I had just moved to Browning Fork around 5 years ago. Nothing ever bad had happened to me, I never saw anything at all.

Then one day I met a girl, we became best friends. Ever since that day I have had scary things happen to me. You would never believe the things we have seen, heard, or the things that have happened to us.

Ever since we watched Bloody Mary Urban Legends, we would see a girl in the weeds with long black hair wearing a dress with pink and purple flowers. One day we saw her and she was hanging from a tree so we hollered at two of our other friends so they could witness it. And as soon as they came to look she had took off running. She left us not knowing how she got un-hung from the rope that was attached to the tree. Another day my best friend (the same girl) came to my house and her dog had followed us home, so we decided to take him back to her house and put him in the house. Sure enough we didn’t think anything of it and she only lived like 4 houses up, so we began to walk, and I was carrying her dog. It was then dark when we had went past the coal mining road and she asked me if I promise to tell you something will you not drop my dog and I said ok. She said when we just walked by the coal mining road she was sitting on the hill side. At first I thought she was joking and I said are you serious? She replied yes. I looked back and then saw the girl, I then dropped her dog and we took off running. Her dog wouldn’t follow us it was standing there barking in the direction of where the girl was sitting. We had to run back to get her dog, and she was gone. We seen her a few more times after that.

Then about 1 year later I met a new friend. And still from my last friend scary things would happen to me. So I went to my new friend’s house and we were sitting there looking through some new magazines we had gotten through the mail. All of the sudden I was floating in the air off of her bed and he took off running, and it was so scary that we were crying. Till this day when we tell people about it no one believes us. But God in heaven knows it is true.

But the first girl moved out of Browning Fork and ever since then nothing bad or scary like that has happened to me.

One evening as I was reading, I started to hear a faint wailing noise. I did not pay much attention to it until it got louder. I asked my son if he could hear anything but he said no. Thinking I had a headache I took some aspirin but I could still hear the wailing. The wailing was starting to disturb me so I went to bed.

In the middle of the night I woke up. The wailing was now so loud that it sounded like someone was screaming in my ear. I looked out the window and I could see a shadow of a woman screaming, but as I looked closer the screaming stopped, and the woman vanished. The next morning I got a call saying my grandmother had passed away. When I asked what time I was told that she started to fade in the evening and passed away at midnight.

In April of 2009 my sister and I visited our grandmother in Nice, France. While walking the streets we came across a voodoo shop and decided to go in. The priestess asked us where we were from and we told her Elkins, WV in the US. She said, “I’ve heard all about West Virginia and the spirits that inhabit the mountains.”

She told us it was a cursed site and that the trees fade. We asked her what she meant by the trees fade. She said the spirits have to take the lives of a living organism to return to the land of the living and that they suck the life out of all the trees. She also warned that if too many trees were cut down then the spirits might start taking the lives of the living.

We returned home a week later not really thinking anything of it. After about a week my sister called me and asked me if anything weird was happening with me in my apartment? I told her I had been hearing a little girl laugh and some weird voices but I didn’t think anything of it. She told me she had been hearing the exact same thing.

After another week we decided we had to talk to the priestess and get rid of whatever fallowed us back from France. So we called our grandmother only to have her tell us there are NO voodoo shops or high priestess in Southern France. So my sister and I freaked out. Well time past and things seemed to get back to normal until a week ago. I had just gotten home from work when I walked into my home and saw the priestess standing in my kitchen. I was absolutely stunned. She looked at me and told me she had warned us about West Virginia and the spirits of the mountains. She said to be warned the spirits of the natives were not friendly. Then she disappeared. I was so freaked out I stayed at my sisters that night. When I returned home I found an old book on my table about the history of West Virginia and a book on protection against spirits. Ever since then I have not seen or heard the priestess. I have, however, still heard the laughter of the little girl but she’s harmless… I hope.

For five years, I worked 3-11 in the Housekeeping department at Weirton Medical Center in Weirton, West Virginia. There were several ghosts in that building, and I have a few short tales here. My ghost tales are amusing now, but weren’t at the time. My job at WMC was as a “Floor Tech”, that is, I cleaned and buffed floors and cleaned carpets.

