West Virginia's Appalachian Music and Literature

Ghosts

Ghost stories and songs are an important part of West Virginia's Appalachian folk literature. Examples of the unknown, strange, suspenseful, or unexplainable have always appealed to people's imaginations.

Ruth Ann Musick, in the Introduction to The Telltale Lilac Bush and Other West Virginia Ghost Tales (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1965), writes:

Anyone who has ever lived in West Virginia, or even traveled through the state, can easily see what an ideal place it would be for ghosts. It is an unending sequence of hills and valleys, with a backdrop of other mountains in the distance. Over all these mountains and valleys is a wilderness of shrubbery and trees so that genuinely lonesome places exist in almost all sections of the state. Hundreds or even thousands of ghosts could gather nightly on West Virginia's hills or sigh from the treetops, and few living souls would know the difference.

According to the folk tradition, ghosts are of three main types:

• The revengeful spirit returns to earth to seek justice for a bad deed.
• The benevolent, helpful spirit returns to aid the living in some manner.
• The poltergeists (a German word meaning "ornery spirit") are spirits of those who have died before their time, suddenly or tragically, and are thus not "laid to rest." Poltergeists make their presence known with annoying, spooky, or playful tricks; their tricks are not harmful.

"Greenbrier Ghost" (story)	"Greenbrier Ghost" Activity	"Molly Vaunder" (song)
Write a Ghost Story	Return to "Traditional Music & Literature" Menu	Discussion Questions

West Virginia's Appalachian Music and Literature is a self-contained teaching unit by Avis Caynor and Reneé Wyatt (1997), reprinted with permission in 2003 in the larger web site AppLit.

Complete list of AppLit pages on folklore
Bibliography of Supernatural Tales from the Appalachian Mountains

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