True American horror stories, told in the dark.
Haunted houses, asylums and prisons. People who walked into the night and never came back. Every one of them real.
American Dark retells one hundred of the country’s most chilling true cases from newspapers, court records and police files, with sources for every story. Read them all here, or download the whole collection free.
The Villisca Axe Murder House
The last good evening the Moore family ever had ended with applause. It was Sunday, June 9, 1912, and the Presbyterian church in Villisca, Iowa, was holding its Children’s Day program — a…
The cases everyone asks about
Six of the most infamous true stories in America. Start with any one of them. You won’t stop at one.
The Villisca Axe Murder House
The last good evening the Moore family ever had ended with applause. It was Sunday, June 9, 1912, and the Presbyterian church in Villisca, Iowa, was holding its Children’s Day program — a…
Read case No. 001 · 8 minThe Lizzie Borden House
Almost every word of that playground rhyme is wrong. It wasn’t an axe; it was almost certainly a hatchet. Abby Borden wasn’t Lizzie’s mother; she was her stepmother.
Read case No. 005 · 8 minElisa Lam
Elisa Lam’s death became one of the most discussed cases of the internet age. A short, grainy security video of her final hours was watched by millions of people.
Read case No. 067 · 5 minThe Yuba County Five
On the night of Friday, February 24, 1978, five young men from Yuba City, California, drove about fifty miles north to Chico to watch a college basketball game.
Read case No. 059 · 5 minThe Sodder Children
For nearly forty years, if you drove Route 16 outside Fayetteville, West Virginia, you passed a billboard with five children’s faces on it.
Read case No. 051 · 9 minBrandon Swanson
The last thing anyone ever heard Brandon Swanson say was two words, shouted into a cell phone in the dark. He had been talking to his father for forty-seven minutes.
Read case No. 053 · 8 minChoose your door
The Places That Remember
Axe-murder houses, abandoned asylums, prisons, hotels and battlefields where something terrible happened, and where people have reported strange things ever since.
Enter the haunted places → Part Two · 50 storiesInto Thin Air
The vanishings and unexplained deaths: people who walked out of a bar, a dorm, a farmhouse or a burning building, and were never found.
Follow the missing →What happened near you?
Every story happened somewhere real. The darker the state, the more cases it holds.
All 100 stories in one book. Free.
American Dark, Volume I collects every case on this site into a single 561-page ebook, with a case file for every story and full sources at the back. Read it offline, on a road trip, in a tent, or out loud around the fire.
- PDF for phones, tablets and computers
- EPUB for Kindle, Apple Books and e-readers
- No email, no sign-up, no catch
- Full table of contents and sources
More files from the cabinet
The Winchester Mystery House
There is a staircase in San Jose that climbs seven steps and ends at the ceiling. There is a door on the second floor that opens onto nothing — a sheer drop to the garden below.
Read case No. 002 · 7 minThe Stanley Hotel
On the night of October 30, 1974, a young writer and his wife checked into a grand white hotel in the Rocky Mountains on the last night before it closed for the winter.
Read case No. 008 · 6 minThe Amityville House
Some houses are haunted because of what happened inside them. The Dutch Colonial on Ocean Avenue in Amityville, Long Island, may be the only house in America that became world-famous for…
Read case No. 011 · 7 minAlcatraz
From the cell blocks of Alcatraz, on certain nights, the inmates could hear the city. San Francisco is only about a mile and a quarter away across the bay.
Read case No. 021 · 6 minThe Mothman
On the night of November 15, 1966, two young married couples were driving around an abandoned World War II munitions plant outside Point Pleasant, West Virginia, looking for something to do.
Read case No. 027 · 6 minD.B. Cooper
He bought his ticket with cash. It was the afternoon before Thanksgiving, November 24, 1971, at Portland International Airport in Oregon.
Read case No. 054 · 9 minThe Springfield Three
It was graduation night. On the afternoon of Saturday, June 6, 1992, Suzie Streeter and Stacy McCall walked across the stage at Kickapoo High School in Springfield, Missouri, and received…
Read case No. 056 · 5 minTara Calico
On June 15, 1989, a woman walking through the parking lot of a convenience store in Port St. Joe, a small town on the Gulf Coast of the Florida Panhandle, noticed something lying on the…
Read case No. 062 · 4 minThe Zodiac Killer
On the evening of December 20, 1968, two teenagers on their first date drove out to a lonely spot on Lake Herman Road, just outside the city of Vallejo, California, about thirty miles…
Read case No. 094 · 5 minThe stories that frighten us most are the ones that really happened.
Read them aloud. Read them alone. Just maybe not right before bed.
About these true horror stories
American Dark is a free archive of true American horror stories: the country’s most notorious haunted places and its strangest unsolved disappearances, told as narrative nonfiction. Part One covers places like the Villisca Axe Murder House, the Lizzie Borden House, the Winchester Mystery House, Waverly Hills Sanatorium and the Stanley Hotel. Part Two follows the missing, from the Sodder children and the Yuba County Five to D.B. Cooper, Brandon Swanson and Elisa Lam.
Every story starts with a case file (where, when, who and where things stand today) and ends with “What Remains”: what you can still visit, what was never explained, and who to contact if a case is still open. Hauntings are reported as witnesses described them, and the history underneath them is checked against the record. Sources are listed at the end of each story.