One evening, I was sent up to do a room on the fifth floor, in Cardiac Care. As I went about my job, mopping the floor in preparation for buffing, I noticed a heart monitor in the corner that was beeping. That monitor wasn’t hooked up, and if anyone out there knows what I mean, when a heart monitor is left unattended, it will beep, but only as a signal that it’s been left on. This monitor, however, was beeping in a normal rhythm….”beep-beep….beep-beep….beep-beep….” As I worked, it kind of started to give me the creeps. I went out to the nurse’s station and told a nurse about it, and how it was weirding me out. She only smiled and came in to remove the monitor. She explained then that heart monitors are not normally left unattended in that particular room. It seems that they have an odd tendency to come on by themselves, even if unplugged. Needless to say, that particular room’s floor got only a cursory job that night.

Another experience I had was in the Cardiac Catherization Lab. Now, the Cath Lab area used to be part of the larger Surgery area, but some remodeling was done several years ago, and it was given its own, smaller suite of rooms. I went down one evening to do the Cath Lab floor, and found the area locked up. Everyone had gone home for the night. No problem, I had a key. I went in, started moving stuff around and mopping, as I usually did. I noticed some dust in a corner behind a heavy shelf, and got a vacuum cleaner with attachments to suck it out. As I was bent over, trying to get at the dust, out of the corner of my eye I noticed something that resembled a human form, moving behind me. I stood up and looked around; thinking a nurse or doctor had come in. There were always emergency catherizations being done, and if that were the case, I’d have to leave. No one was visible, however. I even shut off the vacuum and called out, but no one answered. So, I went back to work.

A few seconds later, another glimpse out of the corner of my eye. This time I turned fast enough and saw one the of the bed tables move, just a bit. I thought little of it, though. The tables were on wheels, and would often shift when moved around, as I had done with them. Several minutes went by, and as I went about mopping the back of the room, I bent over to move a chair. At that moment, something slapped me hard, right on the backside!

I turned, but of course, once again saw no one. I knew that there was supposedly a ghost in the Surgery area, often seen by the nursing staff there and by one of my fellow housekeepers, the woman who cleaned the operating rooms every night. She was so used to the spirit, however, that she had even claimed to have regularly spoken with her if that can be believed.

The ghost was supposedly playful, a younger woman in a pink gown, and she appeared most often in ORs 5 and 6, for some reason. She could also often be seen walking alone in the Core area, the large surgical supply room which opens into all the operating rooms. I think that, since the Cath Lab was once part of Surgery, the good lady considers it part of her domain, as well. Perhaps I irritated her a little for not paying enough attention to her antics.

I also had another little run-in with the OR ghost myself, on another night. I had volunteered to work a double, to cover for the guy who usually worked 11-7 as a Housekeeper. At about 2 AM, I got called to clean up OR 6 after an emergency surgery.

Great! OR 6, ONE OF THE HAUNTED ONES at 2 AM. I knew the whole area would be empty by the time I got there, and it was. I got the Housekeeping cart set up and went to the open door. They had graciously left the light on for me. The floor was spattered here and there with splotches of congealed blood, and various disposable items used in surgery were left lying around. I, of course, had to wipe everything down and thoroughly mop the floor with disinfectant. I went into the Core, just outside the OR, and switched on the stereo, which I blared. I tuned it to an oldies station and started singing loudly along. My eyes kept wandering to the small observation window to the right, where the housekeeper I mentioned earlier, who usually cleaned in the OR, often saw the woman’s face staring at her. Thankfully, I saw nothing. Playful ghost or not, I probably would have ended up cleaning my underwear out as well if I’d seen her. I finished up and put everything away, then went back into the Core to turn off the stereo and turn off the lights. I lowered the volume and switched off the stereo, watching as the “power” light went out; I then hit the lights, plunging the whole area into darkness. The only light came from a dim light way up at the corner of the hall outside OR 6.

