This story was told to me by my grandmother. She and my Grandfather have lived in Eccles for as long as I can remember. They live in an old 2 bedroom coal-camp house.

The two bedrooms have adjacent doors and one can easily see into one room from the other. So one night my grandmother was startled out of her sleep for no apparent reason. She looked out into the hallway and saw a young girl that was about 4 or 5 years old.

Well at this time my mother was about 5 years old, so my grandmother assumed it was my mother. She was about to tell the girl to go back to bed, when she looked across the hallway. And there in the other room was my mother…fast asleep. When my grandmother’s attention was directed back to the young girl, the young girl turned and vanished. My grandmother still has no explanation to this day.

It was winter of 1994 and my mother had just gotten home from work. My babysitter was taking care of me. As my mom was going upstairs to her bedroom, she saw a little boy run across the upstairs hallway. She screamed and my babysitter almost dropped me. My mom told her what happened, and the babysitter thought she was crazy.

Shortly after that, my parents went to a party at a neighbor’s house. There my mother met these two old ladies who had lived in the neighborhood for a long time. My mom told them the story and one recognized the boy from the description immediately. She told mom it was a boy who lived in our house some thirty years ago and had killed himself due to depression.

There have been no more sightings of this boy in my house. We hope his soul is set free.

It was Halloween of 1980. My sister and I had already finished trick-or-treating and our parents decided to let us go five houses up the hollow (also called hollers) to visit my aunt.

After a few hours, my sister and I wanted to go home to get something for our aunt. When we mentioned it, her father-in-law started teasing us about the “Late Night Stranger” getting us. We had heard this story, and many others about ghosts, all our lives, so we didn’t think much about it and headed out the door.

There had been a light drizzle all evening long, which added an eerie touch to our surroundings. The holler was completely abandoned and was unnaturally quiet.

My sister suddenly put her hand on my shoulder and whispered, “Hey, where’s everybody at?”. I said, “I don’t know… maybe they all went inside. Let’s go.”

She hesitated a bit, then whispered, “It’s kinda creepy. Should we go back?”.

I grabbed a hold of her shirt sleeve and pulled her along. “Come on, Sis. What, are you scared or something?”.

We got about halfway home when she stopped and said she was scared. I turned to her and told her that we were almost home and she could make it.

When I turned back, there was a man walking towards us. He was a short distance away and I noticed that he was dressed in a black trench coat with a black hat on.

My sister’s hand tightened on my shoulder and she whispered, “Who’s that?”.

“I don’t know. Let’s just keep moving.”

We kept walking. As the stranger passed, I glanced up towards his face, but couldn’t see anything. His features appeared as a black blur.

He must have noticed me looking, for he said, “Good evening, ladies.” His voice was soft and strange. My sister and I didn’t respond but kept walking.

After a few paces, I turned around and then back, half expecting him to be following us, a child’s instinct, I suppose. What I saw was even more frightening. The street was completely deserted. There were no signs of anyone having been up or down the road. No man; no footprints on the wet cement; nothing at all!

There wasn’t a single place the man could have went or hidden in such a short amount of time. Yet, he was gone. A chill ran down my spine.

I looked at my sister in utter disbelief. She gazed at me with the same expression, then we both turned in unison and ran the rest of the way home.

I explained to my grandpa the details of the encounter. From the spot where my grandpa was sitting on the porch, he could see my aunt’s house. He claimed that he had only seen my sister and I come up the road, no one else.

We are all convinced that it was the “Late Night Stranger” that we had heard about in previous stories. Although I had heard of him my entire life, I never expected to actually see him, and I’ll always remember that night.

One night, when I was about sixteen years old, I had gone to bed and had been asleep for several hours when I awoke with a feeling that someone was in the room with me. As I looked down at the foot of my bed, I saw a woman with long white hair, dressed in a brilliant white gown. I could not see through her, but she appeared translucent. She was smiling at me and the look on her face was one of contentment. I was so horrified that I immediately covered my head with my blanket. I was afraid to bring the blanket down, in fear she would still be there. When I finally did bring it down, she had vanished. I told my father and mother this the next morning and my father laughed and told me I had been dreaming. I knew I was wide awake, though.

Years later, after I had married, my wife and I were staying in the house with our newborn daughter. We had been sleeping in a different room from the one in which I had my experience. My wife was in the room alone, awake, when a woman dressed in a white gown, with her hair in a bun, wearing an old time sun bonnet, appeared standing in the door way. She was staring into the room at our daughter’s bassinet. Like me, my wife also threw her blanket over her head. She said she pulled the blanket down and the lady was still there in the doorway. She was so frightened that she pulled the blanket over her head again. My wife said a feeling of comfort came over her and when she pulled the blanket down a second time, the lady was gone. I asked her later if the woman had white hair. She told me that she did. I then told her of my own sighting of the lady when I was younger.

