Southern Gothic

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Southern Gothic

Southern Gothic Media LLC

33 minutes 5 seconds

Unraveling the Mystery of Pink Lizzie | Encore Episode
In 1871, Clara Robertson’s life was forever altered by an encounter with a ghost. The blonde-haired, blue-eyed girl witnessed a haunting vision of a transparent, emaciated young girl in a tattered pink dress while practicing piano upstairs at the Brinkley Female College in Memphis, Tennessee. The sensational series of events that followed was widely covered in the media of the day, causing a frenzy in town and making the tale of Pink Lizzie one of the most infamous hauntings in Memphis history.

Key Highlights
- Brinkley Female College’s short history.
- The First Encounter of Pink Lizzie, the emaciated looking ghost of a young girl.
- The Ghost’s Wishes for Clara to take action that will help give her family justice.
- Séances and Revelations with Mrs. Nourse, the spiritualist attempting to assist the family.
- The Public Excavation of the spirit’s purported treasure.
- Fact vs. Fiction, and the legitimacy of the tales.
This episode is sponsored by Hello Fresh, America’s #1 Meal Kit. Visit ⁠HelloFresh.com/GothicFree⁠ and use code “gothicfree” for FREE breakfast for life! One breakfast item per box while the subscription is active!

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Additional Resources for This Episode:

⁠Haunted Memphis⁠ by Laura Cunningham

⁠Myths and Mysteries of Tennessee⁠ by Susan Sawyer

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23 February 2026, 8:00 am
32 minutes 10 seconds

The Many Mysteries of Rocky Hill Castle | Encore Episode
Rocky Hill Castle, once a majestic plantation house in Alabama, now stands only as a memory, shrouded in tragic history and chilling tales of the paranormal. Built between 1858 and 1861 by Colonel James Edmonds Saunders, the mansion was a marvel of its time, showcasing a unique blend of Greek Revival and Italianate architectural styles, but today its legacy lives on through the folklore surrounding it.

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16 February 2026, 8:00 am
52 minutes 38 seconds

Margaret Garner and the Impossible Choice
In 1856, an enslaved woman named Margaret Garner fled Kentucky with her family, crossing a frozen Ohio River into Cincinnati in a desperate bid for freedom. But when slave catchers and federal deputies closed in under the Fugitive Slave Act, Margaret was forced into a moment of terror so absolute it still stops people cold: rather than watch her children be dragged back into bondage, she made a choice that turned the nation’s stomach—and exposed exactly what slavery demanded of mothers.

Her case exploded into one of the most controversial fugitive slave proceedings in American history, pulling in abolitionists, newspapers, and the courts as Ohio wrestled with a brutal question: would Margaret be tried for murder on free soil, or treated as property to be returned to slavery? Decades later, her story would echo again through Toni Morrison’s Beloved, a “ghost story” rooted in real history—because some horrors don’t end when the chains come off.

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9 February 2026, 8:00 am
32 minutes 50 seconds

The Horrors of Andersonville Prison | Encore Episode
Andersonville Prison, officially known as Camp Sumter, was a Confederate prisoner-of-war camp during the American Civil War, operating from February 1864 to April 1865 near Andersonville, Georgia. Notorious for its horrific conditions and high mortality rate, it was designed for 10,000 prisoners but held over 32,000 at its peak, leading to severe overcrowding. The prisoners endured appalling conditions with inadequate shelter, contaminated water, insufficient food, and rampant disease. As a result, nearly 13,000 of the 45,000 Union soldiers imprisoned there died, making it one of the most dangerous locations in the United States during the American Civil War. Join us as we explore the history of this notorious prison camp.

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2 February 2026, 8:00 am
52 minutes 4 seconds

Introducing: Haunted American History

Haunted American History is a daily campfire-style podcast blending American history, folklore, and original ghost stories.

What scares you? Let’s find out!

Listen now on your favorite podcasting app!

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29 January 2026, 8:00 am
37 minutes 54 seconds

The Mysterious Disappearance of David Lang
In the fall of 1880, a Tennessee farmer named David Lang was said to have vanished in broad daylight, in the middle of his own pasture, with his wife, children, and two visiting men watching from only yards away. No trees. No brush. No place to hide. One moment he was standing there, waving, and the next he was simply gone. The story has become one of the most infamous disappearances in American folklore, tied to phantom voices calling from the field, a strange circle where grass refused to grow, and a family left behind with no explanation and no body.

Over the years, the disappearance of David Lang has been retold in newspapers, paranormal magazines, and books on unexplained phenomena, securing its place among America’s most unsettling unsolved mysteries. The legend has been linked to nineteenth-century Tennessee, early investigations into the supernatural, and even the work of American gothic writer Ambrose Bierce, whose fiction explored eerily similar themes of sudden erasure and fractured reality. Whether rooted in history, folklore, or something far stranger, the story endures because it asks an impossible question: how can a man vanish in the open air, in front of witnesses, and leave nothing behind?

