I have heard stories of train wrecks in Terra Alta that have killed railroad workers. Well one evening I and my friends were driving across the tracks near Washington Ave, when we were in the middle of the tracks we saw this bright train light within feet of our vehicle, the lights on the crossing were not flashing and the crossing arms were still up. We screamed and hurried across the tracks into an empty parking lot and looked at the tracks and there was nothing there. We call this out “ghost train”. Our families and the rest of our friends think we are crazy, but we know what we saw.

I have lived in this small former mining community for all of my life. At one time, this was actually a very large and very busy little town. There were numerous businesses, a large school, a company store where you could get anything you could imagine, even a movie theater. It is hard to believe that they even found room for all of this in such a small place, but ask anyone who has been here for a while; they did it! Once the mines shut down, many of the residents left to find work elsewhere. With them, went the businesses, heritage, and many of the stories that could possibly explain some of the strange things that have happened here.

One story in particular that thoroughly freaks me out happens to be one that happened to me. When I was around 3 years old, I can clearly remember this little girl who lived just down the road from me. Her name was Beth. She was very petite with long sandy blond hair and freckles, and close to the same age as me. I remember playing on the swing set in my yard with her and playing with my dolls, but she would never come in my house with me. I don’t remember playing with her a lot, but I very clearly remember everything about the last day she came up just as though it happened yesterday.

We were playing in my yard, on the swings just like always. I had just had a birthday, so I had a lot of new toys to play with and I wanted to show them to my friend. I asked her to come inside to see them since I wasn’t allowed to bring any of them outside. She didn’t want to. I begged, but to no avail.

Her mother came walking up the road soon after. She was a small built woman, with her long red hair piled up neatly on her head. She was wearing a mid-calf yellow dress. When she got to the driveway, she started to call to Beth, telling her “We have to leave, come on now! It’s time to go, now tell your friend goodbye and get down the road!” That was the last I ever heard of Beth or any of her family. I have asked my Great-Grandmother and my Grandfather many times if they remember her, but neither of them even heard of the little girl or her mom. I finally asked my mother who lives in another state and has for most of my life if she remembers me talking about Beth when I was a little girl. Her face went pale. She asked “are you talking about the little girl with really long hair and freckles” I was so happy to hear that I wasn’t crazy, that I really did have a friend named Beth…boy was I wrong…

Mom told me that she remembers her because she knew her too and has the same story that I do. Only, she played with Beth when she was a little girl too. She did some research though to find out just who this elusive little girl was.

Apparently Beth lived here long ago with her parents. Her dad was a miner here. Long before my family moved to the community, they all got very sick with some kind of virus that eventually took the lives of the whole family. Perhaps Beth was too young and innocent to realize what happened, she just wanted a friend to play on the swings with her and found two generations of us.

When I was only 8 or 9 years old my family (Mom, Dad & my younger brother and I) moved to a new house just down from where we had lived for several years. Upon entering the house for the first time, I can recall a great fear and anxiety about a certain walk-in closet that separated the two bedrooms in the house. After moving in, I would have nightmares of an old ugly gray haired woman with very long fingernails coming out of the closet at me. There were times when I wasn’t sure if they were nightmares or actual occurrences. I told my brother about them and he said he wasn’t scared of the closet and had not had any such dreams. When I told my mom, I can recall that she didn’t take the news well. She told me not to think about it and it would go away, but it never did.

Several years later, when I was in high school, and we had long moved from that house, mom told us of an incident that had happened several times in the old house. Monday was “wash” day at our house and mom said that she dreaded it with a passion. Not just because of the physical work involved, but because of another reason. The way mom had the bathroom set up for wash day was to have the wringer type washing machine poised next to a bath tub full of cold water. When she would run the clothes through the wringer they would fall into the tub and mom would then bend over and pull them out to dry. Mom said on several different occasions she would be bent over the tub and get a strange feeling that someone was watching her. She would look up and see this old gray haired woman with long fingernails standing in the doorway to the bathroom and she would start moving towards mom with an eerie grimace on her face.

I was determined to find out if anyone else had experienced these sightings before we moved into the house. I talked with the elderly gentleman who had lived next door to us when we lived in the spooky house. I asked him if he knew who lived in the house before us. I noticed a change in his usual happy go-lucky attitude. He told me with a rather sad tone of voice that his mother-in-law, an elderly lady with gray hair had lived there. He said she had been afflicted with mental problems for some time before her death. When I asked how she had died, he replied “She hung herself in the walk-in closet between the two bedrooms.”

