty-two feet out of the flat land of the Ohio River valley: a perfectly rounded…
Read case No. 015 · 5 minThe Myrtles
There is a mirror in the front hall of the Myrtles, a long, gilded antique that has hung in the house since the 1800s. If you look at it closely in the right light, guests say, you can see…
Read case No. 016 · 6 minThe Sallie House
Atchison, Kansas, is a quiet river town on a bluff above the Missouri, best known as the birthplace of Amelia Earhart. It’s a place of brick streets, old churches, Victorian homes and…
Read case No. 017 · 5 minHotel del Coronado and Kate Morgan
She checked in on Thanksgiving Day. It was November 24, 1892, and the Hotel del Coronado was only four years old: a vast, red-roofed Victorian resort on a strip of sand across the bay from…
Read case No. 018 · 5 minGettysburg
In the summer of 1863, Gettysburg was a market town of about 2,400 people, with a college, a seminary, and a dozen roads that met in its center like spokes on a wheel.
Read case No. 019 · 7 minSt. Augustine Lighthouse
The lighthouse at St. Augustine is striped like a barber’s pole — black and white bands spiraling up a tower 165 feet tall, topped with a bright red lantern room.
Read case No. 020 · 5 minAlcatraz
From the cell blocks of Alcatraz, on certain nights, the inmates could hear the city. San Francisco is only about a mile and a quarter away across the bay.
Read case No. 021 · 6 minBobby Mackey’s Music World
For more than forty years, a country music bar on the banks of the Licking River in northern Kentucky had one of the strangest reputations of any business in America.
Read case No. 022 · 5 minFranklin Castle
From the street, Franklin Castle looks like the house a child would draw if you asked for a haunted mansion. It is a four-story mass of dark sandstone in Cleveland’s Ohio City…
Read case No. 023 · 5 minPennhurst State School and Hospital
In 1968, a young television reporter named Bill Baldini walked into a state institution in the countryside outside Philadelphia with a camera crew.
Read case No. 024 · 5 minBachelor’s Grove Cemetery
You reach it on foot. There’s no road anymore. From a turnout on the busy Midlothian Turnpike, southwest of Chicago, a gated, overgrown gravel path leads into the woods, past a chain…
Read case No. 025 · 5 minResurrection Mary
Every big city has its vanishing hitchhiker. The story goes something like this. A young man is driving home late at night on a lonely road.
Read case No. 026 · 5 minThe Mothman
On the night of November 15, 1966, two young married couples were driving around an abandoned World War II munitions plant outside Point Pleasant, West Virginia, looking for something to do.
Read case No. 027 · 6 minThe Jersey Devil
In the southern half of New Jersey, between the suburbs of Philadelphia and the casinos of Atlantic City, there is a forest most Americans have never heard of.
Read case No. 028 · 5 minThe Perron Family Haunting
In January 1971, Roger and Carolyn Perron packed up their five daughters and moved from New Jersey to a farmhouse in the Rhode Island countryside.
Read case No. 029 · 5 minThe Smurl Haunting
West Pittston is a small, tidy town on the Susquehanna River in northeastern Pennsylvania’s coal country. In the 1970s, it was the kind of place where people knew their neighbors, went to…
Read case No. 030 · 5 minThe 1886 Crescent Hotel
In the summer of 1937, a man in a white linen suit, a lavender shirt and a purple tie arrived in the little Ozark mountain resort town of Eureka Springs, Arkansas, and bought its grandest…
Read case No. 031 · 5 minThe Bird Cage Theatre
In 1882, the New York Times reportedly called it the wildest, wickedest night spot between Basin Street and the Barbary Coast.
Read case No. 032 · 5 minJerome Grand Hotel
Jerome, Arizona, clings to the side of a mountain. The town is built on the steep slope of Cleopatra Hill, more than five thousand feet above sea level, its houses and shops stacked on top…
Read case No. 033 · 4 minThe Driskill Hotel
The Driskill Hotel was built to be the finest hotel in Texas, and for a long time it was. It rises four stories over Sixth Street in downtown Austin, a massive Romanesque pile of brick and…
Read case No. 034 · 5 minThe Congress Plaza Hotel
In the spring of 1893, Chicago threw a party for the whole world. The World’s Columbian Exposition, held to mark four hundred years since Columbus reached the Americas, transformed the…
Read case No. 035 · 5 minThe Old Charleston Jail
Charleston, South Carolina, is one of the most beautiful cities in America: pastel row houses, wrought-iron balconies, church steeples, cobblestone streets and gas lamps flickering under…
Read case No. 036 · 6 minThe Shanghai Tunnels
In the waterfront saloons of nineteenth-century Portland, Oregon, a sailor who drank too much might wake up at sea. That was the fear, anyway.