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26 January 2026, 8:00 am
32 minutes 56 seconds

Shadows of the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum | Encore Episode
Rising above the hills of Weston, West Virginia, the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum stands as one of the most infamous psychiatric hospitals in American history. Originally opened in the mid-19th century as part of a nationwide mental health reform movement inspired by Dorothea Dix and the Kirkbride Plan, the asylum was meant to represent progress and compassion in the treatment of mental illness. Instead, it became a symbol of systemic failure—marked by extreme overcrowding, neglect, experimental treatments like lobotomies and electroshock therapy, and the quiet disappearance of thousands of patients whose stories were never fully recorded. What began as a hopeful institution slowly transformed into a place of suffering, secrecy, and irreversible trauma.

Today, the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum is widely regarded as one of the most haunted locations in the United States, drawing paranormal investigators, historians, and dark tourism enthusiasts from around the world. Visitors report shadow figures in abandoned wards, disembodied voices echoing through miles of empty hallways, and an overwhelming sense of dread tied to the building’s violent past. Beneath the gothic architecture and decaying stone lies a chilling legacy of 19th- and 20th-century psychiatric care, unmarked graves, and unanswered questions—making this asylum not just a haunted place, but a grim monument to how society once treated its most vulnerable people.

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19 January 2026, 8:00 am
33 minutes 18 seconds

Gaines Tavern's History of Horror
Just north of downtown Walton, Kentucky, along an old turnpike that once carried stagecoaches between Lexington and Cincinnati, stands a two-hundred-year-old brick building with a reputation that has never quite faded. Known today as Gaines Tavern, the structure has been called many things over the years: a frontier inn, a family home, a community gathering place—and, for more than a century, the Kentucky Horror House. From the outside, it looks like a well-preserved piece of early American history. But beneath that calm, symmetrical façade lies a past marked by suicide, murder, racial violence, and sudden death, events so numerous and so tightly clustered that locals began to wonder whether the house itself was somehow cursed.

For generations, stories have followed Gaines Tavern: travelers who never made it out alive, a room long whispered about for its connection to self-inflicted death, a brutal killing that ended a grand social ball in an instant, and acts of mob violence carried out in the shadow of the house during Reconstruction. Add to that decades of reported hauntings—apparitions in upstairs windows, unexplained footsteps, voices, lights, and the persistent figure of a headless man—and the line between documented history and lingering legend becomes dangerously thin. In this episode of Southern Gothic, we trace the full, unsettling history of Gaines Tavern in Walton, Kentucky, exploring how a vital stop along a nineteenth-century road became one of the most infamous haunted locations in the state—and why, even today, those who know its story say the house may not be finished with us yet.

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12 January 2026, 8:00 am
41 minutes 3 seconds

The Longfellow House of Pascagoula
The Longfellow House in Pascagoula, Mississippi is an elegant antebellum mansion overlooking the Gulf of Mexico—symmetrical, refined, and seemingly untouched by time. But beneath its pristine façade lies a reputation shaped by violence, exploitation, and stories that refuse to fade. For generations, locals have whispered that the house was built on suffering tied to the domestic slave trade, and that whatever happened inside its walls left more than just historical scars behind.

Over the years, people who lived, worked, or passed through the Longfellow House have reported unsettling encounters: unexplained sounds in empty rooms, figures appearing on staircases, objects moving without cause, and the persistent feeling of being watched. These experiences have followed the house through every phase of its long life—from private residence to school, museum, hotel, and beyond—suggesting that some histories don’t stay buried, no matter how carefully a place is restored.

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5 January 2026, 8:00 am
1 hour 3 minutes

Introducing: Weird in the Wade

Do you like your spooky stories with some historical context? Do you like your history with a pinch of the paranormal? Then Weird in the Wade is the podcast for you. Weird in the Wade is about all that’s weird, wonderful and a little off kilter in a small English town called Biggleswade and its surrounding area. Each episode we explore a story that will make you pause and ponder, whether its a haunting, flying saucers, witches, poisoners or body snatchers. Social history meets the unexplained in Weird in the Wade.

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29 December 2025, 8:00 am
48 minutes 9 seconds

Disaster at Camp Creek
On a storm-soaked night in June of 1900, just outside McDonough, Georgia, a Southern Railway passenger train plunged into the flooded waters of Camp Creek, triggering one of the deadliest train disasters in Georgia history. Weeks of relentless rain, a washed-out trestle, and a fateful decision made under impossible conditions combined to turn a routine run toward Atlanta into a mass casualty event that would forever alter a small Southern town. In the hours that followed, Camp Creek became a scene of fire, flood, and unimaginable loss—while the courthouse square in downtown McDonough was transformed into a place of mourning, identification, and reckoning.

More than a century later, the wreck still casts a long shadow. The tragedy left behind unmarked graves, unresolved questions, and a legacy of local lore that continues to cling to the courthouse square and the historic buildings surrounding it. From contemporary newspaper accounts to the quiet persistence of ghost stories, this episode of Southern Gothic explores how a single night of disaster reshaped a community—and why some places never quite let go of the past.

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22 December 2025, 8:00 am
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