Rest in Pieces

What happens when a body is buried without its head? In the South, you get a ghost. . . and a whole lot of history.

From the fog-drenched lowlands of South Carolina to the blood-soaked battlefields of the Civil War, the Gothic South has always had a complicated relationship with the dead, especially the incomplete dead. In this episode, mystery author Liam Ashe traces the folklore of headless and dismembered spirits back to their real-world origins, starting with Washington Irving’s legendary Headless Horseman and the ancient folk tale tradition that inspired it. Along the way, you'll meet Joe Baldwin, a doomed railroad brakeman still swinging his phantom lantern in the Carolina darkness; a Confederate soldier haunting a Greensboro cemetery with half a skull and an empty canteen; and the genuinely bizarre true story of Lewis Powell. A Lincoln assassination conspirator and failed murderer, Powell was a man whose head spent over a century lost in a Smithsonian skull collection before finally coming home to Florida. Part ghost story, part American history, this episode will make you think twice about what (and who) might be buried beneath your feet.

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, Liam 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.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:05

You know what's interesting about Southern Ghost stories? These spirits always seem to stick around for a specific reason. Now it might be a broken heart or plotting revenge or maybe desperately searching for something that they lost when they died. Take South Carolina for example. Three of the state's most famous hauntings follow this exact pattern. First, there's uh Liza Huger, she's also known as the Witch Queen of Clemson, who claws her way out of the grave, seeking the freedom she never had in life. Then you've got Alice Flagg, endlessly wandering the coastal marshes, hunting for her lost ring. And of course, my favorite, Agnes of Glasgow, who roams the cemeteries near Camden, South Carolina on dark nights, still hoping to find her missing sweetheart. So what do they all have in common? Each one of them was buried without something they held dear, something that mattered to them more than life itself. And here's the thing. If being buried without your ring or a chance at love is enough to trap your soul between this world and the next, imagine what happens when you bury a body in one place and an arm in another, or a leg, or god forbid, their head. Yeah, you're definitely getting a ghost. Welcome to Haunts and Hollows True Tales of the Gothic South. I'm your host, mystery author Liam Ash. In this episode, I'll be exploring a popular folklore trope, Ghosts That Are Missing, Limbs and More, as well as the true stories that may have inspired these popular urban legends. This episode of Haunts and Hollows is sponsored by my friends at Arcanoctus. They invite you to unlock your curiosity with their collection of the odd, the unusual, and the obscure. Back in 1820, Washington Irving published a volume he called The Sketch Book of Jeffrey Crayon. Never heard of it? Well that's okay because almost nobody has. But buried deep in that collection of 34 short stories is a tale virtually everyone knows: The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. If you somehow missed it, here is the setup. There's a very jittery, deeply superstitious school teacher named Ichabod Crane. He's riding through the moonlit backwoods of Westchester County, New York when he realizes he's not alone. Behind him, and gaining quickly, is a menacing rider with one very unsettling feature. He has no head. This so-called headless horseman, according to that local legend, was once a Hessian soldier who had the misfortune of meeting a cannonball head on, that's pun intended, during the Revolutionary War. Naturally, the cannonball won. Now, every night, he lurches from the shadows and rides in a furious search for the head that he lost. There's a good chance none of this is news to you. Between the cartoons, the movies, and a really strong start to a TV adaptation, the Headless Horseman has had more screen time than most living celebrities. But stick with me, because the stories behind stories like this one are where things really get interesting. That's because Sleepy Hollow represents an entire sub-genre of folktales. It's the dead returning to haunt the living in search of something precious, usually a missing head or other body part. In fact, this type of story has a specific number on what's called the Arne Thompson Tales Type Index. This is a system that tries to group folktales from around the world based on common themes. For example, if the story you're reading is about slaying a dragon, that is probably type 300. If there's a sleeping princess, that's type 410. This time around, however, we have Tale Type 366, a corpse returns to claim its property. The basic idea is that the dead never find peace in the afterlife until their physical form is intact. Go down a rabbit hole of early American folk tales and you'll find dozens of urban legends just like these. In fact, one of Mark Twain's favorite stories to tell on his reading tours was a 200-year-old tale entitled Where is My Golden Arm? This one is about a woman, and in the story she doesn't have a name, so we'll just call her Susan. And Susan has a prosthetic arm made of pure gold, which sounds both very heavy and kind of impractical. It turns out that her husband is far