Author Denver Michaels

Among the innumerable legends of haunted places, haunted bridges play a prominent role. Horrible accidents occur on bridges; corpses have been dumped off of bridges to hide evidence of horrible crimes; countless desperate people have chosen to jump off of bridges to end their lives. Think of it, how many ghost stories have you heard centered around a bridge with a phantom jumper? There are categories of bridges known as crybaby bridges and suicide bridges. Crybaby bridges are usually attached to legends of a mother drowning her child or babies being thrown into the water below—the angry spirit of the infant stays behind to haunt passersby. It is obvious what the other category, suicide bridges, are all about. In the early part of the 20th century, there was a bridge in Chicago that served as a perfect example of a suicide bridge. The bridge was simply known as the High Bridge or the Lincoln Park Arch—because of the large arch that allowed sailboats to pass underneath—it was also refer...

Looking at the title of this blog post—Pig Lady—if you're old enough to remember Seinfeld , you might hear in your mind Kramer shout:  "It was a pigman, Jerry! Half man, half pig!" The Pig Lady, from Cecil County, Maryland, however, is no joke. She is not a "fat little mental patient" as Kramer's pigman turned out to be. In my book Detours Into the Paranormal: Atlantic City Road Trip , I discussed the legend. The following is an excerpt: ...According to the tale of the Pig Lady, she was horribly disfigured in a house fire. She escaped the burning structure with her life but suffered awful burns in the process. A nearby person came to help, but when he laid eyes on her, he became so frightened by her burnt, disfigured face that he took off running. The poor woman who had just lost her home had now lost her face—she was a freak, an outcast; she fled into the woods and became the Pig Lady. As with a lot of these urban legends , there are several variations of ...

Virginia was arguably the most important Confederate state. It was the most populous with over 1.5 million residents. Virginia was also the wealthiest state, thanks in large part to its industrial base. Virginia was the industrial hub of the Confederacy and it equaled the output of all other Confederate states combined. Being the northernmost Confederate state, and a state of such importance to the South’s war effort, the majority of the Civil War was fought on Virginia soil. The Civil War Sites Advisory Commission classified 384 Civil War engagements as “principal battles.” Of those battles, 123 occurred in Virginia. Tennessee comes in a distant second with 38 principal battles. Some of the most fierce fighting in Virginia occurred in the Shenandoah Valley. For this reason, the valley attracts history buffs from far and wide who visit the battlefields scattered throughout the region. The Breadbasket of the Confederacy Favorable growing conditions made the Shenandoah Valley vital to th...

In his 1896 book Myths and Legends of Our Own Land, Charles M. Skinner recorded a number of strange tales from across the nation. One of those stories came to mind while I was camped at the Buffalo Gap National Grassland in South Dakota. As the sun set, I admired the badlands landscape, and thought of Skinner's story titled “The Banshee of the Bad Lands.” The story tells of a ghostly woman that haunts a butte in the badlands and she is sometimes accompanied by a skeleton that enjoys music. I have reprinted the classic story of the Badlands Banshee in its entirety below: ""Hell, with the fires out,” is what the Bad Lands of Dakota have been called. The fearless Western nomenclature fits the place. It is an ancient sea-bottom, with its clay strata worn by frost and flood into forms like pagodas, pyramids, and terraced cities. Labyrinthine canons wind among these fantastic peaks, which are brilliant in color, but bleak, savage, and oppressive. Game courses over the cast...

There is a historical marker just off I-64 at Exit 156 near Sam Black Church, WV that tells of the Greenbrier Ghost: Interred in nearby cemetery is Zona Heaster Shue. Her death in 1897 was presumed natural until her spirit appeared to her mother to describe how she was killed by her husband Edward. Autopsy on the exhumed body verified the apparition's account. Edward, found guilty of murder, was sentenced to the state prison. Only known case in which testimony from a ghost helped convict a murderer. Indeed, I’m not sure that I have read another ghost story in which the ghost of the deceased secured a murder conviction! The story began in the fall of 1896 when a young Zona Heaster met E. S. “Trout” Shue. Unfortunately for Zona, it would not come out until later—after it was too late—that Shue had been married twice. His second wife died under mysterious circumstances and his first marriage ended in divorce. Shue's first wife accused him of “great cruelty.” Shue was a drifter ...

