News from rural America.

This week we’re starting out with a conversation with energy reporter Julia Tilton about data center bans across rural America. It’s Halloween season and we’re celebrating the spooky with a trip to Madrid, New Mexico with reporter Anya Petrone Slepyan to look into their local ghost tour. Then, Daily Yonder reporter Ilana Newman talks to Betsy Gaines Quammen about her newest book, “This Haunted Land: Reckoning with Ghosts and the Stories that Shape America”. Then we head to coal country where Mitch Troutman writes about the places and people who shaped him in his new book “The Bootleg Coal Rebellion: The Pennsylvania Miners Who Seized an Industry”. Finally, Daily Yonder data editor Sarah Melotte questions whether the Texas panhandle is as rural as the Florida panhandle (who even knew there were this many panhandles?). Our musician this week is country singer Matt Wynn.

TRANSCRIPT

Hi, I'm Jared Ewe, the host of Yonder Radio.

Every week, we bring rural conversations with national reaching.

We're doing it again, Julia Tilton, often here with the latest on data centers.

This time, it's about bands across rural America.

And since it's Halloween season, we're going to celebrate the spooky with a trip to Madrid, New Mexico, and look into their local ghost tour.

And then we have a conversation with Betsy Gaines-Quammen, her newest book about America being haunted by its darker history.

And we head to coal country where Mitch Troutman writes about the history of bootleg coal.

Probably a nightmare for coal mine owners.

And finally, Daily Yonder Data Editor Serum Allot questions whether the Texas panhandle is as rural as the Florida panhandle.

Who even knew there were so many panhandles?

Our musician this week is country singer Matt Wynn.

And you can find all this and more on Yonder Radio.

Rural conversations with National Reach. guitar solo Thank you.

Thank you.

Yonder Radio Rural Conversations with National Reach and a bit of a spooky edition today.

We're not going full on creep mode here, but there are some Halloween related conversations.

That'll be coming up.

As a matter of fact, we're going on a supernatural road trip with Betsy Gaines Kwaman.

That's on the way with trivia.

Panhandles?

Have you thought about these?

And I'm not talking about cooking in the kitchen.

I'm talking about those protruding parts of America's great states. a story about that.

And we're going to talk to country singer Matt Wynn, who could be, if he wanted to, on the phone with Reba McIntyre in a moment's notice.

And speaking of scary, maybe we bring in a news guy.

It's not always scary, but Jan Patolsky, he digs deep as news editor for the Daily Yonder, bringing us rural headlines.

What's going on, Jan?

Hey, Jared.

This week, we're starting with governing and a story about how states are taking the lead in introducing some AI regulation because of, well, to a large degree, federal inaction.

Are they able to do this?

This sounds like a thing that states like to talk about, but it might not be possible without the federal government.

No, I think that's totally plausible.

And we had examples of that kind of action in the past.

You know, famously, California often leads the country with that sort of large, broad spanning regulation.

And not surprisingly, this time around, it's also California leading the pack along with New Mexico.

Well, and New Mexico, they're coming off this huge victory against Meta with the $25 billion settlement.

So I can see why they might be feeling it.

Correct.

I feel like they have some momentum going and I feel like they got a taste for, you know, tech blood.

I think the reason why it's important to talk about it is because we want to see more of the heavy rural population states have a seat at the table.

And so New Mexico in particular in this case is a great leader.

So this is really real, which is strange.

And it's so important that states are taking a hold of the mantle and moving forward in helping protect against it.

What are some measures?

Well, for example, one of the things that I thought really interesting is that in the legislation proposed by New Mexico, they want to make sure that if an AI company makes a safety promise, it's a legally binding claim.

So in other words, you can't just go out there, say a bunch of things, and then come back when something goes wrong and claim, you know, oh, things happened, things went differently, and so on.

And then Texas is in the news via the New York Times.

Yes.

It's a story about how in a small town of Ingram, Texas, a police department joined forces with ICE.

It's a unique story in a sense that it really tells a human tale from the perspective of the officer who got heavily involved in that program and over time started realizing that maybe not all is as clear cut as he wanted to believe in the first place.

I mean, I could see the initial proposal looking great to an officer. you get to make money locally, and then you can also be paid by the feds as part of this 287G program.

I think that's part of the attraction, as well as a lot of those folks genuinely believing, especially closer to the border, that there's a crisis that needs to be addressed.

However, those actions impacted, affected that community so profoundly that now even folks who openly admit to supporting immigration promises made by Trump have second thoughts.

They hope that the crackdown will be focused on violent criminals primarily and not on folks who are building their lives regardless of their immigration status.

Jan Patalski, Daily Yonder News editor, stopping by Yonder Radio with Rural Headlines.

Thank you so much.

Thanks, Jared.

And now we have our favorite data center specialist, Julia Tilton, and she's here to talk about the growing push to ban new data center development.

