Hinton Has Saucers, Too

 

The Leader
10 July 1947

I just love an interesting tidbit of flying saucer lore from the Mountain State! This little article was published in the 10 July 1947 of The Leader, a small newspaper out of Hinton, West Virginia. Just DAYS after the story broke about an alleged UFO crash in Roswell, New Mexico, a housewife from Hinton reported her OWN eyewitness account of no less than six flying saucers over the southern WV town of Hinton, located in Summers County. 

The inevitable report of saucers flying over Hinton came into the Daily News office today.

B.M. Ramsey, 419 Summers street, said his wife, Lee, saw them Saturday afternoon at 2:50 o'clock and "they were about as big as those little plates you get out of boxes of oatmeal."

"She was sitting on the front porch and saw them come over Cemetery hill. I was in the house and she hollered to me, but by the time I got outside they were gone.

"She said they were standing up on edge, cutting through the air. I asked her how many there were and she said she couldn't tell, but she counted six.

"A plane had come over just a minute before, and she glanced up and saw these saucers come over the hill. They were flying from south to north and disappeared over the mountain."

Five years later, Hinton would once again jump on the UFO bandwagon. As reports of flying saucers were coming in from all over the United States, including Washington, D.C., multiple sightings made the local newspaper that summer! In late July of 1952, three women (also on Summers Street) saw a spinning UFO. A month later, a bus driver and several passengers saw what looked like a slow-moving 'wash tub.' I've discussed these two cases in depth in an earlier blog, which you can read here: UFOs Over Hinton

Is Hinton, West Virginia some kind of UFO hotbed or area of high strangeness? Were the locals simply influenced by bigger UFO cases gripping the nation at the time and simply made a misidentification based on those perceptions? Did the newspaper editors just have a brilliant plan to sell papers? Whatever the reason for the influx of UFO cases over Hinton, the fact that they were preserved by the local paper has inevitably tied them to West Virginia's weird and wonderful history...a history that I hope to help document and share with future generations!

*If you have a UFO sighting or experience you'd like to share, please leave me a comment below, or find me over on Theresa's Haunted History Facebook!*

Movie Review: American Werewolves

Last night, my husband and I decided to have a lil' impromptu home movie night. Being as we're cheap, we popped some popcorn, snuggled into bed, and brought up the Tubi app on my tablet to see what was available. Our original plan was to find a pretty bad B-level sci-fi horror to riff on ( awhile back we watched a horribly hilarious movie called Christmas Twisters, but the title card was misspelled as Christams Twisters and we still laugh about it to this day). But, Tubi has really stepped up its level of programming, especially when it comes to paranormal documentaries, and is even carrying quite a few of the Small Town Monsters selections!

As a native West Virginian, I've been following Seth Breedlove and the rest of the STMs crew almost since the beginning. I've loved their work on films featuring West Virginia favorites like the Flatwoods Monster and the Mothman...and I've (almost) forgiven them for leaving me out of the UFO feature---I swear, it felt like I was the only WV researcher NOT interviewed for that one, and I've actually seen quite a few UFOs in addition to my documentation of old UFO cases. Anyway, I digress. I try to keep up with all the new releases, and when I contributed to the 2022 Kickstarter, American Werewolves was one of the projects I was most looking forward to. 

Each STM movie is its own documentary. I've enjoyed seeing the the filmmakers' style evolve with each new production, but not just evolve. Each movie really is unique in the way it is shot and laid out. American Werewolves is a rather dark, atmospheric documentary that relies almost entirely on eyewitness accounts. There's a little folklore and history thrown in for context, but for the most part American Werewolves is a collection of stories told by the people who lived them. And these stories are absolutely terrifying.

When I think of an American werewolf, my thoughts go straight to the rougarou of the southern states. That's not really the focus of this documentary, however. Rather, the focus is on what cryptozoologists generally have come to call dogmen, a phenomenon largely associated in the case known famously as the Beast of Bray Road (Wisconsin). The dogmen of American Werewolves, however, are tales mostly from Ohio and Kentucky,  but especially an area of Tennessee known as The Land Between the Lakes. I kind of wish that the distinction between a dogman and a werewolf was explained a little more thoroughly, but to some, there really is no distinction, as we have no idea exactly what these 'dogmen' are. It's interesting to note, however, that many of the witnesses who told their stories, despite describing flesh and blood bipedal creatures with a canine head and ears, swore that they felt there was some sort of supernatural element to these beings. They weren't just animals; they were truly monsters beyond our current realm of understanding.

