Mysteries in the Mountain State’s Woods

West Virginia’s misty hollows and dense forests have long been the stage for eerie encounters. Locals tell of ghostly apparitions flitting between trees, uncanny lights humming through the hollows, and creatures that defy logic lurking in the wilderness. The following true stories – drawn from West Virginians’ firsthand accounts and well-documented local reports – capture some of the strangest, spookiest, and most unexplainable events ever witnessed in the Mountain State’s woods. These tales range from supernatural specters to rare natural anomalies, each one rooted in eyewitness testimony. (All source URLs are provided for fact-checking.)

Ghostly Sightings in the Forests

One chilling account comes from the Grey Flats Trails near Beckley, WV. Hikers exploring an old farmstead in the woods began sharing stories of a “shadowy figure” dubbed the Grey Flats Ghost. In 2014, a group of friends on the trail experienced something unforgettable. As dusk fell, they saw a pitch-black, man-shaped figure wearing what looked like a long coat and broad-brimmed hat. It glided silently among the oaks, “moving without walking,” as if unaware of the laws of gravity. The dark figure slipped behind the trees and vanished into the ground on a rise of rocky earth. Immediately, one friend became ill, doubled over by a sudden nauseating dread. The terrified group hurried out of the woods, only to look back and see the black silhouette emerging from the earth again, watching them from the treeline. To this day, hikers report an uneasy feeling at that site. Some locals believe the haunting is tied to an old murder on that farm, though no records confirm it. Whatever the cause, the Grey Flats apparition has turned a simple hiking trail into the stuff of local legend.

Not all ghostly tales feature human phantoms – some speak of spectral animals. In rural Calhoun County, an enduring 19th-century legend tells of Cale Betts’s ghost, which allegedly plagued a farmhouse and then roamed the surrounding hills after the house was torn down. Neighbors back in the 1880s described “weird, strange instances of ghostly manifestations” on the Betts farm – unexplained rapping noises, moving objects, and a glowing presence that followed the family even after they relocated. One newspaper at the time reported that the haunt so “annoyed and frightened” a nearby farmer’s family that they actually picked up and moved their newly built house to the opposite end of the farm. To this day, teachers in Grantsville use the Cale Betts Ghost story as a lesson in local folklore. While it’s hard to find modern first-person accounts of this ghost, the tale remains a campfire favorite – a reminder that some West Virginia “haints” have been around for generations.

Mysterious Lights in the Woods

Strange lights bobbing through the trees or hovering over the hills have spooked West Virginians for centuries. In fact, early settlers in the Ohio Valley reported seeing “ghostly lights” flicker in remote parts of the frontier. In recent years, these phenomena have taken on a modern twist. In December 2024, residents across southern West Virginia began flooding a local news station with reports – and even videos – of unexplained lights in the sky. Witnesses from Bluefield, Princeton, and rural McDowell County described orbs and glowing objects zipping silently overhead. According to WVVA News, sightings of these “strange lights” (initially suspected to be drones) continued night after night, with baffled locals submitting photos of the mysterious aerial phenomena. The governor of neighboring Virginia even issued a statement acknowledging the reports. While officials scrambled for an explanation, many lifelong residents were left wondering if something otherworldly was roaming the night skies above their hollers.

Sometimes those lights in the woods seem to come in for a landing – and what follows can be downright terrifying. One of West Virginia’s most famous encounters began on the evening of September 12, 1952 in the small town of Flatwoods. As dusk settled, two young brothers and a friend saw a pulsing red light streak across the sky and crash on a nearby hilltop. Excited, they gathered a small party – including their mother and a National Guardsman named Eugene “Gene” Lemon – and hiked up to find the source of the glow. What they found became the stuff of legend. According to contemporary news reports, “seven Braxton County residents” (the boys, their mom, Lemon, and others) witnessed a 10-foot-tall creature in those woods. Lemon’s flashlight first caught two bright eyes shining from a tree limb. Then the beam revealed the creature: a towering figure with a blood-red body and a green face that seemed to glow. It had an almost ace-of-spades shaped hood around its head, and some accounts said clawed hands were visible in the eerie mist. The “Flatwoods Monster,” as it came to be known, hissed and glided toward the group, sending Gene Lemon into a panicked fall and the entire party fleeing in terror. Back in town, several of the witnesses were so distraught that one boy vomited and the family dog hid, tail between its legs. The encounter made national news and even drew U.S. Air Force investigators to Flatwoods as part of the Project Blue Book UFO inquiry. To this day, locals still debate what the group saw on that hill – an alien visitor, a paranormal specter, or simply a misidentified owl – but those who were there swear that something utterly unexplainable landed in the woods that night.

