Deadly Dames, Part 2 | Ep 5 | Six More Lethal Southern Ladies with a Mind for Murder

What if the most dangerous person in the room wasn’t the one you’d ever suspect? History has a way of overlooking women, and for decades, even the FBI refused to acknowledge they could be serial killers at all. This episode of Haunts & Hollows: True Tales of the Gothic South aims to set the record straight.

In this second installment of our Deadly Dames series, we round out our list of twelve lethal women with six more cases that are equal parts fascinating and disturbing. Along the way, we unpack why female killers are so much harder to catch (Need a hint? They tend to know their victims, favor undetectable methods like poison, and often operate in plain sight as trusted caregivers).

The first trio killed not for money, but out of psychological compulsion: a veterans’ hospital nursing assistant who fatally injected elderly patients, a mentally ill nurse who kept a handwritten list of her victims, and a troubled babysitter who suffocated multiple children in her care.

The second trio were coldly profit-driven: Charleston’s legendary 18th-century innkeeper who allegedly poisoned travelers, a churchgoing grandmother who arsenic-poisoned five family members for insurance payouts, and the infamous “Giggling Granny,” Nannie Doss, who killed eleven people across three decades, including four husbands, before anyone thought to look her way.

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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.

Transcript

Let me start with a simple question. How many serial killers can you name now off the top of your head? Think of your top ten. Okay, good. Now, how many of these are actually women? And if there aren’t many (or perhaps even any) women on your list, that shouldn’t come as a surprise. As we discussed in the podcast’s last episode, murder is usually thought of as, and this is historically at least, as a male crime, and this extends to the ranks of serial killers, both those we can name and those who still remain unidentified. So, history suggests that time and time again, the diabolical murderers lurking in the shadows, just waiting to claim their next victims? They’re probably men. A little research shows that that doesn’t have to be the case. So, to round out our list of twelve deadly dames, I want to dive into to six lethal ladies or fatal females, your choice, who have left their marks on the history books and dozens of innocent lives.

Welcome to Haunts & Hollows: True Tales of the Gothic South. I’m your host, mystery author Liam Ashe. In this episode, I’ll be taking a look at a second half-dozen of twelve deadly dames. These women, and today it’s going to be Lethal Ladies and Fatal Females, weren’t going to let something as trivial as a little murder stand between them and what they felt life owed them. This episode of Haunts & Hollows is sponsored by my friends at Arca Noctis. They encourage you to unlock your curiosity with their collection of the odd, the unusual, and the obscure.

Most of us have grown up with the stories of modern day women killers like Aileen Wuornos. You’d think that we’d all agree that she clearly fits the term “serial killer,” but that’s a surprisingly recent development. I want to start this off with an interesting fact. The FBI wouldn’t recognize the existence of female serial killers until the 1990s. So before then, and that’s officially at least, they contended that all serial killers were men. And before we get too deep into these numbers, what exactly is a serial killer? Now, according to the FBI, there are two important factors. First, there needs to be a string of three or more victims. Second, and this is the part most people don’t know, there needs to be a cooling off period between the killings. For FBI analysts, that’s at least one week. Otherwise, you simply have a spree killer or a mass murderer on your hands.

Let’s take a dive into some of the other facts about women’s serial killers and how they differ from men. The biggest difference is the prevalence. The serial killer population in the US is thought to be split up into about to 90% men, so only 10 to 15% percent women. That means that men are six to nine times more likely to fall into that category. On a side note, in 2023, it was estimated that only about 8% of reported serial murders in the U.S. were committed by women, so it would be easy to jump to the conclusion that the men were racking up more victims than their women counterparts by a margin as high as two to one. But there’s another possibility. Female killers may just be far better at hiding their crimes, and I’ll have more on that idea in a few minutes.

So, what else sets the women apart? How about their motives? Studies suggest that male serial killers do what they do, and this is more often than not, due to sexual urges or domination fantasies. It’s an issue of exerting control over another person. Women, on the other hand, are more likely to kill for financial gain, revenge, or ideations of mercy, such as in the case of what we call “angels of death” killers. This is not 100% true in every case, but it is an undeniable trend in serial killer populations.

