SYNOPSIS

 Ghosts of West Virginia is two books in one. The first part is a personal account of the various paranormal occurrences the author has experienced both in his home and on a number of ghost hunts. The second part is a Paranormal Field Guide for aspiring ghost hunters. It is a full index of all the known haunted places in West Virginia and where to find them. The book also features an in-depth look at Point Pleasant, the city which seems to sit at the heart of the supernatural activity in the Appalachian region. Ghosts of West Virginia is a frightening and captivating read for anyone interested in the paranormal.

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  Excerpt One:

Preface

   I didn’t believe in ghosts until I moved to West Virginia.  Before that, I thought of ghost stories as little more than entertainment; mysterious and creepy stories with no real basis in fact. Being scared is fun. I guess that’s because it’s a visceral experience the briefly overpowers the mundane world in which we carry out our day-to-day routine. The adrenaline that fear produces is a jolt that reminds us that we’re alive.

   I had a teacher in grade school, third grade I think it was, who used to tell us her ghost stories now and then in lieu of the normal curriculum. This was in Miami, where I grew up. I can’t recall her name now but I remember she was a short black woman who wore distinctly African jewelry. For the purpose of the story, I’ll call her Mrs. Smith. Of all the stories she told, one still stands out.

   When Mrs. Smith was a little girl, about the same age as me and my classmates, her mother sent her up to the attic to collect something that belonged to her late grandmother. She went up and found the box that contained the item she was sent to retrieve. When she turned to leave she heard a low voice speak her name. She spun around, and beside an old rocking chair stood her grandma. Mrs. Smith said that she could see straight through her at first, but she soon solidified, appearing as real as a living person. The old woman smiled at her and reached out her hand. The little girl froze. Her grandmother took a step forward, and then another. As the ghost advanced forward, she slowly shrank, becoming shorter with each step. Her knees and ankles moved closer to each other; her eyes inched closer together and nearer her nose. Her lips thinned out and disappeared completely. They managed to say her granddaughter’s name once more before they vanished. Finally, the frozen shock of seeing this passed and the little girl ran from the attic screaming. By the time she made it to her mother’s arms she was crying hysterically, blurting out what she had seen between sobs and heavy breaths. Once the story was told, her mother consoled her.

   “It was just your imagination,” her mother said. “Sometimes when people get scared they see things that aren’t really there.”

   This infuriated the little girl. She insisted it wasn’t her imagination and she had no reason to be scared before she saw the ghost. Mrs. Smith went on to say that to that day, her mother still believed it was her imagination.

   “I know I didn’t imagine it,” Mrs. Smith declared. “I am well aware of what I saw. I remember it like it was yesterday.”

   I still find that story creepy after all these years. It has even worked its way into my dreams once or twice.

   My grandmother, who all the kids called Nana, also believed in ghosts. When I was nine my aunt Anita died. It hit my Mom and Nana pretty hard. Nana used to have dreams about Anita that she believed was her daughter contacting her from “the other side.” She used to say that she would often feel Anita around her and smell her perfume. Nana died two years later and ever since I occasionally smell her perfume when I am at home and the house is silent.

   I lived in South Florida until I was 22. My friend Brenda Nowlin had moved to Milton, West Virginia the year before and her parents said I was welcome to move in with them if I wanted to. At first, I was hesitant to break my ties with the state where I grew up, but eventually the idea of going somewhere new became intriguing, so in late 1995 I took a Greyhound to WV.

   I live in Huntington, WV now, which sits on the Ohio River across from Chesapeake, OH. This is considered to be one of the most haunted regions in America. This whole area is Civil War/American Revolution territory. A massive number of people died on these lands and likely still haunt them. About a forty-five minute drive from here is the city of Point Pleasant, known largely as the city where the first sightings of the Mothman occurred. From 1966 to the devastating collapse of the Silver Bridge in 1967, a generous portion of the city had sighted the Mothman, generating as much interest in the strange creature as Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster. I’ve heard Point Pleasant referred to as the City of Monsters. I have been there several times and I can tell you that it has its share of ghosts, too. More on that later.

   Huntington is an old city. It was called Holderby’s Landing when Collis P. Huntington, president of the C & O Railroad, began building the railroad here. In February of 1871, Holderby’s Landing was renamed Huntington. In 1875, Jesse James and his gang robbed the Bank of Huntington and rode away twenty-thousand dollars richer. That bank still stands (it’s a computer store now) and can be found in Heritage Village across from Harris Riverfront Park.

   They are many old buildings in the city, most of which were built during the first two decades of the 20^th century. The Huntington Downtown Historic District—a six block area in the heart of downtown—was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1986. Many other places, mostly churches and government buildings, are also on the list. A lot of these buildings have history, like the land itself.

   All places with history have their own ties to the past. Generations pass and leave a little of themselves behind. Sometimes what is left behind is just a name on a plaque or a statue of some significant person. Sometimes it is the person himself.

   810 Fifth Street is a big white house with hardwood floors. In the center of the living room was a large, square patch of wood that had apparently replaced a damaged section of the original floor. It looked ugly, so we covered it up with an area rug that sat between the couch and the TV. It really pulled the room together. We had not lived there long when the strange noises began. Every now and then, it would sound like someone was pacing the floor upstairs, in Brenda and Ernie’s bedroom. This always occurred when it was just me and Brenda at home, or when she was alone. She would tell Ernie about it, but he was a non-believer at the time and told her she was just hearing things. She would usually respond, “Yeah, I’m hearing footsteps in our room.”

