In downtown Elkins, there are a lot of old buildings. On Davis Avenue, a long time ago there was a great fire that destroyed 3 blocks of the city and 12 people died. One of those people was Sharah Goodwest. She died in the old Opera house. If you go to the Wilson building, which now stands where the Opera house was, you can hear her scream.

Another place is the train station, one night a group of friends and I went there at around 11 pm. We were just hanging out when a man dressed in a conductor’s outfit walked up to us and said “you’re going to miss your train” then disappeared.

If you go to Davis Memorial Hospital, you will either see or hear a ghost. This I promise.

For many years the Elkhorn Ghost has made his presence known to a passerby as they either left or entered the mountain near the bridge. He is very tall always wearing a red plaid jacket, blue jeans and seems to usually appear on foggy nights.

Everyone that usually spots him has their bright headlights on and notices that he is facing traffic and when you see him his face is a black void with no facial features distinguishable. Well, I admit I had seen him several times just like that but it all changed on July 10th 2000 around 12 am.

My husband and I had just got through visiting his Mom and brother after returning from our honeymoon when we decided to take the shortcut to Elkhorn Mountain to go home to Bluefield rather than go through Welch. I stopped at the intersection to go to Elkhorn Mountain at the bridge to see if it was clear to turn and he appeared to us.

He was walking from the Anawalt way and stopped walking when he saw us. I recognized at once that it was him from his clothes and I told my husband that it was him. His legs were transparent and he had some type of hunting cap atop his head sorta like a winter cap. Also, he had a brown paper bag which appeared to have a liquor bottle in it and when he looked at us his facial features were more distinguishable he appeared to have a beard but his eyes were empty black voids.

To this day I don’t know that anyone else has seen him like we did or if he still just appears with his face as a black void. Who knows if you happen to travel Elkhorn Mountain on a foggy night maybe you’ll see the Elkhorn Ghost.

One evening around 1 am a friend of mine and I was out driving through a heavy residential zone of Bridgeport. We were driving along E. Olive St. heading towards West Olive and the extremely aged Bridgeport cemetery (which is about 3/4 mile away and probably has nothing to do with this particular spirit).

We came to a stop at a stop sign. We were talking, and all of a sudden, I got a bizarre feeling. It was not a feeling of dread or a happy feeling, it was just strange. I looked over to my friend who was sitting in the passenger. On the other side of him (where the window should normally be) there was a younger man sitting with his seat belt buckled. It appeared as if we had three seats in the front of the car and the other man was in the car with us, which is of course physically impossible.

I stared at him for a moment and he stared right back. My friend asked me what I was doing, I motioned for him to turn his head, and he did. After a moment, we started driving again, with the spirit still “in the car.” After about 400 feet, the man disappeared and we have never seen him again or heard anyone else who has seen him.

I can’t remember the year, but my daughter was 15 and she’s 26 now (so you do the math), but it was not a good year for us here in Yuma (Arizona). My daughter was just getting over a serious illness and I was out of work. We had taken a vacation the year before to visit with my cousins in West Virginia. It was a great time! And they really wanted us to visit again. So we packed up. We had a great time and everyone was so wonderful that we decided to move from Arizona to West Virginia and kind of begin again.

We began looking at houses before coming home to sell our house and pack. After much much searching we found a two-story home in a little town named Eleanor. It sat on about an acre with huge elm trees and a big area for a garden and the roses! The house was white with dark green trim. Two stories with four bedrooms upstairs and a bathroom. A stairwell with a skylight and wonderful banisters. Downstairs was a huge kitchen (19×15), a bathroom, dining room, living room and another bedroom–with wood floors and beams. All for $30,000! No kidding! And besides, we all talked about how lonesome the house seemed and wanted us to move in and fix it up. So we went home and packed all the dogs and cats and books and beds and moved 2300 miles.

We moved into the house in August. It is really sticky in West Virginia in August and we didn’t have AC, but as we started setting up housekeeping we were sleeping in the downstairs bedroom because it was always “cooler” in there even in the hot part of the day. We thought it was because it was over the cellar (walk under) of the house that had been dug out so you could get to the plumbing!

We painted and carpeted and everything was going fine. It was a mess to clean up though, the house had been vacated for about three years and before that, an invalid had lived in the house. We had to rip out all of the carpeting from the upstairs before anything because someone used some of it as a bathroom at one time, and it was really gross (the stains) especially in the small front room over the downstairs cool room that Nanny had picked for her bedroom.

We cleaned up and sparkling the house seemed to welcome us. But then some different frights, sounds, and smells begin to come into our lives.

First let me tell you that all three of us are sensitive to some sights, sounds and smells to a certain degree. Always have been and have seemingly made some adjustments. That is why I don’t know why none of us really knew what was going on.