Now, she dug into nationwide data to show where these bans are being proposed most frequently and what the trends look like as of August.

Her article in dailyyonder.com, most data center bans are in metro areas despite more facilities heading for rural areas.

Well, let me just get into this.

You in this one article, there's a lot of locality information, rural versus urban, but now the president has weighed in.

There's a whole new dimension to what you've been reporting on.

So hopefully that doesn't shake up all the stuff you've already had, but he comes out, President Trump saying that communities who don't want data centers will end up being backwards and poor from what you've been able to establish with your reporting.

Is that the sentiment of rural America?

We know from polling that was done in May and June that a majority of Americans are against data centers being built in their backyards.

And so it is interesting, President Trump singling out communities who don't want data centers and labeling them this way.

I will say, you know, anecdotally from my reporting on the ground in rural communities, I wouldn't characterize residents that don't want data centers in their areas as being backwards and poor.

And in fact, I would say that the coalition that has come together to resist data center development or oppose data center development really is from a broad spectrum of political ideologies.

And we also see a growing number of political candidates that are running for office that are speaking out on this issue, often to propose regulations on data centers, not only at the federal level, but also at various state and local levels.

I mean, what do we know about bans on data centers?

The data is still very much emerging on this part of the data center conversation specifically, and that is local governments taking action to regulate data center development, often through moratoriums, which are temporary bans, or through full-on bans that might be permanent until future regulations come into place.

My colleague, Sarah Mallott, and I worked through a data set that was gathered by Frack Tracker Alliance, which is a nonprofit organization that provides information on the fracking industry, the oil and gas industry, and now more recently on the data center industry.

And what we found looking at Frack Tracker Alliance's data set is that of nearly 700 bans that had been enacted or proposed as of August 2026, so far, a quarter of them, 25%, are in rural areas, while a majority are in metro areas.

And it's too early to parse out the trends just because this is an evolving issue.

But one reason why there might be more bans in place in metropolitan areas currently is just a reflection of the history of data center development.

Most data centers currently in operation are in metropolitan areas.

But the paradigm is shifting here and that the majority of planned data centers are going to be in rural areas.

As this issue evolves, we might see that more rural areas start passing their own regulations on data center development.

Well, and we've had bans before, you know, bans on energy development, for example.

How do these differ than maybe what we saw on wind or solar or nuclear bans?

Yeah, I think that's a really good question, especially because the opposition to data centers sometimes gets mixed up or characterized as NIMBY, not in my backyard, which comes oftentimes from the anti-clean energy, anti-renewable movement.

You know, I don't want to put wind turbines in my backyard.

I don't want solar in my backyard.

And I have been beating the drum in my reporting for a long time that the data center opposition is very different from renewable energy opposition.

Following from that opposition, the regulation that we're starting to see being put in place at a local level is also quite different from bans on renewable energy that have been in place for a long time, that have been on the rise.

Because it comes from a different ideology, it comes from a different place.

The opposition to data centers is much more politically, ideologically diverse than the opposition to renewable energy in most cases.

Is this going to be a midterm election issue?

So far, all signs point to yes.

If we see this issue, which has quickly coalesced into sort of a key election issue, bring about certain results that, you know, candidates that have spoken out about wanting to regulate data centers are successful and candidates that did not speak out about regulating data centers are not successful.

I think that tells us something about what kind of power this opposition can bring to policy.

I spoke with Stephen Smith, who is the executive director of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy.

The Southern Alliance for Clean Energy recently put out a call for a data center moratorium.

And when I asked him about this call and whether there's a political appetite among those in office in the South, like, you know, different governors and among those who are running for office to actually enact this kind of thing.

He essentially said that, you know, there's going to be consequences for politicians who don't pay attention to their constituents' concerns over data centers in the election.

Now, people, just because much of Julia Tilton's existence is due to data centers right now, that doesn't mean she's not real life.

She is right here and she is reporting and you continue to do so.

Thank you so much.

Thanks, Jared.

That was Julia Tilton putting the AI in Julia as she's talking about data centers across the countries and all the latest developments we have here on Yonder Radio.

And we've gone yonder and we've gone out to Missouri and we found ourselves a country musician.

Flint Hill, Missouri brings us their pride and joy.

Matt Wynn, a musician who now lives in Nashville.

He's got a song he's written for Reba McIntyre, for Christian Chenoweth.

Matt Wynn is here.

He brings with him his impressive Rolodex and his country music roots.

I'm talking to Matt Wynn here, a country musician.

He writes music.

There's lots to talk about with you.

And I think most importantly, it needs to be asked, like, could you just pick up the phone and call Reba McIntyre right now?

How close are you to Reba?

Yeah, I could.

I don't like abuse that privilege for sure, because she is probably one of the more busy people I know.

Kind of the Energizer Bunny, you know what I mean?

