So many things took place at my childhood home, so many that it’s hard to know where to begin. I’m 27 years, married w/child, and moved to a different part of the county, however, I feel as though I am still visited on occasion.

I suppose I should narrow the field to one story, this seems like a good idea as there are many events having taken place in and around the old company house where I spent my first 18 years.

I think it was a Saturday, definitely a summer day, was about 13-15. Mother was in the bathroom preparing for the day. I had just finished making breakfast (bacon & eggs w/fried potatoes) when I was portioning out the food at the table. Now, even though I was alone in the room and she was in another part of the house, what happened next disturbs me greatly to this day. I had distributed the food almost evenly between the two plates, save the eggs, which I awarded myself the greater portion.

Just as I was about to turn and leave the table a plate “slid” across the table! What I mean to say is it propelled itself from one side to the other resting in front of me. As if to say “What about me?”

Immediately I went to tell Mother what had happened. At first I was calm, but as I was relaying what happened I began to “lose it.” It was as if saying the words aloud made it real, like not telling anyone would allow me to tell myself it’s just my imagination. Only I knew it had happened, right before my eyes.

It took us a while to put it together, but Mother and I figured that it was her deceased boyfriend “Oliver.” You see the plate had moved from his place setting, its original location, all the way across a dressed table, coming to rest inches from the edge directly in front of me.

I can’t really explain it, but this is, in my mind proof of something just beyond the realm of our five senses, letting us know that it’s there. Sometimes we can sense it in one way or another or perhaps not at all. Realize this though; there IS something, someone around us at all times. We may not be conscious of a presence but they/it/he/she is with us.

This is only one episode to occur at this address, many “unexplainable” events took place in my presence. I only hope to someday have answers.

My wife and I were witnesses to a specter on the side of the road about two and a half weeks ago. It was 4:30 am on a country rural road outside Charles Town. This area by the way had vast amounts of Civil War activity.

The white cloudy object had a body and head form that slowly lifted off of the ground, reformed and glided into a wooded area above at a 45 degree angle. As it left the ground and reformed it was followed by a tail type of appearance.

We were both eyewitnesses to this event, no drugs or alcohol was involved and we had never seen anything like this before in our lives.

In 1990, I was a civil war reenactor with the 17th Virginia Cavalry. We had gone to Droop Mountain for the reenactment in October. I rode to Droop with Joe Hoff, another member of the 17th. It was raining hard and had been all evening. We arrived about ten o’clock that night. When we arrived, we found that all the cavalry units, both Federal and Confederate, were bivouacked in the same place so that all the horses could be kept together. Since we were dismounted, we were told to go camp where the infantry units were, on the other end of the park, near the observation tower.

When we finally got over there, I had to find a restroom. Joe and I both went through the playground area looking for one. I was walking ahead of Joe, and shining a flashlight around when suddenly, my beam struck a white horse standing near me, probably about 20 feet away. It took my breath, and I called out, “Look there, Joe.” He said, “I see it.” I said, “Joe, there are no horses on this side of the mountain.” He said, “That one is!” The next day, I found out that there was, indeed, a horse where we were the night before. It was used to pull a supply wagon, however, it was a chestnut colored horse.

On the way home, the following Sunday evening, we started talking about the mystery horse. Joe wanted me to describe the horse for him. I told him that I had held the light on it for him to see. He said, “You didn’t hold a light on the horse I saw.” The horse that Joe saw was the Chestnut. I told him that the one I saw was white, that it had a figure on it’s back, but the figure was just a gray mist, that it didn’t really have a form, it just extended above the horse’s back. It did not have a saddle or bridle on it, but looked as if something had reined it in sharply because both front feet were planted in the ground, and it’s back legs were low to the ground. The eyes glowed in the light like a cat’s eyes.

I had talked to Mike Smith, the park Superintendent, and asked if he had any ghosts on the mountain. He said there were plenty of them reported, some of them similar to mine. I’m not sure what it was that I saw, but it was unusual.

Recently, I picked up a book on Droop Mountain called “LAST SLEEP” and found my story about the white horse in the book. The Parkersburg News did an article on it and a lady writing ghost stories about the civil war from Charlottesville, Virginia. wrote about it in her book.

I was told this story by my adoptive mother, who was born in Wirt County. I’ve also heard it from older family members.

