Carthage, Arkansas - Tree Surgeon Buried in a Tree, Maybe

I spoke again with the same 70 year old man and he has been asking around himself about this tree. He talked to a Mrs. Bradley, whose maiden name was Wylie. She said there was no one buried in the tree. The tree had become diseased and was starting to rot away, her parents scraped out the rotted part and filled it with concrete to try and keep the tree from falling and damaging tombstones. The name was written in the concrete by the children of the man who filled the whole with cement.

Sorry to kill this really interesting urban legend, but thats all it is.... a legend. [Clark, 01/10/2006]

I read about this in your tips section. Directed by locals, I visited the cemetery, found the tree and measured it. If it's hollow and if the wood and bark are one inch thick, there's a hole 20 inches across inside, and that's measured one foot off the ground. It's just too small for somebody to be buried inside. The markings on the cement patch covering the opening seem to emulate the name/date conventions of the local timber industry. You'll see signs on the side of the road "John Smith, 1970." That just means that John Smith owns these trees and they were planted in 1970. It looks like somebody patched a hole in a tree at this graveyard and some joker made a similar mark, which is sometimes these days passed off as a grave marker. [Russell T. Johnson, 11/25/2005]

[RA: Russell, we love you -- you're such a fact-finding zealot. We still haven't recovered from when you savaged the supposed origins of Toad Suck, Arkansas. But maybe that tree surgeon was tiny, a midget like Buster Brown.]

There is a little cemetery between Fordyce and Leola Arkansas that has a tree surgeon buried in a tree. It was a favorite cruisin' place to visit in my high school days. The tree was hollowed out and he was stuffed up inside the tree and a brick layer closed up the hole with bricks and mortar as per his directions in his last will and testament.

The tree never died....but as time is going on, the tree has slowly covered the bricks. Even though the grave is not marked, it is right at the entrance of the cemetery. One side of the tree had a bricked up side from the ground up to about five ft or so and the tree began to heal itself and grow over the bricks. The last time I saw the tree was about two years ago, and very little of the bricks were showing at that time. [Gloria Herman, 04/08/2001]