Porchlight File 003: Barbara Ann Hackmann Taylor

The Woman Once Known as Tent Girl

In 1968, along a quiet roadside near Georgetown, Kentucky, a young woman was found wrapped in canvas and left without a name.

For nearly thirty years, she was known only as “Tent Girl.”

No one came forward.
No missing persons report seemed to match.
And slowly, her story faded into the background, becoming one of Kentucky’s most haunting unsolved mysteries.

But she was never meant to remain unknown.

In 1998, through determination, early internet sleuthing, and a refusal to let her be forgotten, her identity was finally restored.

Her name was Barbara Ann Hackmann Taylor.

In this episode of Blood in the Bluegrass: Porchlight Files, we tell her story — from the moment she was found, to the decades she went unnamed, to the truth that finally brought her home.

She was never meant to be just a nickname.