Ghost of the Ozarks: Murder and Memory in the Upland South

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Mysterious Radio

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🗓️ 1 November 2023

⏱️ 55 minutes

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Summary

My special guest is author Brooks Blevins who's here to discuss his book called Ghost of the Ozarks: Murder and Memory in the Upland South. Get it on Amazon.

In 1929, in a remote county of the Arkansas Ozarks, the gruesome murder of harmonica-playing drifter Connie Franklin and the brutal rape of his teenaged fiancée captured the attention of a nation on the cusp of the Great Depression. National press from coast to coast ran stories of the sensational exploits of night-riding moonshiners, powerful "Barons of the Hills," and a world of feudal oppression in the isolation of the rugged Ozarks. The ensuing arrest of five local men for both crimes and the confusion and superstition surrounding the trial and conviction gave Stone County a dubious and short-lived notoriety.

Closely examining how the story and its regional setting were interpreted by the media, Brooks Blevins recounts the gripping events of the murder investigation and trial, where a man claiming to be the murder victim--the "Ghost" of the Ozarks--appeared to testify. Local conditions in Stone County, which had no electricity and only one long-distance telephone line, frustrated the dozen or more reporters who found their way to the rural Ozarks, and the developments following the arrests often prompted reporters' caricatures of the region: accusations of imposture and insanity, revelations of hidden pasts and assumed names, and threats of widespread violence. Locating the past squarely within the major currents of American history, Ghost of the Ozarks: Murder and Memory in the Upland South paints a convincing backdrop to a story that, more than 80 years later, remains riddled with mystery.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi there, I'm K-Town, and on this edition of Mysterious Radio.
0:04.6	Yeah, I was I was working on a book called Arkansas Arkansas. It was a book that's
0:34.2	just chronicling the kind of history of the hillbilly image of Arkansas and how it came to be and how it's
0:41.2	stuck and all that kind of stuff. And in the latter stages of that, it was probably 15 or 16 years
0:46.2	ago. I came across this little just a little bit of one paragraph article in Time magazine about this
0:56.2	about this murder story in a remote place in the Ozarks in Stone County, Arkansas, and I just kind
1:03.4	of got hooked. And first thing I knew, I had spent several months digging up information on it,
1:09.8	and eventually that developed into Ghost of the Ozarks. Had there ever been a book written on this
1:17.5	before yours, Brooke? No, no, they're hadn't. Okay, tell me, tell me about the area. Tell us where
1:24.8	the Ozarks is the whole state. That's what I want is the whole state of Missouri, the Ozarks or
1:30.5	the Ozarks is a it's really, it's sometimes called the Ozark Mountains, but technically almost
1:38.7	the entire region is really a any-roaded plateau. It was just just an uplift that for millions of
1:45.8	years was eroded. It's kind of like a just a big region of giant ditches instead of mountains.
1:52.2	You mean for the entire state or just one part of that? No, it's it most of the Ozarks is in the
1:59.0	southern half of Missouri, but there's also a lot of it in northern Arkansas, and then it
2:05.4	lops over into northeastern Oklahoma, and there's even a little corner like the southeastern corner
2:11.7	of Kansas is technically inside the this Ozark region. It's the region itself is it's about the
2:19.3	size of the state of New York. So it's a you know, it's not as big as Appalachia, but it's a pretty
2:24.6	good sized region. That's just go ahead and jump into the book here, and tell me first of all,
2:29.8	tell us about how this actually started out in what year did this occur. Yeah, everything in the
2:37.5	book takes place are 99.9% of the stuff the things in the book took place in the year 1929,
2:46.4	and the the action, the you know, the alleged murder in the book and the alleged rape in the book
	...

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