She she she does now she does as much as she wants to do.

But what she wants to do, whether it's music or acting or anything like that, she just has a lot on her plate.

Not to mention being a mom and significant other and all that other stuff that we forget about.

Well, I wanted to ask that because Matt Wynn is no Nepo baby, people.

He wrote a song that she sang.

Quiet corner booth.

I wouldn't spend all my seconds asking God questions.

Cause he knows I'd be back soon.

How awesome is that?

Oh, unbelievable, man.

I mean, that's, you know, you have people that you grow up listening to on various levels, and she's kind of one of those people that she lives in country music, but she also is one of those people that's kind of broken outside of her genre, you know?

So she's kind of a world artist now, not just a country artist, even though she is the queen of country.

But it's never not amazing to have a song that not only a song that she cut, but a song that was super significant to me personally.

And we've written songs together, too, and all that kind of stuff.

She's a wonderful human.

But that was kind of the beginning of our relationship was that song, Seven Minutes in Heaven.

If I had seven minutes in heaven, I'd spend them all with you.

You seem to do well with the female demographic as Christian Chenoweth also sings one of your songs.

And then you teamed up on what looks to be kind of like an anthem for women on feminine energy.

Where are you coming from?

Are you musician first or songwriter first?

You know, I always say I sing to write and I write to sing.

You know, for me, they're in the same ballpark.

I grew up not only singing, but also writing from a really young age.

And I had a passion for both.

And they kind of feel different needs, I think, personally for me.

You know, if I'm writing too much and not on stage enough or vice versa, I feel a little bit unbalanced.

I mean, I have been surrounded by a lot of incredible women in my life, from my mom to my grandma to my wife and many more, you know.

So I think that maybe influenced me.

Yeah, feminine energy is always one I get asked about now because it is totally that female rock star empowerment thing.

But that's by an artist named Alexander Kaye.

And I've known her for a really long time because I grew up about an hour past St. Louis, a small town called Flint Hill.

And she grew up on the Illinois side.

So we grew up playing dive bars together and stuff like that.

And she's doing incredible right now.

But that was a good song for her.

Yeah, guys, if you need a superpower, if you want to be successful in your life, take it from Matt Wynn.

As he said in there, he just listens.

That's all it takes is just listen.

It is a big part of it.

You channel this into the latest song, One Less Cornfield.

It's a good looking piece of land.

Pass down from my old man With some patience and some rain It'll grow anything And this is a very appropriate song for the time.

Yeah, man.

I know.

I mean, it's definitely something for me that's personal.

You know, just because I grew up in a true blanky missus town.

Most people that live right next to it don't know it's there.

You know, because it's just a lot of farms and generationally.

And some of them six plus generations deep, you know, small town life is really important to me.

And it is to my family, too.

My dad's the mayor of our town.

What?

Yeah, funny.

I said you weren't a Nepo baby and I was wrong.

So I'm very proud of where I grew up.

It was a really great place to grow up and be a kid.

Every time when you when you live far away from your hometown, it is wild when you don't you get back less and less.

The more you get busy and the more you live life and the more you tour. when you get even less so to that little hometown that you grew up in you notice the changes right you notice the shifts and everything and every time I went back there I would notice it was just some of these farms that I some of them I grew up working on and things like that you know were a little bit smaller you know when I when I would come back there'd be another subdivision or there'd be um you know more development or gas station or whatever else so many people's stories for generations kids you know houses built there people had kids all these different things there's so much more than just one less cornfield you know um that we had talked about in the song it was personally inspired from my trips back there and continues to be so i know the small town's gotta get bigger know the rich man's gotta get richer but it's more than grass with a for sale sign more and in asking Christ one less harvest on a hard-earned land one less pair of calloused hands one less saying grace for a homegrown family meal it's a whole lot more than one less cornfield I'm just gonna equate being a musician to kind of a superpower because you I mean you could get angry and just be a guy shouting at the bar but I think you know you're touching people's hearts here by telling a story that I think is far more powerful.

Right.

I mean, it's, I think it's easy to do that part, the part where you get angry and yell at people in a crowd or bar from some stage that you have the mic, you know, to do.

I mean, I always felt like my job was to make people think, you know, but also at the same time, I always say my biggest things I say I'm in the business of moving people, whether that's to tears, to think, to laugh, to want to raise a drink up and dance, you know, that's the job.

And hopefully probably all within one show.

Most of my job is to make people forget about all the differences we got and make people realize how much more like we are.

Well, thank you so much, Matt.

Brother, thank you.

I appreciate it.

I love what you all do here.

So thanks for spending some time with me.

We're building rooftops to the sky.

Builds her pile and just stays high You can find Matt's music on Spotify, Apple Music, or wherever you listen to music and find more about Matt and his upcoming touring dates at mattwinmusic.com and that's W-Y-N-N.

