Unexplained South: Interview with author Alan Brown Pt 2

Alan 2 Transcript

Speakers: Benjamin Morris & Alan Brown

Benjamin Morris (00:00):

Welcome back to Crime Capsule Alan, we are so glad to have you.

Alan Brown (00:05):

Oh, thank you, this is fun.

Benjamin Morris (00:18):

So, let's just dive right back in where we left off last week. We were looking at some of the different sections in your book, and one of the sections that you have is on mysterious people and there's a case in there which stood out to me for a couple of reasons.

Benjamin Morris (00:33):

I mean, number one, it's from Hazlehurst, Mississippi which is a city I know fairly well. And number two, you also have an eerie sort of overlap with eagle-eared listeners of this show will remember an interview that we did with Lisa Livingston-Martin about the tornado in Joplin, Missouri.

Benjamin Morris (00:53):

And the strange things that happened after that major, major tornado in Joplin, where you had unusual butterfly people and presences leading survivors out of the records. And then these figures became iconic and real spooky stuff.

Benjamin Morris (01:13):

They kind of celebrated in murals now, even though they disappeared; were they angels? Were they something else? Who knows? Anyway, the boy prophet of Hazlehurst, Mississippi really kind of struck me as like a, I don't know, like a precursor almost to what we saw in that Joplin tornado. So, take us to Hazlehurst in the '60s here.

Alan Brown (01:39):

Well, it actually starts in 1966 and in the little town of Hazlehurst where there's a large African American community. The story goes that there was one day, this little boy, 10-year-old boy showed up had dark skin, had dark, curly hair.

Alan Brown (02:08):

And he had this dent in his head, and he was able to take a Coke bottle and put it inside that depression in his head and walk around with it. He didn't have to carry his Coke bottles with him. Well, he did a little preaching, he did faith healing on the side. And he was so unusual that some people mocked him, made fun of him, teased him, the police at one time, arrested him for vagrancy.

Alan Brown (02:59):

And they put handcuffs on him, the story goes that he got out of the handcuff, and he was on top of this tall wooden bridge. He jumped off but he didn't fall, they said he moved his feet like he was almost pumping a bicycle and he just landed softly on the ground which is really strange.

Alan Brown (03:29):

And he did say though that in the late 1960s, at the end of the decade, something terrible is going to happen in Hazlehurst, and it would change the little town forever. Well, turns out that on January 23rd, 1969, an F4 tornado hit Hazlehurst and most of the people were asleep, which added to the number of casualties, 32 people died, and 241 were injured. And people in Hazlehurst have never forgotten this.

Alan Brown (04:06):

In fact, there's a young man named Steve Collins, who was a little boy when this happened. And he said he survived by hiding under several corpses. Well, he's planning to film a documentary about this. I'm trying to remember where this was. I was at a conference several years ago where a middle-aged lady who was a little girl at this time, talked about her experiences there and talked about the little boy, and he is part of their history.

Benjamin Morris (05:03):

That's what makes it so interesting, you have in your book so many cases from different time periods, and in this is one in which the case dwells securely within living memory. I mean, this is not reaching back into the 1840s where all we have to go are some half scribbled down accounts and nothing to corroborate it. I mean, here you have folks who remember this child, it's fascinating.

Alan Brown (05:32):

Yeah, and they're keeping him alive too, through these stories they keep telling to the media and to their own relatives and neighbors, that sort of thing.

Benjamin Morris (05:44):

Well, maybe we'll see more to come in future years, but this was a really enigmatic scenario. Let's swerve over to something slightly, no less enigmatic but slightly more comical. There's a case in your section on UFOs, which, will take or leave the whole alien invaders from out of space.

Benjamin Morris (06:08):

But the mysteries from the skies, the UFOs and so forth, there's an incident which, as I was reading it I thought this really sets the standard for what I should hope will characterize any future encounters with UFOs. It's called the Kelly-Hopkinsville Green Man Case.

Benjamin Morris (06:33):

And I think my favorite part of this account Alan, is not that you have some good old boys who got picked up off the side of the road by some individuals they'd never met before and never wanted to meet again, that's fairly back standard, as they say. I mean that's kind of par for the course.

