Aaron Manke (0:00)

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Aaron Manke (1:03)

Some people love to insult American food. The food of the old world, they say, is more classy, more fine dining. America is only good at making fast food where quality takes the backseat to cost and convenience. But these opinions couldn't be further from the truth. Barbecue Cajun soul food sure, some of these may technically have their roots in other countries, but but in America, they have evolved into something that you can't quite find anywhere else. From the lobster roll to Key lime pie, America knows how to get creative in the kitchen. Sure, we may be a melting pot that is borrowed from other countries, but we've been cooking up something new here for a very long time. American food is uniquely its own. Going beyond the food metaphor, though, this nation is full of distinct regional cultures that often get overlooked on the world stage. And and one of the most unique of them all comes from a legendary place, Appalachia. Stretching nearly 2,000 miles along the eastern United States, the Appalachian Mountains have given birth to some of the most colorful folklore in America. And while its settlers did originally take inspiration from the many early Scots and Irishmen who immigrated there, those old mountains twisted their songs and stories into something brand new and absolutely creepy. So pull on your boots and grab your walking stick because we're about to take a hike through some of the best Appalachian ghost stories around. You'd better hope that black bears are the only danger we run into, though, because these hills, my friends, are haunted. I'm Aaron Manke, and this is Lore Legends. There was a woman walking down the road and she was completely barefoot. Foster couldn't Believe his eyes. He squeezed them shut, then opened them again. But she was still there. A small wisp of a woman was making her way down the lane with no shoes on her feet, completely nonchalant, as if she did this every day. Her lack of footwear didn't sit right with Foster, and it was a cold night and she shouldn't have been walking around while she wasn't dressed for the weather, especially deep in the mountains of Tennessee. So when his horse finally reached her, Foster offered her a ride home. With a smile, the girl accepted. She mounted his horse and then introduced herself as Lucy. Foster and Lucy chatted as they rode through the dusky mountains. With every passing minute, he became more and more infatuated with the beautiful woman. It wasn't a long journey, but by the time he dropped her off outside her parents cabin, he knew that he was head over heels in love with her. The next day, he returned to Lucy's parents to ask for her hand in marriage. But Lucy wasn't home. And she hadn't been home for a long, long time. With shaking voices, Lucy's parents told Foster that their daughter had died in a cabin fire a few years before. It seems that he hadn't actually delivered a beautiful woman to her home the night before. He had escorted her ghost. And he wasn't the only one. Lucy had received dozens of marriage offers since she had died. And every single time her parents were reminded that she would never walk down an aisle and say, I do. She was gone. And so goes the legend of Lucy of the Roaring Fork, Named after the river that winds through the Great Smoky Mountain National Park. Lucy is a favorite ghost story amongst park visitors. Drivers who take the scenic route down the Roaring Fork Motor Trail at sunrise and sunset often report coming across a beautiful barefoot woman. Although thankfully, the motorists of the 21st century don't offer her a ride anymore. The Appalachian Mountains are full of ghost stories like this one. But hauntings in Appalachia are complicated. And sometimes they're as difficult to grab hold of as the morning mountain fog. Lucy, you see, is not an old story. The legend says that Foster met her in 1909, but there's no evidence that the tale existed before the 1990s. In fact, locals claim that this entire story has never been part of the local lore. It was completely made up by tourists. There's something about the Appalachian Mountains that settles deep into people's bones. Dating back 480 million years, it's the oldest mountain range in the world. These mountains are older than the rings of Jupiter. Older than the ozone layer, they're even older than trees. Today, the mountains of Appalachia almost look like gentle rolling hills. But at one point, they were taller than the Himalayas. Over the course of hundreds of millions of years, they have eroded, shrinking from their original towering height to the soft, rounded peaks of the 21st century. These ancient mountains, hunched over with age, call to people's hearts. They inspire us. And so it only stands to reason that people have been telling stories about Appalachia for as long as they have been living there. From Cherokee lore to West Virginia miners, campfire stories, these mountains have been haunted for a very long time. But even though there are generations worth of Appalachian folklore and ghost stories out there, some people seem to think that there still aren't enough. On the Internet, we've seen the rise of Appalachian fake lore. From Reddit horror stories about the Not Deer to tourist tales about Lucy of the Roaring Fork. The landscape, landscape of Appalachian storytelling has completely changed within the last 30 years. Of course, technically, all