Except for the sunbonnet and her hair being up, the descriptions of the lady were the same. I grew up in the house that was built by my great grandfather back in the 1800’s. It is located in the town of Ravenswood. The house has always been in my family, so I would say that whoever visits there is some past relative. I like to think that perhaps she is a guardian angel. After these two experiences neither I, nor my wife, have had any encounters with her again. To my knowledge, my wife and I are the only ones who have ever seen her.

My mom told me this story, since it happened when I was about a month old. She was getting ready for bed one night, waiting on my dad to get home from work. All night she had heard this one song in her head, “There’s a stranger in my house.” I forget who sings it (Ronnie Milsap), but my mom kept hearing it, all day long.

After my dad got home and cleaned up, he and my mom decided to go to bed. My mom told my dad she had a bad feeling about putting me in my room and that she wanted me to sleep with them. So, I slept with them that night.

Mom says she couldn’t have been asleep more than twenty minutes, when she was woke up by everything in her kitchen rattling and banging. She wakes my dad up and he tells her to get me and run next door to my granny’s house. When we got there, my parents ran to the back room, which was straight across from our kitchen, so they could look and see if they could see anything in there. As soon as they got to the window, they say a white blur darted from our kitchen into the street light between the two houses and the light got as bright as possible and then just went completely out.

I grew up in a very rural area in West Virginia in a large two story house built by my grandfather. The house sat in a narrow valley with cemeteries located upon both opposite hillsides. One of these cemeteries holds my sister who died at the age of three, and having been born about four years after her death, I never knew her.

Another sister, also older than I, had a room across from mine and my brothers (we three shared the same room, which was larger than hers), both on the second floor of the house. One night when I was about six years old I awoke in the dead of night to hear my sister sobbing in her room, the sound muffled by her closed door. I lay for a long time listening to her, wondering if I should check on her and ask if she was all right (or wake one of my brothers to do it). Instead I simply lay there, somewhat paralyzed by the sound of the sobs as they ebbed and swelled.

I remember that at some point I realized goosebumps were chilling my arms, and pulled up my covers around my neck to warm them. I also remember that the sobs had at some point taken on a sound that I found hard to correlate with my older sister. They sounded too young for her. At some point I fell back into slumber and woke to the smell of eggs, bacon, and coffee being prepared by my mother in the kitchen below. I dressed and went downstairs.

Seeing my mother I quite casually asked, “Mom, what was sis crying about last night?” She turned to me with a stunned look on her face, halting her work to blurt out “What?” “I heard her crying really late last night, just thought you might know why, that’s all.” Her face had gone white as she stood motionless looking at me. “There’s no way you could have heard your sister last night” she said, “she stayed with her friend Tina out in Spring Valley.”

I could have swallowed my tongue, Spring Valley was over thirty miles away. The goosebumps of the night before returned to my arms at that moment. A moment that I both cherish for the realization of my possible contact with my deceased sister, and fear, for the very same reason.

This event took place about 23 years ago, when I was 11 years old. I lived on Grasslick Road where I just learned about the murders that took place there. I knew nothing of these events as a child.

I was alone at the house and had gone out to the barn to get the tack for my friend and me to go horseback riding. While in the barn I heard a female voice say in a very excited voice, “Help me, help me, please, help me!” Then there was a blood-curdling scream. My first thought was that someone had fallen out of the loft of the barn. I ran up the stairs yelling,”Where are you?” No one answered me. I proceeded screaming the same thing and running all around the house, barn, and other sheds. There was no sign of anyone around. I felt a cold chill and ran down the road about a mile to where my friend was waiting to go horseback riding.

Yesterday, I learned that the murder either occurred at that house or down the road. The murderer did live in my house.

During court testimony, the sister who survived the attack reported that while she was running away down the very same road, she could hear her sister screaming for help as she was being killed. Now, I am certain that this is whom I heard that day in the barn by the house.

The years of the Civil War wreaked a terrible toll on the citizens of West Virginia and on the slaves who were held captive in points further south. For many years, there have been stories and rumors of terrible atrocities that were carried out on escaped slaves who were once again recaptured.

There is a house in Moorefield where these stories and rumors proved very real… resulting in a haunting that still echoes there today.

Despite the fact that the state of West Virginia has “seceded” from the Confederacy and had remained a part of the Union, there were still many Confederate sympathizers and outright supporters who lived in the state. One of these bastions of Confederate loyalty was the town of Moorefield in Hardy County. Many of the residents had remained Confederates after the start of the war because of the slave labor used to work the farms here.

The town also served as the headquarters to “McNeill’s Rangers”, a guerrilla band of Confederate troops who numbered no more than 100 men but who fought numerous battles in the war and captured tons of Federal supplies and ammunition.

The small army was led by partisan John Hanson McNeill, a former Missouri Confederate who had been imprisoned in St. Louis is 1861. After being paroled, he returned to West Virginia and raised volunteers for a fighting force. The band of men operated successfully against Crook and Sheridan and fought in guerrilla operations with Mosby in the Shenandoah Valley. They would also fight at Gettysburg and at the Battle of New Market.

