Real Appalachian ghost stories are scarier—and better—than #hauntedappalachia

In the early winter months of 1897, a woman named Mary J. Heaster found herself in regular prayer. Her daughter, Elva Zona Heaster Shue, had just died that January. Only recently married, Zona (as she was known) was a young woman, and her “death by heart disease”—as the county coroner had determined—weighed heavily on Mary. Had the coroner gotten the cause of death wrong? Mary prayed that her daughter would return to guide her toward an answer.

And according to recorded court testimony from July 1897, Zona did return to speak to her mother over the course of four nights that winter. She told her mother where to find her blood. She told her where on the spine her neck had been broken. She told her who did it. 

With her daughter’s ghostly testimony in hand, Mary proceeded to have her daughter’s body exhumed. This new evidence resulted in a murder conviction for Zona’s former husband, the blacksmith E. S. Shue, who was sent to prison in Moundsville, West Virginia, where he later died.

The tale of the “Greenbrier Ghost,” as Zona has come to be known, is a quintessential Appalachian ghost story. It’s got a spectral return for the purposes of justice. It has a traumatic event that is experienced at the communal level. And, perhaps most significantly, the story relies on strong matrilineal ties to realize its resolution; after all, an unwavering mother must raise her voice to reopen her beloved child’s case. 

(Haunted Appalachia? These ancient mountains witnessed the birth of man and monster.)

With trending social media hashtags like #hauntedappalachia driving millions of video views, broad interest in the region’s lore is at an all-time high.The #hauntedappalachia videos range from sincere to playful to mercenary, allegedly offering a window into the daily spectral realities of people in Appalachian states. Some co-opt Indigenous traditions from the region—and around the country—and place them in Appalachia. Others clearly mock the trend, aiming to poke fun at the idea that an entire region is populated by a seemingly inexhaustible supply of boogers, haints, witches, cryptids, and—of course—babies crying in the woods at night. Some, like many trends on social media, seem mostly intended to just get as many views as possible. 

In reality, very little of the #hauntedappalachia chatter takes up the real lore that makes the region so rich in spooky storytelling. Instead, it, perhaps unwittingly, participates in a longstanding fascination—and even revulsion—outsiders have with Appalachia. Many of the videos suggest a fundamental malevolence lurking in the hills and hollers. 

For the late folklorist Ruth Anne Musick, this would have been a fundamental misreading of so many Appalachian specters. As perhaps the region’s most prominent collector of ghost tales, Musick believed the ghosts of West Virginia were more like “angels of the underdog” than fearsome ghouls bent on keeping Appalachians indoors.

Angels of the underdog

West Virginia, where Zona’s story unfolds, is located in the heart of the Appalachian region. It’s a place rich in oral tradition and populated by ghosts seeking justice, ghosts offering protection, and ghosts whose stories provide a window into the inner lives of the people who live there, their “beliefs, fears, and hopes,” as the West Virginia folklorist Judy Prozzillo Byers describes it.

All of these qualities of the story are what scholars call “motifs,” and these specific motifs can be found across Appalachian ghost tales. The Telltale Lilac Bush, a landmark work collected by Musick and stewarded by Byers, of these spectral stories, is rife with them.

(The tragic backstory of one of the most haunted roads in America.)

There’s the tale of the coal miner whose reason for return is to save a fellow miner called “Big John’s Ghost.” There’s a story about a deceased little ghost girl who returns to aid her sick mother. And there are countless other examples of spectral returns for the purposes of offering help and seeking justice, nearly all done in service of the oppressed. 

As Byers describes it, Musick saw two dominant reasons for ghostly returns in these stories: to save “the lives or fortunes of living people” or to “seek [justice] for mistreatment or death … by revealing the oppressor.”

When #hauntedappalachia TikToks aim to frighten viewers with tales of the “feral people” in the Appalachian wilderness, they miss out on the loving, helpful specters Musick saw as fundamental. They also participate in the long tradition of framing the region as populated by frightening people.

‘Horrifying hillbillies’

From as early as colonial times, and frequently with exploitative intentions, “lowlander” narratives around Appalachians portray them as “horrifying hillbillies,” as Steven Stoll, professor of history at Fordham University, writes in Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia.

This general idea of a place lost to time where the population is backwards and poor and maybe even frightening in its backwardness and poverty can be found in both scholarly work and pop culture from across the 20th century. One needs look no further than Jack E. Weller’s 1965 book Yesterday’s People or the 1972 film Deliverance. To an extent, #hauntedappalachia just uses the most modern technology to participate in an age-old tradition. 

“What I have started seeing is a lot of Appalachian creators making videos that are like ‘I’ve never seen a skinwalker in Appalachia, but I have seen how the opioid epidemic has taken advantage of people so heavily,’” says Olivia Sizemore, Kentuckian and co-author of Haint Country: Dark Folktales from the Hills and Hollers. “And my biggest fear is that it’s going to lead to people—and Appalachians—being completely disinterested in their own folklore. And that would be a real shame because it’s … a way we deal with the ramifications of our history.” 

The history of Appalachia is riddled with the broken promises and deceptions wrought by outsiders. The extractive industries that historically thrived in the region—namely timber and coal—were dangerous, and disasters and losses of life were too common for those who labored in them. With the ghosts of Appalachia—who made use of the afterlife to right some of the wrongs done in the one before—hope remains. If not in this life, then the next.

(How music is used to heal the sick in Appalachia.)

Sparks’s Haint Country, which she collaborated on with fellow Kentuckian Matthew Sparks, represents an attempt from creators who are from Appalachia, steeped in its storytelling, to get it right. 

Rather than treat Appalachia as a monolith, Sparks and Sizemore focus on the lore of very specific counties in Eastern Kentucky, and they use first-person voices—those of the storytellers they actually spoke with—to relay the tales. This is important, they say, because there is no “one” version of Appalachia or Appalachians. Stories, therefore, need to be rooted in place and history to be their most effective—and even frightening—selves.

“These stories are attempts to try to deal with the haunting” of these broken promises says Ed Karshner, southeastern Ohioan and department head of English and Media Arts at Robert Morris University. “But we’re going to continue to be haunted by the same ghosts until we do something about them.”