Mountain State Matters

In the first of a several-part series about some West Virginia (specifically Wyoming County, in the southern coalfields) folklore, below is a recording of Bugs Stover telling the tale of the Wyoming County Courthouse Ghost.

Bugs is the county’s Circuit Clerk, and knows more about local legends than anyone else I’ve come into contact with. He collects the stories of others and tells them around a campfire at Twin Falls State Park when the weather is warm. He’s a wonderful guy, and a great storyteller. More from him next week…I’ve got a recording of him telling the tale of the Poke Gap Monster.

Please excuse the quality of the recording–it’s not great because I was in a public place. The transcription of the story is below, too.

Download Bugs Stover–The Courthouse Ghost

Transcript:

In 1935, the circuit clerk of Wyoming County, for whatever reason, turned up a bottle of carbolic acid, a pint jar, and drank enough to end up killing himself. It dissolves your insides. He was a likeable guy—everybody liked him and would bring things to him. Moonshine or elderberry wine or apple cider. Just bring things. And he was friendly and young and 30-some and quite popular. And there was speculation of why he did this. It was, of course, in the heights of the Great Depression and the Republican Party was in a collapse. In fact, he is the last Republican clerk until me…from 1935 when he died until now.

The two speculations are that he was just sad and ended up committing suicide, and the newspaper articles don’t use that word, but they do imply it. The other thing is that they were getting ready to build a road through a little town in this county called John McGraws. There was a 100-and-some thousand dollars worth, and most of that money ended up disappearing. And there’s some speculation that he knew it, knew who did it, or participated in it, or didn’t but knew about it, and was about to come clean and someone killed him. And if you’re a guy who simply appears one day and there’s a pint jar on your desk and that’s just normal and you turn it up and drink a little moonshine out of it. But he turned up and drank enough what he thought was moonshine, which would burn going down anyway and it turned out to be carbolic acid. And he ran out into the courtroom and apparently died in his wife’s arms…she was the assistant clerk that was in the courtroom that day.

Which is a neat little story, but didn’t end there. Because almost immediately, employees began to hear things moving around the courtroom, both in the upstairs where I am now, and in the courtroom itself. Doors would open, people would walk, some folks even claimed to have heard someone screaming in pain and dashing about. That’s been going on ever since.

In fact, in the 1970s, I was here at a political meeting about clean government or something—I was a fairly young guy. The door burst open and I looked up and didn’t see anyone. We were sitting out in the courtroom. And I assumed because I didn’t see anyone and the door burst open that they had gone out. So I asked a man who was sitting there, Mr. Moler, who was quite a colorful figure, an attorney and former prosecuter, and said ‘Mr. Moler, who just left in such a tizzy?’ And he goes, ‘Aw, no one left, that was just the courthouse ghost!’ That was my first understanding, but people don’t even react much to it now.

But anyway, it did happen and is still said to have occurred. And I still hang around here on the, maybe it was January 18, I’m don’t remember the date for sure without looking it up, but I always anticipate that date and hang around a little bit. We do have some odd things occur around that date. The phone will ring, no one’s on it. You hear people walking, but you know, I’m not sure it’s any more than other times too, those kind of things occur. I don’t know anyone who’s actually walked up and had a conversation with it. But the rumor persists that the courthouse ghost still haunts the courthouse. So that would seem to imply that he probably hadn’t committed suicide, but someone had got to him and he needs to have that solved, I guess.