What Was That?

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.