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Charleston Courier is directly below a report of the arrest of John Smith and Joseph Roberts in regard to the gang. It is most likely that the information of the corpses came from them. Since neither Smith nor Roberts was charged with murder, one can assume that the man in the grave may have been in allegiance with the gang and not their victim.

    The body count is greatly exaggerated in the legend. In fact, no murders were ever attributed to the Fishers. Courtesy of author.

    The oleander tea, the dismembered bodies and even the wedding dress have no basis in fact. Courtesy of Kayla Orr.
    As the legend has it, the numerous skeletal remains and decomposing corpses had been located in a cellar under the house. Now as far as cellars in Charleston, Charleston is below sea level and has constant drainage and flooding issues. It did then and does continue to have them to this day. That being said, it does not mean that there were none, but the likelihood of a colonial cellar in the area where the Six Mile House stood even on the outskirts of the city is extremely unlikely.
    During this time, beer cellars were popular in European countries and used to store kegs and casks of beer and keep them cool. There was, of course, no refrigeration. A below-ground cellar such as a root cellar or a beer cellar most probably would not have existed in the Charleston area.
    Most beer cellars in the Charleston area were storage areas above ground and directly under the first floor of the home. The homes that had them were elevated to allow such areas. Had there been a multitude of decaying corpses above ground or even shallowly buried under the home, the smell would have been unbearable. The presence of one rotting corpse in the Charleston summer is not pleasant. A multitude of decaying corpses would be horrendous. Someone would have surely noticed. That is exactly what led to the apprehension of serial killer John Wayne Gacy and the location of the thirty-three decaying corpses he had stuffed in his crawl space and the additional three buried in shallow graves in his yard. The smell just has a way of giving those things away. If Lavinia and John Fisher had murdered that many people, there would have been reports made, and the papers would have reported such disappearances. Again, none were found.
    The tale of multiple corpses can be attributed to Peter Neilson. Peter Neilson, a Scot, claimed to have been in Charleston in 1820 when the Fisher ordeal reached its climax. He wrote a book, published in 1830, in which he stated that the Six Mile House gang “had for years carried on a complete trade of murdering and robbing altogether unheard of, except perhaps in Italy in former times.” He goes on, further stating, “On digging around this den of iniquity, a great number of skeletons were found, no doubt the remains of unfortunate travelers.”
    Mr. Neilson would have been familiar with beer cellars in his own homeland. He possibly attributed this “writer’s embellishment” to the Six Mile House tavern. His book was ten years after the fact and one begins to question why he would wait so long to report such a horrific find unless he was waiting on the facts to fade and the fantastic to be embraced. Perhaps the real answer lies in what would become known as the “Penny Dreadful.”
    In the nineteenth century, publications known as Penny Dreadfuls circulated Europe. They were cheap, thus the name. They were also sensational fictional works or overexaggerations of actual events. Our Scottish friend Peter Neilson appears to have been author of such. That would have made it 1830 if he waited ten years after the events. This was actually the height of popularity for these cheap stories. He can be attributed as the direct source of the excessive body count. His Penny Dreadful account of the Fishers boosted their villainy as much as the dime novels in the later 1800s did for outlaws such as Billy the Kid.
    With the legend