When I was 6 years old, we lived in a house with a graveyard in the backyard. When I first visited the house something about it freaked me out, but it didn’t seem to bother my mom at all. The landlord’s mother was said to have died in the attic (don’t know how).

Once when me and my cousin were playing hide & seek in the graveyard, this man came up to me; he had an old army suit. He told me that his name was John (can’t remember his last name) he told me he died in the army, got shot three times in the chest and then he disappeared. I went to tell my mom and aunt. After I told them they wanted to go and see if it might be true and guess what… they found his gravestone. That house always freaked me out. Every night I would have the same dream after another (since I moved there till I moved out).

One thing that didn’t really freak me out but kind of was funny was when I was upstairs helping my mom with the laundry and I saw this pink car (see through) with 4 people in it. They had subs for heads (strange huh?). I chased them down to the basement but it seemed to disappear by the time I made it to the basement. There were many other things that really scared me!! One was a man who always followed me and told me bad things. There was a very nice one, her name was Sara. I don’t remember much. She followed me to the next house and then after a while I seemed to not see her much. I don’t see them really anymore, but I still hear things and sometimes may see something move on its own.

I am 15 years old and live in Huttonsville, WV. I haven’t had any encounters with any of the ghosts on Rich Mountain but, I do know people who have.

My dad has told me stories of when he was young and has heard noises and he has seen strange lights up there. One of my dad’s closest friends from Ohio has made many visits to Rich Mountain and has had at least 3 encounters. There is a memorial marker where John Hart’s house used to stand, my dad’s friend (Jason) was talking to my dad and said something insulting about John Hart (I am not going to say what!) and all of the sudden something chased them back to the truck.

Another encounter happened on Independence Day of this year, there was a bunch of people that went up there and they turned the truck off and all the lights, in a close distance they could see a horse. One of the guys got very sick and started throwing up and crying! It was very frightening to hear that. They haven’t been back there since but, when we go back I will update you in what’s going on up on that creepy mountain.

If you love ghosts of the civil war take a trip to Beverly, WV.

This story was told to me by my brother who is a coal miner in a local coal mine. Robby, my brother operates a “man trip”, a sort of miniature train that carries miners and supplies into and out of the coal mine. He stated that he had taken supplies into the face of the mine and was on his way back out to unload the trash and excess from the man trip. Robby had been lying on the man trip w/ his eyes closed for several minutes while the machine traveled on the rails back to the surface when he had a strange feeling come over him.

He stated that he felt as if someone was reaching out to touch him. Now cowardice to the unexplained runs in our family, so Robby quickly opened his eyes to see if he could find anywhere on the man trip to maneuver away from this foreboding feeling when he saw running or floating beside the machine, a ghostly looking young girl. According to Robby, she appeared to be about six years old and had long stringy dirt filled hair. Robby stated that her eyes were empty sockets of blackness.

My brother informed me that it appeared as if the rafe was attempting to reach out for the motor of the man trip. The apparition appeared to him for only a few seconds before disappearing. Robby questioned several of his co-workers, but they all just laughed off the story and informed him that he was crazy.

Several weeks went by and my brother put his sighting into the back of his mind, or at least tried to do so. On his way back into the mine he was informed that some of his co-workers had been traveling into the mine and that a cable mounted to the roof of the mine had broken, dropping some equipment onto their man trip. This had missed the miners by mere feet.

The strange twist to the story is that this “accident” had taken place at nearly the same location as where my brother had seen his ghostly premonition!

I was born and raised in West Virginia. I use to live in Bolivar near Harpers Ferry growing up. Near Harpers Ferry Middle School (then known as Harpers Ferry Jr. High), there was a cemetery across the street. There are some soldiers from the civil war buried there. My friend Tiffany, her sister, my sister, my then boyfriend Scott, and his brothers would always go out walking the streets at night. On this one Halloween, I suggested we sit in the cemetery for a while since I heard it was haunted.

My best friend Tiffany, her sister, my then boyfriend Scott and his brothers went to the cemetery, we walked around for hours. When we got to the end of a little walkway that we were walking down, we seen two people that were dressed like soldiers. We thought they were the reactors that get together every year to reenact the civil war.

Tiffany yelled out, “Hey what are you guys doing here, its dark out?” The soldiers turned around and looked at us. They were confused and started staring at a grave for a very long time. One of the soldiers looked at us and asked, “excuse me kids, what date is it?” I looked at the solider and said, “Sir it’s October 31, 1998.” Just then when my boyfriend and his brothers came to where my best friend, her sister, and I were… the soldiers had disappeared.

