I can still remember the first time I saw a nightmare on Elm Street as a child.

Those tense moments in the dark, the thumping of my hearts in my chest, the screams.

But the decades have reduced much of those memories down to impressions and flashes of

key images. The most important of those, of course, was the glove.

Freddy Krueger's glove was iconic, all leather and metal and fish knives. Just a glimpse

of it was enough to send shivers down the spines of millions. It was one of a handful of

weapons that became foundational to a new wave of horror movies that started about 35

years ago. There were others, of course, the chainsaw, with its screaming motor and biting

teeth filled many nightmares. The machete always takes me back to the hockey mask wearing

Jason Voorhees in Friday the 13th. There are many stories of a killer who uses a hook,

from I know what you did last summer to an early episode of Supernatural, and who could

forget the wooden stake that makes an appearance in almost every vampire movie. But no tool

of destruction has been more prolific and more horrific than the axe. It's the stuff of

nightmares equal parts passion and skill. It's a near mythic weapon that instantly inspires

fear. But a little over a century ago, those nightmares became reality.

I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is lore.

Between January of 1911 and April of 1912, a killer traveled across Western Louisiana and

Eastern Texas. And whoever they were, a trail of bodies was left on a scale beyond anything

we can imagine today. They were crimes of intense passion and brutality. They were calculated

and merciless. They were hate crimes to the core, focusing on victims of mixed race, and

they were all committed with an axe.

The first murder took place in Rain Louisiana in January of 1911, while a young mother and

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