Appalachia's haunted highway: legends of West Virginia Turnpike ghosts

CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Completed in 1954, the West Virginia Turnpike, twisting like a ribbon through 88 miles of the Appalachian Mountains, is not just a feat of 20th-century engineering; it's one of the most important interstate corridors in the eastern U.S.

And when night falls, it turns eerily haunting, especially along those mountain stretches where the city lights vanish into the distance. It's little wonder, then, that for more than half a century the highway has been the setting of some of West Virginia’s most persistent and well-documented paranormal legends.

From phantom hitchhikers to unexplained lights in the sky, tales of West Virginia Turnpike ghosts remain some of the most popular in Mountain State folklore, and for good reason, according to the late Dennis Deitz, a West Virginia folklorist and author of The Greenbrier Ghost and Other Strange Stories.

The road has seen countless commuters and truckers pass along its winding miles. Roughly 36.5 million toll transactions are now processed annually. Deitz wrote that many have reported encounters not of this world.

He documented that strange sightings, eerie encounters, and events with no rational explanation have haunted a 15-mile stretch between Mossy and Standard, especially around the travel plaza at Morton, the northernmost of three travel plazas on the pike.

This narrow valley, surrounded by rugged hills and shadowed by history, has long been considered a supernatural hotspot by paranormal enthusiasts and those who know the history of the pike. The stories that have emerged from this remarkable stretch of highway form a spine-chilling tapestry of West Virginia's ghostly past.

All of the following stories were collected by Deitz, who believed the paranormal activity was partly due to the violent history of the valley before the turnpike was built.

Part of the path it follows across the mountains was part of an ancient Native American war trail known as the Paint Creek Trail, which indigenous tribes used for travel and battle. Frontier heroine Mary Draper Ingles was captured and led along the trail.

In the early 20th century, the same region bore witness to the violent Paint Creek–Cabin Creek Strikes during the West Virginia Mine Wars, in which coal miners clashed with operators and private militias, marking one of the most brutal labor uprisings in American history.

Deitz proposed that as the turnpike was constructed, displacing cemeteries and cutting through land marked by tragedy, it unknowingly paved over layers of unrest, struggle, and sorrow that continue to echo in local legends and ghost stories to this day.

A state trooper's silent encounter

James A. “Abe” Roberts, a retired state police sergeant, spent years patrolling the Charleston-to-Beckley section on the West Virginia Turnpike. For most of his career, he saw nothing unusual. That is, until one night near Nuckolls, just past the old Morton Truck Stop, he encountered something he was never able to explain.

“I don’t know what made me look up,” Roberts told Deitz. “Something in the sky caught my attention.”

What he saw was unlike anything he had ever experienced, he said—a glowing, sparkling object hovering high above the hills, somewhere between 1,000 to 1,500 feet in the air.

Roughly 15 to 20 feet wide, the UFO was lit up like old-fashioned Christmas tinsel. Within seconds, the mysterious object vanished. Roberts said he initially kept the sighting to himself.

"Even though I was convinced that I was wide awake and alert, I decided not to mention the incident to anyone. Then, when news stories began to appear in the local daily newspaper about UFO sightings down the river (in Dunbar, West Virginia) below Charleston, I volunteered to tell that I had also sighted the same objects," Roberts said.

"Later, a fellow turnpike patrolman told of seeing the same sight or object. All witnesses gave almost identical descriptions, like to this day I remember what this object looked like. I don't know what it was, but I do know that I have never seen anything before or since that resembled this object."

The supervisor didn’t believe in ghosts

Clinton Ayers, a maintenance supervisor for the West Virginia Parkways Authority, formerly the West Virginia Turnpike Commission, worked at the maintenance center off exit 74 near Nuckolls for years. Though a self-declared skeptic, he admitted to witnessing events that defied logic.

“I don’t believe in ghosts,” he said. “But some things happened I just can’t explain.”

Ayers said that more than once, he saw what looked like an old World War I military ambulance driving up the railroad tracks—complete with an Army insignia. It would disappear before he could get a clear look with his spotlight.

"On two or three occasions, I heard the sound of a vehicle coming up the railroad tracks. Looking out the window, I saw it leave the railroad tracks, head up a roadway toward the maintenance building, then turn up a road toward the old cemetery," he said.

"It looked like an old-time military ambulance used during World War I, with an Army insignia. I would go outside with my big spotlight, but could never see the ambulance again."

Even more puzzling were the nights when he heard the baying of foxhounds echoing around the snow-covered hills. Despite the noise all around him, his spotlight revealed nothing—no foxes, no hounds, no ghosts, and no tracks in the snow.

"One night, with the ground covered with snow, I heard the sound of fox hounds baying on the trail of a fox," he said. "Since I loved to listen and see hounds chasing foxes, I took my spotlight and went outside to see the hounds or maybe the fox. The hounds were sounding all around me. My spotlight didn't show even one fox. No tracks of either a fox or the hounds showed in the snow, then or in daylight. I am still mystified by this, as I still don't believe in ghosts."