Read case No. 037 · 5 minRolling Hills Asylum
Before Social Security, before unemployment insurance, before nursing homes and food stamps and public housing, there was the poorhouse.
Read case No. 038 · 5 minThe Sorrel-Weed House
Savannah, Georgia, may be the most haunted city in America. That’s not my claim; it’s the city’s own boast, and it has the tour companies to prove it.
Read case No. 039 · 4 minThe Brown Mountain Lights
On a clear autumn night in the Blue Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina, people park their cars at an overlook on Highway 181, bundle up against the cold, and stare out into the dark…
Read case No. 040 · 5 minThe Marfa Lights
Nine miles east of the town of Marfa, in the high desert of far West Texas, there’s a roadside rest stop with a difference.
Read case No. 041 · 4 minSkinwalker Ranch
In 1994, a rancher named Terry Sherman and his wife, Gwen, bought a 480-acre property in the Uintah Basin of northeastern Utah and moved their cattle onto it.
Read case No. 042 · 5 minThe Flatwoods Monster
It was a little after seven o’clock on the evening of Friday, September 12, 1952, in the small town of Flatwoods, West Virginia.
Read case No. 043 · 5 minThe Hopkinsville Goblins
On the evening of August 21, 1955, a young man named Billy Ray Taylor walked out to the well behind a farmhouse in the tiny community of Kelly, Kentucky, to get a bucket of water.
Read case No. 044 · 5 minThe Dover Demon
Dover, Massachusetts, is one of the wealthiest towns in New England — a quiet, leafy place of old stone walls, horse farms and large colonial houses, about fifteen miles southwest of Boston.
Read case No. 045 · 4 minStull Cemetery
Stull, Kansas, is barely a town at all. It’s a scattering of houses, a church and a few farm buildings at a crossroads in the rolling prairie about ten miles west of Lawrence, the home of…
Read case No. 046 · 4 minUSS Hornet (CV-12)
On July 24, 1969, the eyes of the world were on an aircraft carrier in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. A few hours earlier, the Apollo 11 command module, carrying astronauts Neil…
Read case No. 047 · 4 minOld Idaho Penitentiary
The Old Idaho Penitentiary sits at the foot of the hills on the eastern edge of Boise, behind high sandstone walls the color of dry bones.
Read case No. 048 · 5 minLake Lanier
On a summer weekend, Lake Lanier is one of the busiest lakes in America. It sprawls across nearly forty thousand acres of the foothills north of Atlanta, its long fingers reaching into the…
Read case No. 049 · 5 minPoint Lookout
At the southern tip of Maryland’s western shore, the land narrows to a flat, sandy point between two great bodies of water.
Read case No. 050 · 4 minThe Sodder Children
For nearly forty years, if you drove Route 16 outside Fayetteville, West Virginia, you passed a billboard with five children’s faces on it.
Read case No. 051 · 9 minThe Lost Colony of Roanoke
On August 18, 1590, a man named John White came ashore on Roanoke Island looking for his family. He had been gone three years.
Read case No. 052 · 8 minBrandon Swanson
The last thing anyone ever heard Brandon Swanson say was two words, shouted into a cell phone in the dark. He had been talking to his father for forty-seven minutes.
Read case No. 053 · 8 minD.B. Cooper
He bought his ticket with cash. It was the afternoon before Thanksgiving, November 24, 1971, at Portland International Airport in Oregon.
Read case No. 054 · 9 minMaura Murray
In the White Mountains of New Hampshire, Route 112 runs east from the Vermont border through dense woods and scattered farmhouses, rising and curving along the Wild Ammonoosuc River.
Read case No. 055 · 7 minThe Springfield Three
It was graduation night. On the afternoon of Saturday, June 6, 1992, Suzie Streeter and Stacy McCall walked across the stage at Kickapoo High School in Springfield, Missouri, and received…
Read case No. 056 · 5 minAsha Degree
In the early hours of Valentine’s Day 2000, during a cold winter storm, a truck driver on a two-lane highway outside Shelby, North Carolina, saw something strange in his headlights.
Read case No. 057 · 5 minBrian Shaffer
The security cameras caught him walking in. At 1:15 a.m. on Saturday, April 1, 2006, a camera at the entrance to a bar called the Ugly Tuna Saloona, on the second floor of a new shopping…
Read case No. 058 · 4 minThe Yuba County Five
On the night of Friday, February 24, 1978, five young men from Yuba City, California, drove about fifty miles north to Chico to watch a college basketball game.