Benjamin Morris (06:56):

My favorite part of this is undoubtedly the fact that these good old boys in rural Kentucky, they didn't just get picked up by these visitors from outer space, they got into a shootout with them. I mean, they weren't going down easy. So, tell us what happened in Hopkinsville, Kentucky because there's bullet casings on the ground so far as I understand it.

Alan Brown (07:24):

Well, this happened on August 21st, 1955, and I think it's important to note that UFO fever was rampant at this time. Movies were being made about flying saucers, people were having sightings all over the place, so they were on people's minds at this time.

Alan Brown (07:46):

Well, there was a couple named - Billy Ray Taylor and his wife, they were staying at the home of some friends of theirs, the Elmer Sutton and his wife, and they were trying to go to sleep. And Billy Ray decided that he was thirsty, he said that he would go get some water for them. Well, he went out to the well ... And now, he said he saw this large shining object land about a quarter mile away.

Alan Brown (08:26):

Well, no one really believed him, and then the dog started barking. And of course, people in his part of the country ... The dogs barking, that's an alarm, they pick up their guns. And they went outside and they saw this little creature walking toward them.

Alan Brown (08:55):

Now, they said he was between three and four feet tall. And they said it had large eyes, a thin mouth, large ears, short legs, claw-like hands so they fired their weapons, but they had no effect on the creature, and it ran into the woods. Well, the men ran back to the house, and they got inside and they saw the little creature's face staring at them through a window. So, they fired the guns again.

Alan Brown (09:27):

And then all nine members of the family started shooting through the windows. And they said that the creatures were on top of the roof, and they were between 12 and 15 of them, and one of the people I guess, had stuck his hand outside the windows, and one of these things grabbed his hand. Well, somehow, they made their way outside the house and into their cars, drove to the police station in Hopkinsville.

Benjamin Morris (10:06):

I mean, I was wondering, did they have enough ammo? I mean, if you're going to be shooting these suckers off, you got to resupply somewhere.

Alan Brown (10:23):

Apparently, they had a lot of bullets. Well, they made their way to the police station, and the policeman thought, well, maybe there's something to this. So, they followed them to the Sutton Farmhouse 20 officers searched the property, but found nothing except a lot of bullet holes in walls and windows, that's all they found.

Alan Brown (10:48):

But the police didn't know what had scared these people but they knew something had. I guess, they knew the family well enough to know that they weren't given to bouts of hysteria all the time, and so they did check it out. Well, the police department persuaded U.S. Air Force to investigate the incident. A policeman came and talked to the Suttons and the family members, and walked a perimeter house, and they found nothing at all.

Alan Brown (11:22):

Well, the story was published in the local newspaper and the newspaper article featured sketches of these beings that a crime artist had recorded and Dr. Jay Allen Hynek did his own investigation of it. And he thought that the incident was genuine. Now, Jay Allen Hynek was associated with Project Blue Book, he is a very big deal.

Alan Brown (11:58):

And people tended, I guess because of his testimony, people did think that there was something to this story. Well, since 2005Hopkinsville has celebrated this event with a little Green Man Days Festival. It's a two-day festival and features the vendors, writers, alien costumes, and that sort of thing. Well, in recent years one investigator has concluded that what these people really saw was a flock of great horned owls.

Benjamin Morris (12:44):

Oh, okay.

Alan Brown (12:45):

That they were not little green men. And if you look at the description, all of those features do fit that of an owl. Now, those owls aren't three to four feet tall, but they do have those horns, those ears, I guess, they kind of look like ears, and they have claws. And so, that's what they think they probably saw.

Benjamin Morris (13:05):

Well, there's a detail here, which is really worth considering, a very important detail, which is that when Elmer and Billy Ray go and get this water from the well, there may be a little bit of a metaphor at play there. Are they getting some fire water from the well of spirits in the backyard? This is the prohibition era, and what are they drinking? What are they seeing?

Alan Brown (13:38):

That thought didn't occur to me, I wonder if that was like a metaphor for going to the still and pulling up a jug or something or some mason jars.

Benjamin Morris (13:48):

I just could not help but wonder, and then the other question I had for you was, please tell me, please tell me, Alan, please tell me the answer is yes - that at this particular festival that they have in Hopkinsville, please tell me there's a reenactment.

Alan Brown (14:02):

Oh, I don't know. I'd go if there was, that would be hilarious.