As men are thought to kill for control, they are far more likely to kill strangers. And that same recent study points to the fact that almost two thirds of these killers stalked their victims first, to learn their habits and routines. Women, on the other hand, typically know their victims well. More than 90% of the victims were known to their killers, and nearly two thirds were immediate family members. As such, less than 4% of the victims were stalked ahead of the actual murders.

So, what about their methods and means? This is a critical difference. Men tend to express aggression outwardly. As such, their crimes tend to be more overt. They use guns, knives, and even torture to achieve those goals. They leave bodies, blood, and evidence behind as a sign that they have successfully killed. Many times, the crimes aren’t even hidden and instead they are positioned to draw maximum publicity after the fact. Women, on the other hand, have been conditioned to internalize aggression. This can lead to manipulation, depression, or even self-harm. They are much more likely to kill alone (and that’s without a partner) and use means that are not as readily detectable. Think poison, for example. This means that authorities are often not aware there is even a killer at work until the statistics, like a string of unusual deaths in a nursing home, prove otherwise. As such, female serial killers often ply their trade for far longer before detection and capture.

So, now that we’ve looked at the numbers, I want to focus on six more lethal ladies who left a trail of bodies in their wake. These first three all follow a common thread: they killed for reasons other than financial gain. There was no inheRetance or insurance payouts, and as you’ll soon see, they might have done it out of frustration, mental illness, or perhaps they thought their actions were viewed as benevolence.

Speaking of numbers, a high death count in a hospital isn’t exactly unexpected. I mean, that’s where people go to take their final breaths. Places like the Louis A. Johnson Veterans Medical Center in Clarksburg, West Virginia. When an unusual pattern emerges, though, now you’ve got a problem, and that’s exactly what happened in July of 2017. It was right about then when elderly patients began suffering from severe, unexplained drops in their blood sugar levels. Over the next year, twenty patients were thought to have died due to hyperglycemia, including many who were never even insulin dependent.

After the death of an 84 year old Korean War vet named Archie Edgell, the staff took a closer look. He had suffered a dangerous blood sugar drop, only to be stabilized, but then died from a second drop a few days later. When the hospital performed an autopsy, they were alarmed by what they found. Archie’s body showed clear signs of four recent unexplained injections. That fact alone launched a formal investigation to eleven deaths over the past year.

Police soon focused their attention on a woman named Reta Phyllis Mays. She was a graveyard shift nursing assistant at the center. Their initial suspicions were based simply on her work schedule, because it overlapped the times and dates when the victims were most likely given these unprescribed injections. Born in nearby Reynoldsville, Reta was a U.S. National Guard veteran who was deployed for a time to Iraq and Kuwait with the 192 Engineer Battalion. After returning home, she worked as a corrections officer, and the only thing of note there was that she was one defendant in an inmate’s lawsuit that alleged that he had been repeatedly beaten by Reta and other officers. Ultimately, that lawsuit was dismissed on a summary judgment.

So, two years before the string of deaths began, Reta was hired by the Veterans Medical Center as an uncertified and unlicensed nursing assistant. Over the course of her time there, Reta’s ward experienced more than 100 deaths, with nearly half involving what’s known as a hypoglycemic (or low blood sugar) event. Twenty one of these were so unusual that they were termed an “adverse event.” And for us nonmedical types, that’s any unusual sign, symptom or even lab result that suggests something just isn’t quite right here.

Throughout a two year investigation, Reta maintained her innocence even after she was let go from the center. In the meantime, the police were building one hell of a circumstantial case against the former nursing assistant. And honestly, this is about as good as circumstantial cases get.

So, let’s run through this first, her work schedule put her on site for each of these adverse events. That’s not a great start. Second, her internet search history showed an unapologetic interest in female serial killers. That’s not great either. And third, her Netflix account included the series “Nurses Who Kill” on the recently watched list, including episodes about nurses who had killed using insulin. So, so far, this is a decent case, but not yet a slam dunk. Well, that dunk came from phone calls she made to her husband, Gordon. At the time, he was in prison for child sexual materials, so their calls were recorded. Among some of the statements Reta made included wanting to, quote unquote, “freaking strangle” one of her patients on the morning following one of these adverse events and a suggestion that another patient had no quality of life and would simply go to sleep if his blood sugar level dropped low enough.

The case proved plenty strong enough, and on May 11, 2021, Reta was sentenced to seven life sentences plus twenty years for these crimes. After agreeing to a plea deal, she admitted in court that she had killed the patients. She never offered a motive, but she did note that she was being treated for PTSD at the time. In a later interview, she claimed she only wanted to help these patients avoid suffering and pass away gently.