folklore once started out as fake lore. That's how we've always gotten new stories. At some point, someone had to actually come up with a tall tale and then start spreading it around. But these new spooky stories aren't actually from the Appalachian region. And as the years pass, it becomes harder and harder to know what stories were created by the people who live there and which ones are, for lack of a better term, alien to the landscape. True Appalachian folklore gives us a unique insight into a very specific slice of American culture, a culture built by the grit and toil that it took to make a home in those hills. And I say this as a lover of legends and tall tales. We need to be picky and fight to preserve the older generation stories as much as we can so that they don't get lost to history. Because if we manage to remember their ghosts, then they will never truly die. Without the railroad, there's no telling what Appalachia would look like today. The region was notoriously difficult for travelers. Early colonists were forced to rely on passes like the Cumberland Gap or which could easily be blocked by snow. Otherwise, they traveled along rivers and canoes. Even after a few trails were created, it was still hard to get a wagon and a team of horses through the mountains. This meant that Appalachian settlements were isolated. It was hard for locals to get man made goods shipped in from bigger cities, and even more difficult to convince visitors to stop by. Compared to the rest of the bustling east coast, very few people wanted to settle in a part of the country where where they would have so few neighbors or daily luxuries that shifted. Once the railroad industry started to make its way into Appalachia, it still wasn't the easiest place to live. But suddenly people could buy a train ticket and be in the heart of the mountains in a matter of days, not weeks or months. It was a big change, but it was the first thing that really connected the people of Appalachia to the outside world. Whether or not they wanted to be connected was another matter entirely. The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, or as it was more commonly known, the B and O, was the first railway company to breach the mountains, snaking its way through the Potomac river valley until it reached Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. If you were to visit the town today, you could still walk along the old tracks. In fact, it's encouraged. Harpers Ferry is run by the National Park Service, preserved in time as a 19th century village, and the BNO's bridge over the river is still a major tourist attraction. What you won't see today are the little sheds that once lined the tracks. Those storage sheds were used during the railroad's construction to store tools and materials. After the tracks were completed, they were abandoned by the B and O, only to be taken over by the local unhoused population. The sheds were drafty and depressing, but when your only other option was to sleep outside, they were the obvious choice. Our next story can be traced all the way back to 1833, when the B and O was still a relatively new presence in Harpers Ferry. A young woman named Jenny was living in one of those sheds along the track. Even though she didn't have much, Jenny was said to be a kind and generous soul who would go out of her way to help anyone who needed it. She would even give them her dinner if she thought that they needed it more. On this particular cold autumn night, no one had needed any food, so Jenny was able to eat her dinner in peace. Sitting by her little fire. She sipped on her broth, savoring the warmth that filled her belly. And she was so focused on her soup that she didn't notice when a spark flew from the flames and landed on her skirt. By the time she saw the fire that was spreading along her hem, it was too late. She tried to douse the flame by tossing the rest of her broth over it, but there wasn't enough liquid to stop it. Panicking, Jenny ran out of the shed, screaming for help, but nobody came. The night was still. The only living soul out there was Jenny, wailing in agony as her clothes caught fire. Blinded by the pain, she stumbled about, still screaming for help. She didn't notice it when she stepped on the tracks, and she never saw the train coming. As the train rounded the bend, the engineer saw a moving ball of fire that, and I quote, barely looked human on the tracks in front of him. He hit the brakes, but it was too late. The train couldn't stop. Jenny's body was found on the tracks, mangled and still smoldering. She was buried in an unmarked grave, and to this day, no one knows where she is. But the train engineers can never forget her. It's said that on the anniversary of her death, every year a burning woman appears on the tracks, screaming for somebody to help her. According to one longtime ghost tour guide. In Harpers Ferry, you can, and I quote, watch the trains pass this point in the old armory yard. You will be able to tell which engineers have met Screaming Jenny by the slack speed by which they guide their trains over this section of track. It's fair to say that Screaming Jenny is a staple in Harpers Ferry folklore. She's so well known that she even has an IPA named after her from a local brewery. There's just one problem with her story. The B and O Railroad wasn't in Harper's Ferry in 1833. Most people seem to agree that the story originated in that year. But at the time, there was no train