Goat Castle: Murder, Myth, and Jim Crow Justice in Natchez
Gone South
Audacy Podcasts
4.8 • 4.2K Ratings
🗓️ 11 March 2026
⏱️ 36 minutes
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Summary
In 2012, historian Karen Cox is digging through the Mississippi State Archives when an archivist tells her, “If you want to know about Natchez, you need to look at Goat Castle.” Cox expects a ghost story. What she finds is stranger and darker: a 1932 murder that turned into a national Southern Gothic spectacle.
The victim was a reclusive former Southern belle. The suspects were her eccentric neighbors, a failed concert pianist and an aging socialite, living in a decaying mansion overrun with goats. Newspapers dubbed them the Wild Man and the Goat Woman, and tourists flocked to Natchez to gawk.
But beneath the spectacle was the real tragedy: Emily Burns, a young Black woman forced into the story and ultimately blamed, while the white suspects became local celebrities. Sent to Mississippi’s brutal Parchman prison, Emily was erased from the public record.
Cox set out to write her back in and to expose what Goat Castle reveals about justice in the Jim Crow South.
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Karen Cox is the author of Goat Castle: A True Story of Murder, Race, and the Gothic South:https://www.amazon.com/Goat-Castle-Story-Murder-Gothic/dp/1469661438
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | What I've dedicated my life to is revenge. |
| 0:04.0 | A brand new drama based on the best-selling novel. |
| 0:07.0 | They think they're better than us. |
| 0:08.0 | Who do you think you are? |
| 0:10.0 | I'm going to prove to them that they're wrong. |
| 0:11.0 | She's punishing me. |
| 0:13.0 | You destroyed my family. |
| 0:14.0 | I will not rest until I've destroyed yours. |
| 0:17.0 | A woman of substance on Channel 4 starts tonight at 9. |
| 0:20.0 | I'm Sarah Turney. |
| 0:21.7 | And I'm Courtney Nicole. |
| 0:23.5 | We're the host of the Crime House original podcast The Final Hours. |
| 0:27.5 | Crime has impacted both of our families, teaching us how the last conversations, the |
| 0:31.9 | misbred flags, can change everything. |
| 0:34.5 | On the final hours, we examine the moments before a disappearance and the |
| 0:38.7 | questions that never got answered, a podcast that puts the moments before it disappearance under |
| 0:43.8 | a microscope. Listen to and follow the final hours, available now wherever you get your podcasts. |
| 1:01.0 | In the summer of 2012, historian Karen Cox was digging through the Mississippi State Archives. |
| 1:12.0 | She was researching something called the Natchez Pilgrimage, an annual event that brings thousands of people to the city of Natchez to tour its grand antebellum homes. |
| 1:19.0 | While I was there and I was talking to a historian slash archivist named Clinton Bagley, |
| 1:26.2 | and Clinton is now a friend, but at the time, Clinton said to me, if you want to know about Natchez, you need to look at goat castle. |
| 1:30.2 | Karen thought he'd said ghost castle, but the archivist corrected her, goat castle. |
... |
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