This program was made possible by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.

Thank you.

I am Mike Galligan with the law offices of Galligan and Newman and McMinnville, Tennessee.

I support WCTE, The Upper Cumberland's own PBS station, because I believe it is important to create entertaining TV programs that also promote lifelong learning and understanding.

When I support WCTE I know that I am helping our Upper Cumberland community for generations to come.

The law offices of Galligan and Newman provide clients with large firm expertise and small, firm, personalized care and service.

On this episode of Where Stories Live, we traveled to Willow Grove Marina in Overton County, where we had the honor of meeting Darren Shell, a local author, historian, and storyteller of folklore.

From an early age, Darren developed a fascination with storytelling, especially tales exchanged around campfires by lake visitors.

His passion for the region's history fueled his interest, but it was the encouragement from his mother that ultimately led to the creation of his books.

♪ Light Music ♪ I never really grew up.

I'm just an old guy and the kids body.

So I've always loved telling stories and jokes.

And I love a treasure hunt, so it's helped me just investigate many things.

So that's part of my make up.

I had great parents, have great parents, and they've always supported me in most of my endeavors.

And I moved from out of state to here when I was 13.

So it was a big difference.

Moving to this part of the country, big change for me.

And we purchased the Marina at Willow Grove.

So I've always I've grown up at the lake.

So the work ethic and working with family, that's, it's kind of built me to some degree.

I first met Darren here at Willow Grove.

His dad owned the Marina at the time, and, I don't know, they've always just been so super nice to everybody down here.

When we got our houseboat, it's been 20 years ago.

When I first, like, really met him.

But we've been coming here to Willow Grove.

Even when he was little, we had our other boats.

The boat dock was a great place to grow up.

See the lake every day.

And I would have.

I often would find myself at the campground in the evening.

It's joined the property, the boat dock, and so doing, I found a lot of lake stories and would hear from locals.

And then I would retell the stories to those that were not from here.

And it would it would entertain them.

And I always liked doing that.

I always like being an entertainer and being that'll make somebody, laugh or smile or make something memorable about the lake allows.

I did a lot of study on early on on how to tell a joke properly, and I found that that kind of bridged itself into writing music, writing stories, and writing what I was going to say.

If I was going to give a talk or a tour.

So all of those are closely entwined.

And so even young, I didn't realize I was going to become this.

I didn't set out to be an author.

I didn't set out to be a public speaker.

I didn't set out to do any of this.

But it developed on its own.

What if I if I knew I was going to become an author, I would have paid a lot more attention in school.

Well, as I said, they were always very supportive of me.

And I had been writing articles since, before I wrote the history book.

I've been writing articles, just little ones here and there for local magazines.

I have talked and told stories, but it my mother wanted to see the history book happen as a compilation of some of those, and I was postponing it, and it was her that pushed me or nudged me into doing what eventually became the history book.

Darren, having spent his younger years at the Marina, developed a deep understanding of the myths and legends associated with the lake, which he enjoyed in conveying through his storytelling.

Nevertheless, it was an unforeseen discovery at the lake's edge that prompted him to embark on his own investigation into the lake's history.

Yeah.

So Willow Grove, the, Willow Grove Resort is very, very close.

A few hundred yards from the old city of Willow Grove, which is on Dale Hall Lake, named after the Dale family, which is one of the early, settlers here.

Many of the stories date to the creek you see behind me.

That's Iron Creek.

Many of those stories come from there.

So Dale Hollow Lake and most of its names came from the early settlers when.

And most of those settlers all bought their property from the Native Americans, the Cherokee Indians.

A lot of good stories there.

Well, many of the, especially the early settlers couldn't read or write.

And it was important to have a storyteller.

Some were just storytellers in in the community just to preserve history.

And those could be quite colorful.

So that that became an art to some degree.

But without someone to to literally keep telling the stories, the history would have been lost.

Usually it's been my findings that when we do discover some early, very early settler stories, they've been documented much later than very rarely was it documented what had happened.

As you know, many family members aren't all that concerned when they're young about their ancestors.

But as they grow, it becomes much more, in tune with what their where their life is.

And I think that having that oral history preserves that until somebody is willing to document it in black and white.

And it's probably a little entertaining to hear what grandpa did back in the day.

♪Soft Music♪ Well, it makes boating on this lake more fun when you know the history of certain places here at the lake.

Just like when I have visitors down here, I take them out on the pontoon boat and, Darren has told us different stories about, you know, different places.

And I can pass that story on to them.

And they're like, how do you know all this?

And I'm like, Darren, he tells us this.

I read it in his book here, read his book.

