Tales of ghostly spirits envelop the northeast Tennessee landscape like a familiar mountain fog. Join Pete Dykes, editor of Kingsport's "Daily News," as he offers up a collection of spooky local stories and legends from centuries past, including such spine-chilling accounts as the foreboding ghost of Netherland Inn Road, spectral disturbances at the Rotherwood Mansion, devilish felines, ruthless poltergeists in Caney Creek Falls, the tortured cries from fallen Rebel soldiers still heard today- and could bigfoot really be buried in the woods of Big Stone Gap?

The sudden unexpected explosion at the Tennessee Eastman Aniline Plant in October, 1960, brought horrific death and destruction to the huge Kingsport industrial complex. Following the shattering blast, nearby storage tanks of chemicals exploded as well, adding to the growing piles of rubble and debris that heaped up, burying bodies and body parts in a desolate scene of destruction. Flames spread, and multiple drums of stored material exploded as the heat reached them. Nothing like this had ever happened at the forty year old facility, where more than twelve thousand employees earned their livings. "The Eastman Explosion Tragedy" takes the reader back in time with eyewitness accounts of that terrible day in East Tennessee.

On a beautiful spring afternoon of April 13, 1925, 5 officers converged on the Holston River bank in Kingsport, Tennessee, guns drawn and ready for action. They were there to arrest a youthful fugutive named Kinnie Wagner, a native of nearby Scott County Virginia, now wanted by the law in Mississippi for allegedly shooting and killing a deputy sheriff. Thus began what may be one of the most well known stories of a southern gunman, his trial, escapes from jail and prison, and his eventual surrender in another state to a woman sheriff. This story, told in the vernacular of an old time Kingsport resident named Pug Potter, contains all the facts and reports of the shootings, the trial, escape, and later career. No southern library is complete without it! Paper back.