Way back up in a holler in Wirt County is a two-story, white house. It has been unoccupied since the early 1900’s. Rumor has it that nobody would stay there very long because it was haunted. My mother’s brother and a group of other young men from the neighborhood decided to spend the night there one summer. They were passing time by playing cards when the front door opened on it’s own. Each time someone got up and closed it, the door would open again within a short time. Finally, my uncle got up and slammed it shut and yelled, “Now stay shut!” It did.

A few hours after midnight, they all went to sleep on the floor downstairs. My uncle dreamed of an old man who told him to look under the front porch piling for his lost money. The next day, my uncle went back alone and dug where the man in his dream told him to and found a small bag with a small amount of old coins and a few other trinkets.

I heard this story many times while growing up in West Virginia, not only from my mother, but from other family members, as well. Many years later, one of my mother’s relatives lived in that old house and I spent nights in it. It seemed to be a sad place of unfulfilled dreams. I think it is still there.

It was a cold Winter night, me and my cousin Maria were on our way to see our Aunt Kate and Uncle Max. We were driving on a concrete country road and we slide on a patch of ice. As we were spinning there was this Icy face right in front of us that said “Beware of The Winter Ghost in the great hills of Seneca”.

We were scared to death, and as we stopped spinning we got back on the road. We arrived At our Aunt and Uncle’s house 45 minutes later. We told them about what had happened, they said the same thing happened to them 1 year ago today and have yet to see the the Winter Ghost of Seneca.

My Family moved to a house on North Walnut when I was 5 years old. It was then that I started to see this old woman on a regular basis.

From my second story bedroom she seemed to float in through the window. A cold air rushed over me as she came towards my bed. She was very old looking and if I had to guess was from the 1800s. She had gray hair pulled back into a bun and had eyes that were so deep, so deep that the seemed to be endless. What would happen is she would just float from the window with her arm outstretched. She never talked or made a sound, but for some reason I knew that she was saying, “Help me.”

Many times she appeared to me. She only manifested herself in that room though. Other things went down in that room too. Sometimes the window would open and stuff would move across the room. I am talking about a couch and many other things just floating across the room before my very eyes. The TV would turn itself on and channels would flip at night. There would be times when I would come into the room and see that it had been ram sacked, things were throw astray, my bed overturned, etc. I was being scared out of my room and I gave the room to my sister.

My sister has seen her on numerous occasions and described the event exactly as I experienced it. She too was scared out of the room and currently uses the front room to sleep. To this very day that spirit dwells in that upstairs room.

While growing up in WV, I have heard many ghost stories. I originally lived in Coal City, and had heard the headless Hannah story of the girl who walked the train tracks located behind Independence High School. As a child, me and my friends often walked the tracks late at night after sneaking out of our homes to hopefully see the “ghost” of the young girl supposedly beheaded by a passing train. The only thing we ever found was plenty of bramble bushes to scratch ourselves up with.

It wasn’t until I moved with my family to Hardy County that I witnessed anything out of the ordinary. My parents purchased an old farm house located in Mathias, WV. The place has numerous outbuildings and is located near a small shallow creek. We moved there when I had just turned sixteen. I had heard many odd noises and things that seemed not to make sense at the time, but had attributed it to an over-active imagination, until one night my sister had a experience as well.

We had all gone to bed as usual, nothing out of the ordinary. My sister’s room shared a wall with mine and the rooms being side by side and in such an old house, you could hear what was going on in the next room very well. The walls were not insulated and the boards were old, some of which had slight cracks between them. I was awakened very early in the morning by this blaring music. It was tremendously loud and was coming from my sister’s room. She had a stereo in her room and I became angry thinking that she was being very inconsiderate and playing it loudly without regard to my parents or myself sleeping. I walked into her room and said to her, “Turn that thing down Becky, mom is gonna be really mad at you.” As soon as this left my mouth, I noticed that my sister was under her covers on her bed and shaking. She put her head out and told me that she didn’t know how the stereo got turned on and that she had been awakened by the noise as well. I believed her because she was clearly near tears and it did not seem like her to lie about something like that. After that, there were other things that happened that made me wonder what was going on, but I never paid too much attention to it because I really didn’t believe in ghosts.

I moved away after graduating from high school and joined the army where I met my wife. I soon moved her and myself back to my parents house when I left the military. Upon moving in, my wife had mentioned on several occasions of hearing or seeing “things” that didn’t add up. But the thing that made me believe in ghosts without a doubt happened not long after we moved into my parents house with them.

