American Hauntings Podcast

January in Chicago was always brutal. The winter of 1946 was no different. Three murders with one kidnapping in the same area. Were they all the work of one killer? Or was an "innocent" man put away for life while a more brutal killer was still on the loose, living amongst us...?

There’s a house just outside the town of Ocklawaha, Florida, that stands as one of the most infamous locations in America’s gangland history. It was at this house where the last stand of the Barker gang took place and where Ma Barker and her son, Fred, battled it out with G-men before being shot to death. The violent and blood-soaked battle occurred many decades ago but there are many who believe it’s not quite over for the spirits that still linger behind these walls.

There was nothing unusual about that Easter Sunday in 1975.

“How’s your Volkswagen, Jimmie?” Leonard asked him.

James didn’t speak. He answered the question by shooting his brother, setting off a spiral of violence and rage that ended as the deadliest shooting spree to ever occur in a private home in America’s bloody history.

One that left a grim and troubling haunting behind.

On a windy hill near the small Southern Illinois town of Equality is a decaying mansion that was known for decades as the region’s most haunted house. It was a place dubbed Hickory Hill by its builder and over the years, it’s been many things – a plantation house, farmhouse, a tourist attraction, and many believe, a chamber of horrors for men and women brought to this house in chains. Thanks to the long-standing legend of the terrible things that occurred in the house, locals eventually began referring to it as “The Old Slave House.”

Hidden away in the deep, dark woods of the Chattahoochee National Forest was once an isolated mansion that was the object of terror to most of the people who lived in the small town of Summerville, Georgia.

A terror that lingers to this day.

It was on the chilly night of December 12 that year that a secluded house became a place of torture and bloodshed.

The name of the house – Corpsewood Manor – seems like something right out of a horror novel, but on that dark night, the terror was unbelievably real.