A Real Southern Gothic Story

A story of a woman and her child tragically dying in the 1920s was written in my local newspaper where the man who wrote it framed the women in the story as incompetent and the pleading stories from the two who had passed and the other two girls who survived the story as "weak accusations." I wanted to give this story the approach of a woman who has struggled with trying to get a story through about an abusive man while others write about this horrible tragedy as no where near the fault of the father.

The father by the name of Frank Markham was waiting for the ladies at their mountain home on Sharp's mountain. He let the women stay out there freezing and starving to death under a hollowed out tree. He was well known to understand the entire mapping of the area and could have easily found the women and lead them home. He did not go out to find them until they were conveniently already dead or almost dead. There was not much showing him or his part in the tragedy and seemed to be made hush hush about the father's real part in how avoidable this issue could have been.

Frank Markham was known to be abusive and the ladies around him many times tried to tell someone. People wondered if they were hiding from him under the tree or if he kept trying to confuse them the whole time. This could have been just like the problem of where the word gaslighting came from in the first place. He could have been tuning on lights to lead them somewhere with home they thought was home and then turning on a new light somewhere else. If they were constantly going in circles with no way back, that may be why they started sheltering in the tree and giving up on finding the cabin.

The two girls that were found still sheltering under the tree with a passed away mother and baby had terrible frostbite and even had to wait for the snow to clear more to finally be taken down to the hospital. After this, there was more hush hush in that those daughters were taken into the custody of a man named Dr. Thrasher. Frank Markham was tried for murder that was unfortunately dismissed. Frank was later taken to an asylum for abusing his new wife and because his daughters were in the care of another, they finally came out about how terrible their father had been at them. The daughters no longer had to fear living with the terrible man after reporting him.

There was so much of the same story from several different women around him and his very own daughters telling of the story shows there was a huge issue that was just never dealt with that should have been long before. This type of problem can still happen even today where someone will constantly report abuse, even several times, but yet the type of proof needed to charge them is extreme. Here we are in a world where people can go to jail for 5 years just for using the "wrong bathroom" while men who partake in horrible assault crimes that are constantly reported are not hardly believed. Now there is at least phones to record or internet tracking, but sometimes with that, the jail time is still less for them than the jail time for using the wrong bathroom of today. Tragic tales like this seem like they would be left in the 1920s, but there is still much harm done every day by those who reposition the people trying to report extreme issues as "hysterical."