Lore and Legend

GANDEEVILLE, W.Va. — In the turbulent years after the Civil War, a remote corner of the border country between Roane and Jackson counties became the scene of one of West Virginia’s least remembered outbreaks of vigilante violence. A string of ambushes, assassinations, lynchings, and retaliatory killings shattered the isolated farming community of Countsville in 1877, … Read more

BECKLEY, W.Va. — Long before hydrogeologists, groundwater maps, or drilling contractors, families across Europe and North America sometimes sought the help of a water diviner before digging a well. Few places, however, embraced the tradition as enduringly as Appalachia. Carried to the mountains by English and German settlers, water divining became part of everyday rural … Read more

PURSLEY, W.Va. — A Tyler County woman who lived to 100 years old claimed her family unknowingly sheltered John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of President Abraham Lincoln, shortly after Lincoln’s death in 1865. The account was published in Volume 14 of the W.Va. Heritage Encyclopedia, compiled by West Virginia historian and publisher Jim Comstock. It … Read more

RICHWOOD, W.Va. — West Virginia has long served as a place of retreat. The wealthy have sought refuge at its mineral springs, the devout have embraced its solitude for reflection, and free spirits have been drawn to the independence afforded by its forested hills. Among the most celebrated of those free spirits were two twentieth-century … Read more

FAIRMONT, W.Va. — At least two mysteries tangle in the tale of the Neerly house. What happened to the house? What happened to “old man Neerly? And where did the late folklorist Ruth Ann Musick encounter the legend? The following version of the West Virginia tale appears in the West Virginia Heritage Encyclopedia, edited and … Read more