Southern Mysteries Classics Arkansas Ghost Trial - The Murder of Connie Franklin

In this updated and remastered Southern Mysteries Classic, we revisit the strange disappearance of Connie Franklin and the mystery of the man who returned from the dead. In 1929, five men in Stone County, Arkansas, were charged with the murder of Franklin, a drifter who had vanished from the Ozarks. A teenage girl said he had been brutally attacked and his body burned in the woods, and investigators believed they had found his charred remains. Then, just days before the murder trial began, a man appeared claiming to be Connie Franklin. The bizarre case drew reporters from across the country and became known as the Arkansas Ghost Trial.

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Episode Sources

Brooks Blevins, Ghost of the Ozarks: Murder and Memory in the Upland South, University of Illinois Press, 2012.

Brooks Blevins, “The Arkansas Ghost Trial: The Connie Franklin Case and the Ozarks in the National Media,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly, Vol. 68, No. 3, Autumn 2009, pp. 245–271.

Encyclopedia of Arkansas, “Connie Franklin (Alleged Murder of).”

Deane Allen, “Man at Batesville Identified as Franklin,” Arkansas Democrat, Dec. 8, 1929, pp. 1, 8.