At King’s Tavern in Natchez, Mississippi, the legend of a murdered woman named Madeline has endured for generations. In the finale of The Devil’s Road, Southern Mysteries explores the tavern’s documented history, its reported hauntings, and the folklore surrounding one of the Natchez Trace’s most mysterious landmarks.
Once a thriving community along the Natchez Trace, Rocky Springs, Mississippi, slowly disappeared. Explore its Civil War history, devastating yellow fever epidemic, the lynching of Amos Hicks, and legends of buried treasure and ghostly encounters surrounding this forgotten town.
Ancient burial mounds line the Natchez Trace, preserving the history of people who lived there nearly two thousand years ago. At one of those sites, Pharr Mounds, a brutal 1992 murder added a much more recent story to this ancient landscape.
In 1972, Bryce, Virginia and Bobby Durham were murdered in Boone, North Carolina. An investigation produced arrests and murder indictments, but the case collapsed. Fifty years later, information from Georgia revived the investigation, leading authorities to Billy Sunday Birt, Billy Wayne Davis and an unexpected explanation for the crime.
In 1929, five men in Stone County, Arkansas, were charged with murdering Connie Franklin. Then, just days before the trial, a man appeared claiming to be Franklin, very much alive. This Southern Mysteries Classic revisits the bizarre Arkansas Ghost Trial and the questions that still remain nearly a century later.
At the bottom of West Virginia’s New River Gorge, the nearly abandoned railroad town of Thurmond hides a history of coal wealth, rival businessmen, gambling, violence and suspicious deaths. This episode traces the rise of Thurmond and the infamous Dun Glen Hotel, the crimes that earned the area a lawless reputation, and the town’s transformation from a booming C&O railroad center into a preserved part of New River Gorge National Park and Preserve.