I had had a number of stories under my belt already, but just little ones and nothing.

Nothing is elaborate as what would eventually come out.

But in the fall I would go out on the water and and I was used to getting out on the bank wherever, you know, I'd look around for some old fishing laws and just be on the lake.

But I was used to getting out of this particular spot where it was all red clay, and I was used to jumping out of the boat, and it was kind of hard and rubbery under my feet.

And I jumped out and I managed to one leg just went a foot into the into the soil, soft mud.

And when I looked down, I was standing in the chest cavity of a shape in the ground that looked like the old Dracula caskets.

Then I looked to my right and there was a row of them out to my left as row.

And I looked behind me.

There was a row of them, and that cemetery just happened to be between a high pool of the lake and the low pool of the lake.

And as the water went up and down each year, it would wash away a little.

But for me, when I stepped out of the boat, not expecting this, I found myself apologizing.

Just someone I didn't know with my foot through their chest.

And that sparked in me the need to find out who those people were and tell their story.

And just the fact that it was in that particular spot.

Then many people on the lake found it, and it was I was the go to.

And everybody wants the story and let me meet the people that gave me great pictures and great stories.

So that helped a bunch.

But that was a very strange day indeed.

Many of my stories are the campfire stories, because I spent many a night going through the campground and and having a lot of fun and meeting a lot of people, and it got to the point where people wanted to hear my stories.

And it was usually at a campfire because I worked all day and that was the time I had was dark and people were cooking hot dogs, and the campground was a just a go to for me.

I usually got a hot dog and got to meet the daughters, and I got to meet the family, and pretty soon I was telling the stories that I had heard from locals and telling people that I hadn't heard it.

So, one of my just it's not even a book, but my campfire stories.

I printed off so many of those just for outsiders, that many of them were ones that heard it when I was young and they said, how you get a copy of that?

And I won't hear that one about, you know, that Loch Ness Monster thing and or whatever the story would be.

They would ask for that.

And I put them together and that little just pamphlet book.

But it's had a great reception.

I know about Darren's storytelling because of his writings.

I just love the way he writes.

It's you can picture everything that he's saying, you know, in the books, like the leaf links, you can picture those little creatures and hear them.

He's very good on making your mind see what he sees.

When he was writing.

The difference between the campfire stories and the history tales is that folklore isn't always historical.

And I've been I've been able to to investigate some of the folklore and campfire stories and actually be able to jot them down as history, because I can prove some of it.

But the campfire stories were always just what the people wanted to hear from, and usually it was creepy because it was dark and it was a campfire, and we could talk about the grave diggers that stole the diamond rings.

Where's my diamond ring?

So.

But many of them in the monsters that you talk about are not campfire.

That's not really history book material, but some of them have been.

Eventually they crossed over and they were cross over here.

The story tells of one of my favorite Livingston people.

He was an older African-American man, one of Livingston's few black families of the area of the time.

His name was Harry Springs.

He was a self-proclaimed soothsayer and that is a prophet.

He studied the astrological signs.

I am intrigued with ghosts, and I am intrigued with the thought of trying to capture them on film.

Part of the reason I started doing ghost tours here in the park and also in Livingston, I was so enthralled with history, but I had been to big cities and started seriously going to the ghost tours there, and I learned there craft and thought, why can't I do this on my own here?

I know all the history.

I got the system down, I can tell the stories.

And the first couple test runs just with family out to tell stories.

We found that we could take some cool pictures in the dark, tell them those ghosts, if you will, their stories.

And we would get true pictures.

I have fascinating pictures of what I can't explain other than they may be ghosts.

I've had experiences with ghosts or apparitions that I believe were ghosts that I could not explain.

But it really sparked why I went into the ghost tour.

It's a part of my life because of my studies about the graves.

I documented all of them.

Every name, all of that stuff.

It's a basically a play on words for the information I've dug up about the graves and when I do the tours and when I do my speeches with the kids or, even for others, wherever I'm speaking.

That's a pretty good persona.

I go dressed as an old grave digger from Willow Grove in 19 early 1940s.

So I dress the part as a grave digger.

And it just happened to be that I'm the one digging up the information.

So I'm not fond of shovels, but I am the grave digger, and I take it as a term of affection.

So, I guess I've grown into the role.

Well, there are countless hours for research.

For every little detail that we come up with.

I come up with.

Most of my study early on came from the studying of the graves of the lake.

I've mapped where all 106 are on the lake that were moved.

Been to all of them that aren't 90ft deep.

The ones I could get to.

I've been to.

And that's given me many stories, and led to as far as a finding that I wasn't quite prepared for it would be the story of the irons family.