I walked into the OR, and suddenly, as I reached the middle of the room, the strains of “Louie Louie” thundered out of the speakers and into the darkness that surrounded me. The stereo had come back on by itself, louder even than I’d had it. That meant that I had to stand there in the dark, waiting for my eyes to adjust, then head back into the Core and turn it off again. I swallowed hard and did this, then hauled tail out of the OR, my feet barely touching the floor, hoping there’d be no more ORs until the next shift came on at 7. There weren’t.

I wasn’t the only one to have stereo trouble in the OR. As I told my tale the next day at work, two other female co-workers volunteered their story; a similar incident had occurred to them as they finished up in the surgery area late one Saturday evening. They were preparing to leave the area and were all the way up in front, out by the doors to the main hall, when the stereo came back on. They called their supervisor, who refused to come to investigate the incident and shut it off. “There are two of you,” he said, and hurriedly hung up.

There were other restless spirits there, too:

Another housekeeper friend had to go up to Psych to clean a room; when she arrived and started cleaning, the nurse at the desk called her out.

“Look here,” he said, pointing at the television monitor (there are cameras in each room, on 24-7, occupied or not). There, on the monitor, was a sheer cloud hovering over the table she’d been cleaning.

They rose and went to look in the room, but of course saw nothing, except that several of the bottles she’d brought with her had been moved. The guy said that they often had trouble with patients in this room seeing odd things or hearing voices, but then, this was the Psyche Ward; such stories were usually dismissed. Maybe the patients aren’t so crazy, after all?

Some other odd things at that hospital.

The “Whistler” was a guy in work boots, jeans and a flannel shirt that hung out in the laundry. We often speculated that maybe he was an employee of the old City Dump, on which the hospital now sits. He didn’t come around often and was usually heralded by a faint whistling.

There was a voice in the Morgue that was actually recorded once on a security guard’s tape recorder. Over the whispery sound of the vents and faint machinery of the Boiler Room down the hall, a voice could be heard saying “Help” several times. I heard that tape myself; very, very creepy. It was no fake, either. Believe me, either the guy was an actor of the caliber of Laurence Olivier, or he was really freaked out by it, too. After that, he refused to go in the Morgue alone, and eventually quit.

I guess that’s all, or at least all I can remember right now. Happy haunting, and remember — Montani Semper Liberi (Mountaineers Are Always Free)!

My sister died in bed at her home in 1988. Although she was ill, her husband was also caught at one time by his sons trying to smother her to death. A few days after she died, my niece was in the house. There was a small hallway between the living room and kitchen and as she was walking down the hallway, she heard a noise in the kitchen. She saw my sister in the kitchen walking toward her and then passed right through her. She ran out of the house and never went back in.

A year later, her husband was found dead in the same bed from a gunshot wound to the head. His death was never investigated.

The weekend following the assignation of President John F. Kennedy at his reported assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, two of my neighborhood friends and I walked off across the railroad tracks from the old C&O Depot at 53rd Street and Lancaster Avenue. We were on our way up the side of the mountain across from the depot to hunt for Civil War artifacts that were common in that area.

Many West Virginians are unaware that Robert E. Lee’s first Confederate command was the protection of the Kanawha Valley from West of Charleston to Gauley Bridge where the New River and the Kanawha meet at the falls. Lee had placed artillery on as many of the mountain tops on both sides of the Kanawha River as he had available. They were manned by the Kanawha Riflemen and other volunteers. Lee was a former colonel in the US Army Corps of Engineers and had set up as formidable defense as he had men to maintain it. His “failure” to march on the Yankees marching in from Ohio had his men disheartened to the point where he had actually been nicknamed “Granny Lee.”

So, with the help of our fathers we boys knew just about every “fort” on top of the hills on our side of the river. My father told us that if we went pretty much straight up the hill behind the depot we’d find an old tunnel that had started out as a coal mine until saltpeter had been located there. Saltpeter is a main component of gun powder and tracks had been laid out in the tunnel so mules could haul it out in boxes. Dad told us that there were other Civil War artifacts to be had there including musket balls and even cannon balls could be found.