I had taken the bedroom that I had lived in as a child and my wife Crissie had chosen an extra room down the hallway across from my sister’s room. At this point me and Crissie were not married yet and my mother and father wouldn’t allow us to share the same bedroom. The evening of the occurrence, Crissie had come to my room with me to play cards and we were both sitting on the floor facing each other. I had my old beat up boom-box sitting on the floor next to us and we were listening to the radio. Suddenly, the station faded out and I paid it no mind thinking that it was just station drift. But there was order to it when another station started playing, different than the one we were listening to.

Then, that station faded and another came into tune. I looked at the radio amazed because of the way it seemed that someone was searching for a certain station. The old boom-box was not one of the new digital types, but had a dial with a knob that had to be turned to change stations. The station playing was shown by a red marker that set at that frequency. Crissie and I both watched in horror as the knob did not move, but the pointer scanned up and down the dial, pausing when a strong signaled station was found, only to move again seconds later as if an impatient hand guided it. She looked at me with her mouth hanging open and I have to admit that I was equally afraid. I reached over and pulled the plug out of the wall socket and the radio died. We both went downstairs and repeated what had just happened to my parents who tried to find a logical explanation. No one ever figured out why it happened and also the stereo never did it again.

Many, many more odd things happened in that house. But only a few am I positive were the happenings of the “ghost”. One being that Crissie and I had just become married. We were sleeping in the room that she had chosen when we first moved into the place. I awakened to her sounding very frightened and shaking me profusely. I asked her what was going on, when she replied, “Shhh.. just listen.. oh my god do you hear it?” And then I did. It was a screaming sound. Definitely a woman and it was coming from right outside the window. I got out of bed and went outside to look. I found nothing outside. But upon returning upstairs and getting back into bed, it started again. Figuring that some prankster was having fun, this time I crept down the stairs and peered out the downstairs windows. The screaming continued, yet I could see nothing that would be causing such a sound. I moved outside via the front door and noticed that the screaming was circling the house opposite the way that I was moving. Still thinking that someone was moving around the house trying to scare me, I stopped and traveled in the opposite direction hoping to catch the person coming around the corner towards me.

I waited at the corner very quietly and could hear an occasional scream coming closer, it seemed that I could also hear footsteps or the rustling of the leaves on the yard as someone stepped on them. The screaming stopped but the walking sound continued. It got right up to the corner and then stopped, I jumped around the corner and yelled, “Ha, I caught you!” But there was no one there. When I went back upstairs, my wife told me that she had watched me walk around the corner of the house from one window, and had went to the other to see me come around the corner, she said that the other side was empty, and she soon saw me jump around to that side.

Some people have tried to tell me that a cougar or maybe a bobcat will scream like that, and that I had one pacing around my house early that morning. But if this was so, why didn’t my wife see it out of the window while she clearly saw me in the moonlight? Needless to say, to this day. My wife will not go outside of my parents house when it is dark and when we are visiting them. It would take me all day to account all of the odd happenings here for you to read, so I am only going to briefly highlight the others such as slamming doors, footfalls on the stair steps, things coming up missing only to be found days or weeks later in their original locations.

There have also been voices calling out your name and when you go to see what someone wanted, no one says that they called for you. My daughter even mentioned a girl that she talked to in the house, which I attributed to an “imaginary friend”. However, my daughter faithfully described a girls dress similar to the dresses at the time that was worn when the house had first been built. I have since learned that the house’s front room had been used as a sort of viewing room for the deceased of the community when a wake was being held. Do some of the people who die and have their wake held there still walk at my parents house? I do not know. But there is obviously something very odd in that house.

I am originally from Parkersburg, West Virginia, but in 1958, I married and left home. In 1988, I was living in Meredian, Mississippi and worked at a J. C. Penney’s in a small mall there. One day I was returning to the store after my lunch break, when an elderly little man grabbed me by the arm and stopped me in my tracks. Before I could say anything, he said, “You are very sick. See a Doctor, now!” I simply thought he was confused and answered that I was not feeling ill. He continued to grasp my arm and repeated himself. To humor him I said, “Okay, I will. Now let me go, I need to get back to work!”