Edward Irons bought his property from the Cherokee best friend of the Cherokee.

But where they lived eventually became the city of Willow Grove.

But in the early 1800s, it was his family.

And his family ended up being Dale Hollow's most famous historical story.

Edward and Sarah had two children.

Would be.

The boy's name was Edward Eddie.

We know him by.

And they had a daughter, Rachel, that Edward was a young Edward was a avid horseman, and there wasn't a lot to do if you were a young man in the early 1800s, other than farm the family at Family Acres and, race horses with the Indians.

So he was a pretty fiery young lad.

And for his birthday, his family gave him a new horse that wasn't fully broken.

But being as various he was, he was adamant about going.

He was going to write his birthday present on his birthday.

And when he rode, when he turned on the horse, the horse bolted and took him straight for a grove of walnut trees.

And at his head hit a low lying limb, and it killed him instantly.

Has his family watched?

So they eventually buried him on a shelf?

No, on the family property, which would eventually become Willow Grove, the town of Willow Grove.

But it was just the Ireland's place then, and that's where Edward had planned to have his family buried.

He just didn't expect to put his son there.

So where they.

But soon after that the he the family moved his.

The heartbreak was just too much and they left his grave there.

And over time, as this community began to grow, they needed a school and they started calling the community Willow Grove.

And they needed to build a little log cabin.

And in so doing, they scraped off the ground and found this walnut casket, pulled it out of the ground, opened it up to see what it was.

And some of the locals said, yeah, we remember him.

That's that island boy.

What are we going to do now?

And some said, let's just dig him in a little deeper.

He was there before us and he'll be there forever.

As a testimony to the settlers of old.

And that's what they did.

And probably another 50 years past.

Willow Grove is getting bigger, and they decided they need a bigger school.

So they demolished the old and started scraping the ground again.

And lo and behold, a walnut casket.

And some of the older folks are saying, yep, that's him.

That's that island boy.

What are we going to do now?

Let's just dig him in a little deeper and he'll be there forever.

Is the testimony to the settlers of old.

And they did.

And another 50 years passed, and now Willow Grove has become quite the city.

And they needed big concrete, brick and mortar, big place.

And they started scraping the ground and on the whole walnut casket.

And for the third time, they've dug this poor lad out.

And now what are we going to do?

I said, well, we got concrete this time with slide him into the concrete of the front steps, will bury him, and he'll be there forever.

As a testimony to the settlers of Old.

And that's what they did.

Seven years later, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers come along.

And what are they doing?

They are digging up graves and demolishing buildings.

And poor Eddie was both.

So they set off a charge of dynamite.

Boom!

Little pieces fall that he didn't break.

So yet he's still out there under the waves.

And on the other side of the coin for his family.

His sister Rachel grew up and married William Dale, who owned 449 acres down near Salina.

And that is where our big chunk of concrete is to this day, and why we are named Dale Hollow Lake for William Dale and Rachel.

He plays instruments.

He can sing, he can tell stories.

His.

He also does those graveyard tours in the haunted tours in Livingston, which are awesome to take anybody on.

Old to four years old would enjoy his storytelling on those tours.

Then in the campground right near the boat dock, now there's a spot where it's a campsite and it's also part of the road.

There's a young boy that was killed there when he was young.

He was nine, I think, and he was leading the family cow to be milked on it with a rope.

And he was tired of that cow chafing.

His hands put, tugging on him, and he tied it around his waist, and something spooked the cow, and it trampled him to death.

Live for nine days right there where the family lived in the campground and died.

And in that spot, people talk about that.

People that in their tents at night literally have nightmares.

I know I don't feel like a bad vibe there, but the people that camp there literally will move because the nightmares and that spot, there are often times, even when it's mega hot in the summer, you can walk through that spot and it'll be cold down part of your body.

Just give.

Given a tour one night and it was 85 degrees dark and these two girls were there just shivering.

I said, ladies, if you'll move about five feet, you'll warm up.

And immediately they did.

I had a friend that was with us.

He is not much of a believer.

And so he said, you know what?

I went back, but later that night, because I was just going to say, you're full of it.

But he sent it back and I was freezing from my knees down in that spot.

So that same night we took a picture there and there was a picture of a boy, a in a kind of a wide brimmed hat and knickers on, but had no feet just floating there in the campground.

So that picture is pretty cool.

And I found some in Livingston too for that just so we don't always get good pictures when we take the tours, but the tour is.

I've been told that by people more knowledgeable in the spiritual realm than me, that the reason they're there is because we're telling their story.

And that's there's I believe that because I've been on some tours of others.