Throughout Appalachia , there are tales of "phantom dogs" and it is widely believed that these stories were carried to the New World by European immigrants long ago. The most famous of these ghostly dogs has to be the Snarly Yow, but my favorite tale is of the "Black Dog of the Blue Ridge." It is the story of both a frightening apparition and a loyal companion to the end—and beyond. Writing in the Journal of American Folklore in 1907, Mrs. R.F. Herrick recounted the tale: In Botetourt County, Virginia, there is a pass that was much traveled by people going to Bedford County and by visitors to mineral springs in the vicinity. In the year 1683, the report was spread that at the wildest part of the trail in this pass there appeared at sunset a great black dog, who, with majestic tread, walked in a listening attitude about two hundred feet and then turned and walked back. Thus he passed back and forth like a sentinel on guard, always appearing at sunset to keep his n...

According to local legend, there is a phantom hitchhiker named Lucy along the Roaring Fork Motor Nature Trail just outside of Gatlinburg, Tennessee. This trail is a six-mile, one-way drive that cuts through a dense tree canopy. Roaring Fork Motor Nature Trail is easily accessible from downtown Gatlinburg and lands you a world away from the busy streets in mere minutes. The trail follows Roaring Fork, a beautiful cold-water stream typical of those found in the Great Smoky Mountains. The white-water crashes against large boulders and there are small waterfalls and deep pools of frigid mountain water along the way. Mills, old structures, and historic homesites are scattered along the trail—a reminder that people used to live and work here. One of those old mountain folks that lived along the trail in the early 1900s was Lucy. As the story goes, Lucy was a young lady who died tragically when her family’s cabin burned down. Sometime after her death, a man named Foster (I don’t know if this ...

In 1935, when the Great Depression was ravaging the country, the federal government formed the Works Progress Administration (later named the Work Project Administration) to combat the devastating effects of the depression on the nation. The largest and most successful project was the Tennessee Valley Authority, which, through the construction of hydroelectric dams, modernized the region and created desperately needed jobs. One of the administration’s lesser-known projects was the Federal Writers Project. This project employed thousands of out-of-work teachers, researchers, librarians and historians who went about recording American oral histories and folklore. One of the better-known works of the Federal Writers Projects is Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States , which was compiled from over two thousand interviews with formerly enslaved people. Field workers employed by the federally subsidized Virginia Writers Project captured all manner of Virginia folkl...

The oldest house in Winchester, Virginia is known as "Abram's Delight." The history of the home goes back to the 1730s days when Abraham Hollingsworth received a land grant consisting of 582 acres in present-day Winchester . His land was a “delight to behold,” and he built a log cabin alongside a natural spring. Hollingsworth died in 1748, and his wife passed away a year later. His second son, Isaac, inherited the property, which would stay in the Hollingsworth family for two hundred years. Isaac built a stone house that served as the first quaker meeting place in the area, and it holds the distinction of being the oldest house in Winchester. Old homes and hauntings go together like peanut butter and chocolate, so, of course, Abram’s Delight has its share of ghost stories. Abram’s Delight underwent restoration in the 1950s. During this time, workers began seeing a tall man, over six feet in height, dressed in quaker’s clothing, walking in an out of the house. Marguerite ...