McNeill’s Rangers became notorious for their raids on supply trains, camps and railroads but his tactics were not always appreciated by his superiors. He was criticized for his field performance and in 1864 he was court-martialed for accepting Confederate deserters into his ranks. He was acquitted of the charges but the taint of them followed him for some time. He was later captured and died from wounds in November of 1864.

McNeill and his men were also some of the most brutal of Confederate guerrillas. They met opposition in Moorefield by a prominent farmer named John Frist. He was a man who was loyal to the Union and McNeill hated him. One night, a hot-headed group of Rangers went to Frist’s house and murdered him, his wife and their three children.

After this, the house was turned into a prison where captured runaway slaves were held. The slaves were taken into the basement of the house, chained to the walls and left for dead. These unfortunate souls were not among the slaves who were released at the end of the war.
In 1865, a group of townspeople went to the Frist house and cleared out the bones and decaying bodies and gave them as decent a burial as possible, considering the tragic circumstances.

The house is still standing in Moorefield today and since the Civil War, many families have either owned or rented it. None of them have remained in the place for more than a year. It is said that each year, on the anniversary of the Frist family’s murder, blood appears on the walls and the floors of the room in which they were killed. It slowly wears off as time passes but it is impossible to paint over or wipe away.

There are also stories of strange sounds, screams and moans that come from the basement. Those who have been brave enough to venture down there in the darkness say that the sounds of rattling chains convince them not to stay for very long.

Here, before God, in the presence of these witnesses, I consecrate my life to the destruction of slavery…… John Brown, 1837. Along the streets of Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, a strange, gaunt, white-haired man walks along with a small black dog at his side. The two odd companions stroll past the storefronts and the buildings and the tourists who come here notice him and remark on his eerie resemblance to the man that made this town famous, John Brown. In fact, the resemblance is so uncanny that many will ask this man if they can take his photograph. Little do they know that when they get their film developed, no man will appear in their photograph. The man walks down the street to the door of the fire engine house, where he abruptly vanishes. Such are the encounters with the ghost of John Brown. For most of the citizens of America, the Civil War began in 1861 with the firing upon of Fort Sumpter, but for many, the war for freedom began many years before. For the abolitionists of the north and the slaves who were held in chains in the south, the Civil War was about the question of slavery. To those people, the war actually began in 1859….although for the instigator of this savage event, a man named John Brown, the war had begun much earlier than that. On October 16, 1859, the fanatical prophet of doom led a small army of five black men and thirteen white men into the village of Harpers Ferry. He brought along a wagon filled with 200 rifles, 200 pistols and 1000 pikes to arm the slaves that he was sure would rally to his cause of freedom… at any cost. He would lead his army south along the Appalachians and destroy slavery through the plantations of the south. Brown was many things in his life, from failed businessman to guerrilla leader in the Kansas Territory. When the question had come about whether or not Kansas was to have slavery, Brown had formed a personal strike force of killers to ensure that it didn’t. There was fierce fighting on both sides of the issue and towns like Lawrence suffered by being burned to the ground by pro-slavery forces and men like those in a cabin at Pottawatomie Creek were hacked to death with swords by Brown and his army of anti-slavery men. Brown became a symbol of the abolitionist movement and men who would speak out against slavery, but would not strike with the sword, railed his cause in abolitionist newspapers of the day. Brown moved east, bringing the fight to the slavery strongholds of the southern states.

At Harpers Ferry, Brown quickly seized the federal arsenal, the armory, and the engine house and then gathered up hostages from the village. After that, things started to spiral out of control. The first man killed was the town’s baggage master, a free black man. The army of slaves did not appear, but the townspeople did after Brown and his men opened fire on an incoming train. The first of Brown’s men to fall was a former slave who hoped that Brown could liberate his wife and children, still being held in the south. Someone in the crowd cut off this man’s ears as souvenirs. Before the battle was over, Brown would lose nine more men, two of them his own sons. Federal troops soon arrived from Washington and in command was Colonel Robert E. Lee, who had come so quickly with 100 men that he had not even had time to put on his uniform. A dozen of Lee’s men stormed the arsenal and fought their way inside. Brown was slashed with an officer’s sword and captured to be held by the state of Virginia for treason. He was hanged on December 2. No one had any idea what an effect Brown’s attack on Harpers Ferry would have on the northern public. Those who opposed slavery spoke out in anger and marveled at the courage shown by Brown. Herman Melville would call him “the meteor of the war”. In the south, people were horrified by the raid and by the sympathy shown to Brown for his reckless actions. It would be one of the catalysts to the coming secession by the southern states. As for the village of Harpers Ferry, the events of that day have left a lasting impression, from the ghost of John Brown to the memories and the history of those who fell and those who won the day. I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood… John Brown’s final public statement But John Brown’s ghost is not the only spirit to linger in Harpers Ferry… there are other ghosts here too, like that of one of Brown’s murdered men, who was mutilated by townsfolk and left to die with the hogs. There is also a haunted church, which was hit by a mortar round during the Civil War. This building is haunted by a priest who has been seen disappearing into the walls and by the sound of a baby crying, which can be heard on the front steps.