Lost in the Stacks: Cave Mountain

One April morning in 2001 springtime beckoned hikers up to Cave Mountain. With their bluffs and overlooks, waterfalls and wildflowers, the beautiful Arkansas Ozarks were a perfect place for a family walk. The wilderness was also the perfect place for 6-year-old Haley to get lost. After an intensive and heart-wrenching three-day search, rescuers with mules found Haley exhausted and dehydrated by the Buffalo River. Haley told her parents that an “imaginary friend,” a little girl with pigtails and a flashlight, comforted her and guided her to the river.

On another April day decades before Cave Mountain beckoned another group, a tiny religious cult fleeing from warrants. Led by a 17-year-old prophet the Church of God in Christ through the Holy Spirit, Inc. awaited Tribulation. Hidden in the woods with rifles and handguns, knives and nunchuks they had all they needed to survive. What they didn’t need or want was a 3-year-old girl, a little girl who sometimes wore pigtails and had a flashlight.

Oooh, creepy, right? You should know Benjamin Hale’s Cave Mountain isn’t a straightforward true crime narrative. There are dips and hollows into personal and Ozark history, wanderings into religious musings and personal asides. Yet it all adds up to a page-turning read.