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, we trace 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.