Unusual Creatures of the Backwoods

West Virginia’s forests are home to all manner of wildlife – black bears, bobcats, deer – but occasionally people report creatures that simply shouldn’t exist. One of the earliest and most fearsome frontier legends is the Ogua, a monster said to lurk in the waterways. Tales of the Ogua date back to 1745, when it allegedly dragged a 12-year-old boy underwater in the Monongahela River. Most locals assumed it was just a folktale – until fishermen in Marion County started seeing something odd. In fact, as recently as 2020, two men fishing on the West Fork River near Fairmont claimed they encountered the Ogua. They described a giant snapping-turtle-like beast, brown in color, about 20 feet long and weighing an estimated 500 pounds, with a long tail – and perhaps even two heads. The massive creature supposedly slipped back into the muddy depths before they could snap a photo. Biologists remain skeptical, but locals point out that the region’s prehistoric past (and the discovery of ancient turtle fossils) makes the legend a bit more believable. Whether real or imagined, the Ogua has joined the roster of West Virginia’s weirdest woodland residents.

On dry land, too, people have met beasts straight out of nightmares. Just ask the folks in Point Pleasant, who in the 1960s found themselves face-to-face with the infamous Mothman. It all began in November 1966 when two young couples drove out to the old TNT area north of town one night. In the shadows by an abandoned power plant, they saw a pair of glowing red eyes – attached to a gray, human-sized figure with ten-foot wings. As the stunned teens watched, the creature shot straight up into the air with a screeching squeal. The panicked couples sped off in their car, but within minutes the winged entity was chasing them, easily keeping up even as they hit 100 mph on the straightaway back to town. At the city limits, the thing banged the roof of their car “three times” before veering off into the darkness. Shaken, the four went straight to the Mason County sheriff. By the next day their story hit local news, and the mysterious flying figure was dubbed “Mothman” (after the Batman comics character). In the year that followed, over 100 separate Mothman sightings were reported around Point Pleasant – from teenagers who saw it perched by a quarry to a man chased in his car down Route 62. Then, abruptly, the sightings stopped in December 1967, just after the tragic collapse of the Silver Bridge. Many locals at the time believed the creature was an omen of the disaster. Today Mothman has become a quirky local celebrity (with a museum and statue in town), but for those who saw its fiery red eyes up close in 1966, the terror was very real.

Not all monsters in West Virginia folklore are as well-known as Mothman. Down in the southwestern counties, there’s talk of a hulking white-furred beast ominously called the Sheepsquatch (or “White Thing”). Folklorist Ruth Ann Musick first recorded stories of a white, woolly, horned creature in the hills of Kanawha County in the 1950s. But sightings really picked up in the 1990s. In 1994, for instance, a former U.S. Navy seaman reported a startling encounter with a large white creature while hiking in the woods of Boone County. He said the beast was crouched by a creek “knelt to drink” water, when it suddenly noticed him and bolted into the brush. It was about the size of a bear, covered in shaggy white fur with an oddly long snout and a pair of horn-like protrusions. Later that year, two children in Boone County came upon something they described as a “white bear” that stood up on its hind legs to a height of over six feet, then ran off snapping tree limbs as it vanished into the forest. Dozens more Sheepsquatch reports emerged throughout the ’90s in Mason, Putnam, Kanawha, and Boone counties– including a 1995 case where a car was attacked by a horned, four-eyed white beast, and a 1999 incident where campers were chased from their campsite by a screaming white creature. While no physical evidence was ever found, the legend grew so prominent that a TV show (Mountain Monsters) even mounted an unsuccessful “hunt” for the Sheepsquatch in 2014. Whether it’s an unknown species, a misidentified albino bear, or pure mountain myth, the White Thing remains one of West Virginia’s creepiest cryptids.

