Cave Mountain: A Disappearance and a Reckoning in the Ozarks

With the immediacy and extraordinary feeling for people and place of Under the Banner of Heaven and Say Nothing, a compelling true crime story about two young girls who went missing in the same Arkansas woods twenty five 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 a ghostly vision she reported once she was found—would eventually connect her disappearance to another almost forgotten story from twenty years earlier: a dark and bizarre story of brainwashing and murder and the apocalyptic visions of a teenage prophet.

Enriched by Benjamin Hale’s own family lore and connections to the culture of the Arkansas Ozarks, Cave Mountain is a gripping story about nature and survival, police and corruption, and religion and skepticism. At its center are two young girls, years apart, both trapped in the verdant, suffocating grip of the Arkansas wilds.