Read case No. 059 · 5 minDorothy Arnold
On a bright, cold afternoon in December 1910, a young woman in a blue serge suit, a black velvet hat trimmed with flowers, and a fox-fur scarf walked out of her family’s townhouse on East…
Read case No. 060 · 4 minJudge Joseph Force Crater
For decades after 1930, if someone in America didn’t show up when they were supposed to, people would joke: “Judge Crater, call your office.”
Read case No. 061 · 5 minTara Calico
On June 15, 1989, a woman walking through the parking lot of a convenience store in Port St. Joe, a small town on the Gulf Coast of the Florida Panhandle, noticed something lying on the…
Read case No. 062 · 4 minThe Bennington Triangle
In the southwestern corner of Vermont, east of the town of Bennington, the Green Mountains rise in a dense, dark, rolling wilderness of spruce, birch and maple.
Read case No. 063 · 5 minFlight 19
At 2:10 in the afternoon on December 5, 1945, five U.S. Navy torpedo bombers took off from Naval Air Station Fort Lauderdale in Florida on a routine training mission.
Read case No. 064 · 5 minAmelia Earhart
At 8:43 on the morning of July 2, 1937, the radio room of the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Itasca, anchored off a speck of coral in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, picked up a woman’s voice.
Read case No. 065 · 5 minJimmy Hoffa
At about 2:30 on the afternoon of Wednesday, July 30, 1975, a short, stocky man in a dark blue shirt and dark pants stood in the parking lot of a restaurant in the Detroit suburbs, waiting.
Read case No. 066 · 5 minElisa Lam
Elisa Lam’s death became one of the most discussed cases of the internet age. A short, grainy security video of her final hours was watched by millions of people.
Read case No. 067 · 5 minDennis Martin
It was supposed to be a Father’s Day tradition. Every year, the men of the Martin family of Knoxville, Tennessee, went camping together in the Great Smoky Mountains for Father’s Day weekend.
Read case No. 068 · 4 minZebb Quinn
Two days after Zebb Quinn disappeared, his car turned up in a restaurant parking lot near a hospital in Asheville, North Carolina.
Read case No. 069 · 4 minKenny Veach
In the fall of 2014, a man from Las Vegas posted a short video on YouTube of himself hiking through the desert mountains north of the city.
Read case No. 070 · 4 minJoshua Maddux
In the summer of 2015, a crew of contractors was hired to tear down an old cabin in the mountain town of Woodland Park, Colorado.
Read case No. 071 · 4 minGlen and Bessie Hyde
In the autumn of 1928, two newlyweds set out to do something no woman had ever done. Glen and Bessie Hyde had been married for only a few months.
Read case No. 072 · 5 minEverett Ruess
In February 1935, a search party riding through the remote canyon country of southern Utah came upon two burros grazing in a small, makeshift corral in a side canyon called Davis Gulch.
Read case No. 073 · 5 minJean Spangler
On the evening of Friday, October 7, 1949, a young actress and dancer named Jean Spangler kissed her five-year-old daughter goodbye, told her sister-in-law she was going to see her…
Read case No. 074 · 5 minConnie Converse
In August 1974, a fifty-year-old woman in Ann Arbor, Michigan, packed her belongings into her Volkswagen Beetle, said goodbye to almost no one, and drove away.
Read case No. 075 · 5 minMary Shotwell Little
At about eight o’clock on the evening of Thursday, October 14, 1965, a young woman finished dinner with a co-worker at the Piccadilly Cafeteria in Lenox Square, the gleaming new shopping…
Read case No. 076 · 5 minRey Rivera
On a spring evening in 2006, a man in Baltimore took a phone call at home, hurried out of the house, and drove away. Eight days later, his body was found in an empty room of one of the…
Read case No. 077 · 5 min657 Boulevard
In June 2014, Derek and Maria Broaddus closed on the house of their dreams. It was a big, gracious, six-bedroom Dutch Colonial built in 1905, on a tree-lined street called Boulevard in…
Read case No. 078 · 4 minThe Carroll A. Deering
On the morning of January 31, 1921, a Coast Guard lookout at the Cape Hatteras station on North Carolina’s Outer Banks spotted a large sailing ship stuck fast on the Diamond Shoals.
Read case No. 079 · 5 minNorthwest Orient Flight 2501
Shortly after midnight on June 24, 1950, a Northwest Orient Airlines plane flying west over Lake Michigan radioed a routine request to air traffic controllers.