fonder of the arm than he is of Susan. I'm not spoiling anything when I reveal that he kills Susan for that arm. It actually happens in the first paragraph. In any event, it turns out that Susan was very familiar with the R Thompson Tales type index story type 366, and soon enough she comes back as an armless ghost and haunts him until she gets that arm. And on a side note, I did the math and the arm would have weighed just south of 150 pounds. Stories like Where is My Golden Arm led to folk tales of not quite complete specters spreading like wildfire around the rural south. For example, in Williamson County, North Carolina, locals claim to have seen a lonely, unnamed ghost wandering the creek near Glen Cannon Falls. The Spectre, they say, is a Union soldier who, just like the horseman, was decapitated by a well-aimed cannonball. Walk the creek under a full moon, and you just might see the ghost searching for his fallen comrades and his missing head. A little further south, the city cemetery in Greensboro holds more than 3,000 residents in eternal rest. In my opinion, the most interesting guest, however, is one who can never enter the gates. For decades, local residents have talked of a terrifying sight, a ghost you can only see on nights without a moon. They swear that if you walk to the farthest corner of the cemetery and look out along the railroad line, you may hear a weak voice asking for help. It might even beg you for a drink of water. The lost ghost of Greensboro, as they now call him, appears to be a young Confederate soldier. In another cannonball-related mishap, the poor guy has only half his head remaining. In his blood-caked hands, he holds an empty canteen. No one knows his name, but we do know his fate. If the legends are true, he will wander this stretch of tracks forever in search of something to drink. Now, not all headless ghosts are the result of cannon fire. Back in the 1860s, near Brunswick County, North Carolina, a marshy stretch of the railroad line lies just past Rattlesnake Creek. According to legend, on a dark night in 1867, a railroad brakeman named Joe Baldwin was just settling down for a little sleep on the Atlantic Coast Line caboose. Just as the train was taking the rattlesnake bend, he felt the car lurch. In the darkness he heard the screech of twisting iron. In an instant he knew the caboose had uncoupled from the rest of the train. He checked his watch, and he soon figured the midnight train was just a few moments behind. With the bend in the line, they would never see him in time to stop. So Joe grabbed his lantern, threw open the door, and waved his light against the night. Sadly, the legend says it was too little too late, and the two trains collided in a fiery crash. Caught between the two, Joe was crushed in an instant. The impact was so strong, in fact, that his head was torn clean from his body and sent flying into the darkness. Now, locals claim that on nights when the moon is hidden, you just might see a phantom lantern light dancing in the darkness. They claim this is Joe Baldwin, walking the rails and looking for his missing head. Since this ghost has a name, you'd think it might be a little easier to track down the truth behind the folktale. And there are slivers of fact here and there, but nothing exact. If you go back a dozen years before Joe's death, the January 1856 edition of The Tarboro Southerner gives the details of a railroad accident that occurred near a spot called Rattlesnake Creek, and that should sound a little familiar. In the report, two trains collided when one failed to break in time. There were several injuries, but only one confirmed death. A young railroad man named Charles Baldwin. Not exactly Joe Baldwin, but damn close. And Charles, in another familiar beat, later died due to severe head injuries from the crash. It's not hard to see how a story like that, told over and over again across the years, could turn into the legend of Joe Baldwin, and that's with or without his head. So what other true stories do we have about the burial of incomplete bodies? It turns out there are plenty. Let me give you two of my favorite examples that happened elsewhere in the U.S. On the evening of September 17, 1898, a 52-year-old woman named Sarah Ware disappeared near her home in Bucksport, Maine. Two weeks later, her battered body was discovered just off Miles Lane. Now, reports aren't clear, but likely due to severe head trauma, when they tried to move her body, her head simply fell off. The township police were quick to look at a local thug named William Treworgi, and they had plenty of reason to do so. I'll give you just four. One, where was last seen with him on the night she disappeared? 2. Traorgi had a long history of violent behavior. 