The Six Mile House just outside Charleston, South Carolina, allegedly harbored a dark, deadly secret.
Husband and wife John and Lavinia Fisher ran the roadside inn, welcoming weary travelers making their way along treacherous 19th century highways.
According to legend, men looking for a rest stop were also treated to their female host's flirtatious advances - and offered a special nightcap before bed. But, so the story goes, Lavinia's tea was laced with poisonous oleander leaves.
Once incapacitated, the victims were then dropped through a secret trapdoor into the cellar, where John lay in wait to finish them off with a knife and rob them of their worldly wares.
Rumor has it that the basement was even fitted with metal spikes, impaling the men as they plunged to the floor below.
Dozens, if not hundreds, of travelers went missing in the 1800s, meeting a grisly end at the hands of the alleged killer couple, their skeletons silently littering the cellar like a mass grave.
The killing spree reportedly came to light when one guest's dislike of tea ultimately saved his life, allowing him to escape.
The Fishers were arrested, tried and sentenced to death for their crimes. They were publicly executed close to Charleston's Old City Jail.
In a final theatrical act of defiance, Lavinia is said to have gone to the gallows dressed in her white wedding dress, shouting her last words to the large crowd of spectators: 'If you have a message you want to send to hell, give it to me - I'll carry it.'
And that was the end of America's so-called first female serial killer.
It's a haunting tale that has been the stuff of legend in Charleston for more than 200 years.
Except there's one small problem: nearly none of it is true.
There's no evidence that Lavinia and John killed anyone - or that anyone was even murdered. In fact, the Fishers might not have been criminals at all.
Instead, according to retired detective Bruce Orr, the case is not about a depraved serial killing couple but actually 'one of the greatest forgotten love stories Charleston has ever had.'
As a child in Charleston, Orr read about the Fishers in a book of ghost tales.
'It was one of my favorite stories,' he said.
The case followed him into adulthood. 'As a detective, I would come out of my office every single day to get in my car and directly across the street was the Old Navy Hospital which was built on the grounds where the inn used to be,' he told the Daily Mail.
'So I always thought: "One day, when I retire, I'm going to look into the story" - and that's exactly what I did. I started looking at the facts beyond the fiction.'
In his book, 'Six Miles to Charleston: The True Story of John and Lavinia Fisher,' Orr debunks many of the myths that have swirled around the couple for the past two centuries, from the body count to the trap door to the charges.
But, it turns out, the facts are just as riveting - and perhaps even more scandalous.
The saga of the Fishers began in 1819. It was a time when highway robberies were rife, with traders often targeted by land pirates as they traveled in and out of the port city of Charleston.
Against this backdrop, a lynch mob set out in February 1819 in pursuit of people they claimed to be highwaymen to bring them to justice.
First, they descended on the nearby Five Mile House owned by William Haywood, ordering everyone out of the property and burning it to the ground.
Next, they targeted the Six Mile House - planning to do the same. After everyone was driven from the house, a man named David Ross was left to stand guard at the inn.
According to Ross's sworn statement to authorities, a group, including John and Lavinia Fisher, returned and attacked him. Lavinia allegedly choked him and shoved his head through a window pane.
John, meanwhile, made a brazen threat: 'You damned infernal rascal. If I ever catch you, I will give you a hundred lashes.'
Ross escaped and fled to the town.
Mere hours later, a trader named John Peoples stopped by the Six Mile House to water his horses. He, too, was allegedly attacked and robbed by a group, including the Fishers.
The couple and some others were hauled off to the Old City Jail and their inn was burned to the ground.
Among the ruins, no cellar and no collection of skeletons was found.
In a bizarre twist, the decomposed remains of two people were found in the nearby woods soon after. But their deaths were never connected to the Fishers.
The only confirmed death ever blamed on the couple was that of a stolen cow, whose hide was found.
The Fishers went on trial for highway robbery - not murder - and were convicted and sentenced to death.
