Battleaxe

Arkansas · United States · House

A lantern crosses a field near Tuckerman before and after a storm, carried by a man reburying his gold.

Battleaxe is a stretch of farmland in Jackson County, Arkansas, near Tuckerman, and the story told about it is one of the oldest kinds there is: a man, a buried fortune, and a price paid by the wrong people.

During the Civil War, so the account goes, a wealthy family farmed here. Arkansas in those years was thick with bushwhackers, irregular bands who robbed and killed on both sides and neither, and the father of the family received word that one such band was working its way through the district. He took everything he had in gold out into the woods and buried it. When he came back to the house, his wife and children were dead.

He understood, in the way these stories always insist, that they had died because of what he had gone out to protect. And so he does it again. On stormy nights, in the pressure just before the rain and in the stillness after it has passed, a lantern is seen crossing the back of the field, swinging at the height of a man's hand, moving from where the house stood toward the treeline. It goes out among the trees. It comes back. Nobody who has followed it has found anything but the field.

FAQ

Where is Battleaxe located?

Battleaxe is in Arkansas, United States.