 In our very first story time video on this channel, I told you about the Gray Man, the first ghost story I ever heard as a child from my mother growing up. Well today, in our second story time video on this channel, we're gonna head back to South Carolina and I'm gonna tell you about the ghost story that scared the absolute crap out of me as a child. And to be honest with you, still shakes me up a little bit to this day. Anyway, before we get started, remember to hit that subscribe button, give us a like, tell your friends, share it around and hit the bell to be notified for more videos. Welcome to us, Oteric Atlanta. My name is Bryce and today I'm gonna tell you about Levenia Fisher. The story as it was told to me. And look at the story from a different perspective. When I was a teenager, I was in Charleston and I overheard somebody talking about how they were trying to rebuild the courthouse and all these big burly construction worker men were quitting on the job. They were having a really hard time getting stuff done. Now, if you are from Charleston, South Carolina or another town that has a lot of historical significance to the founding of the United States, then you probably have a historical society. Places like Charleston, Savannah, New Orleans, all these old cities, for there to be any renovations done in the historical district, it has to go through a historical society. So obviously it's pretty difficult to do renovations to begin with. And now we've got this situation on our hand where the construction workers hired to do the renovations are quitting. Just dropping their tools, walking out, not coming back. And for the person that was telling this story, the most logical explanation for why these big burly men were walking out on the job was because they were seeing the ghost of Lavinia Fisher. Lavinia Fisher, we assume, was born in the late 1700s, possibly around 1790 to 1795. We don't have any records of her birth. We don't know who her parents were. We don't even know if she was technically born in Charleston, she could have emigrated from England or elsewhere, but it is assumed that she was born in Charleston. And if it wasn't for the situation around her death, she probably would have gone on to be one of the countless many faces throughout our world history that have just fallen through the cracks. We do know that Lavinia Fisher at some point married a man named John Fisher. Now, Lavinia and John Fisher ran a boarding house. It was called the Six Mile Wayfare House that was six miles outside of Charleston, South Carolina. For those who are up on their history, again, Charleston was a very big port, a lot of ships came in, and so a lot of men would come in and out of Charleston as traveling salesmen. They would roll their carriages up, go to market, sell their furs, sell whatever it is they were selling. It was a big cosmopolitan area of business. And so for Lavinia and John, they set up their bed and breakfast, their little inn, to greet these men as they were coming into the city, give them a place to rest up before the last bit of their journey into market the next day. Six Miles, for us, doesn't seem that long of a travel to get somewhere, but you have to remember this was in a time where there were no cars, they were on a horseback. So Six Miles was a bit of a journey into the city. And so the story I was told was that John and Lavinia would take in these salesmen and these men would never be seen again. Now, this little racket they had going on apparently went on for a pretty long time. Of course, again, these traveling salesmen, they were not local to Charleston. And back in those days, there was no GPS. There was no way of really tracking someone. You could disappear pretty easily. So for their loved ones back at home for someone to go missing, there's no telling what happened to them. So John and Lavinia Fisher, they took this as an opportunity. They would take these men in and they would feed them and give them room and board. Well, the Orleander flower is a flower that grows in Charleston, South Carolina. And it is notoriously a poisonous flower. Many a days, dogs, horses will get into these plants and get very sick and sometimes die. So what John and Lavinia would do is they would take the Orleander flower and they would crush it up and put it into tea. This would kill the men. They would take the bodies, bury the bodies in the backyard and then they would take all of their products and sell them themselves. And then as I was told, the gig was up when one day a hunter was out with his dogs in the area of their inn. And the dogs dug up these bones. Upon seeing the bones, the hunter realized that these were not animal bones. These were human bones. He turned them into the city of Charleston. He alerted the authorities and John and Lavinia Fisher were arrested. Now, once that they were arrested, they were found guilty and sentenced to hang. Now for John Fisher, this was a no-brainer. But then when it got to Lavinia Fisher, that was a little bit of a trickier situation. You see, laws in Charleston or in South Carolina at that time said that a woman who was married could not be executed. And for those of you who are not from America or maybe are American and don't really understand American law, again, as we talked about in our Thomas Paine video, the United States is a republic. So what this means is that each state acts as its own territory or for lack of a better metaphor, its own country. No, this does not mean that if I live in Georgia and I go to South Carolina, I have to have a passport, not at all. We're all still united under the same country. But for individual states, there are different laws that states will vote on. So for today in 2020, some states have the death penalty and some states don't. And usually that is voted upon by the people that live in the state. So each governor rules over each state and the federal government is only meant to be back up to the state government. And of course, as I said in the Thomas Paine video, we do elect officials to go to Washington for the federal level to represent each state as well. So for South Carolina, this wasn't the United States. This was purely for South Carolina. The law stated that a married woman could not be executed. I apologize for all the sirens you hear outside. I think I've said in videos before, I do live in the middle of Atlanta and we are in a pandemic right now. So I hope