Like Granny once told me, Tin Mountain is where I belong.
Where I’ll always belong.
Home.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I always knew I wanted to write about home. But I didn’t know how until I’d left.
Growing up in the Ozarks, I didn’t always appreciate the beauty of the landscape. This rocky land, with its lakes, caves, and serpentine rivers shone clearer for me in my rearview mirror as its rolling hills, pastures, and forests were replaced by California’s equally beautiful mountains, deserts, and beaches.
A lot of media gets us wrong. Our dialect, our family ties, our resolve and stubborn resilience. You have to be stubborn to live in a place like this. Marked by fitful weather that can quickly transform balmy, mild spring days to fickle tempests that bring killer tornadoes and baseball-sized hail, the Ozarks are mercurial. The weather events in The Witch of Tin Mountain are only slightly exaggerated—and while they are touched with a hint of the supernatural, I myself have witnessed the kind of weather my characters experience within these pages. This novel was revised during a particularly brutal Ozarks winter, and even though being home added a layer of nostalgia to this work, it reaffirmed that I much prefer California’s subtly shifting seasons.
The Ozarks （Aux Arc） were first named as such and rudimentarily mapped in the eighteenth century by French and Acadian fur trappers and missionaries, who found this land between mountains teeming with bounty. After the Louisiana Purchase, a variety of European immigrants came west to break ground and stake a claim—stealing from and colonizing Indigenous lands. Native peoples including the Osage, Caddo, Quapaw, Tunica, Kickapoo, and Chickasaw—who had inhabited this lush riparian wilderness since Homo sapiens first emerged in North America, rightfully resisted the European settlers’ encroachment, and were later joined by the Cherokee, who arrived shortly after the European settlers forced them out of Appalachia. After Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, the Ozarks’ abundance of caves, hidden hollows, and rocky bluffs aided in the Native peoples’ fight to maintain a foothold on their ancestral lands and resist forced relocation. The Arkansas band of the Western Cherokee still remain in the area to this day.
Tin Mountain itself, while a fantastical figment of my imagination, is inspired by the array of tiny towns that sprang up in nineteenth-century southern Missouri and northern Arkansas along rivers and railroads, many of them named for railway moguls. Many of the places mentioned in this book are real: Rogers, Fayetteville, and Blytheville, Arkansas, and Springfield, Missouri （my hometown）。 While my fictional Tin Mountain would be a bit north of the actual Ponca Wilderness, savvy readers from the area will recognize my renaming of Whitaker Point, also known as Hawksbill Crag, which overlooks the breathtakingly beautiful Buffalo River Valley. The Buffalo itself is a fine river to float down on a hot summer day.
I have taken some liberties with the establishment of railway lines and connections and took marginal liberty with the official founding date of Rogers, Arkansas （which happened about a week after Deirdre’s departure to Charleston）。 The café she eats lunch at in Rogers was also not yet in existence, although the train depot was. I have done my best to stay as accurate as possible otherwise. The CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas （https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net） was a valuable resource for dates, times, locations, and general history of the area that I know well but am often still surprised by.
As for the folklore that inspired me to write this novel, I loosely based the core haunting on the Bell Witch legend of rural Adams, Tennessee. I consulted several sources in my research on the Bell family and their eponymous witch, including An Authenticated History of the Famous Bell Witch by Martin Van Buren Ingram, which was written in 1894 and is the closest thing historians have to a primary resource about the haunting. There are a variety of theories about what exactly happened to the Bell family during the early nineteenth century, but as their descendants are still living, out of respect, I will refrain from making my own conjectures about the nature of the haunting. My reasoning behind the fictional Sutter/Werner family’s generational haunting/curse is strictly the result of my own imagination. The Bell Witch haunting has inspired many other fictional adaptations, among them Little Sister Death by William Gay, which I highly recommend to those interested in American folklore and southern gothic literature.
My decision to set my own Bell Witch–inspired novel in the Ozarks instead of Tennessee reflects the fact that many Appalachians, like my father, migrated to the Ozarks, bringing their stories, music, and history along with them. The two regions are quite similar in topography, socioeconomic status, and cultural heritage. The abundant underground springs and mineral-rich karst geology of the Ozarks plateau contribute to the similarities—and the folklore. Some unique regional phenomena can be confirmed by locals—for example, real places in the Ozarks such as Magnetic Mountain and Magnetic Spring have electromagnetic anomalies that have been experienced by residents for generations. The failure of compasses to settle on a direction in the vicinity of Tin Mountain, however, is entirely my own invention, although paranormal researchers and mystics claim that the convergence of ley lines and iron ore deposits in northern Arkansas work as a sort of magnetic spiritual vortex, and who am I to argue? It makes for a great story.
As for the rest of the strange phenomena occurring in Tin Mountain, a good percentage of the paranormal content was generated by my own family’s tradition of oral storytelling and their personal anecdotes. My father, who grew up during the Great Depression, hailed originally from Tennessee, not far from where the Bell Witch haunting occurred. His recollections of his family’s log cabin inspired the Sutter/Werner homestead, and some of his strange and unusual stories have made it into the book—the specter of the flaming man running up the hillside that Abby recounts was an apparition he saw himself, as a boy. My dad’s recollections about sharecropping, music parties, and foraging for food in the wilderness also gave me firsthand information about day-to-day life for the rural poor during the Depression.
My mother’s anecdotes also have a place in this novel. For example, Deirdre’s vision of the wolf attacking Gracelynn was a vision my own grandmother had about my mother. （Unlike Gracie, my mother did not go to the tent revival she was warned away from!） My grandmother was a deeply religious woman of the Pentecostal faith, who often had visions. One of the characteristics of Ozarkian folk magic and mysticism is its symbiosis with Christianity. If you ever go to a Pentecostal church service or a tent revival in the Ozarks, you’ll see exactly what I’m talking about.
Concerning my research on early Ozarks “hillbilly” culture, I consulted Vance Randolph’s Ozark Magic and Folklore, as well as Ozark Mountain Folks. Randolph spent a great deal of time in the Ozarks during the Depression, and his entertaining and unique experiences with the granny women, water witchers, and other hill folk helped to infuse my own work with eyewitness authenticity—including midwives who placed axes beneath the beds of laboring mothers to “cut the pain,” as Ebba does within this novel. Randolph was also one of the first historians to catalogue our unique Ozark dialect, vocabulary, and the colloquial speech of rural Missouri and Arkansas. Many of those colloquialisms are featured in this book, and I can attest from personal experience that most are still in use to this day. The Facebook page Dark Ozarks and the excellent online magazine StateoftheOzarks provided many anecdotes that helped shore up the historical detail in this novel.