3. Witnesses claimed that he actually asked them to move her body the day after she disappeared. And four, there was a bloody hammer found at the scene with his initials. Despite all of this, Traworgi was tried, found not guilty, and released. For reasons still unknown, the court decided to hold on to Ware's head for safekeeping. The rest of her was buried in Oak Hill Cemetery, although her daughter soon moved the body to an unmarked grave to prevent vandalism. Almost a hundred years later, a very surprised courthouse clerk discovered the woman's head in a storage closet. Since the location of Ware's body was by that time completely unknown, the city buried her head with its own tombstone. Okay, ready for a slightly more graphic example? Let's go out west in the 1870s. A man named Stephen Decatur Richards, who was also later known as the Ohio Monster or the Nebraska Fiend, went on a two-year killing spree. He left a trail of somewhere between nine and twelve bodies, a count that included a mother and her three children. In 1879, he was captured and quickly hanged in front of an angry mob. The sheriff posted guards at his gravesite, but it did little good. Within 48 hours, his corpse had been dug up and removed from its coffin. The local paper suggested it was likely doctors who had wanted to study him for posterity. A few days later, Richards was miraculously returned to his grave. Fast forward several months, and his body was dug up again. This time his bones were scattered and placed in public areas all around town. That left the local lawman with a gruesome task, collecting each of his bones. And by all accounts, they did a lousy job at this. While most of Richards was reburied, that same local newspaper got hold of his skull. They then placed it on display in their office window, and soon the skull vanished into history. So, how about the Gothic South? In my research, I found dozens of reports of bodies buried without limbs and limbs buried without bodies. I guess it was more common than you'd think. To start, the past few hundred years were a dangerous time. In rural areas, doctors could be scarce. Too often, it was easier to simply lose a limb than face the risk of an infection and a slow death. So, a bad day at the sawmill or a little rough luck while fishing with dynamite, and I promise I'll get back to that in a second, could be both life-altering and limb deleting. If you visit Oak Hill Cemetery in Noonan, Georgia, just a bit southwest of Atlanta, you might come across a very curious grave marker. The flat stone measures no bigger than a welcome doormat, it has no name, no dates, in fact, there's no inscription at all. It just features a relief carving of somebody's arm. It turns out that buried beneath that marker is exactly that, a human arm. Back in late 19th century Georgia, John, Harrison Keith worked at the local sawmill. Following a workplace accident, he lost an arm. And apparently it's the right arm if the stone carving is accurate. It was buried here, and some 50 years later, the rest of Keith was buried in a nearby grave next to his wife Sarah. Just under three hours north of Keith's arm, the arm of Adolphus Buell Stanley is buried at the Stanley Creek Church Cemetery in Blue Ridge. According to the inscription, 49-year-old Buell, as he was known, lost the arm while attempting to fish on the Tacoa River using sticks of dynamite. At his request, the arm was given a good Christian burial. The loss of the arm didn't seem to slow him down though, and the rest of Buell lived another 28 years. Today he is buried nearby in the Macedonia Church Cemetery. On a side note, local lore notes that Buell's father, Elisha Stanley, occupies a shared grave with his brother-in-law, Elv Evan Hughes. The two were killed for refusing to join the Confederate Army. To save both time and energy, they were buried in a single grave, as there were no men left to help the women dig. A better known arm lies buried, or possibly not, at Elwood Manor in Virginia. According to historians, General Stonewall Jackson was accidentally shot by friendly fire at the Battle of Chancellorsville in 1863. In the gunfire, his left arm was shattered. The doctors had no option but to amputate the ruined limb. Elwood Manor was home to the J. Horace Lacey family, and they had a lovely family cemetery there. So the choice was made to bury the arm at the manor, and it was overseen by Beverly Tucker Lacey, who served as the general's chaplain. It turns out that they all could have saved a lot of time as Jackson only lived a few more days before dying from his wounds. After his death, he was buried in Lexington, Virginia. His widow, Mary Anna Jackson, declined to have the arm dug up and reburied. Since then, however, there have been several reports that the arm has been disinterred and returned to Lexington. Today a granite marker notes the spot where Jackson's arm may or may not be buried. Now, Jackson's story was one that was all too common during the Civil War. Historians estimate that nearly 75% of all battlefield operations during the war were limb amputations. Union records suggest that just upper arm amputations accounted for 5,540 procedures. Sadly, the risk of unsanitary instruments and conditions meant that many of these operations failed to save the patient. Of those upper arm procedures, an estimated 1,270 died from complications, a nearly one in four fatality rate. Today, what might be considered medical waste was, even during the horrors of wartime, seen as a solemn separation. With so many amputations being conducted under such brutal conditions, efforts were still made to give the arms and legs a Christian burial. In June of 2018, researchers located a civil war limb pit near the town of McLean, Virginia. In that grave, they uncovered two full skeletons and evidence of at least a dozen additional miscellaneous limbs. Each of the bones showed clear marks from surgical instruments, likely following the Second Battle of Bull Run. One of the strangest stories to come from the Civil War happened just as the conflict drew to a close. While John Wilkes Booth is best remembered for the assassination of President Lincoln on April 14, 1865, there were several others who were tried and imprisoned or executed