The three of us made our way up the hill, stopping occasionally to swing on a grapevine or two and before very long, about two-thirds of the way up, a hole in the side of the hill was found. It wasn’t very deep into the mountain, maybe 30-40 feet or so, and the light from the winter sun shone fairly deep into the hole. We’d also swiped a few candles and so armed, made our way inside.

What I remember most about that late afternoon was how cold it was inside the tunnel. Indeed, there were some rusty tracks inside but they no longer went the entire length of the tunnel. We also found a pick and a couple of tongs, a rusted shovel and a couple of cases worth of empty Wild Irish Rose Wine bottles. There was a whole lot of dirt piled up on either side of the tunnel so we went to work sifting through it hoping to find Confederate buttons, old lead round-ball bullets, and especially one of those cannon balls my Dad said were up there.

When you are a kid, on a mission, you lose track of time and we did. Before too long, it was dark and our candles wouldn’t stay lit because of a wind that kept blowing them out. We had stayed until true dark and we were becoming more and more certain there were ghosts in the tunnel.

We decided to lock hands and stretch out to hold onto a wall and walk the short distance out. The problem was that the tunnel that we thought was only about 30 feet deep seemed miles long on our journey out. We got scared and one of the boys, my wimpy cousin (or was it me–NAWWW) started crying and yelling for help. Our imaginations ran wild and soon we could hear voices in the tunnel. When we yelled out to them to help us, all we heard was laughter and, what was worse, no one answered our cries for help.

We rounded a slight bend in the tunnel, one none of us could remember seeing going in, and wonder of wonders, there was a lighted oil lamp burning on the wall. It wasn’t the type of kerosene lamp we were used to seeing either. It was square with a large front glass and somewhat square in shape. There was a reflector behind it. About ten feet behind the lamp was the opening to the tunnel and we took off for it without even thinking.

We flew down the side of that hill, ripping through blackberry and other briar patches, falling and slipping all the way down. The street lights were on below us so we had no trouble finding our way down. I fell and hurt my ankle and the other two guys kept on running, leaving me behind to fend for myself. After sitting still for a minute, I got up, turned around and could just make out the dim light of the lamp above me. I heard, once again, the laughter from inside the tunnel.

And the light. Where had the light come from?

So far as I know, none of us ever went back to that tunnel.

My grandfather, Christy Minks, had a farm by Silver Run south of the East Tunnel cut and part of the farm was actually on top of the tunnel. My dad was born 1894 in a log cabin by the tunnel. Dad claimed to have seen the “Ghost”. He also claimed to have seen several other ghostly figures. Grandmother lived on that farm all her adult life but never believed in ghosts. She said Railroaders were heavy drinkers and could see anything in the ghostly mists. Dad claimed ghostly lights would appear atop the hill ridges just before someone died. Dad said he heard a woman’s cry at night. Grandmother said it was the wind through the tunnel tuned by the safety man holes in the tunnel. There is an old little cemetery on the north side of the county road on the north side of the east tunnel cut. Dad had a lot of ghostly stories about the Silver Run area.

I had lost my dad at a young age of 14. My dad was my hero. He was our world. My family is a close family in which we share our happiness, dreams, sorrows, disappointments… all of it!

I was on my way home after visiting with my mother. There was myself and my oldest daughter in the vehicle; she was three years old at the time. It was at night, which was difficult for me as I have night blindness and prefer to drive during daylight hours.

My front passenger side tire went off the side of the road and when trying to bring the vehicle back onto the road I panicked. Instead of stepping on the brake, I slammed my foot on the gas pedal and jerked swiftly and out of control onto the road. I threw myself over my daughter to protect her and had no idea that the truck literally ‘flew’ over the guard railing that ran along the riverbank. When the vehicle stopped with a jerk, I raised up to find broken glass everywhere, even embedded in the back of my head, neck and back. I thanked God that my daughter was ok.