I returned to work and gave it no more thought, until later that afternoon. I thought to myself that as an adoptee I didn’t know much about my family medical history. On my next break, I called my Doctor and asked for an immediate appointment to have a mammogram, as I knew my biological mother had died in her early forties of breast cancer. My Doctor agreed to do the test later that day. After he ran the test he told me that he found a suspicious lump. He ordered a biopsy and informed me I had Breast cancer. Surgery, chemotherapy and radiation treatments followed the next six months.

I recovered and began searching for my brothers and sisters in West Virginia. I found two sisters. One visited me in Jacksonville, Florida and brought family pictures that I had no idea existed. While looking at them, I immediately saw the little old man who had grabbed me in the mall. I asked my sister who he was and she said he was my great grandfather. I will never forget his twinkling blue eyes.

To start, I have NEVER believed in ghosts and still do not, but this story is still today, unexplainable to me. In July of 1992 I became a Deputy Sheriff in central West Virginia and from 1992 until 1995, (when the State Prison in Moundsville closed), I had made a few prisoner transports to and from the prison. I always thought it was a creepy place, but aren’t prisons suppose to be?

In spring of 2000 I was scheduled to have a training class at the Moundsville Prison. Today many law enforcement agencies use the Prison for training but this was to be the first training class there. I was a Prevention Resource Officer in a local Junior High School and the training dealt with School Violence.

I live a few hours away so I allowed myself plenty of time to get to the training class. I pulled up to the prison and the front door was open. I had been there before and figured I would go on in. I stepped inside the front entrance and yelled out but no one answered. I knew someone was there somewhere because the doors were all open, although there were no other cars parked in front. Not finding anyone I proceeded to try to find where the class was going to be held. I looked around for several minutes but I didn’t find anyone nor did I find a “classroom”. I was at one end of a hallway and saw a man dressed in a blue shirt and pants at the other end of the hallway go into an adjoining hallway. I yelled out to him but he never acknowledged my presence. Figuring this was probably an employee or perhaps the instructor of the class I followed in the direction he went. When I made my way to the other hallway in which he “ducked” into, I found that it led to an office, but nowhere else. There were no other doors in which the man could have gone.

At this time I heard voices from where I had just came from and turned and went back. I met up with two other guys who were taking the class and thought nothing else of the man who “disappeared” except that I never saw anyone all day long dressed in blue. I left that evening after the class without really wondering or thinking about it.

Later that same year the television show “Fear” taped an episode at the prison and that intrigued the students at the school in which I was assigned. I taught a Criminal Justice class and the students wanted to take a trip to Wheeling and tour the prison while there. I arranged the trip and in January of 2001 we went to tour the prison. Before “Fear” I had never heard of the prison being “haunted”. While on the tour the students were full of questions for the guide, mostly on the subject of “haunting”.

I was very surprised when the guide told the story of a “prisoner” being sited by the tower guards going into the prison on the north side, but after investigated the “prisoner” was never found. The guide explained that this occurred often. Supposedly this “prisoner” was one of the “ghosts” at the prison. The guide then showed us where this “sighting” always occurred, unbelievably at the same door and hallway where I saw the “man in blue” nearly a year earlier. I had to ask “what was he wearing?”…the guide said that if the “prisoner” was in fact the “ghost” of the inmate they suspected it was, then they wore blue uniforms at the time.

Still not convinced this was actually a “ghost”, it still puzzles me today and I thought I’d share this experience.

One night I woke up to something touching my hair, like it was behind me leaning over to stroke my hair. My bed was up against a wall at that time, so how could someone fit back there?

I looked up to see a long skinny thing in the dark. It looked shaggy, its nails were long. I jumped up away from it, not looking back, I ran to the door, conveniently located next to the light switch. I decided to reach for the light first.

I reached out my hand, but quickly pulled it back when I saw another one, leaning on the wall with one foot on the wall, on the other side of the light switch. He smiled at me, as if enjoying my fear.

I looked in front of me to open the door, and looked back for another attempt to turn the light on. The thing I had seen was gone. I turned the light on. I was scared, but, almost half asleep still. Being the lazy person that I am, not letting anything keep me from my sleep, I headed back towards my bed and slept.

The next morning I remembered what had happened, and wondered, “Was it all a dream?” if so, why was my light on, and door open? Why was it so real?

Other Comments: I have many night demons, numerous times I have had bad dreams, or felt something get on top of me or harass me in some way.