Warning – spoilers for episode 2 and beyond.
xS-Town began life when Serial journalist Brian Reed received an email with the subject “John B McLemore lives in S***town, Alabama”.
John, a horologist, “celibate homosexual” and self-described outsider, wrote to Brian asking if he would investigate an alleged murder in his hometown that he claimed had been covered up.
Brian solved the mystery in episode two, discovering that the murder never took place.
Soon after, while back home in New York, he received the sad news that John committed suicide by drinking cyanide.
The remainder of the series is a touching look at John’s life – his eccentricities, his friends, neighbours and lovers, and his unusual hobbies.
Where is John B McLemore’s maze?
One of John’s passions was a giant hedge maze that he had planted his his back yard.
Brian Reed redacted the exact co-ordinates of John’s estate to protect his privacy, but it didn’t take listeners long to find it using Google Maps.
John designed and planted the labyrinth himself, installing wooden gates to allow for 64 possible solutions.
When Brian was recording the podcast the hedges were hip-high, but John had hopes that the greenery would grow tall enough that people would be able to get lost in it.
An anonymous Imgur post appears to show the maze around the time that S-Town was recorded, with healthy green bushes and a cleanly swept floor.
After John’s death, his property was sold to Kendall Burt – father of Kabram Burt, the falsely accused murderer who inspired John to contact Brian.
In episode seven, Brian asked Kendall whether he will maintain the maze.
He replied: “I would like to see it reach maturity but I probably will not put forth the effort or the money to do so. It’s a real neat concept.”
A since-deleted post on Reddit has revealed that the maze is now overgrown and unkempt, with many of its hedges dying and turning brown.
Fans are now rallying to save the maze and turn it into a memorial to John.
Where is Woodstock, Alabama?
Woodstock, affectionately dubbed S***town by John, is a small town in in Bibb and Tuscaloosa counties.
It has an estimated population of 1,500 and was known as North Bibb until residents voted to change its name.
The average resident is 34 years old, earns $ 18,950 per year (£15,000) and lives in a house worth $ 110,000 (£90,000) according to city-data.com.
The population is overwhelmingly white (93 per cent), with just 3.4 per cent of its total made up of black people and 2.1 per cent of hispanic people.
According to John, there are “95 churches in this damn county”.
