In the 1960’s, when I was about 8 years old, my family lived in a small hollow down off Fort Hill in Charleston. Our house had been built in the 1920’s, and my deceased aunt & her family had lived there before I was born.

One night, I was asleep on the couch with my cat. It was very, very late & I was in a deep sleep when my cat awoke me by hissing, growling, spitting, and just generally throwing a fit. I was surprised because he never behaved like that. I was turned facing the back of the couch and the cat was snuggled between me &  the couch. Thinking I must have crowded him, I petted him & mumbled something. But the cat wasn’t looking AT me while he freaked out;  he was looking PAST me, into the dark center of the room.

He was standing by now, hackles raised, back arched, growling and hissing like crazy. I slowly turned & looked over my shoulder to where the cat was staring. There was a white mist, kind of column-shaped, no real form to it, hovering in the middle of the room! Almost immediately, it began to slowly fade, and at the same moment the cat stopped howling, settled in again, and fell asleep like nothing had happened. The mist faded completely, and was gone.

I didn’t sleep anymore that night and I never fell asleep on the couch again.  Years later, as an adult, I learned that not only had my aunt lived in the house before us, she had also died there, in 1959, before I turned three. She was very fond of me, as I was her youngest brother’s first child. I like to think she was checking up on me….without expecting the cat to see her first!

This story took place at a fire station in WV.

My great grandfather was a fire fighter for over 20 years. While at the station weird things happened.

There would be rooms in the station with only one door and no windows, that you would hear things being moved around in. But when you looked there would be nobody in there.

Another time my grandfather was there for night shift and there were only a few other men. He was doing something when a black shadow figure started walking in his direction. As it got close he just stepped out of the way. He said for some reason he didn’t feel scared. It walked past him and into another room.

(This is a story that my great granddad told my Nana who told my dad who told me, so it might not be exactly what happened.)

This took place in Barboursville, West Virginia. This is my dad’s story, it happened about 18 years ago.

My father and a few of his friends had gone to a graveyard near one of their houses. They had set their ouija board down in the middle of it and started asking questions. After getting no responses the wooden part that went over the words, letters, and the yes and no, it flew into the air. Nothing more happened after that so they decided to leave.

As they were leaving my dad started seeing dogs in the corner of his eyes, but when he turned around only to see no dogs. His best friend Scott (who was also there) Swore he was seeing the same thing (they believed they were hell hounds).

Then others thought they saw black shadow figures walking around.

Eventually after almost everyone was gone it was just my dad and Dirk (one of the friends). Dirk had made my dad walk him home because he was scared.

The entire time they saw the black shadows and hell hounds. The next day, James had got his aunt who lived with him to talk with them all. She said they had opened a door allowing spirits to come to the world and they had to get rid of them. I’m not exactly sure how they did it.

Nothing else happened there after that.

The stories that I am going to tell you didn’t happen to me but it happened to my mother, my aunt, and my mother’s cousins. My mother was raised on Droop Mountain, West Virginia right beside where the Droop Mountain Battlefield State Park is. At that time there was no road around that park. My mom and her sister came home from a log church down on the lower end of Droop Mountain one night. When the guy turned out the lights there was a man standing in the field glowing in the dark with no head. Turn on the lights and he would be gone.

Another incident right in the same area, my mom’s cousins and mother and father were walking down on the northeast side of Droop Mountain. There use to be a store there. About dusk one evening, they looked up right in the corner of that park in the same area and there was a man sitting on a horse that they could see through and it turned around and it was gone. All of them seen it and their dad was a preacher and he said, “We’re going back home.”

I went to a camp last summer that I will not name. There were many interesting ghost stories that they told the first-year, and I often got scared at night, and could not sleep. One story in particular was the Ghost dog Trevor. He was a camp dog, there used to be three, and he was docile, and loved children.

One day he was bitten by a rabid raccoon, and he became rabid, chasing kids and counselors around the camp. They eventually shot him in the woods. Now, campers and counselors often say that they hear snarls and howls in the night, and almost everyone on campus has seen dead Trevor’s red glowing eyes and foaming mouth for an instant before campfire.

Let me start out by saying that, like most posts I’ve read on here, before this experience I was a firm non-believer. There exists a moment in this story that I actually thought, “Holy moly ghosts are REAL!”. It was that vivid, that clear, and that undeniable.

This is private property (owned by my uncle, who would not take kindly to strangers on his land without his knowledge) so please don’t try to go there.

