This story dates back to 1970, when I was just 18 years old. I will not give my name because people never believed me, and I did not even live there. I was only visiting my buddy, R.M. It has long been said by some that this was one of the most haunted hollows in West Virginia, and from everything I heard, it seemed to have a dark history.

To get into Turkey Creek, you had to cross an old bridge that many people claimed was haunted. Late one night, I saw a faceless woman hitchhiking there. She was wearing a red nightgown, and she appeared to be Mexican. People said she roamed the bridge late at night, usually between 3:00 a.m. and 5:00 a.m., either trying to get a ride or appearing suddenly in the middle of the road.

R.M. once told me that one of his neighbors had married a Mexican woman named Isabella and treated her like a slave. According to the story, his two sons also abused her. One night, she escaped from the head of the hollow and walked down to the bridge around 3:00 a.m. She could not get anyone at the houses to help her, so she went to the bridge hoping to get a ride from someone heading to work. Supposedly, a panther got to her there and tore up her face so badly that she was unrecognizable.

What I know is this. She appeared right in front of me while I was driving, and when my truck hit her, she vanished.

I heard plenty of other stories from up there too. People talked about a ghostly man who would chase you from the Spaulding place to the Morgans. They said that above the old Van place, strange noises could be heard. At the head of the hollow, down in the creek, there was also said to be the ghost of a woman who drowned.

It was a cold, dark Thanksgiving evening in rural West Virginia. My family and I were on our way home from my grandpa’s house after enjoying Thanksgiving dinner. We were driving along a place called Lower King Shoals, an area that already feels a little spooky after dark.

We were traveling down a straight stretch of road when, all of a sudden, the car’s blind spot monitors went off. The warning indicated that something was beside or behind us, as if another vehicle was about to pass.

My dad slowed down a little to let it go around.

But nothing passed us.

There was not another car in sight.

Since I have always been obsessed with paranormal things, my mind immediately went to the accidents that have happened in that area over the years. I could not help wondering if maybe someone was still traveling that road in ghostly form.

Whatever caused the warning, we never saw anything there.

It definitely gave a whole new meaning to the term “blind spot.”

This happened just a few days ago. My girlfriend and I had gone to September Fest. We stayed out late eating and hanging out with friends. On our way home, we were driving down the road near Cabwaylingo Park. I was paying attention to the road and nothing else when my girlfriend, Brittany, suddenly said, “Shawn, did you see that?”

“No. What was it?” I asked.

“Turn around,” she begged.

I turned around at the wide spot in the road.

“I saw lights over at the pool!” she said.

“Britt, it’s 3 a.m. I doubt you saw anything,” I told her as I pulled across the bridge near the Cabwaylingo pool.

Then I saw the lights too.

“See? What is that?” she asked.

I parked the car, got out, and told her, “Stay here.”

I turned off my headlights so I could investigate and used the flashlight on my iPhone. I looked through the gate, and the lights suddenly disappeared. I climbed up the chain-link fence, and then everything went black.

All at once, a big black thing slammed into the fence and knocked me onto my back. I hit the ground hard. When I looked up, I saw its red-eyed, bony face.

I scrambled to my feet as Brittany screamed. I ran back to the car, jumped in, and we drove off.

I am still not sure what it was. I do not know why the lights were shining or what was making them, but I know I saw the scariest black thing I have ever seen. I had dreams about it that night, and I was completely freaked out.

No, I was not drunk or anything like that. Believe me or not, but I am telling my story.

I live in Wayne County, West Virginia. About 14 years ago, my wife, Jacklyn, and I stayed at Cabwaylingo Park for the weekend. We spent our time fishing, hiking, and playing in the creek.

One afternoon, after swimming, we were sitting beside the creek. I can remember it like it happened yesterday. First, the wind suddenly started blowing. Then we heard what sounded like someone walking through the creek.

A man’s voice whispered, “Judy. Judy, are you there?”

My wife jumped up, and I grabbed her arm. The man kept calling out, “Judy.”

I finally shouted back that we were not Judy, but the voice just kept repeating, “Judy. Judy, you there? Judy?”

We climbed up the hill and walked down a little way, trying to find whoever was calling, but we never saw the man or this Judy he seemed to be searching for.

We returned to the park about six years later, but we never heard or saw anything else.

Still, that afternoon by the creek was one of the strangest and creepiest things we ever experienced.

I would like to start by letting everyone know that I grew up in Widen. I have lived in seven different homes in this small town. Over the years, I have seen many strange things down here, including ghost trains, horse and buggy apparitions, people, orbs, shadows, and even phantom cars.

For anyone who does not know Widen, it is an old coal mining town. There were small wars over coal and land, along with deaths from everything from accidents to murder, and even earlier conflicts from when West Virginia was still part of Virginia.