Then there were the lights and windows in the maintenance building opening on their own. Light switches flickering on and off without human touch. One night, a truck driver witnessed the building’s lights malfunction and refused to enter the facility alone again.

“It was like the place had a mind of its own,” Ayers said.

Phantom hitchhikers and cold hands

Perhaps the most enduring ghost tale from the West Virginia Turnpike is that of the phantom hitchhiker. One night, a trooper picked up a young man walking along the highway. Moments later, when the officer turned to speak to the hitchhiker, the passenger had vanished.

"There were many reports from turnpike travelers stopping at the old Glass House [now the Beckley Travel Plaza] and reporting the phantom hitchhiker," Ayers said.

At the old turnpike gas pumps, another trooper experienced a bone-chilling encounter. As he filled his patrol car in the dead of night, he suddenly felt two cold hands grab the back of his neck. No one was around. He bolted, forgetting the gas nozzle still in the tank.

Ayers told Deitz the trooper would never use that pump again alone, no matter what it cost.

UFOs over Mossy

Bill Treadway, a resident of the Paint Creek Valley near Mossy and later a transplant to Arizona, was a frequent witness to strange aerial phenomena in the region, according to Deitz. His accounts span from the late 1970s through the 1980s.

Treadway recounted to Deitz: "First part of the 80s of last of 70s. One evening just at dusk, drove my brother up to mouth of Mossy to telephone his wife in Arizona. Parked in front of Ted Gray's store. About six bright lights driving at each other. No noise and didn't hit each other. They got behind the timber over about where Plum Orchard Lake is. About the start of winter of that year."

Another time, a bright silver disk—about the size of a No. 2 washtub—emerged from behind a cloud, flipped over, and disappeared when touched by sunlight.

Among his strangest accounts is one of a glowing copper-colored orb the size of a basketball, followed by a striped, flag-shaped object colored like neon that slowly descended and vanished. “It was like nothing I’ve ever seen,” Treadway said.

The history behind the West Virginia Turnpike ghosts

Dennis Deitz believed the turnpike’s haunted reputation was more than myth. In his research, he wrote that he traced the root of the strange occurrences back to the land itself, particularly the area between Mossy and Mile Post 59.

“Most of the ghost stories began when construction on the turnpike started in 1954,” Deitz wrote. “And they seemed to end about 20 years later.”

Why the window of time? Deitz suggested that the construction of the turnpike disturbed something ancient and unresolved. The road cuts through the Paint Creek and Cabin Creek regions, sites of deadly mine wars, catastrophic floods, and countless mining deaths.

The 1916 flood on Cabin Creek and the 1932 disaster on Paint Creek alone claimed the lives of roughly 150 people.

"When I wrote the book 'The Flood and The Blood,' I interviewed people who had survived this disastrous flood of 1932. In these interviews, I heard of a number of stories of strange happenings and sights along the old WV Turnpike, now I-64 and I-77," Deitz recalled.

"Both creeks were full of mines and mining towns where hundreds of men were killed by accidents and mine explosions. A lot of murders took place on both creeks."

Cemeteries were moved, graves were unearthed, and old mining towns were bulldozed to make way for progress. “Did this disturbance of the dead,” Deitz asked, “trigger the strange happenings that followed?”

The Sand Branch Lights

In the early 1980s, Trooper John Ferda of the Beckley detachment responded to what he thought was a prank call about “strange lights” over the turnpike. But when he arrived in the Sand Branch area, he saw them for himself.

“It looked like two or three flashlights in a tight cluster,” Ferda said. “High above the treeline. No noise. Just there.”

He and fellow officers watched the lights for nearly an hour as they floated, shifted, then dropped from sight. No aircraft were reported in the area, and no explanation was ever found.

Deitz wrote that, "Ferda and other police officers at the scene watched, the lights appeared to move from left to right, then dropped out of sight. Ferda said he observed the lights for nearly an hour before they disappeared. He and the other policemen went to an area near the WV Turnpike where the lights appeared to be coming from, but they could not find any source for the aerial show."

“I’m not saying it was aliens,” Ferda told Deitz, “but I’ve never seen anything like it before or since.”

A haunted past that won’t stay buried

To this day, travelers still report flickering lights in the night sky, strange figures on the roadside, and a lingering sense of unease near the travel plaza at Morton. Although the ghost stories of the turnpike peaked in the 1970s and 1980s, occasional sightings still surface, keeping the legends alive.

Whether one believes in the supernatural or not, the sheer volume of eerily consistent reports over decades cannot be easily dismissed. The West Virginia Turnpike Ghosts—as reported by law enforcement and maintenance crews—form a collective memory of something uncanny, unresolved, and perhaps still active beneath the asphalt.

So next time you find yourself driving the lonely stretches between Charleston and Beckley late at night, take a second glance at the shadows. You might just find that the West Virginia Turnpike Ghosts are still watching.

The Greenbrier Ghost and Other Strange Stories is available on Amazon and through the West Virginia Book Company.