Sometimes, however, the cryptids in West Virginia are a little too real for comfort. Consider the experience of Stephen Summers, a 44-year-old resident of Crooked Run, WV. In May 2010, Summers was riding in a car near Arnoldsburg when he suddenly yelled for the driver to stop – across a small river, walking along a power line right-of-way, was a gigantic ape-like figure. The driver couldn’t stop in time, but Summers got a clear look. He described an upright creature, about 9 feet tall, covered in jet-black hair. “Its legs looked as big as five-gallon buckets,” he recounted – so massive that he could see daylight between them as it strode away. Summers insists it was no bear or human in a suit. “I’ve been in the woods all my life. I wasn’t drunk,” he told a local Calhoun County reporter, “God in heaven, be my witness, I saw it. I’ll take it to my grave.”. Despite teasing from some neighbors (“Everybody is laughing at me,” he admitted), Summers stood by his story of seeing a Bigfoot that day. Intriguingly, he’s not alone – West Virginia has dozens of Sasquatch sightings on record, from the “Wildman” reports in the 1800s to modern accounts in the Monongahela National Forest. In fact, just a few years before Summers’ encounter, Braxton County had its own Bigfoot flap where multiple witnesses heard eerie whoops and saw large hairy figures in the woods. The West Virginia Bigfoot Museum in Sutton now proudly displays casts of alleged footprints and catalogs of sightings. Skeptics may roll their eyes, but as Summers emphatically told the Hur Herald, he knows what he saw.

Another bizarre backwoods tale comes from Taylor County. In June 1964, the small railroad town of Grafton, WV was thrust into chaos by reports of a monster on the loose. It started with Robert Cockrell, a reporter at the Grafton Sentinel. Driving home late one night along Riverside Drive, Cockrell slammed on his brakes at the sight of a huge figure by the road. In a later interview he described a **muscular, nine-foot-tall creature with pale, almost translucent skin – and no visible head. The thing had smooth, seal-like skin and hunched shoulders that rose to where a head should have been. Cockrell was so startled that he sped away, then gathered a few friends to return and search, but they found nothing. When his newspaper ran a brief item about his encounter, all hell broke loose. Within days, more than 20 phone calls flooded into the Sentinel from people claiming they too had seen the “Beast of Grafton” skulking in the woods. Several teenagers out “monster hunting” at night even phoned police to report a creature matching the description lurching along the outskirts of town. The Grafton Sentinel noted that cars were “bumper-to-bumper” on country roads as armed locals set out on the area’s most popular hunt in years – searching for the headless horror. While no hard evidence ever turned up (no tracks, fur, or damage), the legend of the Grafton Monster was born. To this day, folks in Grafton talk in hushed tones about that summer of ’64 when something strange prowled the Tygart Valley River valley. Modern skeptics suspect it might have been a misidentified large animal or even an overactive imagination. But given the sheer number of eyewitness reports – and the genuine fear in those voices – many in town still believe some hulking entity paid Grafton a visit that year.