This trope of the Angel of Death is a common one when we’re studying female serial killers. Whether due to stress, mental fatigue, or even just a need for control in uncertain matters like life and death, these women are depicted as choosing to end a victim’s life as an act of mercy. In Reta’s case, there were not many signs that anything was amiss until those patients started dying.

Now, other serial killers give plenty of warnings, but these signs are often ignored until things go very, very wrong. At Saint Petersburg’s North Horizon Health Center. The first sign that something was very, very wrong was the death of 97 year old Aggie Marsh on the night of November 13, 1984. Well, given her age, this alone didn’t raise any eyebrows. Well, that’s until 94 year old Anna Larsen nearly died a few days later. The cause? It was an insulin overdose, and this was only suspicious as Mrs. Larsen was not diabetic. A week later, 85 year old Lacey McKnight died from another insulin overdose. And on that same night, a fire which was likely arson broke out in a hospital linen closet.

Two days later, two more patients, 97 year old Mary Cartwright and 85 year old Stella Bradham, died on the overnight shift. The next day, five more patients died, one right after the other. And to up the creepy factor, an anonymous call was placed to the facility, claiming that all five had been murdered. When the police arrived at North Horizon before dawn the next day, a nurse was found with a non-fatal stab wound in her side. That nurse, an Illinois native named Bobbie Sue Terrell, blamed the attack on a prowler, and she even filed a $22,000 claim for workman’s comp for those injuries. This is when everything began to unravel, and the truth, as confusing as it would be, came to light.

So, let’s go back a few years, because Bobbie Sue’s story begins in 1952, when she was born one of seven siblings in a tiny Illinois town. She was an average student, but a devout and outspoken churchgoer. She even played the organ and sang in the choir. After graduation, she became a registered nurse and married a man named Danny Dudley. When she found that they were unable to have children, they adopted a son. But the child was soon hospitalized for a drug overdose. Danny accused his wife of feeding the boy the tranquilizers she had been prescribed for her own schizophrenia.

The couple soon divorced, and Bobbie Sue lost her parental rights after five hospital stays in a very short time. She voluntarily committed herself to a state mental hospital for more than a year. Despite this, she found work as a nurse at a local rest home. After several unexplained incidents at the home, and that included two different occasions on which Bobbie Sue was stabbed by persons unknown, she was let go, so she moved to Florida in 1984, and she eventually found work at North Horizon.

When the police uncovered her medical and professional history. Bobbie Sue became their prime suspect in the twelve unexplained deaths. In early 1985, Bobbie Sue was voluntarily hospitalized for psychiatric evaluation. Officials used this time to exhume several of the dead patients. Florida’s Department of Professional Regulation suspended her nursing license by an emergency order. They also asked the state’s Board of Nursing to permanently revoke her credentials.

While released from the hospital, Bobbie Sue kept busy, too. First, she demanded a formal hearing over her license. Second, she also married a 38 year old Tampa plumber named Ron Terrell. And despite this new start as Bobbie Sue 2.0, she was soon back in another mental ward. But this time it was against her will. While she was there, the state’s board announced a five year suspension of her license. Despite her history and the ongoing police investigation, the board said she could actually get her license back if she underwent psychiatric treatment. All I can say is that was very, very optimistic of them.

Fortunately, and that’s for the board at least, they’d never have to regret that ruling, as Bobbie Sue was formally charged on March 17 with the attempted murder of Anna Larson. Four more charges quickly followed. For her part, Bobbie Sue swore up and down that she had no involvement in the deaths. Now, this was harder to take at face value when police found a notebook under her mattress at home. It contained a five page manifesto that listed each dead patient, their names, their bed numbers and the exact times they died. Finally, in February of 1988, Bobbi Sue pled guilty to reduced charges of second degree murder. She received a 65 year sentence and died in 2007 before any chance of release.

So, what exactly happened here? And I’m not talking about the lack of background checks or the state board giving her a path to get her license back. In Bobbie Sue’s case, there was clearly a history of mental illness, both diagnosed and undiagnosed at the time. They did a formal evaluation for her during the trial and claimed she suffered from schizophrenia, the related disorder of Munchausen’s Syndrome and possibly Munchausen’s by Proxy. Despite this psychological need to harm herself and others, she was noted as a very effective caregiver. One spokesman for the North Horizon facility called her a damn good nurse, lucid as hell and a bright diagnostician.