While awaiting execution, the couple plotted a daring jailbreak. They took bars out of the cell window and tied blankets together.
John went first, shimmying down the makeshift rope to freedom outside but, when Lavinia went to follow him, the rope snapped, leaving her trapped inside the jail.
Despite his own newfound freedom, John refused to flee without her. He was recaptured and sent back to jail.
'Lavinia and John Fisher is probably one of the greatest forgotten love stories,' Orr said.
'John could have had his freedom but he stayed in Charleston to steal things to try to bribe guards to get her... he wouldn't leave Lavinia. He wouldn't leave Charleston without her.'
He added: 'How many significant others facing death escape and can walk away but they choose to stay and not leave their loved one behind? He literally went to the gallows waiting for her.'
Orr's research uncovered even more.
He found a bill of sale showing that Lavinia was once enslaved. John's uncle, a North Carolina slave owner, had sold her to someone in South Carolina.
Lavinia and John's story is, said Orr,actuallyone of forbidden love: she was black,despiteappearing to be white in portraits; while he was a white man and a relative of a slave owner.
When their romance was discovered, he theorizes, John's uncle sent Lavinia away but John followed and they began a new life together in the suburbs of Charleston.
Being an interracial couple in the early 1800s was just one factor that might have put a target on the Fishers' backs.
Another was that Lavinia and John were property owners.
Orr raises the question as to whether they committed any crime whatsoever or whether they could have been innocent victims of a corrupt government.
A news article from February 19, 1820, detailing the execution of John and Lavinia Fisher
'A big group of people were arrested but the only ones that were executed were the property owners,' Orr said,'and that kind of raises an eyebrow and makes you look into it a little more.'
He explains that the government was looking to build a Navy base in Charleston at the time and might have been wanting to claim the Fishers’ property as part of this plan.
'If you wanted somebody’s property,you could seize itif they didn’t pay their taxes within a year. John and Lavinia Fisher were arrested on February 18,1819;and,lo and behold,they were executed on February 18,1820,exactly one year later,'he said.
The old Charleston Naval Hospital now sits on the land where the Six Mile House once stood.
A news article details their final moments: 'A little past 2 o'clock the husband and wife embraced each other upon the platform, for the last time in this world, when the fatal signal was given - the drop fell - and they were launched into eternity. She died without a struggle or a groan.'
Lavinia's scathing last words are a rare truth in the tale but she did not wear her wedding dress. Both she and John wore standard white death garb,Orrsaid.
The Old City Jail in a photo taken during a ghost tour around Charleston. The Fishers tried to escape from the jail while awaiting execution
So how then did Lavinia Fisher,a potentially innocent innkeeper,earn such a villainous title as America's first female serial killer?
Two key events,he said.
First,Scottishbusinessman Peter Neilson published his book 'Six Years' Residence in America' in 1830,regalinga wildly sensational and fictionalized tale of the Fishers.
Thenthe Charleston Museumput a human skeleton on display one Halloween,claimingthat it belonged tothe local highwaywoman.
'People came to see it and the legend spread from there,' Orr said.
Like much of the story,he has also debunked this part-finding evidence thatthe skeletonwas not even Lavinia’s.
But,by then,the legend had already taken hold and tales ofthe killer couple’s murderous reignspread,becoming more embellished overthe years.
More than two centuries later,localsand tourists still flock to Charleston for ghost tours aboutthe so-called 'first female serial killer in America'-and to try to glimpse her vengeful ghost hauntingthe old jail.
'It is probably the best-known ghost tale in Charleston,' Orr said.
He jokes that he was not very popular when he debunked much of it but feels that Lavinia is finally 'getting a bit fairer treatment now than she did back then.'
'It's a classic. It's always easy to make a woman a villain... we villainize women all the time,' Orr said.
'That's what basically happened. They made Lavinia this great big,bigger-than-life,villainous woman who killed over 50 people.
'It's just that there's not a whole lot of truth to it.'