It’s that time of year when many folks get a hankering to read ghost stories. If that’s you, especially if you like stories that are not only scary but also true, I have a book suggestion.
That book is “24 Tales: More Appalachian Ghost Stories, Legends & Mysteries,” edited by Terry Shaw and recently released by Howling Hills Publishing in Kingsport. Last year, Howling Hills published “23 Tales: Appalachian Ghost Stories, Legends & Mysteries,” which I wrote about in this column. I’m pleased to have stories in both books. Last year’s tale was about a haunted house in West Virginia. This year’s story is even more haunting.
Entitled “Where’s Dennis?” it tells a sad, sad story that some of you may remember hearing about. In mid-June 1969, six-year-old Dennis Martin of Knoxville headed out to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park on a weekend camping trip with his dad, granddad, and nine-year-old brother. They spent Friday night at Russell Field, just south of Cades Cove, and then hiked three miles east to Spence Field the next morning. As friends and family gathered there that afternoon, Dennis and other children played hide-and-seek. When the adults called them in to supper, everyone returned to the picnic shelter.
Except Dennis. Not then. Not ever. More than half a century later, his disappearance is a Smoky Mountain mystery that’s never been solved. Some says his ghost still haunts those hills.
The Martin family immediately reported Dennis missing and began a frantic search. As darkness fell, a fierce thunderstorm rolled in, postponing rescue efforts until morning. Word about the lost little boy spread quickly, and–within hours–more than 1,400 people joined the search. Those “helpers” and bad weather almost certainly hampered the efforts of park rangers and professional trackers. No evidence, other than a set of footprints that led to a swollen stream and then disappeared, was ever found. On June 29, two weeks after Dennis Martin disappeared, the search for him was officially abandoned.
Theories of what happened to him abound. You can read about those theories in “Where’s Dennis?” But here’s what makes this a ghost story. To this day, some visitors to Cades Cove report seeing a small, dark-haired boy wearing a red t-shirt standing alone near the vistor center and looking lost and afraid. Some even claim to have seen a small, shadowy apparition at the edge of the woods near the Tipton Cabin.
If that doesn’t make the hair on the back of your neck stand up, I’d like to know what does.
Another creepy story in “24 Tales” is set in a place near and dear to my heart: Brushy Mountain State Prison in Petros, Tennessee. Back at the turn of the twenty-first century, my late friend Calvin Dickinson and I—while doing research for our book “Tennessee Tales the Textbooks Don’t Tell”—traveled there to learn more about the place where James Earl Ray was sent after being convicted of the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. He tried twice to escape but failed. But in 1977, he went over the wall of the exercise yard and into the dense forest that blankets Frozen Head Mountain. He was soon recaptured and never again attempted escape.
Brushy Mountain was still a maximum-security facility when Calvin and I visited. Closed by the state in 2009, these days it serves as a tourist destination, billed as “one of the most haunted places in the state.” Visitors can explore the buildings and grounds while learning about the facility’s long and sordid history. Or attend concerts. Or spend an entire night hunting ghosts in pitch-black darkness. Want to know more? Don’t miss “Brushy Mountain Prison Blues” by Kevin Saylor.
If you’d like to get your hands of a copy of “24 Tales,” it’s available at Plenty on Broad bookshop in downtown Cookeville, or wherever books are sold.
(October 26, 2024)