Paranormal Urban Legends

The Night Doctors +Instagram Update

 Note at the end!!!!!

Night Doctors (sometimes called Night Riders or Klan Doctors) stem from African-American folklore, predominantly in Georgia and Alabama. Many stories were told by slave owners to keep their slaves fearful of leaving even after they were free to do so. 

This particular story tells of doctors who would ride at night, abducting black workers to perform experiments on them. The Night Doctors would snatch people off the streets and take them to medical facilities to dissect, torture, and kill them, then harvest their organs. New Orleans had similar bogeymen but they were called Needle Men or Black Bottle Men. They would stick people with needles full of mysterious deadly toxins or use black bottles of poison so they could take the bodies back to Charity Hospital or John Hopkins Hospital for student doctors to dissect.

These stories of white doctors victimizing black communities have roots in some horrific truths. During the early 19th century, grave robbing to provide medical students with cadavers was a huge issue and Africans Americans were powerless to protect their dead. Also, doctors and medical students really were performing surgeries on living members of the black community. Southern teaching hospitals would only perform live surgical techniques for medical students on African-American patients.

As if that weren't bad enough, in 1932, Alabama's Public Health Service and Tuskegee University launched the Tuskgee Syphilips . They took 600 African American men; 399 already had syphilis and 201 did not. These men were given food and burial insurance and were promised free medical care, but the funding for the study was lost and no one bothered to tell the participants. Investigators wanted to observe the progression of the disease, so they kept going and told patients they were being treated for "bad blood." They never told them they had syphilis or that the standard treatment was penicillin, which they did not give them. The Tuskegee scientists made the decision to withhold medication from their patients as well as information about their condition.

These facts, paired with slave owners in white sheets pretending to be ghosts on horseback riding around at night (a tradition later continued by the Klu Klux Klan after the Civil War), gave the African-American community a very real fear of the Night Doctors legend

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