The story of “McChesney’s Ghost” is one of the best ghost stories in all the Shenandoah Valley. It began in Augusta County’s unincorporated community of Newport in 1825 in the home of Dr. John McChesney—a man of unquestioned honesty and integrity in his day. McChesney, his wife and four children were gathered for their evening dinner when one of his slaves, an eight-year-old girl named Maria, burst in from the kitchen. Maria was frightened to the core and said an old woman “with her head tied up chased her.” Unsurprisingly, McChesney ignored the girl’s story, attributing the tale to childhood imagination. For days after the event, Maria complained of being frightened, and shortly thereafter, “vollies of stones began to fall on the dwelling house, and continued to fall at intervals, in daytime and also at night.” Most of the rocks were fist-sized, but some were “too large to be thrown by a person of ordinary strength.” Even weirder, some of the stones were so hot they burned the grass ...

In June 2015, I was driving into work listening to Coast to Coast AM, and I caught most of a conversation about Robert the Doll, a haunted doll in Key West, Florida. This was exciting to me, because in July, the family and I would be in south Florida on vacation. I listened intently to the conversation and made a mental note of the museum in which the doll was housed. Then and there I planned to see the haunted doll for myself when I reached Key West. Robert the Doll is a handmade doll about forty inches tall. The Steiff Company of Germany made the doll around the turn of the twentieth century. According to legend, Robert giggles, moves on his own, changes facial expressions, and more. Gene Otto, a young boy from a prominent Key West family, owned Robert and had a lifelong friendship with the doll. Growing up, Gene often blamed Robert for his misbehaving, claiming “Robert did it.” Some have speculated that this constant and powerful energy from Gene may have animated the doll, causi...

Braley Pond is a picturesque body of water in the George Washington National Forest surrounded by the mountains in western Augusta County. This day use area has hiking trails, a campground, picnic area, and the pond is stocked with trout throughout the October–May stocking season. This tranquil setting seems far away from it all—it is a world away from city traffic and the annoyances of daily life—a place to unplug and unwind. But even all the way out here, in the seclusion of the national forest, the evil of the outside world can find its way in. In May 2003, members of the Crips street gang lured nineteen-year-old Christopher Kennedy to Braley Pond and killed him. Kennedy had expressed interest in leaving the gang, and according to court documents, Kenneth E. Jackson, Candace Knott, Kalani Noa and Seth Tinsley feared he might inform the police of their activities and decided to kill him. Court records state: "The defendant [Kenneth E. Jackson] gave Noa and Tinsley an order to ...

The wife and I spent a few days in West Des Moines, Iowa during the summer of 2022. We stayed in a nice and quiet state park that lies on the banks of the Raccoon River. While we were in the area, we spent a day touring the covered bridges nearby. One of those bridges, the Roseman Bridge, is allegedly haunted. Bridges of Madison County The Madison County, Iowa Chamber of Commerce promotes the covered bridges in the area which lie along the Covered Bridges Scenic Byway: The Covered Bridges Scenic Byway offers visitors a journey into iconic America. Dotting the classic Iowa landscape are the famed covered bridges of Madison County, immortalized in the novel, movie and musical, The Bridges of Madison County . At the county’s center is an authentic and thriving historic town square. Tour the birthplace of legendary actor John Wayne and the only museum in the world dedicated to The Duke. Or explore the Iowa Quilt Museum and quilt shops in the town where Fons & Porter’s Love of Quilting...

The Paw Paw Tunnel in Oldtown, Maryland goes back to the days of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, better known as the C&O Canal. The C&O Canal operated from 1831 until 1924 along the Potomac River from Washington, D.C., to Cumberland, Maryland. The canal was primarily used to transport coal from the Allegheny Mountains. Building the 184-mile canal was a huge undertaking at the time; the lands to the west were remote and mountainous. A section of the canal, in Allegany County, Maryland, just across the river from present-day Paw Paw, West Virginia had to be bored through a mountain in order to bypass the Paw Paw bends, a 6-mile section of the Potomac with several horseshoe bends. Work on the tunnel began in 1836 and was completed in 1850. However, the tunnel was initially estimated to be complete in 1838. The work was slow-going and hazardous; using only hand tools and dynamite, works were only able to tunnel about 12 feet per day. Cave-ins were commonplace, as were injuries and ...