I was 18 at this time, accompanied by 3 others who were the same age. We decided to go out and “rough” it for a night with a camping trip.  The area we went to was accessible only by ATV, and it sat right on the bank of the creek visible on the map.  This giant bend in the creek is referred to as King’s Bend by the locals and is known for good fishing (in the day) and a place to avoid like the plague at night. Here’s a little back story that I discovered after the event happened.  There are 2 train tunnels that run under the hills in this area. They were built way back in the day by slave labor, and the slaves who died during this process were buried in shoddy, unmarked graves close to where we camped.  There is also a large field to the west of the camp site, it has a house on it which I believe is used by WV State Troopers as a camp ground.  The reason it’s used by them is that it was possessed by the state after a shootout occurred there in which several members of a local group of bad men were killed by the police in a raid.  Just up the creek a ways from our site, a large, old, dead tree hangs out over the water which a man had hung himself on many years earlier. ALSO, (I know, I wish I had known about all of these before we went camping) a woman and her child had drowned in a canoe accident, from what I learned directly in the creek in front of our camping site.  So, with all of that out of the way, and remember that we had no clue of any of this as we went down that night, I begin my story.

My cousin, friends, and I gathered up our camping supplies, fishing poles, food, etc. and headed down while the sun was still up, although close to setting.  In the last hour of day, we started our fire, set up our tent and started goofing off.  Mind you there was no alcohol, drugs, or any other things that would have impaired our perceptions used.  This was all witnessed, felt, or heard by everyone involved.  It was not long after the sun set and total darkness was upon as that the first sign that something wasn’t right began.

My cousin and I were sitting on the bank of the creek, roughly 30 ft. from our camping site. We had a spotlight, shining it down in the water spotting fish and trying to spear them. We weren’t very successful, but that’s not the important part. After about 3 minutes of doing this, we noticed that every time we would shut the light off, we would hear a WHOOSH-WHOOSH in the water. Very distinctly the sound of someone sloshing through water. When we turned the light back on, you could see waves/ripples in the water. Not slight ripples that could be called by a fish or something else,but very heavy, rough ripples that needed weight to cause. This alone was not enough to cause concern, but my cousin and I looked at each thinking, ‘That’s weird…” but we went on about our business.

Sitting back at the campsite, with the fire raging in front of us, we started shooting the breeze and enjoying the night.  However, it wasn’t long before once again, weird things started.  We started hearing voices echoing off of the hillside. They were more like whispers, but they were loud, if that makes any sense. At first, this wouldn’t be cause for alarm as people hunt for raccoon at all times of the night.  However, the voices never got louder, never got softer. They stayed the same volume. They sounded like they were practically on top of us. They were so clear and loud that it sounded like someone was whispering directly into my ear, only everyone was hearing it that way. So it was like one voice was whispering into our collective ears.  We looked around our immediate area, nothing. There were tall weeds/grass in the area around our campsite, and once or twice it sounded like someone ran through them. Solid thuds on the ground, grass thrashing and moving violently.  The fear had begun to sink in.  At first, the voice was very hushed, indistinct but clearly visible. After about 2-3 minutes, it started to become more apparent. The voice was whispering about us. “What are they doing here?” ‘They need to leave’ “You shouldn’t be here”. If this sounds like something out of a horror novel, I am 1000% inclined to agree with you.  At this point, sheer panic broke out. We decided at that moment to LEAVE. QUICKLY.

The ATV was parked just out of firelight, still visible but faintly.  As I stood up, looked at my friends and told them that we needed to GO, I started to jog toward the ATV to get it started while my friends got what they absolutely couldn’t leave behind that night. I was looking over my shoulder at first, and when I turned to look ahead at the ATV, I was literally frozen in place at what I saw. Standing just beside the ATV, under a tree, was the outline of a tall man in what looked like a hat. You could see no details, it was just blackness. You could see through it, as it was transparent, but what was beyond looked twisted and distorted, like looking through water or something. There were no red eyes, as I’ve read in other encounters of such things, but I’m sure there are variants of every type of supernatural thing. He had no feet, it just sort of ended at his ankles in wavy lines, almost like what heat waves look like above a fire.  My heart sank into my stomach, an undeniable feeling of fear and revulsion took over. I could not move. I could not speak. I was rooted on the spot from the moment I laid eyes on it. This is the moment where I realized “Holy moly ghosts are real!!!!”  My cousin came up just beside me at that time and saw it too. He was also just frozen on the spot. After about 10-15 seconds (I don’t really know, it seemed like an eternity to me) it sort of like…zipped? back in the direction of the train tunnels. The best way I can describe it is if you remember the Flash, how he had sort of an outline of himself behind him as he moved really fast. Just like that.  It just went, VERY quickly, back into the darkness and disappeared.  We got on that ATV and hauled out of there with full fury, like the hounds of hell were on our tail, because for all we knew, they were.