I don't want to give away too much of the actual stories because I really think you need to watch this film. But, I'm pleased that they mentioned a few things that research has seemed to link with these sightings, such as encounters being reported near Adena burial mounds and near sources of water. With all the Adena burial mounds that were (and the many that still are standing) in West Virginia, I'm really surprised that we don't have a ton more reports of dogmen. However, that may be a good thing, as another common thread in many of the stories shared in American Werewolves was a theme of violence. At best, the encounter left the witness with a feeling of fear and dread. At worst, people were presumed to be massacred. 

Overall, I'd definitely recommend giving this film a watch. It's a little under an hour and a half long, and is available on a variety of streaming platforms. Even a die hard skeptic who might not necessarily give much credence to eyewitness testimony alone, can still enjoy these tales for simply just being well told spooky campfire stories---in some cases, literally. American Werewolves is an interesting look at a cryptid that doesn't seem to get as much attention as some of the others in this field, but if there is any truth at all to these claims, it's definitely a phenomenon that warrants all the attention we can give it. It might just save someone from becoming the next victim of the dogman. 

Small Town Monsters Website

Small Town Monsters YouTube

Cursed Fridge: AFriday Funny

 

My stepmother had a heart attack on our kitchen floor in the middle of an electrical storm, and her soul was transferred into the computer unit of our smart fridge. She has been subtly undermining me ever since, commenting on how many processed cheese slices I've eaten, or whether I've put properly a lid back on a thing.

Whilst my wife finds comfort in her mother's still being around, I'm starting to feel it completely unreasonable that she's decided to linger in our fridge, judging me on my culinary decisions. SHE HAS TO GO.  Aside from the soul within, the fridge itself is in complete working order, and I'm sure the unit would be farm more agreeably housed with someone who hadn't forced their 'perfect child' into a life of 'mediocre servitude' 

I've come across this little flyer for a haunted fridge up for sale a couple of different times on social media, and have definitely had a giggle. This sounds like the perfect plot for a sci-fi horror; actually, I'm pretty sure I HAVE seen a near-similar plot! Anyway, it's interesting and begs the question---can an appliance be haunted, especially one with such a high tech computer component to it, here a human consciousness may become intertwined? That's kinda horrifying to think about. 

Want MORE haunted appliance stories?

Satanic Toast: A Tale of a Possessed Toaster

Possessed Toilet

'Bewitched' Man Adjudged Insane

 

Bluefield Daily Telegraph
22 May 1917

As someone who started her college career as a psychology major, the line between mental illness and the paranormal has always been a topic that has fascinated, but has also befuddled, me. While arguably there a many, many cases that would once be deemed the work of demons and/or spirits that can now be easily diagnosed and treated as a mental disorder, there are always the cases where the lines are blurred. Perhaps there are even cases where the lines overlap. And...in the most frightening scenario, perhaps there are even a few cases where a person was experiencing true paranormal activity, yet was deemed 'insane' by the medical community. 

Which one of these scenarios, if any, fit the tragic fate of Crew Hall, a middle-aged farmer from Mercer County, West Virginia.  In may of 1917, Mr. Hall was was committed to the state asylum in Spencer, WV after being adjudged insane by lunacy commission. What was the cause of this diagnosis? Well, Mr. Hall was convinced that he, along with his farm animals and farm equipment, were bewitched by neighbors. He nearly beat his horse to death, and sold a young heifer because he claimed that both animals were under a spell. He also claimed a spell affected the handles of his plow and axe, causing his to be unable to use them. At the time of being admitted to the hospital in Spencer, Hall was married with three daughters. The local newspaper that reported on the case mentions that three years prior, Mr. Hall had undergone similar delusions, but to a lesser extent. 

Entrance to Spencer State Hospital
Source: WV History on View 

Unfortunately, it seems as though Mr. Hall would never recover from this latest bout of delusions. On January 20, 1919, C.D. (Crews) Hall died within the walls of the Spencer State Hospital in Roane County. The cause of death was tuberculosis.  It would seem to the modern reader that Mr. Hall was simply another mentally ill patient, admitted to a state facility in a time where there weren't many options in the way of treatment for such issues. But COULD there be something deeper? COULD Mr. Hall have been telling the truth when he claimed that a neighbor bewitched him? 

