10 Reasons That Arkansas Is The Most Terrifying, Spookiest State
By J.B. VanDyke|Published May 23, 2016
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J.B. VanDyke
Author
J.B. Weisenfels has lived in rural Arkansas for three decades. She is a writer, a mom, and a graduate student. She is also an avid collector of tacky fish whatnots, slightly chipped teapots, and other old things. In her spare time she enjoys driving to the nearest creek to sit a while. If you were to visit her, she'd try to feed you cornbread.
Every place has its dark side, and Arkansas is no different. Arkansas has more than just a dark side, though—it also has a long history of oral tradition. We pass stories along. We whisper them to each other. We hold flashlights under our chins and repeat them around campfires or in bedrooms. We’ve got stories about monsters, hitchhiking ghosts, and cemeteries where the flags wave without a breeze. We also have true stories, stories we can find in the news, that are just as horrifying. Here are the ten things that make Arkansas the most terrifying state in the U.S.:
In the span of a week in 1987, Ronald Gene Simmons of Russellville killed sixteen people. He decided to kill all the members of his family, and succeeded. Afterward, he laid them all out in the house and spent the evening drinking beer and watching TV.
It was originally called the Army-Navy hospital and for awhile it served as a hospital for the criminally insane. There were once so many bodies that they lined them up in the halls of one floor. The elevator doesn’t stop on that floor anymore. Plus it just looks spooky, doesn’t it?
Blamed for both the destruction of livestock and the 1971 attack on a family, the Fouke or Boggy Creek Monster is sometimes called the Southern Sasquatch.
Said to be the ghosts of Spanish conquistadors looking for gold or coal miners mourning the mine collapse that killed them, lights appear near a dirt road north of Dover. Reports of the lights date back to the time before electricity.
When there is no wind, a ghostly breeze blows the flags on the graves of Fredonia Cemetery. People tend to feel uneasy there, and hear voices murmuring among the graves.
Let’s face it: you could fall off a mountain or bluff, drown in a flash flood, be bitten by a snake or spider, anger a bee hive . . . there are all kinds of reasons to be terrified of Arkansas nature.
