Roots and Shadows: The Real Appalachia Podcast

In this episode of Roots & Shadows: The Real Appalachia Podcast, we tell the story of Old 97, the Southern Railway Fast Mail train whose name would become one of America’s most famous railroad ballads.

On September 27, 1903, Southern Railway’s Fast Mail Train Number 97 was racing south through Virginia carrying United States mail moving from New York through Washington, D.C., toward New Orleans. Known for speed and strict schedu...

Deep in the mountains of Appalachia, people have been disappearing for centuries.

Some walked out into the wilderness and never came home. Some vanished from quiet farming communities where everybody knew their name. Others disappeared in places so remote and unforgiving that even massive search efforts turned up nothing at all.

In this episode of Roots & Shadows: The Real Appalachia Podcast, we explore some of the most haunting ...

In 1987, something unusual was happening in the skies over Southwest Virginia.

Across Wytheville and Wythe County, people began reporting strange lights moving through the night. These were not quick glances or distant flashes. Witnesses described objects hovering low, moving silently, and changing direction in ways that didn’t match anything they recognized. Some said the lights followed their cars down backroads. Others described ...

This week on Roots and Shadows: The Real Appalachia Podcast, we head into Smyth County, Virginia, to a quiet stretch of land along the South Fork of the Holston River, an area that doesn’t look like much at first glance, but once held one of the most ambitious industrial communities in this part of Appalachia.

In the mid-1800s, Abijah Thomas built more than just a home here. He built an operation, iron works, a tannery, and Holston ...

In September of 1996, in the small town of Marion, something happened that this community has never fully moved past.

She was 68 years old. A retired schoolteacher. The kind of woman people didn’t just know, they remembered. For decades, she taught fifth grade in Smyth County. She stayed active in her church. She volunteered. She checked on people. And if you needed something… she was the kind of person who would bring it to your do...

In this episode of Roots & Shadows: The Real Appalachia, we explore two lost treasure stories rooted deep in the mountains of Appalachia, both tied to real places, real history, and mysteries that have never been fully solved.

The first story takes us into one of the most well-known legends in Appalachian history: the lost silver mine of Jonathan Swift. Said to have been discovered in the mid-1700s, Swift and his men reportedly ...

In the late 1700s, long before Tennessee became a state and while much of Appalachia was still considered the western frontier, something began taking shape in the mountains that most people have never heard about. It wasn’t just talk or frustration with distant government. It was a real attempt to build something new.

This is the story of the State of Franklin, a lost chapter of American history that nearly became the 14th state of...

In 1942, something happened in the mountains of Southwest Virginia that most people today have never heard about… but for a short time, it shook a quiet Appalachian town in a way that couldn’t be ignored.

It started with two soldiers, Charles Joseph Lovett and James Edward Testerman, men who had already stepped outside the lines of military order. What followed was a chain of decisions that carried them out of the structured world o...

In the mountains of Southwest Virginia, there are places people don’t talk about unless you ask, and even then, you might not get much more than a short answer and a look that tells you not to press it any further.

This week on Roots & Shadows: The Real Appalachia Podcast, we travel to a quiet holler in Rich Valley, where stories have been passed down for decades about something that has been seen there, something that doesn’t q...

An old brick house beside Interstate 81 in Seven Mile Ford, Virginia holds nearly two centuries of Appalachian history, mystery, and folklore.
From a Wilderness Road tavern and a cave discovery to the unusual life of writer Lucy Crockett, the Preston House carries stories that refuse to disappear.If you drive north on Interstate 81 through Smyth County, Virginia, just before the Seven Mile Ford exit, there’s an old brick house s...

In June of 1990, a quiet Appalachian town in southwest Virginia was shaken by a crime that many people here still remember decades later. In the small community of Saltville, nestled in Smyth County, life moved at the steady rhythm familiar to so many mountain towns. Families had lived there for generations. Neighbors knew one another. Children rode bikes through the neighborhoods during long summer evenings while the mountains set...

In the mountains of Appalachia, some families carried a name that set them apart. Melungeon.

For generations in Southwest Virginia, and East Tennessee Melungeon families lived in the space between racial categories. In court records they were labeled “free persons of color.” In census rolls they were marked inconsistently. As racial classification laws hardened in the late 1700s and early 1800s, identity in the mountains became less...

In far southwestern Virginia, near the Tennessee border, the small mountain community of Taylors Valley carries one of Washington County’s most enduring ghost stories, the Legend of the Creekfield Woman.

Taylors Valley sits just outside Damascus, Virginia, along what is now the Virginia Creeper Trail. Long before hikers and cyclists passed through the valley, the area was shaped by farming communities, Civil War memory, and late...

In 1989, something changed in Smyth County, Virginia.

What began as separate acts of violence slowly started to feel connected. Reports came in from back roads, small communities, and gathering places where people had once felt safe. A convenience store clerk. A fire hall dance. A U.S. Forest Service employee who survived am attack and was able to identify her attacker. Across Southwest Virginia, fear moved quietly through towns...

On Christmas Eve, 1924, the town of Saltville, Virginia went to bed expecting morning.

What came instead was one of the most devastating industrial disasters in the history of Southwest Virginia.

Saltville sits in Smyth County along the North Fork of the Holston River, near the Tennessee border. For generations, the town’s economy depended on salt production and chemical manufacturing. The region’s natural salt deposits made ...

It started the way a lot of things do in the mountains, with long winter nights, too much boredom, and a group of young people looking for something to fill the quiet.

What followed wasn’t a jump scare or a campfire story, but a slow unraveling. A Ouija board bought off a store shelf. Questions asked half-jokingly. Answers that came back a little too specific. And a sense that something had been invited into the room long before any...

The manhunt was over.

By mid-1984, all six escapees from Virginia’s death row had been captured. Lem Tuggle Jr., Willie Leroy Jones, Linwood Earl Briley, James Briley, Raymond V. Clark, and Derick Peterson were once again behind bars. The immediate crisis surrounding the escape from Mecklenburg Correctional Center had ended.

But in Appalachia, the end of the chase was not the end of the story.

The escape of the Mecklenburg...

In the days after the May 1984 escape from Mecklenburg Correctional Center, nothing felt settled.

Six condemned men had walked off Virginia’s death row. Lem Tuggle Jr., Willie Leroy Jones, Linwood Earl Briley, James Briley, Raymond V. Clark, and Derick Peterson were no longer behind the walls of the Commonwealth’s most secure prison. Their absence immediately triggered one of the largest manhunts in Virginia history.

Mecklenb...

In 1984, the Commonwealth of Virginia believed it had placed its most dangerous men behind walls designed to hold forever.

Those walls stood at Mecklenburg Correctional Center, a maximum security prison in Boydton, Virginia, known at the time for housing death row inmates and some of the state’s most violent offenders. It was considered escape proof.

On a quiet spring night in May 1984, that promise failed.

Six condemned m...