I gathered her in my arms and crawled out of the truck and was making my way up the embankment when I saw the brightest light! I was thanking my lucky stars that another vehicle had witnessed the accident and was stopping to help. However, as I looked up the embankment towards the main road, there was no vehicle, but my dad! He was wearing a brown suit, hat, and was the most beautiful vision I had ever seen. He smiled, told me that help was on the way and that he would always be with me!

I heard sirens and knew that help was nearly there. I held my daughter tight as the tears flowed freely and did not find out until the next day that the only thing keeping us back from going into the river was a guide wire from a telephone pole lodged between the cab and back camper of the truck!

Over the last twenty-one years, I have visited my dad’s grave often. Several times a year I sit at his grave and tell him all about the goings on in my life just as if he were still sitting right there beside me when I was a child. I continue to thank him every single day for watching over my family and me.

Newly married, my husband was excited to be taking me to visit and meet his Grandparents. All I knew about them and the area in which they lived was that it was back in what was referred to as a holler and that they continued to live without many modern day conveniences. They had electricity, but I found this to be their only convenience. No running water, nothing else that pertained to modern day. They continued to collect water needed from a natural mountain stream at the end of the holler. I found this intriguing considering it was 1985!

We were invited to stay the night. I needed to ‘relieve’ myself before turning in for the night and my husband escorted me to the outhouse. He had warned me in advance to not be frightened. When asked what he meant by that, he simply replied again that I should not be too concerned with anything I may experience. We headed back to the house, with me in awe of what my husband could have been referring to.

At approximately 10 p.m. I was lying on the bed when I heard what sounded like a vehicle trying to make its way up the drive. I sat up, looked out the window and even saw the headlights! I walked into the dining area where my husband’s Grandfather sat and told him that company was coming. He told me that there was no one coming. I repeated myself and again, he told me that no one was coming. I told him that I heard the car, saw the headlights, and even heard a door shutting. He then told me that it happens often. That one will hear a vehicle, see the headlights and even hear the vehicle door shutting, but that no one would be there.

I literally felt the hair on my arms stand up and chills went down my spine. Scared to death, I went into the room where my husband was lying and told him what I had experienced. He smiled and told me once again that he warned me not to be frightened. No one in the family could ever explain the experience. No one knew why or what the reason was for such a phenomenon.

This was twenty-three years ago and I have carried it with me always. I have never forgotten the experience and just last summer my husband and I re-visited the area. His Grandparents both passed away in the early 90’s. The house has fallen to ruin and the area itself is now blocked from allowing visitors. I wonder, though, if one particular vehicle has been blocked?

It all started about ten years ago, I had just lost my job and was looking for a cheap place to live. I was looking in the paper when I found a low-income apartment for rent. I called about it to make sure it was still empty. When I found out where it was I went over there to put in my application. I got a call about two or three days later to come and look at it if I still wanted it.

When I saw it and saw how good it looked, I told them I would take it. I started moving in the next day because I wanted to get in it as soon as I could. Once I got settled in I noticed the air was not working. I called maintenance and they told me it worked just fine. The next day I turned on the air and it was not working. It was so hot in that apartment you could set still and be ringing wet with sweat. I called a second time and was told it was working good. I put up with that for about a month and finally they changed the filter and then it started working.

There were other strange things that happened as well, the microwave would turn on by itself, I would wake up and look all over the place for my keys and they would be in the lock of the door on the outside. Sometimes the TV would turn itself on and off, you could turn the bathroom light off at night and in the morning, and it would be turned on.

One day I was going down stairs getting ready to go to my mom’s when the old woman that lived down below me asked me “Why do you walk the floors at night?” I told her “I don’t, when I get home I eat something then go to bed.”

“Well what is that dragging sound I hear all night long?” she asked. “It must be the woman across from me.” I said to her.

When I got back from mom’s the other lady down stairs asked me “Did you know what happened to the last person who lived in your apartment?” “No” I said, “Well he died right there were your couch is sitting.”

“You’re kidding,” I said. “No, come to think about it everyone who has lived in that apartment has died in it”, she said.

I did not believe her, so I asked the maintenance men, and they told me the same thing. It was not long after that I moved out.