Benjamin Morris (14:08):

10 to 12 rednecks cooped up in a cabin shooting at whatever moved. I mean, in the dark of night, drunk off their butts. I mean, I'd pay good money to see that.

Alan Brown (14:18):

Well, this has been reenacted on television, though. I do recall seeing one of these aliens among us hows on, I guess, Discovery Channel or History Channel. And they did reenact it, but they made it look scary and real. But when you start to think about it, though, the whole scenario does have a lot of humorous aspects to it.

Benjamin Morris (14:45):

I'm not saying it didn't happen, I'm not saying nothing happened, I'm just saying something happened. And, you know, I've said my peace. Let's go to Stuckey Bridge.

Alan Brown (15:01):

By the way Benjamin, you're not the first one to suggest that alcohol may have played a part.

Benjamin Morris (15:07):

May have played a slight role roll in the ...

Alan Brown (15:11):

At least a slight roll, yes.

Benjamin Morris (15:14):

Well, let's get a little closer to home for you. I mean, you said that you've been living in Meridian for some years now, and there is a very famous site called the Stuckey Bridge in Queen City. And so, tell us a little bit about what's going on there. This isn't unusual, this is, again, a little bit more sourced in kind of the combination of legend, in fact. But we do have all sorts of interesting stories swirling around this particular structure.

Alan Brown (15:43):

Well, at the Stuckey's Bridge, is one of those haunted bridge stories. There are a lot of haunted bridges in the South. And Stuckey's Bridge is an old iron bridge that spans the Chunky River, and the original was a wooden structure built around 1851. And it was replaced in the early 1900s with an iron bridge.

Alan Brown (16:20):

And story goes that in the late 1850s, there was a member of the Dalton Gang, whose name was Stuckey, we don't know his first name. And he left the gang and decided to live in Lauderdale County, Mississippi. And he set up this end along the Chunky River. Well, Chunky River was very heavily traveled at this time. Flat boats would make their way down the river on their way to sell their goods in Meridian.

Alan Brown (17:06):

And so, he set up this end, and according to the legend, while people would sleep, he'd sneak into their rooms, knock them in the head, kill them, take all their goods, and bury their bodies along the river. You're smart enough to know if he threw them in the river, they'd eventually find the bodies, maybe trace them back to him, so he buried them.

Benjamin Morris (17:30):

Let me point out just a little bit of context here for our listeners. It's easy to think, oh, Meridian is a good size town now and we see it as it's been built up over the years, but in the middle 1800s, Mississippi had only been a state for about 20 or 30 years, and this was very much still considered frontier-ish territory.

Alan Brown (17:53):

Oh, yes.

Benjamin Morris (17:54):

The treaties such as Dancing Rabbit Creek with the Native American populations, the Choctaw and the Chickasaw had only recently been signed. This area was very poorly traveled in many ways, and there were very bad roads, the river was the way to go. Not much rail, it really was kind of the boonies and the whole section of east Mississippi in that area was just in very bad shape as far as infrastructure goes.

Benjamin Morris (18:21):

So, if you were an outlaw, if you were a wrestler in that area, you were probably getting away with a whole lot. And there wasn't a whole lot of law enforcement to come and really take you to task for it. So, not a thriving industrial urban area at all at the time, it was very, very wild.

Alan Brown (18:43):

And the law that was there, oftentimes, did not really follow the law. The sheriff for example, he heard rumors that Stuckey had been killing people at his end. So, he formed a posse and they wrote out and arrested him. They didn't give him a trial, they just took him out to the bridge.

Alan Brown (19:04):

Now, he had been standing on that bridge waving his lantern to signal travelers to come to his end. So, they ironically took him to that bridge and threw a rope over one of the trusses and hanged him from the bridge.

Alan Brown (19:19):

Now, this is one of those legends that doesn't hold up very well to close scrutiny, because the wooden bridge was replaced by an iron bridge in 1901. So, it was a wooden bridge that he was hanged from, not the present iron bridge. But at any rate, people say that at night you can see the light of his lantern on the bridge, swinging on the bridge, they say that you can hear the sound of his body.