Well, it's time for our first trivia clue.

What movie was one of the first viral marketing campaigns in the history of the internet in 1999?

Well, we're going to go on that supernatural road trip that is on the way and more trivia clues on Yonder Radio.

Thank you. guitar solo Yonder Radio, rural conversations with National Reach.

Jared Ewy here, your host, taking you through the spooky season.

And to celebrate, reporter Anya Patron Slepian goes to Madrid, New Mexico, to investigate the ghosts that live in and sometimes haunt the quirky small town.

The American West is studded with ghost towns, communities that were constructed to support mines and railroads and were abandoned just as quickly when the industries moved on.

But sometimes those communities come back from the dead.

Madrid, New Mexico, is one of those places.

Madrid was first developed in the 1890s as a mining company town.

Pre-constructed houses from Sears and Roebuck were moved via railroad from a mining town in Kansas and plunked down on a New Mexico hillside between Santa Fe and Albuquerque.

Madrid was considered a model company town, with a population of 2,500 and the first electrified ballpark west of the Mississippi.

But in the 1950s, the coal market collapsed and the town was abandoned, remaining empty for 20 years.

In the 1970s, new life returned to Madrid.

Hippies, artists, and others involved in the 70s counterculture moved in, reclaiming the town from the desert one building at a time.

Today, Madrid is a vibrant community with around 200 residents, filled with galleries, shops, and of course, stories.

If every town has that one eccentric person, this is all the eccentric people got together and made one town.

That's Andrew Weiss, an author and storyteller who has lived in Madrid for 25 years.

He's the force and the voice behind a series of oral history walking tours that visitors can listen to as they explore the community.

I've always loved local histories, folk tales.

Madrid is a place where it's really apparent.

Everyone is some type of artist and everyone lets their freak flag fly.

And so that makes for great stories and it makes for great storytellers.

Andrew began with a general oral history of Madrid.

He collected around 70 hours of audio from community members and pieced it together into a two-hour walking tour that guests can access with an app.

It went over well, and the storytellers of Madrid weren't finished.

Lily Whiteswan, a Madrid resident who has been part of spiritual cleansings around the community for decades, suggested he put together a second tour, this time with ghost stories.

Once I put out the words, I got to hear some really fun stories from a lot of really interesting people.

And the result of that is the Ghost Town ghost tour.

A story from Lily kicks off the ghost tour.

We moved in in July of 1973.

I saw this lady in Surios that said that she had lived in the house for quite a while.

And she said, don't argue in the house because the house does not like arguing.

I took her advice and told my husband Lee at the time if we need to argue let's go outside because the house does not like arguing but that kind of flew out the window one day and Lee comes in and we start arguing in the bathroom well the bathroom was in the middle of the house and it had two doors one to the kitchen and one to the bedroom and all of a sudden this huge wind picked up and slammed the kitchen door and then slammed the bedroom door you know and then went around and opened the the kitchen and slammed it again and then went around and slammed the bedroom door and we both looked at each other and went, oh my god, it's true.

The house does not like arguing.

I resolved it by kicking Lee out.

Some of the presences encountered on the ghost tour are indifferent to the living, or even friendly.

Others, not so much.

Here's a story from Timothy Willis, who was working late at night in Madrid's Engine House Theater, which many people say is the most haunted place in Madrid.

We have a big giant curtain we call the Grand Drape, which is this purple, like, super thick curtain with weights on it and everything.

It's heavy, you know, it has sandbags on it.

It's not supposed to move.

But this thing started billowing back and forth, and then it blew probably four or five feet off the edge of the stage, up in the air, and parted.

And there was footsteps, you know, it was like, dunk, dunk, dunk, footsteps across the stage.

I felt this sense of dread that I've never felt before that I was going to get thrown off the balcony.

Something was in the balcony with me and wasn't happy with me being there.

I was scared.

And I just said, nope.

And I think I even left the lights on and I just ran the f*** out of there.

One notable thing about the paranormal activity in Madrid is the sheer concentration of it.

The community is small, with just a few main streets off the highway, but there seem to be ghosts on every corner.

I asked Andrew why he thinks there's so much action on the spiritual plane in Madrid.

He chalks it up to the community's difficult past, first as a mining town and then as a refuge outside of mainstream life.

Of the 10 worst coal mining disasters in New Mexican history, half of them happened in Madrid.

And those people are still buried down in mines two miles beneath the town.

The nature of coal mining, just capitalism at its most exploitative, the real horror was just trying to survive in a place like that.

So there's an inevitable backdrop of tragedy in this place.

Equally, with the idea of the tragic figures, is that as Madrid came back from the dead, came back from being a ghost town, it's attracting people that lived on the fringes of society.

And so people were maybe more likely to fall into tragedy or find tragedy themselves.

A lot of people in pain and therefore inflicting pain on others.