It started with Nanny hearing a rocking chair in the living room at night, we didn’t have one. Then Ginifer and I kept seeing shadows coming down the stairs as we sat in the living room. The bedroom stayed cold and we had to put heavy curtains on the windows hoping to keep out the drafts. We finally just used this room as storage.

Where my bedroom was, I could see across the upstairs landing to the door of Ginifer’s room. I began seeing a shadow almost every night pause outside and door and look in as though it were a parent that had come to check on a child at night. There was a nice soft and friendly feeling with her. Ginifer was also aware of the shadow.

Then we began experiencing a SMELL from the downstairs bathroom. It smelled like a dead animal left out in the Arizona sun too long). We had some men come in and check the cellar crawl space for a toilet leak or maybe a dead skunk or cat. It was clean and dry. The smell only happened so often and seemed to last only 5 to 15 minutes. But we all smelled it and so did others.

We also experienced bright orbs and flits of lights in and over the garden at night. No, they were not fireflies.

And we started having what we thought were health problems. Even though Ginifer was well when we moved she seemed to relapse into a fugue state. Not wanting to get out of bed. Even Nanny and I started having a lot of colds and the flu, where you just couldn’t seem to get out of bed.

We all love to travel and visit, but all we did was stay in the house! Our animals even seemed to be in a slump (but how can you tell with cats that sleep 16 hours a day anyway).

I was especially worried about my mom because she is a true “A” type of personality, work! work! work! and now all she did was sleep or sit on the porch. We didn’t even look for jobs and we didn’t have much money left.

It was so unlike us! Then one night Mom and I were in the living room and Gin was upstairs in her room reading in bed. We heard Gin scream and we ran up the stairs. She met us in the hall. She said something was trying to form in her room.

She was reading and happened to look up into the corner. At first, she thought it was a fire. A black cloud was forming in the corner. As she watched almost in a daze to seemed to be forming a body shape. When the head began to appear she screamed and ran. She would not go back into the room even to get her clothes! She moved in with me and Nanny (brave soul) that she brought out the clothes!

Because we were running out of money and Ginifer’s health was in another decline we decided to come home to Arizona. We sold, gave away all of our stuff and with just as much personal items that we could get into a small U-Haul plus the four cats and a dog.

Later we began to put all of the feelings and things together and the list grew and grew. Much more than what I’ve given you here.

We finally after four years were able to sell the house and now its a type of office complex. I don’t know if they have any problems or not.

It happened when I was 13 years old. My mother and my step-father rented out a new place to live. The house was surrounded by trees, and there was a graveyard right beside it. This didn’t bother me though because I had lived in the country all my life.

What did bother me is that when my mother and step-father would go to the store, I would be all by myself and things would happen. I would have time to get settled watching TV after they left, say an hour. Then I would get an awful, cold feeling. I would look down the hallway into their room and the light in my parent’s room would come on. I would try to ignore it and think that I was imagining things. Then I would hear the door shut to their room.

I would get scared because no one was there but me. The only entrance to the house was right in front of the couch where I was sitting. I would sit in fear until they came home. It would not happen when they were home but as sure as they left the same thing would happen. I asked my mother if anyone had died in that house, and she would always say no. About a year after we moved from there, she finally told me that someone did die in the house; an old woman. And guess what? She died in that bedroom.

My mother, like many other West Virginians, was raised in a small two-bedroom coal camp house during the depression. It was located in Long Branch, WV. I know many readers will be able to picture this from their own childhood homes. My mother slept in the back bedroom, which you entered from her parent’s bedroom. Each night her parents would tuck her in and close the bedroom door, which was warped, so it stuck and made a loud noise when you opened or closed it.

Each night she would be awakened by a man in miner’s clothing gently rocking the edge of her bed with his two fists, but when she looked up to see his face there was no visible head. She, of course, would scream loudly and he would vanish. Her parents would run in to see nothing there and would tell her it was just a bad dream. This went on for several nights when finally she asked her parents, “If it was a dream, then why was my door already open when you came in, and why didn’t you hear it open?” From then on, she slept on the couch and never saw him again. In addition, as soon as another company house became available, her family moved!

My stepbrother and his friend told me this story of a house that is located back in the woods in Pentress, just outside of Blacksville. They told me that this house is hundreds of years old. The story behind the house is that 13 children lived there with their mother and father. Somehow 11 of the children died in the house. No one knows how they died. I am going to do research on this, but haven’t been able to yet. Anyways, there is no electricity in the area of the house because it sits about 3 miles back in the woods where there is now a cow pasture. People say that they have seen lights on in the house. No one knows where they are coming from. My brother, while coon hunting one night, was on the ridge opposite of the house and looked over and saw it glowing. To this day he will not go near the house.

There are thirteen windows that go across the front of the house (one for each child). Well, my other brother and I decided to go up one night. No lights were on so we went inside the house. I searched for light sockets and everything. No sign of electricity (no light fixtures, no electrical pole, nothing). In order to get into the house, you must go through the side, kitchen door because the back porch has fallen in.

