Mountain speech may still be heard in rural West Virginia
Though its speakers are aging and declining in number, there are still places in West Virginia where folks speak in what's known as the...
Tale of Eckerlin Brothers portrays struggle for religious freedom
The history of West Virginia is filled with stories of religious diversity—of hermits and holy men and women who escaped the clamor and confines...
Civil War-era mystery of Burning Springs remains unsolved
Curious motorists traveling the valley of the Little Kanawha River southwest of Parkersburg may or may not stop at historic Burning Springs. A defunct...
Meet the top five monsters from the West Virginia hills
In the late 1990s, I was asked to pen a book of West Virginia folklore. I opted instead to create my own tales based...
Ancient West Virginia forests once a mosaic of landscapes
Historians once assumed that West Virginia had been shaded by a vast unbroken forest, but an expert on old forests in the Mountain State...
Rare memoir recalls national park before Thurmond ghost town
Perhaps no small town in West Virginia has gained the worldwide notoriety that the tiny Town of Thurmond has enjoyed. A ghost town located...
Untangling the tale of frontier heroine Mary Draper Ingles
The tale of Mary Draper Ingles—of her escape from Shawnee captors and her return through the mountains—is in many senses the ideal American frontier...
Strange carvings greeted early West Virginia explorers
When pioneers and other explorers first ventured into what would become West Virginia, they encountered artifacts of a much earlier age — carvings, burial...
Bizzare 'Wild West' massacre erupted in Cowen, W.Va., in 1905
Cowen today is a sleepy town of 500, perhaps best known for its location near a quiet lake, but it was hardly so in...
Wolf Moon on Jan. 17 recalls W.Va. as last domain of...
The Wolf Moon to rise over West Virginia on January 17, 2022, recalls a time when the howls of wolves haunted the Mountain State—the...
Account claims lost Swift silver mine delved near Big Sandy
One of the most appealing of all Appalachian legends is that of the tale of the Lost Silver Mine of Johnathan Swift. Almost 200...
1911 horror in central W.Va. allegedly witnessed through ESP
One of the most publicized cases of extrasensory perception (ESP) reported in West Virginia involved the deaths of a mother and six children in...
