352: The Ghost of Bobby Dunbar

This American Life

Society & Culture, News, Politics, Arts

4.6 • 88.8K Ratings

🗓️ 30 April 2023

⏱️ 59 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In 1912 a four-year-old boy named Bobby Dunbar went missing in a swamp in Louisiana. Eight months later, he was found in the hands of a wandering handyman in Mississippi. In 2004, Bobby Dunbar's granddaughter discovered a secret beneath the legend of her grandfather's kidnapping, a secret whose revelation would divide her own family, bring redemption to another, and become the answer to a third family's century-old prayer.

Transcript

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0:00.0	WB Easy Chicago, it's this American life, I'm Ira Glass.
0:07.0	It's been a monobar with the end of 1912.
0:14.0	The kidnapping of John Moore's title, that welcome mystery, the Battle of Hell.
0:20.0	Used to be if something was big news that got turned into a song.
0:23.0	This one's about a famous kidnapping that happened in 1912.
0:26.0	The kidnapping of Bobby Dunbar, a four-year-old boy.
0:30.0	For two years, the details of his disappearance and the search for him,
0:33.0	and how he was found and the trial of his kidnapper was all front-page news,
0:37.0	reported breathlessly all across the country.
0:40.0	But some of the biggest mysteries of the case were never solved.
0:43.0	Until, long after nearly everybody involved was dead, almost a century after it happened.
0:48.0	The mystery finally got solved.
0:50.0	When a Bobby Dunbar's descendant started poking around the old stories,
0:54.0	looking for answers she wasn't really expecting to find.
0:57.0	Today we devote our entire show to the legend of Bobby Dunbar and to what his granddaughter discovered.
1:03.0	The messy, real story of what actually happened, which, as you hear, turns out to be a lot more interesting than the legend.
1:10.0	Today's show is re-routed by the way.
1:12.0	Tom McThenia is our reporter.
1:15.0	Everybody in the family knew it.
1:17.0	The legend of Bobby Dunbar, the lost boy who was found.
1:20.0	Well, the legend was that back in the early 1900s, my grandfather became missing.
1:25.0	My grandfather had gone on a camping trip with his parents.
	...

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