that you excuse all the sirens going on. And I hope whoever is in those sirens are involved in an accident or sickness gets better soon. So Lavinia Fisher banked on this idea that she was not gonna be executed. She knew her husband would be executed, but she thought for sure she would be saved from the gallows. Well, when the judge said that she too would hang for her crimes, she stood up in court, yelled at the judge that he can't do that. It's against the law, she's a married woman. Well, the judge found the loophole. He looked at Lavinia Fisher and told her that he was very well aware of the law, but he believed that she deserved to die as well. And so he found that if he executed her husband first, then she would be a widow and technically would be eligible for the death penalty. So John and Lavinia Fisher were sentenced to die on my birthday actually, February 4th of 1820. Obviously it was not around in 1820, but that is my birthday. And on February 18th, they came to collect both John and Lavinia Fisher. John went first and he stepped up and at this point executions were public events. People came to watch this person die. For the life of me, can't understand how watching someone die would be entertainment, but to each his own. So John stood up, he asked the crowd to forgive him of his sins. Apparently he had found God while in jail and so he wanted at first to be pardoned, but when he wasn't pardoned, he accepted his fate and was executed with dignity. For his wife Lavinia, it was a different story. It is said that she had a really hard time walking. And so the executioners, the gelsmen, they had to carry her up to the podium. And when she got there, she was dressed in a wedding dress, her wedding dress. Now this is peculiar. Usually when they, people were executed, they were given a simple garb to wear and for some reason she was able to talk her dealers into allowing her to wear this wedding dress. The story goes that she did this for one of two reasons. She felt like because of her incredible beauty that if she stood up there with a wedding dress on, a man from the crowd would yell out and asked to marry her on the spot. Therefore she could not be executed. Another side of the story is that she was dressed in her wedding gown because she wanted to be the bride of Satan. When Lavinia Fisher finally realized that there was no hope and that she was going to die, she stepped up onto the pedestal and she looked at the crowd and she said, if anybody has a message for the devil, tell me now and I'll take it to him myself. And with that she kicked out the stool from underneath her and she swung out over the crowd. The demonic ghost of Lavinia Fisher still haunts the old city jail, which is technically the most haunted building in all of South Carolina. She apparently haunts the courthouse and she apparently haunts some churches too. And with this story, Lavinia Fisher became America's first female serial killer or was she? Now I'm not gonna debunk the fact that Lavinia Fisher spirit still haunts parts of Charleston, not at all. But a lot of historians now believe that the story of Lavinia Fisher being a serial killer are simply urban legend and frankly, bunk. Now I told you I first heard this ghost story when I was a teenager and it terrified me the prospect of seeing this demonic woman scare the crap out of me. So when I decided to tell you this story, I thought, okay, well I know this story, this should be pretty easy, but I am gonna do as I always do, do a little due diligence and do my research to see what facts I can find about this legend. And as it turns out, a lot of the story probably is urban legend. Yes, Lavinia Fisher did live in Charleston, South Carolina. Yes, she was married to John Fisher. And yes, she possibly ran an inn for wayward salesman. However, truth sometimes is stranger than fiction. It appears that Lavinia Fisher along with her husband, John and some other people in the area were part of a gang of highway robbers. Now back in this time in South Carolinian history, to be convicted of highway robbery was a sin, a crime that was punishable by death. And I think this is where we started to get a little bit confused in retelling her story. For all I know for today in 2020, for states that have the death penalty, there are only two crimes that make you eligible for capital punishment. The first is obviously homicide, murder. The second is high treason, that's it. So as you can see, if you're convicted of robbery nowadays, you're not gonna get the death sentence. You are gonna have to go to jail or do some time at the least do some probation, but you're not gonna be sent to the gallows for robbing somebody. But in this time period, it was a crime punishable by death. So historians who have studied John and Lavinia Fisher say that she never was convicted of murder. There is no court records that talk about her murdering her guest. In fact, we don't even know for sure if she owned an inn. All we know is that she was a part of a gang of highway robbers. Now this gang did work between two houses. One was the five mile house and one was the six mile house. And the six mile house is the one that has been given the title of perhaps this inn she ran. But we don't know that for sure. That might be part of the urban legend as well. We do know that when Lavinia Fisher was convicted of her crimes and sentenced to death, she did say to the judge, oh, you can't do that. It's against the law. And he did in fact say, I have a way around that law. We're gonna kill your husband first. We do know that in the time period that the Fishers were held in jail and at this point, men and women were held in the same jail. They were not divided. So John and Lavinia Fisher were kept together in a jail cell. And during their time of appeals, they tried to escape the jail. And it is said that John Fisher and Lavinia used all the cloths they had to create a ladder to climb down out of the jail. Apparently the jail wasn't very well guarded at this time. And apparently John went first and he got down to the ground for freedom. But then the cloth broke and Lavinia couldn't get out. So John turned himself back in so that he could be with his wife. Poor John, because it seems that Lavinia was kind of scheming all along. If she did have her wedding dress on and she was trying to bait some man to marry her so that she wouldn't die, she wasn't obviously thinking about her husband. She was