We spent the night indoors, wide awake, scared to death while we tried to rationalize and make sense of what we had just experienced.  It wasn’t until afterwards that I learned about all the things I wrote about above, and heard from men who are hard men, guys who show no fear to any living thing that I wouldn’t want to cross under any circumstance, that even they avoid that area at night.  Nobody goes through that section after the sun goes down. We didn’t know this, of course, or we would have heeded their advice.

If any of this sounds unbelievable, I don’t blame you one bit. If someone told me this story, I would laugh at them, call them a story teller, etc.  I am not one to tell stories myself, and I can tell you that what I have written did happen and it changed my life.  It really led me to question life, death and what happens afterwards.  Thank you for reading my experience, and I apologize for any mistakes or grammatical errors I may have made.

My grandparents live in an old coal camp house in Ottawa, which is just a stones-throw from Blair Mountain. In fact, the railroad behind their house was used to transport miners up to the battlefield site way back when. The house has some history to it, all of it I’m not aware of but I did find out some things thanks to some experiences I had as a kid.

The earliest I can remember anything was from when I was about 4, maybe 5, years old. I can remember hearing footsteps and low talking. Then it evolved into things moving around while I was asleep, to my sheets being yanked off and having my name whispered in my ear randomly in the same room. It never happened anywhere else. I don’t remember any other experiences past when I was 11 or 12.

Years later, I asked my grandma about it. She told me a story about how my grandfather’s aunt owned the house and some men had boarded there for a while. All three men who had lived there died in the same room, the room I slept in as a kid. They weren’t murdered or died tragically that any of us know of, but they were just old men who got sick and their bodies gave in. She told me that she couldn’t think of anything that happened to her and neither can my grandpa. Maybe it was just my childhood imagination, but I still think it happened. I have had experiences in my adult life, like after my friend committed suicide and started visiting me in dreams and in apparitions (he also appeared to my brother-in-law one night, unlocking their bedroom door, peeking around and closing it to be locked again like it hadn’t been touched). My family has always been very spiritual and supposedly fine-tuned to things the naked-eye cannot see, and I also believe that. I have seen and heard too much to not believe in something after death.

I moved to West Virginia for a second year at being a climbing guide. I loved the work and the area and couldn’t be kept away. Instead of living in a campground my friend Aaron and I decided to rent a house a few miles away from work. This would allow us to stay later into the fall season. Our house was newer compared to the 1800s farm houses found in the town. It was probably built in the 1950s. It was a solid brick house the set in a 1 acre indent in a farmer’s field. The house was surrounded on three sides by pastures and a beautiful mountain towered over the backyard. It seemed like a cozy house.

About a week into living there I was standing in the kitchen making lunch when the knife I was using spun around and then flew of the counter around the room. I laughed it off and went on with the rest of my day. Shortly after that my eyes kept getting drawn to the doorway between my kitchen and living room. There was always a sense that someone was just standing in the doorway. Next to that doorway were my basement steps and I could always here a creaking on them as if someone was just hiding there. Sometimes it would sound like someone walking up and down the steps. It was unsettling so I would normally keep the basement door shut and locked.

Just like most houses on farms, there was a problem with mice. They would sometimes just run through the room you were sitting in and they could also be heard crawling through the walls. The noises they made became normally and we seemed to just ignore any small bumps or scratches we hear. One night however there were different noises coming from the attic which sounded like footsteps.  These were human footsteps and not the bitter patter of little mouse feet. I woke Aaron who heard the noises as well. We decided to take the shotgun and see who was up in our attic. Carefully we opened the drop down ladder and crawled up. There wasn’t anyone there. The floor was dusty and we left footprints in the dust as we walked. There was also no way to get in the attic from outside.

From that point on the activity in the house picked up. Laying in bed at night I would hear conversations going on through my wall. It sounded like a man and a women talking. One morning I walked into my kitchen and noticed Aaron asleep on the couch with his gun laying across his chest. He awoke and told me that there was something crawling around on the floor all night. It was small like a child and was just running around the living room.

The house seemed to have a few ghosts, there was a playful child, and elderly couple and a man. The child’s spirit was playful and more like a prankster, the elderly couple seemed as if they were watching on us, but the man just seemed to be bad.