Unsurprisingly, a large number of the stories have to do with miners.

With the darkness, you could see through and see a miner's type clothing, you know, of the heavy blue jeans and the heavy shirt.

I sat up on the couch and I was freaked out.

And like about three or four guys came through the front door.

They came through the door, but the door didn't open.

They were ghosts.

I couldn't believe it.

And they were filthy.

And they had, you know, their faces all had like black soot on them.

They stunk to high heaven.

I mean, to this day...

Andrew hopes that listeners get a thrill from hearing about the paranormal encounters of Madrid.

But more than that, he sees the tour as a way to help people connect with Madrid's history.

Because of the backdrop of Madrid, it becomes inevitable.

Mixed up in the ghost story, you're going to get some of the soil of the town itself.

And it is a way of getting people to engage with the past.

For Yonder Radio, I'm Anya Petron-Slepian in Madrid, New Mexico.

Thank you, Anya, for that ghost tour through a small town in New Mexico.

For more information or to experience the self-guided walking tour yourself through Madrid, visit andrewweiss.com.

That's andrewweiss.com.

So that's out of Madrid, New Mexico.

And now we go to where country music is alive and well.

There are no ghosts in the songs of Matt Wynn, but you might find beer, truck, barbecue, and woman as this man is churning out the heart of country music.

And here's his song, The Hat, on Yonder Radio.

I'm asking him if I could try it on.

He shook his head, smiled and said, boy, you still got a ways to go.

You can settle up.

Throw the whiskey down.

You can shoot a gun, you can drive a truck, and you can talk real tough.

But can you hold on when the right goes wrong?

You can wear the buck or you can buy the boots, but a cowboy's more than a man.

You gotta earn the hat.

No, it ain't just a way to keep the sun out of your face.

It's for a man with working hands, not boys who want to play John Wayne.

You take it all for a lady.

That was The Hat by Matt Wynn.

You can find more from Matt wherever you listen to music or on his website, mattwynnmusic.com, and that's W-Y-N-N.

Well, it's Halloween and we're telling ghost stories.

We have a great conversation between Daily Yonder reporter Ilana Newman and author Betsy Gaines-Quammen, a journalist and author who has a new book out this fall called This Haunted Land, Reckoning with Ghosts and the Stories that Shape America.

Hi, Betsy.

It's so nice to have you here to talk about your book, This Haunted Land, that came out earlier this fall.

In this book, you kind of explore the ghosts that we face in all aspects of our lives, from ghost towns to rivers and waterways that have become depleted to the known and unknown figures in history.

Can you tell me a little bit about how you chose the people and locations that you focused on for this book?

I love ghost stories.

And so I really have always collected ghost stories. think that ghost stories build relationships.

It's kind of communal.

You get together.

It can reflect the continuity of an oral tradition or a culture.

And so when I started this book, I was focused on spooky tales.

But what I started to realize is that these stories really revealed patterns across this country of unresolved and unsettled histories.

So I did have ghost stories about people and individuals, but I also talked about how we are haunted by unsustainable extraction.

In the West, we're haunted by the scarcity of water and the decisions that we've made in and around water use.

We're haunted by the legacy of Indian boarding schools and cultural erasure, as well as our period of slavery in this country.

There are stories within stories.

There are the supernatural tales, but they really do reflect an unsettled history in this nation.

As you mentioned, one of the themes that you explore a lot is extraction.

You're not only focusing on industries like mining in Butte, Montana, but you also talk a little bit about how tourism can be extractive.

Journalism itself can also be kind of extractive in some ways if we're taking these stories without responsibly representing the people that we are talking to or the people whose stories are shared with us.

Can you talk a little bit about how, while you were reporting this book, how did you approach holding that responsibility of the stories of the dead especially?

Yeah, I think that that was one of my biggest commitments in writing this book, that part of it is a supernatural road trip, looking at places throughout the United States that have spooky tales associated with them.

But I became ever more convinced that I had the responsibility to tell these stories with utmost care.

That, I think, is something that there's a risk in sort of paranormal investigations, in dark tourism, where people can be extractive of real tragedies.

What responsibility do we have as people who tell ghost stories to make sure that the folks who live traumatic lives, who live through real horror, are reflected in the truest way we can tell their stories?

And I tried to really honor the lives of people who lived and may have experienced tragic ends or tragic circumstances and made sure that I created their full life, that they weren't reduced to a single tragedy.

A lot of the stories in multiple chapters as the focus and then kind of woven in throughout many other chapters, you're focusing on the ghosts of indigenous people who were systematically killed by colonizers and the ghosts of the culture that was lost through boarding schools.

And that still haunts Native people all over the country today who are potentially disconnected from their past because of those events.

Can you talk about why it was important to you to tell the stories of Indigenous ghosts as a main focus throughout the book?

I don't know about you, but when I grew up, I did not know about the legacy of the Indian boarding school.