The next day we walked up to the cemetery and looked at the graves the soldiers were seen standing by. My best friend got there first and there were pictures on the grave. She gasped and called for me. I came running and I looked at the graves. I saw the pictures of the two soldiers we seen the night before. It was then we realized those soldiers were not actors, they were ghosts of the real soldiers from the civil war.

After that, we never went back to the cemetery during Halloween night.

It was Christmas Eve, my mother was waiting for her brother to arrive, who was going to spend Christmas with us. It was getting late; he was supposed to be taking the bus that ran from Huntington to somewhere above Wayne. It had already passed the house and he did not get off when it stopped. Mom was really getting worried.

Then all of the sudden we heard someone pounding on the front door and yelling. Dad answered the door, there was my uncle, white as a sheet, out of breath, and sweating like it was the middle of summer.

He sat down on the couch to catch his breath; mom gave him a glass of water to drink as he started to explain. He told us that he had worked all day and was very tired; he fell asleep on the bus. When he awoke, the bus was already in Wayne. He got off there and started hitchhiking back to Lavalette. No one would pick him up so he had walked all the way to Dixon. It is there that it happened, in Dixon there is a little family cemetery. A friend of my uncles had been buried there about three days prior to this; my uncle swore that he could hear his voice calling for him. He had run the remaining three miles or so to our house, scared senseless.

Several years after we lived in Wayne, we moved into a house on Childers Road. This house felt strange from the time we moved into it. It began with just hearing what sounded like footsteps in the attic, and then one evening we were out back, my son looked up at the gable vent. He said, look, we looked up and the vent had been pushed out from the inside. I called the landlord, he came and fixed it the next day, nailed it shut. Two days later, it was open again. This was an old house; the only way to get into the attic was using a ladder in our son’s closet. We called the landlord again, he came over. When he went up into the attic, he said it looked like no one had been up there for years. This time he put boards inside and out to hold the vent in, less than 24 hours later it was back out again. This time he just left it out.

Now, all along we had continued to hear footsteps in the attic, now there was a change. You could hear someone climbing the ladder in the closet, this freaked our son out, and so he started sleeping in our room.

It continued to get worse, one day I was told by a woman to wash the dishes, thinking it was my wife, I asked her. She was in the front bedroom. Even our son said his mother hadn’t said anything to me.

We would leave the house with the TV off, just to come back and find it on. We have gone out to sit on the porch; leave the TV on, when we would come back in it would be off. Lights would go off on us or come on. Dishes would be moved around. The water in the kitchen would come on. Whoever or whatever it was liked everything clean and tidy.

My wife later found out that the house had been moved here, after a house right across the road burned down. They lost their son in the fire. When the owner moved this house here, he remodeled it. Both, he and his wife died here.

We just figured that’s who our visitors were. They never did anything to us; just let us know they were there.

We lived in a small house on Beach Fork; we used to always sit out in the yard during the summer, especially in the evenings. We were sitting in the yard one evening; when we began to hear what sounded like a woman screaming. No one could see anything, my dad said, “We should go inside, it could be a panther.”

The next evening we again were sitting in the yard and again we heard this screaming sound. This went on for several days, all along me thinking that a big cat was going to come and get me.

The screaming began to continue way into the night, some nights all night long. My dad said that, that was unusual for a panther. It started to sound like it was getting closer and closer, at one point as if it was in the yard. Dad went out with a gun, not seeing anything he just fired into the air. The screaming did not stop. My dad came back in, he said, “Well I don’t guess it is a panther, the gunshot did not scare it.”

My brothers being a lot older than I am, used to go out exploring all the time. One day they were going out, I begged them to let me go, they did. We came across a small cemetery with about seven headstones in it; one of them had been turned over. We went over and looked at it; it was a woman’s name, which has long since left my mind. They decided that they should stand it back up, so they did. Strange thing we never heard the screaming again.

We had not had any problems anywhere else we lived until we moved into a trailer just above Wayne. Nothing really happened for a long time; you just had a very uneasy feeling and many cold spots.

Then my son started complaining of seeing what he said was great big animals on the hill behind the trailer. One night we were lying in bed I was just about asleep, my wife nudged me and said that a hand was reaching in through the window. I could not see anything, but she swore she did.

Nothing else really happened there after that, the cold spots remained, but no real incidents.