because that could have run over Jennie. Now, bear with me for a moment because I have to go through a bit of train history for you. The B and O Railroad had announced plans to build a railway to Harpers Ferry in 1833. In 1834, they began to extend the tracks toward West Virginia with the intention of crossing the Potomac into Harpers Ferry. By the end of that year, they had reached the river, and in 1837, the truss was completed. It would be expanded and improved in later years. But the important thing here is that there were no trains running through Harpers Ferry until 1837. Now, maybe the year 1833 was a typo or a misunderstanding. That's totally possible. After all, this is a hyper local legend that was mostly spread by word of mouth, and someone's wires could have gotten crossed before it was ever written down. But I'd like to propose a different theory. You see, Harper's Ferry was in a beautiful corner of the world. Thomas Jefferson actually called it, and I quote, perhaps one of the most stupendous scenes in nature. The people who lived in that little town were proud of it. They knew that they had something special. And so maybe, just maybe, Screaming Jenny's story originated as a local reaction to the 1833 news that the B and O Railroad would be tearing down their trees and trampling their land. Maybe they didn't want engine smoke polluting their skies or hundreds of visitors pouring into their little town. Maybe they were happy with things as they were. It's possible that Screaming Jenny was meant to represent Harper's fairy. Poor but happy. Until the train ran them all over. Adam Livingston was having problems, and that was putting it mildly. Before now, he had been a prosperous landowner up in Pennsylvania. Unfortunately, he had come upon hard times. All of his cattle died and his barn had burned down. So when he and his family moved to the remote settlement of Middleway, Virginia, it was for one reason and one reason to make a fresh start. Unfortunately, that fresh start quickly turned rancid. Adam's bad luck was about to get so much worse. And it all started in 1794, when a traveler stopped at the farm and asked to stay for the night. Now, when I tell you that Middleway was remote, I mean that it was really, really remote. Even Today, less than 500 people live there. Back in the 1790s, Adam Livingston lived miles away from any other farms, and he was even further from any kind of inn or tavern. And, and in rural areas like this, it wasn't unusual that travelers would ask for a place to stay. And Adam, of course, had no problem with doing the neighborly thing and letting a stranger into his home. Unfortunately, this unnamed traveler quickly became sick. The Livingston family did all that they could for him, but his illness moved rapidly and soon enough, he was lying on his deathbed. The stranger, knowing that he was not long for this world, begged Adam to send for a priest. And he was a devout Catholic and he wanted to have his last rites read before he died. Adam, however, was an equally devout Lutheran. He was uncomfortable with the idea of inviting a Catholic priest into his home. At the time, only about 1% of the American population was Catholic. Anti Catholic prejudice was rampant. And as it turns out, Adam Livingstone subscribed to that bias. And there was also a logistical problem here. There just weren't that many Catholic priests hanging around. With Catholicism being so unpopular, a rural area like Middleway was most decidedly not a hotbed for priests. So in the end, Adam didn't find a priest. Or maybe he didn't bother sending for one. The result, no matter. His reasoning, was the same. The stranger died without receiving the last rites that he so desperately wanted. And he was buried on unconsecrated ground without a Catholic mass. It was a tragic way for a life to end. It was bad enough to be unceremoniously laid to rest in the presence of strangers instead of friends. But he didn't even get the basic dignity of being sent to the afterlife in a way that he wanted. And as it would turn out, the stranger had a solution. He simply didn't go into the afterlife. Now, don't get me wrong, he definitely died. But as any horror movie aficionado knows, someone who passes away without receiving their final wish just might find a way to stick around for a bit. And unfortunately for the Livingston family, this spirit decided to stick around inside their house. It's said that after the traveler died, candles there would not stay lit in the room where his corpse had been laid out for months on end. Any money that was kept in the house disappeared. Embers and burning logs jumped out of the fireplace, sometimes flying across the room. Beds spontaneously burst in a flame. The Livingston family even kept hearing the ghostly sounds of horses galloping around their house or the noise of china shattering when no crockery had actually been broken. But the most distinctive disruption of all was the clipping. The family constantly heard the sound of scissors snipping. Open and close, open and close. Click, click. And then small crescent shaped holes would appear in materials around the house. No cloth was safe from the ominous clipping. Whether it was linen or leather boots. Even the clothes people were wearing on their bodies could be cut to shreds. The scissor happy spirit continued his reign of terror inside the Livingstone house for years. It became such a well known haunting that the settlement of Middleway