I did not learn enough about the impacts of colonialism, broken treaties, stolen land.

And I feel like it's something that every American not only needs to know, but needs to look straight in the face.

As I worked on this book, I bumped into it.

One of the people that I was able to meet was a graffiti artist named Stephen Grounds.

And he's Navajo, Yuchi, Seminole, and Creek.

And he was the accountant for the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes in Concho, Oklahoma.

Stephen happens to be an incredible graffiti artist, and he asked the tribes if he could use the ruins of an Indian boarding school on tribal grounds as a canvas for his murals.

So he went through the archives of the Cheyenne and Arapaho people and picked out portraits that he painted on the sides of this derelict building.

And he said to me, I want this to be known for something other than ghosts, because it's famously haunted.

And paranormal investigators flock to this place looking for ghosts.

And he said, it's so much more than that.

I wanted this to be my act of resistance.

I was also able to talk to Noreen Starr, who is a historian and outreach coordinator for the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes.

And she, when I told her about the book and said, you know, I'm writing this book called This Haunted Land, she said, you know, that I don't agree with.

She said, when you learn your history, you can begin to heal.

Once we know our history, we can unhaunt our land.

That was Daily Yonder reporter Ilana Newman talking to author Betsy Gaines Quammen about her newest book, This Haunted Land.

Betsy is also on a book tour right now across the West, which you can learn more about on our website, BetsyGainesQuammen.com.

That's B-E-T-S-Y, Gaines, G-A-I-N-E-S, and Quammen, Q-U-A-M-M-E-N.

And it's time for our second trivia clue for this week, which movie kicked off decades of tourism to the tiny town of Burkittsville, Maryland, where visitors still go to retrace the unfortunate steps of the movie protagonist.

We have more clues coming up, and we are going to learn about bootlegged coal on the way on Yonder Radio.

I'm going to go ahead and yonder radio rural conversations with national reach jared ewe here your host we're doing you know we're doing some scary stuff in this show it's not for the faint of heart which i'm surprised i'm still here because just this week's trivia is something that scared me pretty badly in my 20s our next guest describes himself as a writer educator organizer and jack of all trades living in central pennsylvania he's a descendant of coal miners and what he talks about might be a horror story for the owners of coal mines.

It all inspired him to write this new book.

Well, the author is Mitch Troutman, and the book is The Bootleg Coal Rebellion, The Pennsylvania Miners Who Seized an Industry from, get this, 1925 to 1942.

You, in writing this book, or for lack of a better term, you're mining for information, and then you come across a treasure trove.

And I love that story within the story.

How did you come across the information you needed to tell the story about these miners who were stealing coal when the coal mines closed during the Great Depression.

Right.

So I knew there had been bootleg miners and there's still maybe a few people who do that.

And I knew there was a history, but I didn't know what it was.

I read this is where I'm from, you know, so I read everything I could find and there wasn't that much.

I eventually found that there was someone, Michael Kazzura, who was writing a book about this in the late 80s, early 90s.

And in a car accident.

And I managed to find his widow who was thrilled that somebody wanted to pick this up.

That's the reason it's a book is because we have all these people's words.

In a nutshell, how would you describe this book?

I mean, what's the story it's telling?

The story is about the anthracite coal fields in central northeast Pennsylvania.

During the Great Depression, they shut down a lot of the collieries, what we call coal mines, collieries.

And there were so many unemployed people, they started digging their own mines on the company lands.

Through the decade, through the time, more and more of them did it until it was the major industry in two counties, three counties a little.

And there were just so many of them that they couldn't be stopped and started operating in the open air.

At its peak, maybe 10% of anthracite coal was being bootlegged and sold.

They had bootlegged truckers who were selling it in the cities for home heating is mostly what anthracites used for.

Well, you have to ask, like, it's the Great Depression. these communities rely on the mines and then the mines are shut down.

What are they supposed to do?

Am I too empathetic here?

But I feel like this is going to happen.

Yeah, people saw it as theirs, not because they own the land, they didn't, but because they had put in the labor and taken the risk to get it.

And also, like these companies were hated, like nationwide they were hated because they were fairly ruthless.

And that was kind of before the era of PR.

They didn't try to appease people because they had a monopoly on the coal supply in the East Coast.

When the bootleggers started selling their coal and the companies were trying to get the bootleggers prosecuted or even just arrested, they couldn't find much sympathy.

They couldn't find sympathy in the press.

They couldn't find sympathy in Harrisburg, the capital, you know, and they definitely couldn't find sympathy with local judges and juries.

Well, it gets to the point that these bootleggers are going to the mine like it's a regular work day, but there really is no work as officially would be titled for someone getting paid.

They're just going to the work to get coal for themselves and whomever they want to sell it to.

It's incredible.

You had a lot of skilled miners taking that underground and teaching the next generation, which is the same way they would learn in a company mine.