thinking about herself. But here's the thing. We don't know for sure if she wore a wedding dress or not or if that is again another part of the story that has evolved over time. We do know that the execution outfits that everybody wore were basically white robes. So it's possible that that's how this tall tale started. Now it is actually believed that she did say if anybody has a message for the devil, I'll take it to him myself because we had journalists there at the time that reported it as so. So if Lavinia Fisher and John Fisher were not serial killers, if all they were doing was robbing people of their possessions as part of this gang, then how did they get caught? This is the side of the story I obviously had never heard before. It appears that the town of Charleston were very aware of what the fishers and their cohorts were doing outside of the city. Many a times the people of Charleston had pleaded with the authorities to go out and make an arrest, but without any evidence or eyewitnesses, there was nothing they could do. And so a vigilante group of Charlestonians, and I'm not promoting vigilante groups, however, this is how the somewhat true story is. This vigilante group went out to the fishers property, they cleaned them out of their house, kicked them out, basically made a big stink, and they left somebody by the name of David Ross at the house to guard it for when the fishers and their cohorts returned. And as they returned, John Fisher and his other male gang members started to attack David Ross, beating him up. In the crowd, David Ross saw Lavinia and he recognized Lavinia. At this point, people didn't know that Lavinia was part of this as well. After all, she was just a woman. And David looked towards Lavinia pleading for help that she would come help him. And she didn't. She started strangling him and beating his head against a rock. And eventually David got away and he ran back into the town and told the authorities what had happened. On top of this, another man, supposedly by the name of John Peoples, who was from Atlanta, was coming into Charleston as a salesman. And with this part of the story, it does ring true that the fishers did own an end because he stopped at the end. Now, when he got to the fishers end, they said that there was no room available, but he could come in and have dinner. So Lavinia started to make John dinner and John Peoples, that is. And at the end of the dinner, when she had picked enough information out of John Peoples to realize that he was a wealthy target, she all of a sudden, out of nowhere, they had a room available. And so they offered this room to John Peoples. Well, he accepted and before he went to bed, Lavinia Fisher offered him a cup of tea. Supposedly this tea that she offered her guest or her traveling salesman or people that just stopped at her house along the way, we don't really know, was where the oleander root was kept. Now, if she was not murdering people, then this oleander root was literally just to knock people out so that they could take their sales stuff to bring to Charleston. Well, John Peoples already suspecting that something was off. Also, luckily for him, did not like tea. And so as to not be rude when Lavinia turned around, he dumped the tea in a plant and proceeded to go up to the spare room. Well, John Peoples was sitting in a rocking chair. He decided he felt really uncomfortable and so he didn't wanna go to sleep. So he sat up in this rocking chair trying to stay awake the whole night. Well, in the middle of the night, something happened. Big loud sound in the bed dropped to through the floor into another room. John woke in his chair, startled, climbed out of the window and ran back into Charleston to again tell the authorities what had just happened at the Fisher's house. Apparently with this legend of the story, the Fisher's had a lever that they would pull and the beds in all these rooms would drop down into the floor. Some people say that they dropped the floor and John Fisher would stab them to make sure they were dead or that the bed would drop on spikes. Other people say that John Peoples' encounter, his testimony was that he witnessed what was happening with David Ross. And in fact, the only thing we know for sure about these two men is that they were eyewitnesses to highway robbery, which again was punishable by death in those days. So here's my opinion. I do think Lavinia Fisher was a serial killer. I do think her and her husband murdered these men. And it's not because that was the story I was told as a child or the fact that her ghost is claimed to be demonic. It's just common sense to me. I feel like that if Lavinia and John Fisher were a part of this gang of highway robbers, which they were, we do have that. We know for sure they were charged with highway robbery and they were part of a gang of people working together, then how are they gonna complete the task of robbing people and selling their belongings without these people testifying that they had been robbed? If highway robbery is punishable by death, wouldn't you make sure that the person that could turn you in was silenced? So I tend to believe that they were killers as well. They were sentenced to be executed. So the crime of killing, it was paid for by their deaths anyway. Now I do not believe that there was some lever that pulled the beds down. That part of the story, it doesn't make sense to me. It sounds like that story, I can't remember the name of it about the barber of Fleet Shop or whatever in England where they would drop the people and you know what I'm talking about. Anyway, I just think that it's just common sense that they probably killed these men too. And I tend to lean more towards that, yeah, maybe the bones were found by dogs, by hunters. So anyway, that's the story of LaVinia Fisher. I actually think that it would make a really good movie. The story of LaVinia Fisher, she was a bit of a femme fatale as it seems, probably a total psychopathic narcissist, but I mean, I never knew the lady. I've never even seen her ghost. Have you seen her ghost? Are you from Charleston? Have you experienced the demonic hauntings of LaVinia Fisher? Let me know. Anyway, thank you guys so much for our second story time. I appreciate you guys hanging out with me and letting me tell you that story. Again, special thanks to Josh McKay for our music, to Todd Roderick for editing. Thank you to you guys and I will see you soon. Bye.