I live very close to the house, so it is easy for me to go to the house. The second time I went to the house, I saw light coming from the kitchen window. It is not a bright light, but sort of an orange glow. Because the house sits so far back in the woods, you have to use a four-wheeler to get to it. On our way home, our four-wheeler stalled and we could hear what sounded like someone walking while dragging chains. We eventually got the four-wheeler started and left.

You must cross a barb wire fence in order to get to the house. The third time I went, I saw no lights so I crossed the barb wired fence and started walking towards the house. We were about to grab the handle to the kitchen door to enter the house and the light in the kitchen came on. We all ran. On our way home, my brother saw a black figure with glowing red eyes sitting on the side of the road. On down the road, he saw a white figure standing in the middle of the road.

The last time I went up. I took my aunt who is a big-time Christian. Me and my soon to be sister-in-law crossed the barb wired fence and walked down to the house. The light was on in the kitchen so we went back up the hill to the four-wheeler. My aunt didn’t believe us so we walked her down. She stared at the light through the windows for a while and then she opened the kitchen door anyways. Inside, like kind of floating right below the ceiling was one of those long, skinny bulbs. It had no fixture around it. It was just floating there. It wasn’t bright. Like I said before, it was an orange glow.

I haven’t been to the house since and I don’t plan on going back. There are two siblings of the 13 children still alive and they are my neighbors, but they will not talk about the house.

Also, the woods that the house sits in are said to be haunted. My brothers hunt in those woods and usually hunt until after dark. As they walk out at night, they can hear what sounds like someone walking behind them.

There is also a silo that sits up on the hill close to the house. The story behind the silo is that a man was hung at the silo. After that, it is said that a group of the Pagan bikers took a woman up there and beat, raped, and killed her there. They say you can hear people scream, but I have never heard anything.

My family lives in a very old house, 100 years old or maybe a few years less. Back in the day, people called it the Wheeler Mansion because it was the biggest house around. I’m not sure about what happened during its construction, but something happened in this house during the 1900’s. Every day, there is more evidence of an uneasy presence in this house. We have everything that you have stated on your website; we have entities, spirits, ghosts, orbs, we have it all.

We have lived here for three years, and each day brings another reason to… leave. Among the first encounters was the time when a girl of about 14 or 15 years old was sitting on the bed of the oldest daughter. The REALLY scary part is that she was only seen in the reflection of the TV in the next room. It seems her room has been the favorite of entities because she has heard distant conversations from what seems to be inside her west-most wall. The talking was ended by an abrupt scream, which only she heard.

Later, while she was listening to music, her stereo’s volume went to the max all by its self. The remote had no batteries, and the system was set up high on the other side of the room. When the situation was explained, it was thought that there was a volume problem at the radio station, but this theory was proven incorrect because the stereo showed the word “VOL” for volume and “23…24…25…” to the very max volume! What could have caused this?

Several times, our kitchen light switch had turned out light on and off. No one was around except for people on the other side of the room. There is an unusually large presence in the kitchen, also. Our computer room is hooked onto our kitchen, and even now I feel like someone or something is watching me. That room has enormous energy, and that energy is obviously evil.

For some reason, an entity has singled me out. I wake up at 3:13 on numerous occasions, sometimes nights on end for weeks. Most of the time, I don’t have any blankets on me at all when I wake up, and I have very strange dreams, all of which are very dark and indistinct, very vague. Just now I have noticed numerous scratches on my hands and I always seem to have stray bruises on my legs. I have discovered that entities are attracted to people who are introverted and depressed when stressed and that is my personality completely.

Just this evening, while up in the attic, I heard distinct children’s laughter. To help to imagine this, my attic is very wide with low ceilings with beams. My attic has 1 light on the stairs, which makes all other places dark. At the two farthest ends of my attic, there are two long, narrow windows. At the side I was facing, my neighbor’s spotlight shines in, making the windows seem white. At the time I heard laughing, I looked to where it came from: the side of the room with the bright windows. Since the window was the only distinct thing on that side of the attic, I looked at it. When I looked at it, I saw the profile of someone’s face. It looked like they were sitting up, getting ready to stand. They sat up from the right to the left. As soon as I saw movement, I naturally RAN.

This story was told to me by my mother. It took place in the back hills of West Virginia back in the late 1930’s.

My great grandmother Judy and my grandmother Mary were canning vegetables. The house was set up that when you came into the side door you were in the kitchen, from the kitchen you could see into the dining room and then on into the living room. In the living room, there was a huge fireplace, around the fireplace were 7 rocking chairs were the family would sit and talk about the day’s events after dinner.