Alan Brown (20:00):

Apparently, after they hanged him -cut his body to loose and it fell in the water. So, you can hear his body splash and sinking into the water. You can see little orbs of light flooding around the graves of his victims. Going out Stuckey's Bridge is a rite of passage for a lot of young people in Lauderdale County. Now, they blocked it off, you can't drive on it but you can walk on it.

Alan Brown (20:31):

And I actually went out there in a car with a couple of radio personalities, this was over 20 years ago. And at that time, we were able to drive on the bridge, and we drove on it and we waited. And I guess we were pretty impatient, we wanted something to happen right then. And we didn't hear anything, see anything.

Alan Brown (20:55):

It was cool being out there, though, a very, very out-of-the way place. And I guess this brings up the term legend tripping. This usually applies to young people who have heard these legends about old abandoned houses, or old bridges, and they want to test their courage by going out there and seeing if they're real. And they still do that out of Stuckey's bridge.

Benjamin Morris (21:25):

At their own risk.

Alan Brown (21:26):

Very popular. There is a little bit of risk attached to it and that's part of the allure.

Benjamin Morris (21:35):

There's a lot going on there and really appreciated seeing that one included. Now, I wanted to save the very best for last, because everybody knows there's nothing so joyful, so much fun as a good critter, we just love critters.

Benjamin Morris (21:58):

And when it comes to folklore and to legends and mysteries, they're just ... Every state in the union has its own special mythological critter that defines the badlands or the pine barons or wherever it is. And I was so glad to see that you had a chapter, a section, which was just chock full of some of the great southern critters to travel in whose domain we reside.

Benjamin Morris (22:27):

Now, I want to just take a look at two of them, because these might not be as well-known to - everybody knows Moth Man, that sort of thing. We can leave those aside, but I want to look at two. The first was the Lizard Man of South Carolina, which is a curious one because ... Well, the detail that got me there Alan, was the bite marks on the car bumper, but we'll get to that. Just go ahead and tell us what's going on with this Lizard Man of Scape Ore Swamp.

Alan Brown (23:09):

Well, most of the stories of the Lizard Man focus on one incident, and this was on June 29th, 1988, and it was early in the morning. There's a 17-year-old boy, his name was Christopher Davis. He was driving home late from work when he had a flat next to this swamp, and the swamp's name is Scape Ore Swamp.

Alan Brown (23:33):

So, he climbed out of his car, walked over his trunk to get his jack, and then he noticed this seven foot green creature pound on the roof of his car. He said that it had scales, it had red eyes, and long black claws. Well, I don't know if he had fixed his tire at that time or not. What the narratives say is that he basically jumped in the car and took off and went home as fast as he could.

Alan Brown (24:12):

And when he got home, he discovered that there was a hole in the roof of his car, that the side mirror had been ripped off. And two days later, this monster made another appearance. The owner of a car reported that his car had been vandalized during the night. And the investigating officers found long scratches along the side of a car. It looked like they had taken some kind of tool, like a screwdriver or something and scratched the car. And had even removed the chrome from chrome strip from along the side of the car, apparently with its teeth, whatever it was.

Alan Brown (25:09):

They made plaster cast of the three towed footprints, but by fall, the creature apparently was gone. Well, he left a tremendous suppression on the little town of Bishopville, South Carolina, because tourism to the town skyrocketed.

Alan Brown (25:33):

They have a festival there every year celebrating their monster, and I think the important word is their monster because there aren't any other lizard men in the South. There are lots of big foot sightings but they have the one, the only lizard man sighting there. And yeah, this festival's been going on since 2018.

Benjamin Morris (26:08):

Well, I love it because I did not actually realize this until just very recently, we are now almost to the day, at the 35-year anniversary of this encounter of Christopher Davis'ssort of meeting the lizard man or it trying to eat him or just whatever the dynamic was there. But I just thought, well, hell, that's kind of cool, makes you wonder if lizard men keep anniversaries and if we should be looking out for him in the next couple of weeks. I don't know.

Alan Brown (26:44):

Makes me wonder, are they going to commemorate it at the festival? I would think so.

Benjamin Morris (26:49):

Exactly, one would hope, but more to the point, and one of the reasons I wanted to ask you about this one Alan, is because, like a couple of the others in the book, this is very recent. This is very, very, very ... In his historical terms, this happened yesterday.