   After maybe a month or so, our friend John moved in and it was shortly after that that he and I came home and found that the living room had been slightly rearranged. One of the plastic patio chairs that circled the dinner table had apparently been tossed into the living room and the couch had been flipped over. There was no sign of a break in and nothing else was disturbed. We returned the furniture to their original positions, both of us unsure of what to make of it. John was a bit freaked out. So was I, but short of actually seeing the furniture move on its own, I took it all in stride. When Brenda and Ernie came home, we told them what happened and asked if they had anything to do with it. They swore they didn’t. Ernie still thought it was a bunch of bull. That changed one night when we were in the living room watching a movie and the pacing began again. Brenda paused the video and looked at Ernie.

   “Ernie, do you hear that?”

   Heavy steps thudded on the floor upstairs. Ernie listened and his eyes grew wide.

   “What is that?” he said.

   “It’s the ghost,” Brenda said nonchalantly.

   Ernie looked at me with a combination of surprise and confusion.

   “Dude, there’s really something walking around up there!”

   “We told you, man,” I said.

   “Let’s go up,” said Brenda.

   So we did. The pacing stopped as we climbed the staircase and when we checked the bedroom, it was empty and undisturbed. My cat, a black shorthair named Jax, came running out as we came in. Something in there had apparently caught her attention.

   A week or so later Brenda, Ernie and I came home from a friend’s house. Brenda unlocked the door and we all headed straight upstairs to our rooms. After a few minutes, we all went down to watch a movie Brenda had picked up. When we got downstairs, we found that the couch had been turned around and pushed near the foot of the stairwell, as if some unseen guest was sitting there waiting for us to come down. Our first reaction was to see if anyone was there, such as our other roommate. We found that it was just us. If someone had come in, we would have heard it anyway. It stands to reason that we would at least have heard the couch being moved. The living room had hard wood floors and the couch had wooden legs. When the couch was pushed across a hardwood floor, it made a noise you could easily hear from upstairs. I know, because the day after we moved in, I recall Brenda moving the couch around from upstairs when she was setting up the living room. I could even hear it over the tape of eighties pop songs she was listening to. We never heard a noise that night. Whatever had turned the couch around and moved it a distance of about six feet had done so without dragging it across the floor.

  By that time, we had been there for maybe two months. Not long after, Brenda got a German Sheppard from her uncle. The dog refused to go upstairs. I remember one day when she tried to take the dog up there. He was fine until he got about halfway up the stairwell. Then he began to whimper and tried to back up. Brenda pulled gently on the leash and the dog whimpered louder, desperately pulling away from her. After a second or two, she released the leash and the dog clumsily ran down the steps and towards the back of the house.

   All the while, we would regularly hear the restless pacing of our unseen house guest and tensions in the house began to rise. Our tempers grew shorter the longer we lived there. It was subtle at first but quickly escalated into full-blown screaming matches. These intense arguments worsened by the day and on a few occasions almost became physical. The arguments were never about anything serious; in fact, they were rather minor. Our reactions to them were not.  We had become unusually hostile toward each other.

   One night, probably around four in the morning, I went upstairs to read a little before going to sleep. My bedroom had two closets in it, on opposite walls. Both of them ran the entire length of the room. As I was reading, the hollow space of one closet was behind the wall where I was resting my head. Jax was curled up in a ball beside me, purring contently in her sleep. The house was quiet. I had read maybe nine or ten pages, when I began to hear the muffled thud of footfalls from the narrow space behind me. I sat up, listening as the steps came closer to the open closet door to my left. I set my book down and swung my legs off the bed. Jax laid her ears back and produced an irritated meow for being jarred out of her sleep. She slowly set her head down as the steady thuds came out of the closet. Suddenly, she snapped her head up, staring wide eyed at whatever was walking across the room. She was looking up at something at least six feet tall. As the steps crossed my bedroom, towards the door, Jax’s eyes followed them intently. Her purring stopped and she stood up. Her tail had puffed out a bit and her ears were laid flat. I could see the bulge in her throat as she nervously swallowed saliva, which she often does when she is uneasy. As the steps reached the door, which was about half open, it suddenly swung wide and struck the closet door behind it, knocking down an empty box left over from the move. By that time, my heart was galloping in my chest. The thuds faded down the hall, toward the stairs. Jax made a distressed meow and ran to the threshold of the doorway, her eyes fixed on the stairwell. The dull thud of steps faded as they descended the stairs. It was a good thing that I worked nights, because after the incident, I could not sleep until the sun came up.

   The next day Brenda asked me if I had moved the couch the night before. I said I hadn’t. I asked her how far it was moved. She said not too far, but enough to know it wasn’t in its usual spot, maybe a few feet back. I never heard it move at all.

   At the end of the month, we had a falling out with the landlord and decided to move. A few days before we left, Brenda had a talk with one of the neighbors. The woman told her that before we had moved in all the doors upstairs had to be replaced because the prior tenants had carved pentagrams on them. She also found out why the patch of wood on the floor of the living room had been replaced. It too had a pentagram carved into it.

   Later that day, my friend Bret came over. He had recently separated from his wife and was looking for a new roommate to help with the bills. Since he was in need of a housemate and I was in need of a new home, I offered to move in. The timing was just right.

   He hung out for about an hour. During that time, we told him all about the things that had happened in the house. He had been to the house once before and remarked that he had felt uncomfortable while he was there. When we mentioned the pentagrams, he nodded his head. He said that he had lived in a haunted place before but what he felt in our house seemed like something more malevolent than just a restless spirit. He said it felt Demonic.