A superstitious belief in witchcraft was prevalent in the county and surrounding areas, at least until the late 1930's. Back in April, I posted a blog sharing another old newspaper article which not only mentions that residents were still taking witch stories seriously, but told the tale of a young boy, years previously, who had been bewitched by a neighbor. In the boy's case, he refused to take any food or drink. Yet, when a certain neighbor visited, the boy would eat what the man would feed him. The father decided to get to the bottom of what was going on, and nailed a picture of the man to a tree. He then drove another nail straight through the head on the picture, and sure enough, the neighbor came down with a splitting headache, which didn't go away until the nail was removed. After that, the boy's appetite came back and he recovered his full health. 

Just out of sheer curiosity, I looked up the Hall family in the 1910 census, and found Cruse Hall (age 31), with his wife Virginia and infant son, living in Mercer County somewhere in the East River area. All this matches up. I've included a clip of his closest neighbors to each side, both of which who ran farms in the area. Obviously, no one had 'witch' or 'conjurer' listed under their profession, and no one on the whole census sheet really stood out as what would be considered an 'outsider' for that time period. I also just did a really quick, cursory newspaper archive search to see if there were any obvious legal troubles, property disputes, or so forth that were published in the papers, but didn't come up with anything. So yeah...was it just an unfortunate case of mental illness, or has history silenced an actual case of witchcraft in a small West Virginia community. 

1910 Census

Want MORE Articles on Witchcraft in West Virginia? 

Witchcraft in Bluefield, WV

The Witch of Hooker Hollow

The Tyler County Witch

Food Among the Flowers: A Haunted History of a Former Funeral Home

Food Among the Flowers
formerly Bartlett-Burdette-Cox Funeral Home

Several months ago, Spectral Research and Investigation was approached by April of The Charleston Ghost Tour Company to help investigate a 'virgin' location---a location right here in Charleston, West Virginia that had never before been investigated. Of course, we jumped at the chance, and made arrangements to meet with April, Gerry, and several other members of his staff to work out the logistics of a full-scale overnight investigation.

Walking into the location, I was already enthralled. From the outside, its a beautiful old building, and it's big, but I don't think you can really appreciate just HOW big until you really start to explore the maze of corridors and rooms that make up the two stories plus basement. Built on the west side of Charleston (Elk City District area) around 1930, the building began its life as Bartlett's Funeral Home, later to be known as Bartlett-Burdette-Cox Funeral Home. Currently, the location is home to Food Among the Flowers, a florist and event planning/catering business. 

I have to give a shout out to Gerry and the rest of the staff at Food Among the Flowers. This is an awesome local business. If you're planning a wedding, a graduation, or any other big event that needs food, flowers, or any other type of similar service, give them a call! If you need a beautiful bouquet of flowers sent to a loved one for any occasion, give them a call! If you'd like your home or business professionally decorated for the holidays, they can do that, too.  They do beautiful, professional work, and are just awesome people to boot. Plus, their showroom is just a really cool place to browse. Sprinkled among the tasteful silk floral arrangements and upscale lawn and home goods are hilarious, cheeky little gifts that are perfect for family and friends...or as a special treat just for you. Anyway....

From that initial meeting, we knew this location had a lot of potential. In fact, as we were standing around talking, we heard the distinct, disembodied sound of phantom keys jingling down an empty back hallway! We learned that we weren't the only ones that had heard that, or similar sounds. Footsteps, items shifting, jingling sounds, were common, as were other minor occurrences such as two swivel chairs in the main first floor work area rotating on their own and stopping like they were facing the person talking. There was also some talk about the sound system being played with, as if the potential spirits in the buildings didn't quite care for certain choices of music.

The elevator that always took one employee to the basement,
whether or not that's where she wanted to go or not!
To the right is the shelf where Baby Grace's body was
said to have awaited burial for so many years.

Overall, the activity described was not mean, scary, or malevolent in any way, although it could be a bit unnerving at times. We were told that one member of the staff hated using the elevator because even though she'd push the UP button to go to the second floor, it'd inevitably take her down to the dark, creepy basement where the old body storage units were found. Activity seemed to peak when the staff was staying late, and seemed more concentrated on the right side of the building where the living quarters/apartment section is located. It was described almost as if someone was watching them and knew that it was past hours, and therefore, time to be heading on out for the evening. 