itself was dubbed wizard clip and its townspeople were called clippers. The story was so incredibly odd that it spread quickly and people traveled from all over to visit the wizard Clipse ghost. One visitor wrapped her hat in a handkerchief to save it from getting snipped, only to find at the end of her visit that it had been targeted regardless of her caution. Another story claims that a group of young men brought some girls who they wanted to impress to the Livingston house in an attempt to convince their dates of their bravery. They heard the scissors snip and one of the loudest of the men boasted that he wasn't afraid. But until the seat of his pants were cut away, Adam Livingston, of course, tried to expel the ghost. Unfortunately, his Lutheran pastor couldn't help. He then recruited a Methodist minister who ran out of the house after an invisible hand pelted him with stones. Adam even went so far as to bring in a conjurer. But he wasn't able to get rid of the spirit either. In the end, Adam gave in to what the ghost had truly wanted. He begged for a catholic priest named father Dennis cahill To come and help. And at first, the priests merely blessed the home and sprinkled holy water around it. This small offering seemed to be enough to convince the ghost to return some of the missing money, but not to stop its destructive haunting. Undeterred, father cahill brought another priest to the house, and together they performed an exorcism followed by a mass. The ghost finally got the catholic funeral it wanted. Fully at peace now, he laid down his proverbial scissors, Only to terrorize the livingston family in an entirely new way. You see, the wizard may have lost his clip, so to speak, but in the process, he seems to have found his voice. And I mean that quite literally, because almost immediately after the final exorcism, the livingstons began to hear what they dubbed as the voice. This disembodied voice constantly followed them around their home, Unleashing his greatest horror yet, Leaving, lecturing them nonstop about religion. He truly wasn't giving up on his faith. Every day, he taught the livingstons all about catholicism, Asked for prayers, and even demanded that they fast on specific days. If they didn't do exactly what he said, Then he would become destructive again. And as unwelcome as the voice initially was, he had an unexpected impact on the Livingston family. His devotion from beyond the grave Was a powerful testament. And so, years after the traveler died in their house, Adam livingston and his children Converted to catholicism, all because of the work of a Holy Ghost. In 1802, Adam Livingstone sold 34 acres of his very own land to the catholic church for the measly sum of $1. He only had one. A clergy member always had to live on the land, and all profits should be set aside to build a church there. Unfortunately, and sort of ironic Given the origins of his story, Adam's desires weren't initially honored. The land stayed empty for over 100 years. But then, in 1920, a small chapel was finally built there. And in 1978, this land was turned into a facility for prayer retreats called priest field. You can actually still visit priestfield today, and many who do say that it feels like they're on sacred ground. At one point, the voice had told the livingstons, and I quote, before the end of time, this will be a great place of prayer and fasting and praise. That prediction came true, and most of the livingstones seemed to have believed in the vision. There was just one problem. Adam's wife, Mary, really didn't buy into it. Mary was the only member of the Livingston family who did not convert to Catholicism. She may have been a devout Lutheran, or maybe she was just a very suspicious woman. You see, Mary didn't actually believe that the voice belonged to the ghost who had terrorized her house for years. In her mind, that haunting should have fully gone away once they'd had a proper Catholic exorcism. But it didn't. It had just changed its methods. And if you recall, the Livingstons had been fairly prejudiced against Catholics before all of this took place. It would seem that Mary had maintained that bias. Maybe she didn't trust the priests who performed the exorcism. Or she thought that their fame had attracted Catholic ne' er do wells. Whatever the reason, Mary believed that the voice was a scam. She thought that it was the Catholic Church trying to steal their land. You can decide which is more improbable. An evil scheme to take a family's home or a ghost who moonlit as a theology professor, both stretch the limit of believability. I know. But in a roundabout way, Mary was actually kind of right in the end. Her husband truly did give their land to the Church. So Holy Ghost or Holy scammers. Either way, the result was the same. Dozens of acres of newly consecrated holy ground. I hope you've enjoyed today's brief trip through Appalachia. These hills are rife with stories with folklore hiding in just about every shadow and legends that seem to haunt you through the night. I don't know that one single episode can do the place the justice it deserves, though, so we'll definitely have to head back sometime in the future. That said, we do have time for one more tale that can't be missed. Stick around through this brief sponsor break to hear all about it. 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They paid off my family's four phones up to $3200 and gave us four new phones on the house. Bon voyage.