Above the house I lived in the longest, there are still train tracks. On gloomy, dark, stormy nights, I have seen a black train go by, complete with the sounds and vibrations that come with a long train passing. Every now and then, I have also heard horses galloping by, pulling a buggy. I have heard screams and crying women as well. The homes I lived in were also very active, with voices, shadows, orbs, things being tossed around, unexplained touches, and worst of all, the sound of everything in the kitchen falling and shattering.

But the story I am going to tell starts like many others. It seems like just about everywhere has a story that begins like mine.

The Lady in White.

As a child, I was always made to be home before dark because people said she had a habit of taking young girls. She was described as a young woman in a large white dress, like a big poofy ballgown. It was said that you would be fine if you saw her, as long as you did not stop to help her.

An old woman, who has long since passed away, once told me that she personally stopped to help a young lady in a wedding dress not far from a church. She got out of her car and asked if the woman was okay, if she needed a ride, or if she needed help. The Lady in White turned around.

The front of her long gown was ripped open, revealing the legs of a wolf. Blood dripped from the dress. Her face looked more animal than human, or so I was told.

The old woman said she jumped back into her car, which of course, as in any scary story, took a few tries to start. Once it did, she sped all the way home. She ran inside, slammed and locked the door, and hid in a closet, where she stayed all night listening. When morning came, she remained there until around 2 p.m., finally deciding she did not have to worry anymore. When she came out, she packed a bag and got ready to go stay a few weeks with her child. That was when she saw the deep scratches in the door she had locked the night before.

Every story I have ever heard about the Lady in White has been almost the same. The main difference is the dress. Most of the time, people say she wore a large white ballgown ripped open in the front and stained with blood. Other times, I have been told she wore a fitted, flowing white dress, but still with the same bloody rip in the front, the animal legs, and the inhuman face.

I myself have seen figures in white, but fear was never the emotion that hit me when I saw them. It was sadness and betrayal. I have gone out in the middle of the night trying to find out for myself if she was real, but I never saw the woman exactly as people described her. I never saw the bloody ripped dress, the animal-like face, or the wolf legs on a young woman. What I did see was the sadness burning in the piercing eyes of a young woman wearing a white high-low dress, the kind that is shorter in the front and longer in the back. She looked human enough in both face and legs.

I have also seen men wearing long monk-style robes, walking in a line along the road toward the graveyard. They were chanting in a language I did not understand. Then the robes simply dropped to the ground, as if the people inside had turned to dust, and after that, even the robes vanished.

My most recent experience, and my favorite, was seeing a man who died last year in 2018 walking inside the building where he passed away. He spent his life working on four-wheelers and died while working on one. Even in death, his ghost still seems to be working on a four-wheeler.

In the 1990s, I worked as a lifeguard at Cabwaylingo Pool.

Late one evening, I was the only one there cleaning up. I was out near the pool when I heard laughter. I looked around, but no one was there. I headed to the cleaning room to get my broom, and the door suddenly slammed shut on me. I assumed it was just the wind, so I tried not to panic.

While I was sweeping off the deck, I felt a hand touch my leg and heard someone whisper, “Alison. Ali.”

I never told anyone my story at the time, but later I overheard two other lifeguards talking about hearing and seeing strange things there too. Then my uncle, George, told me about a girl who had accidentally drowned in the pool after she and her friends snuck in late one night.

The girl’s name was Alison.

When he told me that, I was terrified. I worked the rest of the summer and continued hearing things throughout the season. I just wanted to share my story because I have seen a lot of other experiences on the site about Cabwaylingo.

When I was a child, my family used to take vacations to visit West Virginia’s state parks, and my dad especially loved Droop Mountain and the surrounding area. So one year, we rented a cabin there for a few nights. I was about 10 years old at the time.

That first day, we spent our time walking around, learning about the battle, and visiting the town near the mountain. We got back to the cabin around dinnertime, and my mom fixed supper. My sister and I were sitting on the front porch right at dusk, and from there we had a good view of the battlefield.

All at once, she yelled, “Look, there’s a guy on horseback!”

We watched him ride across the field and then disappear into the woods. When we were called in for dinner, we mentioned it to our dad. He laughed and said no one was allowed out on that field with horses, and that we were just seeing things and letting our imaginations run wild.

After dinner, all of us sat out on the porch for a while, but we did not see anything unusual. Around 10:00 or so, we went to bed.

Sometime around midnight, my sister woke up to the sound of gunfire and men yelling. She woke me and whispered, “Listen.”

I heard it too.

We crept to the door, slowly opened it, and stepped out onto the porch. What we saw left us stunned. There were soldiers on horseback fighting other soldiers, men shouting as if from far away, swords drawn, and bugles sounding in the night.

The strangest part was that they all seemed to be surrounded by a mist, almost as if the battle was playing out inside a fog.

We looked at each other, then ran as fast as we could back into the cabin, jumped into our beds, and stayed awake the rest of the night, scared to death.

We were both in our 20s before we ever told our parents what we saw that night.

