The Varmint of Burkes Garden
The highest mountain valley in Virginia is Burke’s Garden, also referred to as “God’s Thumbprint” for its bowl-like shape.It was here that something began killing sheep in the winter of 1952. Night a...
23 Touko 13min
They Claimed They Spoke For God: Appalachia's 19th Century New Eden
This week we tell the strange and little-known story of the Mountain Cove Community, a spiritualist commune founded in the mountains of what’s now West Virginia in the early 1850s.Led by Reverends Tho...
16 Touko 26min
The Night They Burned Superman in West Virginia
In 1948, a small town in West Virginia became the center of a growing national fear over the perceived evil influence of comic books. There, in the town of Spencer, a schoolteacher and her students g...
9 Touko 18min
Worse than Savages: The Bloody Legacy of Kirk's Raiders
George Washington Kirk was a carpenter from Greene County, Tennessee.He was also a feared and hated Union soldier/bushwhacker during the Civil War, operating in the mountains along the border of North...
2 Touko 25min
The Long Walk Home: The Harrowing Journey of Mary Draper Ingles
In 1755, the frontier settlement of Draper’s Meadow was shattered by a brutal Shawnee raid in which many settlers were killed and the survivors captured. Among those taken prisoner was Mary Draper Ing...
25 Huhti 27min
James Harrod: The Kentucky Pioneer and his Mysterious Disappearance
James Harrod was a soldier, a longhunter, an explorer and the man who founded Kentucky’s first permanent pioneer settlement. But in February 1792, the legendary Colonel Harrod walked into the woods an...
18 Huhti 17min
The Woman-Hating Hermit of Kentucky
Roger Tandy Quisenberry had every advantage in life: wealth, education, and opportunity, but chose a path few could understand. From the California Gold Rush to a dangerous expedition in Nicaragua, hi...
11 Huhti 14min
The 1895 Flat Top Coal Strike
In the spring of 1895, a sudden wage cut swept through the Flat Top-Pocahontas coal fields along the Virginia/West Virginia border, touching off one of the earliest large-scale labor confrontations in...
4 Huhti 17min