But they also started to get very inventive with how to mine the coal from a bootleg mine without all the equipment and the investment that a huge colliery had.

So they started using Model Ts, which are kind of old at this point and cheap, and would use one of the rims to make a hoist to pull people in and out of the mine.

Or they would use rain spouting to ventilate a mine or connect several mines in a line underground so that they had safety exits, things like that.

Well, you use the word safety, but I'm kind of thinking this is pretty dangerous.

Can you paint a picture of what, say, some 19-year-old is dealing with as they're being lowered down by their dad's Model T?

It involved a lot of trust in the people you worked with who were typically either family or close friends or people you had already spent years with in the mine.

And it required a lot of trust that they knew what they were doing, that they had safety in mind, but accidents happened frequently.

There's so many ways to die in a coal mine.

The scariest that I came across in my research is when you're bootlegging and digging your own tunnels on company ground, you only have your remembrance to go off of for where the company mines are underground.

And so if you accidentally tap into that mine without realizing it was there, you could fall, right?

Or even scarier is if that mine is already flooded when you break through.

It actually sucks you in.

The water pushes at you, but it sucks you into the mine.

Just you talking about this makes me claustrophobic.

This isn't some guy with moonshine in the back of his truck driving on a dirt road in the dark.

Like, this is out in the open on the rail lines that were put in place by the companies that wanted to move this when the mines were open.

Yeah, the companies were so mad.

And it ends up being hilarious the amount of times they try to get a law passed to ban something that's already illegal.

Or the ways the bootleg miners, they were ingenious in the mines.

They were ingenious outside the mines, creating different signals at gas stations so that they knew which way a cop might be when they were on their way selling coal in Philly.

That's what makes it a rebellion is that they're flaunting the law so openly in this one particular way and that the law for 10, 15 years is just no longer being enforced.

Specific law of property rights no longer being enforced.

What is the legacy of this story?

What have you been able to find that's carried over from this?

There is a general attitude in the coal region, in these specific counties, you know, of just being very blunt, very forward, and trying to take care of problems immediately and yourself if you can.

But the history had been forgotten in a lot of ways.

And the reality I found from researching this book is that if you are from those counties, you have ancestors who bootleg coal because everybody was doing it.

Other than your book, is there something within the canon of coal mine bootlegging outside of your effort?

Yeah, there's been some songs recorded by Van Wagner, who was an independent miner, which is what we call a bootlegger who has permission.

Take me down below.

Oil up the buggy for it's time to shoot some coal.

When your family gets hungry, you'll do anything for work.

Carved out a living from Pennsylvania dirt And then there's also a novel that just came out that uses my book as the historical background for it.

That's Patchtown by J.A.

Stein.

I really liked it.

No, I already see this turning into a movie, and I already see Timothee Chalamet and a dramatic scene with a headlamp and a canary and coal-soiled face and lots of drama.

So look forward to the Oscar in your future.

What an incredible story, I'm glad you were there to pick up where others left off and share it in this book.

The book is The Bootleg Coal Rebellion, the Pennsylvania Miners Who Seized an Industry from 1925 to 1942.

Mitch, I'm so glad that you reached out to us so we could share this.

This is incredible.

Yeah, thank you for having me.

Love the show.

And now, Sarah Mallott, data editor for The Daily Yonder.

Now, here's something that maybe a lot of you haven't thought about, unless, of course, you live in one.

Panhandles.

I only think of the one panhandle.

I think of the Texas panhandle or Oklahoma panhandle, a shared panhandle, if you will.

But there are many more.

Sarah Mallott, you dove into the panhandle story.

And, well, why?

What about panhandles interests you?

I don't know exactly why they captivate me so much.

I just kind of think it's a funny word for a geographic area.

And I came up with this idea to maybe write about them like actually a few years ago when I realized that when people talk about panhandles, they usually refer to them as sort of in the middle of nowhere or remote or like culturally distinct from the states that they belong to.

And just kind of got me thinking about why that is or if that's just a stereotype or is it actually true that these places are different or more rural and what's going on there before we get into the details i'm gonna let people know this is on daily yonder.com sarah malant panhandle geography it's a part of your bi-weekly rural index right yes that's right okay daily yonder geographer sarah malant digs into panhandles gets on an oven mitt and digs deep here because I only think of, you know, a couple panhandles maybe, but there are many.

There are many and they're not, there's no strict definition of a panhandle and there's no comprehensive agreed upon list of panhandles either.

And so it was really fun to kind of figure out, okay, which panhandles am I going to consider a panhandles and which ones am I not?

And how, what kind of criteria am I going to use to try to create my own list?

So that was of a fun process.

Yeah, you are playing panhandle god in this article because you say, okay, sure, the nodule north gets in, but not Alabama's phalanges.

And there was really no reasoning.