Benjamin Morris (27:03):

I mean, compared to some of the others that are out there, I'm curious about the role that it occupies in living memory in the area. I'm also curious about the means of investigation that we had for this one, which differ from older cases.

Alan Brown (27:21):

Yes, well, the fact that it is so recent, I guess, places in a category of an urban legend. And urban legends often do deal with monsters and that sort of thing. The difference is though, a lot of urban legends supposedly, there is an account of this incident in a newspaper, but they never find them. This one though, is heavily documented, so it's more than just an urban legend.

Benjamin Morris (27:56):

Well, there's all sorts of mysteries in those southern woods, and I think we can look forward to hearing more as they arrive.

Benjamin Morris (28:04):

Let's take a trip over to Arkansas real quick, a couple more critters to ask you about. And this one is interesting because in Fouke Arkansas, you have another potentially violent encounter with a critter between some locals and so forth. And there's a detail at the end, which I'll ask you about that makes me - that to my mind just adds a lot of plausibility to the locals account. But tell us what happened in Fouke, Arkansas in 1971.

Alan Brown (28:43):

Yeah, this is a Bigfoot story, and I didn't know it. I first encountered this story like everybody else in the country did in 1974 when the documentary the Legend of Boggy Creek came out. But I've always been fascinated with it. In 1971, there was a young man named Bobby Ray, Bobby Ford.

Alan Brown (29:12):

And Bobby Ford, apparently, had been tormented by this creature for several days. His wife told him that she was asleep in the front room when this hairy arm came through the window, and I guess grabbed her. Well, she ran out of the room, and she was able to catch a photographic memory of the appearance of this creature.

Alan Brown (29:51):

He had long hair, red eyes, sharp claws - well, Ford told the police about it. And apparently, not much happened until a few days later when Ford and his honey buddies returned home late in the evening, and they saw this huge figure that his wife had described standing in the back of the house. Well, they had their guns with them, so they did what comes natural naturally, which is they started shooting.

Benjamin Morris (30:26):

What else are you going to do in that case.

Alan Brown (30:27):

What else are you going to do? So, they started shooting, and they said that it fell to the ground. And so, Ford ran through the house, he was concerned about his wife. So, he ran through the house, and apparently, the creature had made his way inside the house, and he was seven feet tall. He grabbed Bobby's shoulder, and Bobby said that it had red eyes, it was panting and its chest was about three feet wide.

Alan Brown (31:06):

But somehow, the creature was still holding onto him when he finally got out of his grasp and crashed through the door, and the creature ran away as well. Well, they called the sheriff, the sheriff found no trace of the monster's blood, but it did find a strange set of tracks around the house and claw marks on the porch.

Alan Brown (31:35):

And so, Bobby Ford began to tell his story everywhere. He talked to a reporter from the local newspaper, Texarkana Gazette, Texarkana Daily News, a radio station interviewer came out to talk to him. And at this time that the media arrived, the Ford family was leaving.

Alan Brown (32:05):

They were packing, they had had enough, but they did help the newspaper reporter write up the story. And the Associated Press and the UPI, they picked it up. They picked up the story, and it became nationally known. And as I said, the documentary soon followed as well.

Benjamin Morris (32:38):

You know, what strikes me about this one? I mean, Alan, really, there are big sightings all over the blue kind of diamond dozen in certain circles. But what really struck me about this one was that little detail of the fact that they had just bought the house and then as you write, I think you say something to the effect of that they decided to leave even though they had owned the home for less than a week.

Benjamin Morris (33:06):

That tells me either that they had managed to pull off one of the biggest hoaxes of the decade, and they'd wanted to cover their tracks and get out, or they were so spooked by something that had happened that they didn't understand, that they were willing to trade in everything they had just invested in after a matter of days and get the hell out. And I can tell you as a homeowner, when you just buy a house, the number one thing you do not want do is leave it again.

Alan Brown (33:41):

Yeah, exactly.

Benjamin Morris (33:43):

That's a really powerful motivator and as far as the detail went and just made me wonder what on earth actually happened there if they were so compelled to reverse course like that.

Alan Brown (33:54):

Yeah, you make a really good point there, and I put a lot more credence in that story than I do the little Green Men in Hopkinsville, Kentucky.