This type of duality is one reason female serial killers often go undetected. Other killers display all the classic indicators of serial killer tendencies things like social isolation, extreme cruelty to animals, and possible signs of mental illness. But few have checked as many boxes as Florida native Christine Laverne Slaughter, and in every way, this is just a sad story. Christine was born in 1963 to a 65 year old man and his new 16 year old wife. From an early age, she suffered from epilepsy and was considered mentally challenged. As a young girl, she spent long periods of time in local orphanages when her parents couldn’t afford to support her. They thought they found a better solution when they forced her at age 14 to marry an older man. Fortunately, that marriage only lasted six weeks.

Unfortunately, Christine was already giving off several warning signs. Most glaring was her contempt for small animals. She would kill domestic cats, often by strangulation or by throwing them from great heights. When she was confronted about the behavior, she would dismiss the concerns by noting that the cats still had eight lives left. For the two years following her divorce, she was hospitalized nearly fifty times for vague symptoms. No medical causes or conditions could ever be found. Her chief complaint was hallucinations, and that included red dots that would appear before her eyes. By the age of 16, she was diagnosed as medically incapacitated.

What followed was a series of bizarre deaths, quick moves, and faulty diagnoses. The first death occurred on February 28, 1980. Three days earlier, Christine had been babysitting two year old Cassidy Johnson, also known as Muffin. She claimed the baby had passed out and fallen from her crib. On the surface, this explained the autopsy report of death due to blunt force trauma to the skull that led to brain inflammation and Muffin’s death just 72 hours later. Years later, Christine would admit that Muffin had gotten, in her words, “rowdy or something.” So, she choked the girl until she stopped breathing and turned purple.

At the time of the child’s death, the attending physician suspected foul play, and he wrote a note recommending a police investigation. According to investigators, that note was lost and never seen.

After this death, Christine moved to nearby Lakeland, Florida. Two months later, four year old Jeffrey Davis died while under her care. The cause was thought to be myocarditis, a heart condition which usually is not fatal. Three days later, during Jeffrey’s funeral, his cousin, two year old Joseph Spring, died while being watched by Christine. This time, the doctor said it was a viral infection. Again, Christine left town. The next year, eight month old Jennifer Daniels died under her half-sister Christine’s care. This time, the doctors blamed SIDs, or Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.

Well, everybody finally caught on in July of 1982, when ten week old Travis Coleman died while Christine was babysitting. This time, the doctors identified internal injuries that could only have been caused by suffocation. When confronted, Christine later admitted she had just choked him for no reason. She picked him up, choked him and put him back into his crib. She ultimately confessed to suffocating three of the children in her care. Her only defense was a claim that voices demanded that she kill the baby.

During the investigation, police discovered one more disturbing detail while living for a brief time in Perry, Florida. In 1981, she worked as a nursing assistant and housekeeper for seniors as babysitting jobs were becoming very hard for her to come by. One of her clients, a 77 year old named William Swindle, died in his kitchen on the same day that Christine began caring for him. In the end, she pled guilty to killing Cassidy, Jeffrey, and Travis. She is still serving three concurrent life sentences, and although she was eligible for parole in 2017 and then again in 2024, both were denied. Her projected release date is now the year 2254.

These next three fatal females belong to what experts insist is the largest percentage of women serial killers, women who kill (and that’s usually husbands and other family members) for profit. For this trio, let’s start at the beginning. Born in 1893, Lavinia Fisher was a South Carolina innkeeper, likely a member in a local gang of highwaymen robbers, and if the legends are true, one of America’s first serial killers. Now, there are some parts of Lavinia’s life that are more or less accepted as fact. It is known that she and her husband, John, owned and operated the Six Mile Wayfarer House, which, as the name would suggest, was located about six miles north of Charleston. During that time, there were several reports of guests going missing, but Lavinia and John were popular with the locals, so nothing came of these rumors.

