This week on One Shot at History, we’re trading Wisconsin weather for Arkansas weirdness — and there is a lot of it.
We start in Little Rock in 1920, where two police officers on a routine patrol stumble into a ditch, see lights floating into the treetops, and nearly get shot by three women who were ghost hunting on a new moon. It gets stranger from there.
We visit the White River, home to Arkansas’s own version of the Loch Ness Monster — a creature so embedded in local culture that the state legislature officially designated a stretch of river as the White River Monster Refuge in 1973. We head to Fouke, where a hairy, red-eyed creature attacked a family in 1971 and inspired a film that helped invent the found-footage horror genre. We drive the railroad tracks outside Gurdon, where a mysterious light has been bobbing in the darkness since the 1930s and no one — not scientists, not Unsolved Mysteries — has fully explained it.
And we spend some real time with the Cherokee legend of the Yunwi Tsunsdi — the Little People — small, powerful spirit beings who guided lost travelers, kept sacred fire burning on the Trail of Tears, and, according to tradition, are still out there. This one isn’t a ghost story. It’s something older and more alive than that.
One Shot at History takes a humorous look at the serious business of folklore — how stories travel, why they survive, and what they say about the people who keep telling them.
From Wisconsin, headed south of the Mason- Dixon Line
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