This is just the malotomy.

This is what was happening.

Yeah, it was just like, basically, do I like the shape or do I not?

And I think I said in my newsletter that Alabama's panhandle panhandles kind of looks like a uvula and so that is not a panhandle they have these like two little protrusions at the bottom but minnesota i like minnesota's panhandle even though i don't think minnesota is on the list of other panhandle lists because it's sort of more like a little nodule at the top it's not really anything that you can grab as you would grab a pandle a pandle A panhandle.

That's how maybe it should be referred to.

Saving us syllables, Sarah Millard.

Well, okay, so you had a question.

You know, what is the makeup?

Are they more rural than the rest of the state?

And what did you find?

I found in general that most panhandles are more rural than the state that they belong to.

So that stereotype was actually kind of true.

And I used two different definitions of rural to try to see maybe like is one definition just sort of biased over the other.

And so I used the definition of from the Office of Management and Budget, which is a county level definition that the Daily Under uses most frequently.

And I also used the census definition of rural, which is at a smaller scale than the county.

Both definitions bore that out that, yeah, panhandles are generally more rural.

The only exception is West Virginia.

West Virginia's panhandles are more urban than the rest of the state.

Well, yeah, it's like the panhandles of West Virginia are leaning in to glom on to other states' urban areas.

Yeah, that's right.

So West Virginia's northern panhandle is close to Pittsburgh, and then the eastern panhandle is sort of reaching towards the D.C. metro area.

What is your favorite panhandle?

Well, I don't know.

I have a few different favorite ones.

I think if you're going to go by shape, then Oklahoma would definitely be the winner. because I just think it's such a satisfying shape and it looks so much more like a panhandle than I think any of the other states and so I think that one would have to win but if you're asking me which one I would rather travel to or visit I think northern Minnesota would have to be the winner.

It looks beautiful up there and I've always wanted to visit but you know I encourage you if you're reading or listening to this and I did not include your state and you think that your state has a good panhandle that I did not include, please send me some hate mail at sarahdailyonder.com.

I'd be happy to hear you out and we can talk panhandles.

But beware, she has some panhandle judgment that she hasn't gotten a reign on.

So if you bring in something that looks like an appendix or other overlooked part of a body, you may not get the attention that you think your panhandle deserves because, well, Sarah Millat here at the Daily Yonder and Yonder Radio, I think, has begun Panhandle fandom.

Yeah, I hope so.

I hope I started a movement.

I, you know, and this maybe would offend some people, but I think Nebraska, I almost did not include Nebraska because I feel like it's not really Panhandle vibes because it's so freaking huge.

It kind of just looks like, yeah, you took a bite out of a square and I don't know, it doesn't really have Panhandle vibes.

But Nebraska is like on all the lists of like states that have panhandle.

So I included it just to be fair.

Thank you so much for digging into this.

Because, well, for one, I don't know who else is.

And this is a very entertaining article.

Panhandle Geography, part of Sarah Mallott's bi-weekly rural index with dailyyonder.com.

Thank you for bringing us this heretofore unearthed information.

Thank you.

And now it's time for our final trivia clue of the week.

Which movie transformed the horror genre with its usage of found footage, which led many viewers to believe it was true and quite terrifying?

Did you guess it?

The answer is...

Yeah, The Blair Witch Project.

Months before The Blair Witch Project was shown at the Sundance Film Festival, its creators filled a website with newspaper articles, police reports, interviews, and photographs telling the story of three student filmmakers who had gone missing in 1994.

This marketing campaign was brilliant and along with the film's found footage style, blurred the lines between fiction and reality.

Today, we call it the midterms and set off a cultural phenomenon.

The small indie film had a budget of $60,000 but eventually grossed almost, wait for it, $250 million internationally.

Residents of Burkittsville didn't know their town had been featured so prominently in the movie and were shocked and kind of annoyed by the flocks of tourists and truth seekers who descended into the town in the following months.

Nowadays, Blair Witch fans can participate in the weekend-long Blair Witch experience, visiting the same locations where the film was shot and learning behind-the-scenes details of the eight-day shoot that changed horror movies.

And the way I lived for at least the next month, it scared me so badly.

Well, be careful out there, whatever you're doing for Halloween, and we will be back as we are every week, right here at Yonder Radio.

Thank you for listening to Yonder Radio, a production of the Center for Rural Strategies, publisher of the Daily Yonder.

I'm your host, Jared Ewey.

Thanks to Don Castle and the Tennessee Sheiks, Steph Gunno and the Lone Tones, Quincy Ponver, Leo Pozel, and Tim Merrimah for the great music.

Our editor and producer is Susanna Brown.

This episode was also produced by Ilana Newman and Will Wright.

Our executive producer is Joel Cohen.

The executive in charge of production is Adam Georgie.

Yonder Radio, Rural Conversations with National Reach. guitar solo