"Our previous sheriff was on TV once. He showed up on Animal Planet's Finding Bigfoot to talk about how he saw a Sasquatch once. Yes, I am serious. They even titled the episode 'Moonshine And Bigfoot,' presumably because they still had a few stereotypical Kentuckian insults left in the bottom of the barrel."

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Then there's Bill Sparkman, a census-taker who, in 2009, was found dead in Clay County, Kentucky, tied to a tree with the word "FED" scrawled on his chest in black marker. The media reaction was immediate, with several news agencies speculating that the murder was committed by insane hillbilly anti-government zealots in the Eastern Kentucky area. Then the police figured out that Sparkman had committed suicide and staged the scene to make it look like a murder. Oops. The story was over by then, but it was just more damage to the reputation of a place that wasn't exactly rolling in rep to begin with.

Our anonymous moonshinin' source explained:

"It gets to the point that locals just flat-out refuse to talk with authorities because we are often one of the few businesses still left. Plus, residents who need to make a quick buck help us make it, bottle it, and, for the larger stills, drive it to bars as far away as Knoxville. I know a few times that liquor control people were in town that no one told them anything -- they would just say they didn't know of anyone who did that, even though everyone either worked for us, drank our moonshine, or had us pay them for goods or services. We may not be the most legal business in town, but it helps bring money to local businesses ..."

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That might explain why moonshining has gone increasingly legit in recent years. One company, Ole Smoky, bases their liquor on traditional Appalachian 'shine and is one of the larger employers in Gatlinburg. So they took all the fun, quirky aspects of underground distilling and just whitewashed out all the blindness and shotgun murders.

If you still think those small-town values outweigh the cons, maybe don't pawn your Prius for a pickup just yet. Ashe again:

"Some people here have trouble getting running water and electricity. A few people just go without electricity and just use a generator for whenever they absolutely need it. A young girl who was a friend of my sister-in-law went for years without running water because she had a heart problem and the medical bills got so high that the family had to do without. They just occasionally bought jugs of water at the store or borrowed from neighbors.

"And, yeah, some people still have outhouses around here. In most cases, they're just for decoration (because people are really fond of the times when they had to take a midnight dump in a cold wooden box, I guess), but I'm reasonably sure some of them still get used occasionally. Also a real thing? Actual tar paper shacks. If you've got the land and a few basic supplies, you can build one yourself on the cheap."

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Anonymous goes on to say, "Even the laws are old. Our liquor laws are straight out of prohibition, and our gun laws are pretty much 'do what you want.' Even things technically against the law, like bringing a gun into a bar, are just overlooked by the cops. ... A lot of these towns, if you just took out the more modern cars and modern logos, you would swear you went back into the 1950s."

Sweet! We know where we're holding our annual Back To The Future LARP festival this year.

"The New York Times found that some parents here take their kids out of literacy classes to keep $700 disability benefits coming in," Anonymous says. "One of the people who went to my high school made money by getting food with food stamps, selling it discounted to families in the area needing a cheap meal, then using the resulting money for the basis of a 'buyer/seller' job for tax purposes [and] paying for food he actually ate from the welfare, not food stamps, he got."

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Keep in mind this little start-up wasn't making the guy rich -- it was only keeping him slightly more comfortably below the poverty line.

"There are no real jobs or jobs people can easily do [or] don't need a degree for, so they find ways to juke the system," he says. "It's both abusing the hell out of the system but also using the system this way as a means to survive."

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You know what they say: "Starving in the middle of fucking nowhere is the mother of invention."