Eerie Anomalies and Unexplained Encounters

Not every mysterious wilderness encounter falls into a neat category of “ghost” or “monster.” Some are just bizarre, possibly natural events that left witnesses rattled. In the Monongahela National Forest, for example, hunters and campers occasionally report blood-curdling sounds echoing through the dark hollows. One veteran hunter shared a story from December 1997, when he and his son were tracking deer near the Cranberry Wilderness area before dawn. The pair suddenly heard an unearthly scream erupt from a nearby gully – “similar to that of a woman screaming,” the hunter said, followed by a strange chatter that sounded like garbled, sped-up language. The cacophony bounced through the foggy trees, then fell silent. The hunter, an experienced outdoorsman, was stunned. “I’ve witnessed black bear, deer, bobcat…you name it,” he wrote, “but I’ve never heard such a spine-tingling sound as I heard that morning”. The eerie mix of human-like babble and animal scream set every hair on his neck on end. He admitted that he has not returned to that spot since. Biologists might note that bobcats and foxes can make hair-raising cries, and that echoes can play tricks on the ear. But those who have heard the Monongahela “scream-chatter” phenomenon aren’t so sure it was any ordinary critter – to them it felt like something unknown was lurking just out of sight, speaking in a language of screams.

Equally unsettling are the inexplicable finds one can stumble upon in the woods. In the early 2010s, a man and his wife were driving home from vacation along a desolate stretch of highway by the Ohio River in West Virginia. It was around midnight when they began noticing an unusual number of dead deer along the road. A deer carcass here or there isn’t uncommon in rural WV, but this was different. The further they drove, the more deer they saw. The man started counting. By the time they had covered about 20 miles, they had passed “more than 60 dead deer” lying just off the highway shoulder. “It was so strange,” the witness recounted – there were no signs of what had killed them, no blood, no destroyed vehicles, and far too many deer for random traffic accidents. “Not sure if they were all hit by semis or what,” he mused, but the sheer scale of carnage was beyond anything he’d ever seen. Sixty deer in twenty miles – essentially a deer corpse every few hundred yards – almost suggested some mass death event. The couple was chilled by the experience. Could a disease or toxic spill have struck the herd? (West Virginia wildlife officials have occasionally dealt with outbreaks of hemorrhagic disease in deer, but those typically occur in late summer and mostly near water, not beside roads at winter’s end.) To this day, the 60-deer road remains a mystery. Other drivers who use that route have reported nothing out of the ordinary, leaving the couple’s experience as an isolated, grisly anomaly – a scene straight out of a horror film, with no clear explanation. It’s the kind of thing that makes you grip the steering wheel a little tighter on late-night drives through the Mountain State, eyes scanning the darkness for whatever might be out there.

From ghostly phantoms and UFO illuminations to strange beasts and baffling natural phenomena, these stories show just how deeply the unexplained runs in West Virginia’s cultural landscape. For those who live here, the woods are more than just trees and trails – they’re alive with legends. Perhaps there’s a logical explanation for each of these tales. Or perhaps, as many West Virginians will insist with a knowing grin, there really are things in the wilderness that defy reason. The next time you find yourself on a dark, winding country road or a lonely mountain path in West Virginia, keep your wits about you. You just might witness a mystery of your own – and join the long tradition of Mountain State storytellers who swear, “I know what I saw.”

Sources:

West Virginia Explorer – “Mysterious shadow luring hikers to Beckley trail system” (Oct. 24, 2024)
WestVirginiaGhosts.com – “The Grey Flats Ghost” (personal account, n.d.)
WestVirginiaGhosts.com – “Monongahela National Forest” (personal account, Jul. 14, 2004)
Phantoms & Monsters – “More Unexplained Highway Incidents” (July 2019)
WVVA News – “Strange lights and ‘drones’ reported in West Virginia” (Dec. 16, 2024)
History.com – “In 1952, the Flatwoods Monster Terrified 6 Kids, a Mom and a Dog” (updated Feb. 18, 2025)
Weelunk – “Creepy Cryptids of West Virginia” (Oct. 2021)
The Hur Herald – “Calhoun Man Spotted Bigfoot” (Bob Weaver, May 2010 / Aug. 2024)
The Columns (Fairmont State Univ.) – “Wild, Wonderful and Weird WV: Craziest Cryptids” (Feb. 13, 2023)
The Columns – “An Introduction to Cryptids” (Feb. 13, 2023)
West Virginia Explorer – “June 16 marks anniversary of Grafton Monster sightings” (David Sibray, June 13, 2018)
West Virginia Explorer – “The tale of Cale Betts’s ghost” (June 30, 2024)