In two separate accounts, guests to the Six Mile Wayfarer House made some fairly damning statements about its owners. One young man named David Ross was near the inn with a vigilante posse intent on stopping what was considered gang activity in the area. When he was separated from his colleagues, he was attacked by a group of highwaymen  robbers, a group that included, and you probably guessed this, Lavinia Fisher. When he begged her specifically for mercy, she choked and struck him. Despite the odds, he did escape, and he gave a detailed account to the authorities.

Almost immediately after David’s encounter, another man named John Peoples stopped at the inn for a night’s sleep. According to his report, Lavinia offered him a cup of tea, and that will be very important later. He hated tea, so he dumped it out when she wasn’t looking. When she eventually gave him a room, he chose to sleep in a chair by the door out of fear. And that was until the bed collapsed, which is also very important. At that point, he just fled through an open window and alerted the authorities.

So, here’s where the facts and the fiction they start to diverge. Whether based on actual events or on tales spun from these two accounts, Lavinia was said to have been up to a good deal of murderous mayhem. According to Charleston legend, her modus operandi was to offer lone guests a cup of laced tea, and yes, I told you that would be important. As she waited for the drugs to take their hold, she’d interrogate the guests about their lives to determine if they might have anything of value, and in what can only be called Shades of Sweeney Todd, when the groggy guest was led to a room, their beds would collapse in the night, dropping them to the basement and a certain death at Lavinia’s hands.

Regardless of whether truth or fantasy, the authorities now had names, locations and two eyewitness accounts, and so police were able to arrest the pair. John admitted to everything, offering the other gang members in an attempt to spare his and Lavinia’s lives. At trial, however, they both proclaimed their innocence. Even so, they were both found guilty and sentenced to execution. At one point, they even attempted to escape from their shared cell. However, their rope of bedsheets broke, leaving John on the ground and Lavinia still trapped in the cell above. He did the gentlemanly thing and eventually turned himself in to be with his wife. And this is where a little more fantasy comes in. At their hanging, it was said that Lavinia asked to wear her wedding dress, which has given rise to countless claims of the ghosts of a vengeful bride at Old City Jail. She was also said to have had a few choice final words, and I quote, “If you have a message you want to send to hell, give it to me and I’ll carry it.” As you can tell from her tale, Lavinia, and that’s if we agree that she was in fact a woman serial killer, was an atypical one — she killed strangers.

The friends and families of these next two weren’t nearly as lucky. So, our next killer was also an unusual case. Unlike many of the women we’ve discussed, Janie Lou Hickox got a very late start on her career as a sociopath. She was born on Christmas Day, 1932, and her first 30 years were entirely nondescript. She married Charles Gibbs in 1948, and they had three healthy boys, Marvin, Melvin and Roger. She was active in her church and even ran a small daycare center out of her house.

So clearly, there was absolutely nothing in any of the way out of place until 1965, when Charles was admitted to the hospital for a laundry list of complaints. To make sure he was eating well, Janie Lou brought him homemade chicken soup every day. The soup didn’t seem to work as Charles died on January 21, 1966, of what doctors listed as liver disease. Janie Lou was allegedly devastated and her church rushed to support her in her hour of grief. She was so thankful, in fact, that she donated a large chunk of Charles life insurance payout to the church.

Eight months later, tragedy struck again and 13 year old Marvin followed his father. The doctors noted it was probably the same liver disease that he must have inherited from Charles. This resulted in another insurance payout and another donation to Janie Lou’s adoring congregation. Six months later, 16 year old Melvin died suddenly from what was listed as a rare muscular disorder. Queue more insurance money and more love from the church. And like clockwork, Janey Liu’s infant grandchild, Ronnie was the next to go, followed a month later by the previously healthy 19 year old Roger. Doctors and authorities finally noticed a pattern after exhumation and autopsies. All five bodies showed critically high levels of arsenic. They charged that Janey Liu had been doctoring her family’s food with the lethal poison, leading to all five deaths.

At first, she was found mentally unfit to stand trial and committed to a mental institution. While there, she was given work and this is completely, inexplicably, as a cook. Later, she was deemed fit for trial and she received five life sentences. She remained in prison until 1999, when she was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and sent to live with her sister. She died 11 years later at age 78, the last living Gibb in her family.

