Picher Oklahoma: America’s Most Toxic Ghost Town (Abandoned Lead Mining Disaster)

Deep in the East Tennessee mountains, Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary was built from the Coal Creek War and the end of convict leasing. For 113 years, men were sent to the end of the line to dig coal inside a mountain that kept most of its secrets. Today the prison is a historic site, and visitors and paranormal investigators report shadow figures, whispering voices, and freezing cold spots in the halls.

Desperation, Nevada – a dying copper town on the loneliest road in America, where the tables are still set, the coffee is still hot, and nobody has been home in years. Stephen King's fictional mining town is the destination this week, and the silence there is listening.

On September 12, 1952, a glowing object dropped from the sky over Flatwoods, West Virginia. A group of boys, a mother, a young National Guardsman and a dog climbed the hill to look. They ran back down describing a ten-foot figure with a blood-red face, a pointed hood and glowing eyes, gliding toward them out of a foul mist. Was it a visitor from another world, or a startled barn owl having a very bad night? In this episode of Destination Terror, we visit the Braxton County hills to dig into the witnesses, the investigators and the skeptics behind the Flatwoods Monster. Our story tonight is a work of fiction inspired by the legend. It deals with a marriage falling apart, a man with a drinking problem, and a very bad night to be out in the woods. Listener discretion is advised.

High in the hills east of the Sierra Nevada sits Bodie, California. It was once one of the most lawless gold rush boomtowns in the West, and today it's the most famous ghost town in America. Its buildings stand frozen in time, with dishes still on the tables and goods still on the shelves. The town has one rule: take nothing. Visitors who pocketed a nail, a shard of glass or even a pebble have reported illness, accidents and a run of bad luck, and every week the park receives apology letters with the stolen items rattling inside.

For over 600 years, monks climbed 600 hand-cut stone steps to live in total isolation on a jagged rock in the Atlantic — hunting God at the edge of the world. Then, without a single written explanation, they vanished. Tonight we climb Skellig Michael's stairway into a storm, a missing brother, and a wordless song rising up from the sea that the monastery was never meant to hear. Real history, real deaths, and a mystery no historian has ever solved.