Some towns get hit by disaster once and disappear. Others take a hit and keep coming back for more.

From a preacher’s curse that erased an entire county seat to a 30-foot wall of water that swallowed a sleeping Bible college campus, Georgia’s past is littered with tiny communities that fate and Mother Nature simply wiped from the map. No place, however, has paid a higher price than Gainesville, Georgia. It’s a city that has survived a devastating downtown fire, two catastrophic tornadoes decades apart, and a deadly industrial accident that killed workers before they even knew what hit them.

In this episode of Haunts & Hollows, we peel back the folk tales to reveal the true stories behind Georgia’s most lethal towns. These stories have now been told for generations, including a mad preacher calling for the wrath of God, more than 100 child workers trapped beneath a burning cotton mill, and entire families who were buried as they died, side by side in unimaginable conditions.

Because sometimes the scariest stories aren’t the ones we make up around a campfire. They’re the ones carved into headstones.