Benjamin Morris (34:08):

Less whiskey maybe in Arkansas in this particular story than in the Kentucky story, but that remains the scene too, so I don't know.

Benjamin Morris (34:17):

Well, so the last critter we're going to leave the book here for a second, because you mentioned that in your hometown, you actually have a critter which is or I guess a monster more than a critter. I mean, what's going on back home in your neck of the woods?

Alan Brown (34:36):

In the late 1600s when Jolliet and Father Marquette made their trip down to Mississippi River, and they stopped off at an area that is now the home of Alton, Illinois. And on the limestone cliffs, they noticed a big painting of a huge creature. It had the antlers of a deer the face of a lizard, it had a scaly tail and the wings of an eagle and the claws of an eagle.

Benjamin Morris (35:31):

That's a weird mix, that's a really weird mix.

Alan Brown (35:34):

It is a weird mix, and they talked to the Indians about this, and they told the legends of this creature that had been killing their people and snatching them out of their beds, and flying up into the cliffs, and eating them. And this was one young brave stood on top of the cliff and fired his arrow at the monster and it fell into the Mississippi River and died.

Alan Brown (36:02):

Well, the anthropologist have taken this very seriously and have looked at it's elements, and they noticed a resemblance of the creature, which is called the Piasa Bird, by the way. They've noticed it has an uncanny resemblance to dragons, which has led them to speculate that possibly, some Asians people did make their way down the Mississippi River at one time.

Benjamin Morris (36:43):

Interesting.

Alan Brown (36:44):

This is one of those stories that identifies ... That's part of our identity. Justa month ago, I interviewed a young man from my hometown for a job at my school. And I said, "Oh, you're from Alton, Illinois, so you know about the Piasa Bird?" He said, "Oh, yeah, sure." Immediately, I formed a bond with this guy I didn't know. And I think that's why these legends last the way they do, they give people a sense of identity,

Benjamin Morris (37:20):

Especially if you got into a shootout with them.

Alan Brown (37:22):

And some people celebrate their identity with festivals and things, I think that's wonderful. I see nothing wrong with it.

Benjamin Morris (37:33):

Well, there are so many cases in your book. I mean, it's hard to pick one out, it's hard to isolate just a handful here. But I absolutely encourage our listeners to go and check it out and pick up a copy. What I loved about it most, I think, Alan, was that a volume as expansive as this actually serves as pretty darn good guidebook to the south.

Benjamin Morris (37:57):

You know, no matter what state you're traveling through or passing through or going to visit family and whatever, you can open up this book and say, "Hey, maybe I do want to go check out old Stuckey's Bridge, while I'm in the area."

Benjamin Morris (38:11):

Carefully, we encourage our listeners to do that carefully. But you've given us a wide range of places and spaces, and best of all, critters to choose from as we travel these country roads, so we sure do appreciate this, it is a lot of fun to read.

Alan Brown (38:32):

Well, I really enjoy talking to people who have a healthy appreciation for legends, who don't just dismiss them as being a lot of bunk. I have some friends in the history department who don't take them very seriously at all. And I think that's a shame because they're part of who we are very much so.

Benjamin Morris (38:55):

Absolutely, well, let me ask you this just before we wrap up here. If folks want to learn more about your books, your many, many books, or the other work that you've been doing, what is the best place for people to find you?

Alan Brown (39:10):

Well, l have a website theghostdoctor.com and all of my books are available on Amazon. And you can also find them at Barnes & Noble, at Books-A-Million. And you can also find them at CVS Pharmacy in Walgreens. The History Press does a really good job promoting their books, and so while you're standing around waiting for your prescription to be filled, you can grab one.

Benjamin Morris (39:56):

You can get the Willys scared out of you is what you can do while you're waiting for your full prescription.

Alan Brown (40:01):

Yeah, that's great.

Benjamin Morris (40:04):

Well, this has been a total joy, thank you so much for taking us on this tour these last few weeks, and I think for all of us out here in podcast land, I for one am definitely going to keep my eyes peeled and my antenna tuned for any strange goings on. And if I happen to come across any, I know exactly who to ask for the real skinny on what's going on. So, thank you so much for joining us, Alan, this has been a pleasure.

Alan Brown (40:35):

Well, thank you for having me, I really appreciate it.