I told my friend what had been happening in the house since she had lived there before us. She asked if I had seen the pictures in the basement. She didn’t say much else about it. I had not and decided to go looking for them. In my basement there was one side full of the landlords thing and stacks of antiques. Digging through them I found a stack of old pictures. There were pictures of an elderly couple, as well as a man that just unpleasant. I couldn’t help but think that these were the spirits in the house. Amongst the antiques were ledger books with locals names in them. The book were from years before showing the neighbors paying thousand of dollars to someone. Moonshine if very popular in this area and the house was full of cupboards with shelves just big enough to hold mason jars and some were still full of jars. The house also had a security system, which is odd for an area with such low crime.

Aaron would leave me there alone a lot to go work in the next over. The nights I was there alone I was sure to sleep with a gun next to me, just in case. Laying in bed at night I would hear the front door open and close. It couldn’t because I had locked it. The sound just became something I ignored. There was a night I was tired and didn’t get the gun out of his room to leave next to my bed. That night I woke up to hearing my kitchen chair sliding across the kitchen and slamming into the cupboards. Following that I heard footsteps into my living room. I flipped on the lights, ran down the hall into Aaron’s room and loaded the gun. I slowly opened the door and hear the floor creaking in the living room. As I walked through the house I flipped on the lights in each room and check them out. There wasn’t anyone there. All the doors and window were shut and locked.

One of the best feelings in the world was when I moved out of that house. It was if something had been lifted off of me. Going off of the feelings and occurrences in the house I wonder if there was another house on the property before and the spirits are connected to the land. There is also part of me that thinks something happened there while someone was storing moonshine. The following year some friends of mine moved into the house. They claimed to have had many of the same experiences. Most of the experiences targeted the one girl living there. One thing is for sure, I have no intentions of ever going back in that house.

I moved to Yokum’s Campground for the summer while I was working as a climbing guide. Yokum sits in the town of Seneca Rocks.The area was a meeting place for Native Americans, as well as a burial ground. In the 1980s the burial grounds were excavated by the Smithsonian and the remains were removed from the area. Many believe that ever since the occurrence that the town and surrounding areas were cursed by the Native Americans.  When I had first found out the guide opening in West Virginia I just got this feeling that I needed to be there. It wasn’t until I was moving down that my mom had told me that most of my family was from the area and that I was also Seneca Indian.

My parents bought be a pop-up camper to stay in for the season. The campground would only be crowded on the weekends and very quiet during the middle of the week. I have always been sensitive to paranormal and I could tell that I wasn’t alone. There ways always a feeling of someone watching me. Like they were peaking through the windows of my camper. My camper was around 100 yards from the bathhouse. I would have to walk past a pavilion which always creeks as if someone were standing on the stage in it. There was always a feeling that I was being watched by someone in the pavilion or off in the tree line. I would constantly hear footsteps behind me in the gravel and there wasn’t anyone there. The bathhouse is on the first floor and there are rooms on the second. The rooms were only rented out on weekends when the tourist would come through. Guides start work early in the morning so there were some days when I was up at 5am to get a shower for work. On several occasions the doors on the bathroom stalls would just unlock and fly open on me. Other times the lights would turn off and on. I would hear boots on the floor upstairs as if someone was walking around, but the rooms weren’t rented out at the time. Someone poked me in the shower a few times as well.

The most unsettling experience occurred in my camper. It was evening and I was watching a movie on my laptop.  Something grabbed the back of my neck near the base of my head and just slammed my head down on to the table. My head hit hard enough to make the room spin. Thankfully this only happened once and nothing else seemed to happen after that.

As a child I grew up in Duffield WV. My brothers and I would walk down the tracks, going to a store in Shenandoah Junction.  We would often pass an old house nestled between two orchards.  This home was said to be the house of screaming Jenny.

I have listened to many stories about this place, but never heard or saw anything.  That would change on a summer day in July.  One afternoon my brother and I were walking down the tracks. As we got closer to the house, I notice what looked like a darkness or night surrounding the house. In my disbelief I asked my brother if he saw what was happening.  He said yes, and I could tell that he was frightened.

He told me to keep walking and not to look up.  As we traveled on we passed directly across from the house.  I could see that it was very dark and decided to look.  What I saw was a woman in a in an old grey dress with a white broach. The type worn during the civil war or earlier. As I looked at her, she motioned with her hand for me to come to her.  She was on the second floor in the top far left window. As I looked I could only see her eyes, which were black. I now knew that all the stories about screaming Jenny was true.

I also saw her that evening as I was getting water from the creek.  As I was dipping the bucket into the creek I saw her reflection . This would be the last time that I saw her.  Later as an adult, my wife and I went back there to see the house. To our surprise the house was overgrown weeds and honeysuckle. The only part visible was the roof.