And if if the story is not told, right, and the people aren't into it, you don't get any cool pictures.

They don't see ghosts on the tours.

But we do capture pictures and I sense, see, smell, feel many things.

And people are sharing pictures with me.

And that's, that's how the ghost tours go.

They're all documented facts.

And what we capture on film is just if it's a good night, if the people are into it, and if I'm telling the story right, tales like the irons family and the Lady of the Lake hold significant value in our local history and community culture.

And thanks to Darren, these stories will be preserved for future generations.

It is this enthusiasm for storytelling that Darren hopes will install a generation of storytellers and encourage passion for lifelong learning.

Being a good listener is a big part of storytelling, and I think it was beneficial for me growing up that, when the rest of my friends and family were saying, oh, so-and-so is telling a story again, I would be glued to that person.

And I guess it served me well.

It has evolved in some way, because a lot of the my original storytellers that that I learned from have passed.

And so finding new, old stories is difficult.

But I'm getting old enough to some of my stories are getting pretty old.

You.

I hope it instills just yet another generation that will do storytelling, because it is a bit of an art, and I would like for it to be able to continue because I worry that in the future that storytelling might be left to the movie makers because, our current state of affairs with, with the world is that we live through our phones and through media, and there's not a lot, not as much of interaction with the the human quotient in it, the camaraderie one on one with a crowd and being able to feed off of their energy and have them enjoy it.

And it is my wish that people could all become better storytellers and better listeners.

I don't know, a lot of the world's problems would kind of go away before they even happen.

With each new generation, we lose a little.

We lose some of that person storytelling and the person that heritage can't remember everything the way that they did.

So I think it's extremely important that we can keep us fresh set of eyes hearing the stories and so that it can survive.

That's why I love talking to the fourth graders, because they they got fresh eyes, they got new eyes on life, and they look at stuff differently than we do, and they ask different questions than we do.

So if I get a kid, ask me something outside my box up here, then that'll spark more things to.

So it's important for me to be the good listener, though, in order to be a good storyteller and to come up with new stories.

Because it is difficult to come up with that new, entertaining thing that's worthy of documenting.

Capturing an emotion in the story is the big deal, because I can tell somebody all day long that there's a Loch Ness monster on this lake, but I don't just describe it because that's not memorable.

I describe the scene and how what was going on so I can instill the emotion so you can feel the fear.

You can feel the excitement, and that's what's memorable.

That's the storytelling entity that needs to be in every story tellers book of tricks.

I have some friends that I would not have had if they hadn't picked up some book and said, hey, what else you got?

I really like that.

And that's flattering.

And I like to make people smile.

I like to make people laugh.

That's just part of me.

I think it's part of every storyteller to be able to pull emotion out of someone.

I mean, some of my most touching stories might make you sad for a while, but I try to give you a happy ending at the end, make you laugh along the way.

Because that's, again, that's part of the human contact part.

If you give me a list of things that I'm supposed to remember, it's not going to happen.

But if you tell me why and made me feel something at the same time, yeah, it's going to stick with me.

And that's a big part of storytelling.

I don't know if I've ever set out to leave a legacy, but I would hope that it would go that my interaction has made somebody else want to do it so that the art doesn't die.

I don't want the only storytellers to be the movie makers.

Movies are great, but they will.

They disallow the human engagement.

I don't want us to be just the person watching the screen.

I want you and me to be able to talk.

And you make me laugh.

You make me smile, cry.

Whatever it takes to to reach that emotion and I guess I would say I would try to instill that in the next generation and maybe since I've got it in book form, that maybe my generations to come will get up and read the book and think to themselves, man, I bet he was cool.

Maybe I was a cool guy in the future.

He was a cool guy.

Maybe that's the legacy.

Maybe that's just a pipe dream.

But, yeah, I my first story I wrote just so my daughter would remember it.

So maybe, maybe somebody a hundred years from now think it's cool to you.

We hope you've enjoyed this episode of Where Stories Live.

And the next time you visit Dale Hollow Lake, you'll have a memory of your own to share.

Thank you for joining us.

And we look forward to seeing you next time when we go where stories live.

♪Light Music♪ I am Mike Galligan with the law offices of Galligan and Newman in McMinnville, Tennessee.

I support WCTE .

The Upper Cumberland's own PBS station because I believe it is important to create entertaining TV programs that also promote lifelong learning and understanding.

When I support WCTE, I know that I am helping our Upper Cumberland community for generations to come.

The law offices of Galligan and Newman provide clients with large, firm expertise and small, firm, personalized care and service.

♪Upbeat Music♪ This program was made possible by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.

Thank you.