Read case No. 080 · 4 minMary Reeser
On the morning of July 2, 1951, a telegram boy knocked on the door of a small apartment in St. Petersburg, Florida. The building’s landlady, Pansy Carpenter, was with him, trying to…
Read case No. 081 · 4 minThe Phoenix Lights
On the evening of Thursday, March 13, 1997, thousands of people across Arizona looked up at the sky and saw something they couldn’t explain.
Read case No. 082 · 4 minThe Kecksburg Incident
At about a quarter to five on the afternoon of December 9, 1965, people across a huge swath of North America looked up and saw a fireball streak across the sky.
Read case No. 083 · 4 minTrenny Gibson
On Friday, October 8, 1976, a school bus carrying a horticulture class from Bearden High School in Knoxville, Tennessee, pulled into the parking lot near Clingmans Dome, the highest point…
Read case No. 084 · 3 minThelma Pauline Melton
On the afternoon of Friday, September 25, 1981, three women set out from a campground for an easy walk in the woods. They were friends — Thelma Pauline Melton, who was fifty-eight, and two…
Read case No. 085 · 3 minDeOrr Kunz Jr.
Timber Creek Campground is a small, remote campsite in the mountains of east-central Idaho, at the end of a long dirt road, surrounded by sagebrush hills, aspen groves and pine forest.
Read case No. 086 · 4 minJennifer Kesse
Somewhere in the hours between the night of Monday, January 23, 2006, and the morning of Tuesday, January 24, Jennifer Kesse vanished from her new condominium in Orlando, Florida.
Read case No. 087 · 4 minLeah Roberts
In March 2000, a twenty-three-year-old woman from Durham, North Carolina, packed up her white 1993 Jeep Cherokee, put her cat in the passenger seat, and set off across the country.
Read case No. 088 · 4 minThe Boy in the Box
On a cold day in February 1957, a young man was checking muskrat traps in a weedy, overgrown lot along Susquehanna Road, in the Fox Chase neighborhood of Philadelphia, when he noticed a…
Read case No. 089 · 4 minBobby Dunbar
This is a story about a boy who disappeared, and a boy who was found. For ninety years, everyone believed they were the same boy.
Read case No. 090 · 4 minAmbrose Bierce
In the autumn of 1913, one of the most famous writers in America set out on a journey he seemed to suspect he would never come back from.
Read case No. 091 · 5 minThe Chicago Tylenol Murders
On the morning of September 29, 1982, a twelve-year-old girl named Mary Kellerman woke up feeling sick in her family’s home in Elk Grove Village, a suburb northwest of Chicago.
Read case No. 092 · 4 minThe Black Dahlia
On the morning of January 15, 1947, a young mother named Betty Bersinger was walking with her three-year-old daughter along a quiet street in the Leimert Park neighborhood of Los Angeles…
Read case No. 093 · 5 minThe Zodiac Killer
On the evening of December 20, 1968, two teenagers on their first date drove out to a lonely spot on Lake Herman Road, just outside the city of Vallejo, California, about thirty miles…
Read case No. 094 · 5 minThe Lady of the Dunes
On a hot summer afternoon in July 1974, a thirteen-year-old girl walking her dog in the sand dunes near Race Point Beach, at the very tip of Cape Cod, found a woman lying on a green beach…
Read case No. 095 · 3 minMorgan Nick
On the evening of Friday, June 9, 1995, a six-year-old girl named Morgan Nick went with her mother to a Little League baseball game in Alma, a small town in western Arkansas, near the…
Read case No. 096 · 3 minThe Max Headroom Broadcast Intrusion
At 9:14 on the evening of Sunday, November 22, 1987, viewers in Chicago who were watching the sports report on WGN-TV’s nine o’clock news saw the screen suddenly go black.
Read case No. 097 · 4 minJim Sullivan
In 1969, a young singer-songwriter from Southern California released an album called U.F.O. The cover showed him leaning against a wall in a hotel, with a strange expression on his face.
Read case No. 098 · 4 minJason Jolkowski
At about 10:45 on the morning of Wednesday, June 13, 2001, a neighbor in Omaha, Nebraska, looked out and saw nineteen-year-old Jason Jolkowski in front of his family’s house, helping his…
Read case No. 099 · 4 minThe Taos Hum
Since the early 1990s, people in and around Taos, New Mexico, have reported a low, droning hum that most of their neighbors can’t hear at all. Scientists studied it. No one found the source.
Read case No. 100 · 4 minNothing in the files matches that. Try another name or town.
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American Dark, Volume I collects every case on this site into a single 561-page ebook, with a case file for every story and full sources at the back. Read it offline, on a road trip, in a tent, or out loud around the fire.
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