I wanted to end this list of twelve with one of my favorites, and she’s a name known to most true crime aficionados. The Legend of Nannie Doss has grown exponentially over the past seventy years. With a staggering eleven deaths attributed to her, Nannie has earned a variety of nicknames, including The Lonely Hearts Killer, Lady Bluebeard, and, most famously, the Giggling Granny. Nanny’s early life was actually normal enough for the times. She was raised on a farm in turn of the century Blue Mountain, Alabama. The only incident of any real note was a train accident when she was seven, according to interviews. The train stopped suddenly, and she hit her head against a metal rail. She later claimed that this led to severe headaches, blackouts and, in the end, mental instability.

At the age of 16, Nannie married co-worker Charlie Braggs. They lived with his disapproving mother, who Nannie by all accounts despised. The couple had four daughters, although Nannie soon turned to smoking and heavy drinking to cope with her new home life. In 1927, two of the girls died due to what was suspected to be food poisoning. Allegedly out of fear of his wife, Charles took one daughter and fled, leaving Nannie with Florine, their youngest. The next year, he did return after his mother died, and he brought along with him another woman and her young child. At this point, Nannie had had enough and they divorced with Nannie and her two daughters moving back to her mother’s home.

Things did not get any better for her the second time around. This time, she married Robert Harrelson in 1929. He was an alcoholic with a criminal record for assault, but they stayed married for 16 years. Now, the first sign that something was gravely wrong may not have been a sign at all. In 1943, oldest daughter Malvina gave birth to baby Robert. Another baby followed in 1945, but soon died. While recovering from that labor and likely a heavy dose of ether, Malvina swore she saw Nannie stick a hat pin into the new baby’s head. Sister Florine confirmed that it was Nannie who had told them the baby died, and yes, she was without explanation holding a hat pin. Her doctor, however, claimed no signs of foul play. Later that year, young Robert died under Nannie’s care while Malvina was visiting her father. The cause was listed as asphyxia, and Nannie collected a $500 life insurance payout. A few months later, Harelson allegedly raped Nannie and she in returned poisoned his corn whiskey jar leading to his quick death.

Nannie met her third husband, Arlie Lanning, through a Lonely Hearts newspaper column, and he soon died of what was listed as heart failure. But due to their quick marriage, the couple’s home was still willed to Arlie’s sister. That proved to be of little concern as the house burned down and Nannie was able to keep the insurance payout. Next, Arlie’s mother died suddenly, so Nannie moved to North Carolina to be with her sister Dovie. And it should surprise no one listening that Dovie died soon after her sister’s arrival.

Okay, on to husband number four. Within fifteen months, he was dead, preceded a few weeks earlier by nanny’s mother, Louisa, who had come for what turned out to be a very short visit. Number five, Samuel Doss of Tulsa, Oklahoma. And from the start, they were not a great match. And three months after their wedding, he was in the hospital with flu like symptoms. He was looked over carefully and released, but when he died a week later, the doctors raised an alarm. The autopsy showed a huge amount of arsenic in his system. At long, long last, Nannie was arrested. Even though the state of Oklahoma was only focused on the death of Samuel Doss, Nannie confessed to several others. In the end, she is believed to have been responsible for the deaths of the following: four of her husbands, her mother, her sister, at least one mother in law, two of her own children and two of her grandsons.

On May 17, 1955, she pled guilty to Samuel’s murder, and she received life in prison. Because she was a woman, prosecutors declined to pursue the death penalty. During the trial, her bubbly nature earned her the nickname the Giggling Granny. She later died from leukemia in the hospital ward of the Oklahoma State Penitentiary almost ten years to the day from when she was sentenced.

Like many women killers in the earlier parts of this country’s history, Nannie was never considered a potential suspect despite a spree that lasted almost thirty years. She had never been seriously looked at in any of the earlier deaths. I hope we’ve all learned a thing or two since then.

So next up on Haunts & Hollows: True Tales of the Gothic South, we’ll take a look at one of my favorite mysteries. It’s a terrifying atmospheric phenomena reported all across the southern states: blood falls. These are historically documented storms where it wasn’t rain that fell from the sky, it was blood.

Want more folk legends and true tales from the Gothic South? I invite you to subscribe to this podcast. You’ll get a new episode every other week, and in each we’ll 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, Florida Coast, for a guided road trip to more than eighty of the darkest, most shadowed spots in the Sunshine State. If you want to see me in person, visit me online at hauntsandhollows.com for a list of latest releases and a schedule of cons and events that I attend all around the South.

Until then, safe travels.