I had just started working at a McDonald’s in Huntington. I was only in my first week, but I was already seeing a lot of repeat customers. One night around 9:00 p.m., I was working at the drive-thru window when something walked past outside. I did not pay much attention to it and just took the next order.

About twenty minutes later, there was a knock at the window, but when I looked, nobody was there. A car pulled up, and I asked the customer if they had seen anyone, but they had not. I handed out a few more orders, and then I saw her.

She was wearing a black shirt and jeans. Her hair was messy, and her face looked messed up. I jumped and spilled the drinks I was holding. Just as quickly as I saw her, she disappeared.

The next day, I noticed a missing poster for the same girl I had seen the night before. I knew then that she was dead, because I believed I had seen her ghost. I even reached out to her family afterward.

My grandparents bought a farm in Wayne, West Virginia, and in the summer of 1998 my family came to visit them. One day, my cousins and I were out exploring the property and playing around when we came across an old well. My cousin Jay, who was the oldest at 12, lifted the lid that covered it. Inside, I noticed a small piece of red sheer fabric.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“Looks like curtains,” my cousin Dale joked.

It was starting to get dark, so we hurried to find our way back to the house.

That night, I shared a bedroom with my brother Sam and my cousin Dale. I woke up to the sound of someone crying. At first, I thought it was my brother, who was 8, but he was lying next to me sound asleep. The crying got louder, so I sat up and saw a dark-haired young woman standing there. She looked to be in her early twenties and was wearing a red sheer dress. She cried for a moment, then suddenly let out a screech.

My brother and cousin woke up, and our parents and grandparents came running into the room. Of course, none of them believed me.

Two days later, Granny Gin was in the kitchen cooking when she saw the same ghost. The woman screeched at her too. She told us about it over meatloaf. Even then, I still was not sure everyone believed what she had seen.

The next night, my dad, Pete, was in the shower when the ghost appeared to him. He said she came right through the shower curtain, and then somehow she left behind a note.

It read, “See you at noon, at the well. Love, Jill.”

After that, my dad and Uncle Roger went to talk to some of the neighbors. They learned that back in 1980, a 20-year-old girl named Jillian had been having an affair with the father of the children she babysat for. According to the story, his wife found out about their meeting and got to Jillian first. Some said she pushed her down into the well on their property.

Jillian went missing, and 12 years later the wife reportedly went crazy and confessed to what she had done.

Three months later, my grandparents sold the farm and moved away. They hated to leave, but they believed the place was haunted.

I was 14 when my baby sister, Tinsley, was born. When Tinny turned 3, she started acting like she had an imaginary friend. She would jabber and play as if someone was there with her. One day, I asked who she was talking to, and she said, “Charlotte. She has a blue dress on.” That caught my attention because she didn’t know anyone by that name.

About two weeks later, I got out of the shower and was heading to my bedroom when I saw a little blond girl wearing a blue dress. She stood there only for a moment, then faded right before my eyes. I screamed, but of course my mom, Terri, did not believe me. My baby sister kept right on talking and playing with Charlotte.

About seven months later, my mom and Aunt Dena were looking through old family photos for my grandparents’ 40th anniversary party. I was in the kitchen baking when I heard my baby sister say, “Charlotte.” I went into the room just in time to hear Aunt Dena say, “This was Dad’s sister Roxanne’s little girl, Charlotte. She drowned at five.”

The glass dish I was holding shattered on the floor.

“That’s the ghost girl I saw!” I exclaimed.

Charlotte had died in a tragic accident in the creek between our house and my aunt’s house. I kept seeing that little girl off and on until I moved out.

I was 25 years old and dating the woman who is now my wife. My family was using the Dunlow Community Center for our family Christmas party.

Jenna and I decided to take a walk down the old railroad bed so we could have a little time alone. Since it gets dark early that time of year, we walked as far as we thought we safely could before the darkness really started creeping in.

We turned around and started heading back. As we approached an old, boarded-up white farmhouse, we saw a young woman walking with her head down.

She was wearing a tattered white dress, which seemed strange for December, along with a pair of black boots. Her brown, stringy hair hung down around her face, and her arms were folded across her chest.

“Hello there,” I said.

She stopped, but she never looked up. If I had to guess, I would say she looked like a teenager.

“Do you live around here? You shouldn’t be out without a coat,” Jenna said.

The girl started walking again. She took about five steps, stopped, and slowly raised her head.

She had no face.

Jenna screamed, and then the girl disappeared. Just like that, she was gone.

I grabbed Jenna’s hand, and we took off running back toward the community center. Of course, when we told everyone what had happened, no one believed us.

I don’t live in Dunlow, so I don’t really know the story behind the ghost or whether anyone else has reported seeing her. I searched online afterward, but the only information I could find about hauntings in the area involved Cabwaylingo State Forest.

I may not know who or what we saw that evening, but I do know what Jenna and I witnessed.

And it scared us badly enough that I have never forgotten it.