The Night They Almost Nuked Big Savage Mountain.
In January, 1964, a crippled B-52 was on its way home from Massachusetts to an airbase in Georgia, when it ran into a heavy snowstorm. The plane’s vertical stabilizer (the tail) was ripped off, and it...
10 Sep 201610min
The Shootout in Clintwood, Virginia
In 1926, Prohibition was in full force, and the Commonwealth of Virginia had prohibition enforcement agents employed across the state, looking for illegal liquor. In Dickenson County, Virginia, that m...
3 Sep 20169min
The French-Eversole Feud
In the last part of the nineteenth century, newspapers across America were obsessed with tales of blood feuds in Appalachia, the best known of which is the Hatfield-McCoy feud. At the time, however, n...
27 Aug 201615min
The 1982 Knoxville Worlds Fair and the Butcher Brothers
In 1982, Knoxville, Tennessee, hosted a Worlds Fair. The fair was a success, breaking even, but it led to the downfall of the Butcher banking empire in East Tennessee. On this episode of the podcast, ...
20 Aug 201611min
The Escape
The people who settled Appalachia were tough. They’d have to be to carve a home out of the forests and mountainsides of the area. In 1777, two girls, Polly Alley and Jane Whittaker, proved how tough t...
13 Aug 20168min
George Went Hensley, Snake Handling Preacher
In the early 20th century, there was an awakening across Appalachia, with Pentecostal churches coming into being across the area. One of the odder branches of Pentecostalism involved the handling of d...
6 Aug 201614min
The Swinging Bridge Collapse
Every year the Tri State Singing Convention would come to Big Stone Gap, Virginia, bringing together the most popular southern gospel groups in the world to play for a packed audience. At the Conventi...
2 Aug 20166min
Eric Robert Rudolph
On July 27th, 1996, the Atlanta Summer Olympic Games were rocked with an explosion which killed one person outright and led to a heart attack that killed another, as well as wounding many more. The ma...
30 Juli 201612min
