Nikki & The Phantom Caller’s namesake Nikki Speake wrote future album cut “They’ve Never Walked Through Shadows” about cryptozoological creatures and battlefield legends from her hometown of Dadeville, Ala., providing her band with an excuse to release a spooky music video just in time for Halloween.
Speake’s family fables come from an area known as Booger Hollow (Booger as in ghost, Hollow pronounced “holler,” like Loretta Lynn says it).
“We were told that the Pig Man haunted the woods, and my older cousins used to scare me to death by saying they could hear his high-pitched squeals at night!,” Speake says. “It’s also only a few miles from the Horseshoe Bend National Park, where Andrew Jackson killed the last of the Red Stick Creeks; ending the Creek War, which resulted in Alabama becoming a state in 1819. So, it has a bit of a sad and supernatural history, and in many ways is a place that time has forgotten.”