Benjamin Hale, CAVE MOUNTAIN

In conversation with Ryan Chapman.

A compelling true crime story about two young girls who went missing in the same Arkansas woods twenty-three years apart and the strange circumstances connecting them.

This story begins in 2001 on top of Cave Mountain in the Arkansas Ozarks. A six-year-old girl named Haley—Benjamin Hale’s cousin—got lost on a mountain trail, prompting what was at the time the largest search and rescue mission in the state’s history. Her disappearance—and her account, after she was found, of the “imaginary friend” she met in the woods—would eventually become connected to another story that took place in the same wilderness more than twenty years earlier: a dark and bizarre story of a cult, brainwashing, M**der, and the apocalyptic visions of a teenage prophet.

“The damndest mixing of true crime, memoir, and maybe (?) ghost story I’ve ever read. Unputdownable." — Patton Oswalt

Benjamin Hale is the author of the novel The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore and the collection The Fat Artist and Other Stories. His writing has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, Paris Review, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Conjunctions, and has been anthologized in Best American Science and Nature Writing. He is a senior editor at Conjunctions, teaches at Bard College and Columbia University.

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