for their part in the plot. Of the eight co-conspirators, there was one, a Confederate soldier named Lewis Thornton Powell, whose bizarre story continued far beyond his death at the gallows. Born in Alabama, Powell was the youngest of eight children. Now he cut a striking figure at well over six feet tall with a broad jaw due to a mule kick when he was thirteen. In his late teens, he fought for the 2nd Florida Infantry in the Peninsula Campaign of 1862. In a bit of uncomfortable foreshadowing, Powell was said to have carried the skull of a Union soldier, which he used as an ashtray. Over the next three years, he fought, was captured, escaped, and fought some more, earning himself the nickname Lewis the Terrible. In early 1865, Powell met John Wilkes Booth in Baltimore, a meeting that changed and likely shortened both of their lives forever. The two became fast friends, and with a group of fellow malcontents, they plotted to kidnap and kill President Lincoln. While Booth stalked their target at Ford's Theater, Powell made his way to the home of Secretary of State William Seward. Despite his size and extensive military experience, Powell was an absolute dumpster fire when it came to stealthy murder. He first bluffed his way into the house with a delivery of medicine for an injured Seward. Powell was quickly confronted by several members of the house. When his gun misfired, he instead pistol whipped Seward's son, attacked the attending sergeant with a hunting knife, and attempted to stab Seward in the face and neck. The secretary had just been injured in a carriage accident. So, fortunately for him, he was bound up in a splint of metal and canvas around his jaw. This deflected most of the blows failing to kill Seward, Powell attacked a second Seward son and a State Department messenger, then fled the building without successfully killing anyone. Three days later he was arrested and easily identified as the man who had attacked the Secretary. The following year, all eight co-conspirators were tried and hung from gallows erected in the Arsenal courtyard in Washington, D.C. As wild as the past year had been, Powell's death is where things really started to get confusing. Originally, he was buried along the east wall of the prison yard with Booth and several of the others. Two years later, the bodies were moved elsewhere in the arsenal, and two years after that, President Johnson agreed to release the remains to their families. What happened next is just a collective guess. Some records suggest that Powell's family in Florida asked to retrieve his body, but they never showed up. Over the years, his bones were then moved from DC's Graceland Cemetery to Holmeade's burying ground. So why am I telling you this story? When the family eventually did show up in 1871, they were given his body for yet another reburial. Well, they got most of his body. Without any explanation, Powell's head was missing. On the way home, according to this story, Powell's father fell ill. So they buried their dead son one more time at a small anonymous farm somewhere along the route back south. Other historians suggest that Powell's family declined to retrieve him, so he was moved again and again before landing in Holmead's burying ground. True or not, Holmead's closed in 1874, and for 10 years bodies were dug up and redistributed around the region. The most reliable report suggests that Powell was moved from the burying ground in 1884 and reburied in a mass grave at nearby Rock Creek Cemetery. That, however, was not the end of Powell's tale. In 1991, a stunned researcher at the Smithsonian was cataloging the museum's Native American skull collection. They stumbled across a skull that was later identified as belonging to Powell, hidden among the specimens. An investigation was launched, and it seems that A. H. Gowler of Gowler's funeral home was in charge of the move to Holmeads. They say that Gowler lifted the skull for unknown reasons. Fifteen years later, though, he donated it to the Army Medical Museum, and in time it found its way to the Smithsonian. The museum was able to contact Powell's closest living relatives, and on November 12, 1994, his skull was buried next to the grave of his mother, Carolyn Patience Powell, at Geneva Cemetery just outside of Orlando. Today you can visit the grave of Powell's skull among the palm scrub beneath the oak trees in the small Florida. Community. So with murder, mayhem, and a little grave robbing, the tale of Lewis Powell's head has just about everything I love in a good southern legend. Except, of course, a ghost on the prowl for his missing skull. Next up on Haunts and Hollows, True Tales of the Gothic South, I'll reveal the name of the deadliest small town in Georgia. It's a quiet rural community that attracts death and destruction like flies to honey. Want more folk legends and true tales from the Gothic South? I invite you to subscribe to this podcast. I will send you a new episode every other week. In each, we will uncover the places, the people, the customs, and the stories that lurk in the shadowed history of the South. You can also check out my latest book, Haint, Tales and Other Stories, for 40 historic legends of spectral hauntings, paranormal encounters, and southern ghost lore. It's a perfect read for a stormy night. If you want to see me in person, visit me online at hauntsandhollows.com for a list of my latest releases and a schedule of cons and events that I attend all around the South. Until then, safe travels.