My great-grandfather, his brother and their cousins all worked for the railroad, so Mary and Judy were the only ones home. They were walking back and forth from the kitchen to the dining room placing the jars on the dining room table when my grandmother yelled for Judy to come and look.

My grandmother was standing in the dining room pointing into the living room at the rocking chairs all rocking at the same tempo, all at the same time. All the windows and doors were shut so there was no breeze in the house. Then all of a sudden they just stopped, they didn’t slow down, they just stopped.

Mary looked at the clock, it read 11:25. About 30 minutes later, my great uncle came running into the house yelling that my great-grandfather had just been hit by a train. The time of death was around 11:30.

My mom was having a baby shower for my little sister who was going to be born in two months. My girlfriend and two of her cousins and I went upstairs to the school. We walked to the top of the stairs and we saw things running across the hallway.

As we stood there waiting for something to happen we heard the lockers shutting and the commodes flushing in the bathroom. We ran back downstairs and told our parents, but they didn’t believe a word we said. So we walked down the downstairs hallway to the bathrooms. We got down to them and we seen people running around that wasn’t at the baby shower.

We ran back down to the cafeteria to tell our moms but they didn’t believe us. So we went down the hall and set right in front of the office and beside the elevator. The elevator started running and the lights beside of it started flashing. Then the office door opened up but nothing walked out. This ghost has been seen on these school grounds for 12 years now. The reason for this ghost is because a man and his brother used to live right on the school grounds and one day they both hung themselves.

It’s time for Halloween, and with that comes those cheesy ghost stories. You know, the ones always involving some insane killer with a hook for a hand. Most people enjoy these stories and consider them nothing more than fiction. But what if I were to tell you that there are people who can tell true ghost stories? Ones they have actually lived through? What if I were to tell you I was one of those people?

When I was 12, my Grandparents still lived at the foot of a mountain in southern West Virginia. They have long since moved away, and are now living with my uncle.

Back then, in school, children used to talk about all the weird legends about the occult they had heard about. I remember someone saying that if you walked back to a grave so many times, it would raise the ghost of that person. They would do anything you said.

Several weeks later, my family went to visit my grandparents. When my dad was a boy, my grandparents used to live on top of the mountain in a house that had been the birth and death place of two generations.

My family even has a small graveyard near the house. While we were visiting them, my brother, sister and a cousin decided to go up the mountain and look around the old home. Of course, we ended up in the graveyard. We were fooling around and reading the headstones when I remember the legend that my classmate had told me about raising a dead person’s ghost.

I wanted to look cool so I told the group about it. Of course, they laughed and thought I was silly for believing that tale. My brother wanted to really tease me so he walked around the grave backward that number of times and said: “go haunt Charlene.”

At first, I was scared and very upset with my brother, but as the day went on nothing happened. I forgot about the incident. However, that night I would be horribly reminded.

The room I used to sleep in at my grandparents’ place had two windows that were high above the ground. One faced the side of the mountain, and the other’s view was obstructed by a large woodshed. That night as I lay curled in my bed, I looked out the window to see something very unnerving. I saw two small bright lights, almost like miniature headlights set an eye width apart, float past the window. I thought I was seeing things so I looked up again, and they floated by again. I could not explain this to myself no matter how hard I tried. The two windows were too high above the ground for it to be anyone walking by, and it couldn’t be any reflection from a passing vehicle since there wasn’t any going down the road at the time and the two windows were pretty well blocked off.

This occurrence continued to happen every time I went to visit my grandparents. Late at night, the two glowing eyes would float past the window. One time I even followed them from one window, then around the corner past the other. Night time became a dreaded thing for me for years when I went to visit my grandparents. And no matter how I tried to tell my family about what was happening, they wouldn’t believe me because it wouldn’t happen when they were looking. Finally, my grandparents moved away and thank goodness, the thing didn’t follow. I’ve learned my lesson From now on, I will not fool with anything having to do with raising the spirits or the dead. If I hear anything else about it, I sure won’t be telling my brother!

In the early 50’s I lived in a strange old house located in Parkersburg, WV.

It was located halfway up Quincy Hill all by itself. From the time my family moved in that place I felt scared. As though something watched me all the time.

One cold morning as I prepared for school, in the small bathroom I glanced in the mirror and saw an old man with long gray hair glaring at me.

I screamed and lost my balance as I turned to get out of the bathroom and fell on the heater.

To this day I carry an “L” shaped scar on the back of my left leg as a reminder of that very unpleasant encounter.

I also remember being home alone on a school day with the flu. I was feverish and decided to go get some hot cocoa in the kitchen.

I opened the cupboard door to get the can of Hershey’s down. I felt something touch my shoulder. I dropped the can and as I turned, I saw just the skirt of a long dress disappear out the porch door.

Needless to say, I was glad we only stayed in that place a short time. Even my mother who wasn’t afraid of anyone or anything never liked the house.

I don’t know if that house is still there or not.