As stated, this location WAS a funeral home from around 1930 all the way up until 2016 and I think the first inclination for some people is that, wow...that's creepy. OF COURSE A FUNERAL HOME WOULD BE HAUNTED! But would it be? According to ghost lore, most ghosts tend to haunt places that meant something to them, such as where they lived or where they died, or even where they spent a lot of time (such as places they worked, or places they really enjoyed visiting in life). Why would they want to stick around with their bodies? There are a couple of theories that say its possible that the soul would stay with the body for a set period of time, or perhaps indefinitely if it had nowhere else to go...so what type of ghosts could possibly be haunting THIS location? That's what SRI, joined with Charleston Ghost Tour Company and Mountaineer Paranormal set out to find during our investigation in late May. 

And one of the first stories we concentrated our research and investigation on was the tragic tale of Baby Grace. As the story goes, some time around the 1950s or so, the body of a baby girl was left on the steps of the funeral home. There was nothing left with the body to identify who the little girl was, or who her family had been. As with any other unclaimed body, the funeral home processed her as normal...but there was one difference. Generally, when an unclaimed body was brought into an area funeral home, it was processed by that funeral home and sent for burial at Charleston's Spring Hill Cemetery, which had a 'pauper's cemetery' section laid out for indigent individuals. For whatever reason, this baby girl's body was embalmed, laid out in a little coffin, and put upon a high shelf in the basement. 

Bruce Bartlett, original owner and founder
of Bartlett-Burdette-Cox Funeral Home

There she stayed, on a wooden shelf, right by the staircase, until 1996, when John 'Sonny' Cox, the owner, sold the business to Stewart Enterprises (which later became Service Corporation International). Cox stayed on as the funeral director, but under the business' new ownership, the staff was told that Baby Grace, as the little infant was now known, would finally need to be laid to rest. Supposedly, it was now time for her to take her place among the other unknowns in Spring Hill Cemetery. It's a heart-wrenching story, and those with knowledge of the tale are adamant that the story is exactly as described. Unfortunately from a documentation point of view...we just can't verify it. 

Sadly, there were a LOT of newborn babies found abandoned in the Charleston area, especially between the 1930's (onset of the Great Depression) and the 1960's (when most of the online records cease to be available). Going through the state archives, there are just pages after pages of unknown infants, many of them found thrown in the Elk River and the cause of death being hemorrhage due to the umbilical cord not being properly clamped. Several of these babies were brought in to Bartlett's, but the death certificates all state they were promptly buried in Spring Hill. There is no mention of any NOT being buried, or any actually being found on the steps of the funeral home itself. Nor is there any publicly available record of such a burial in or around 1996 at Spring Hill. So, although we cannot say the story didn't happen, we can't prove as of this writing that it did. 

This 2nd floor apartment wing was the site of much
activity during our investigation. Motion-activated 'cat balls'
continuously went off without any known source of provocation.

There's another unfortunate story connected to the funeral home, one that happened rather recently. In 2016, there was a mix up. Two women, passing away around the same time, were 'misidentified,' and the body of one ended up being shown at the funeral for the other. Despite protests from the family that the body in the casket was not who it was supposed to be, she was put in the grave meant for that other woman. The mix-up was finally acknowledged and proven, and of course the funeral home was sued by both families. That same year, Mr. Cox decided to retire as funeral director, so both factors inevitably led to the Bartlett-Burdette-Cox Funeral Home being shuttered for good. 

Those two cases by themselves could theoretically be fodder for some hauntings, but to do our due diligence, we have to look at ALL scenarios. Based on the feelings of the staff and the concentration of activity in the apartment area, could the ghosts of the building be from those who worked and/or lived there? To learn a little more about that, we had to take a look at just who owned the building. 

The land that now sits at 513 Tennessee Avenue was acquired by Bruce E. Bartlett in 1928 for the purpose of building a stately new funeral home. Bartlett had come from a family of funeral directors, and had been in business since 1918 on the East End of Charleston with a man named Boyle. The new West Side funeral home was finished around 1930, with Bartlett serving as funeral director until the early 1960's. He passed away in 1965, but his predecessor, Garnet Frank Burdette had already purchased the business...but not the building. The building actually remained in the Bartlett family until 1981 when John 'Sonny' Cox purchased the building. Cox had already been working there for years, and had purchased the business in 1976, right around the time Burdette passed away. These three owners/funeral directors were the main faces of Bartlett-Burdette-Cox, but they were joined by Harold Meadows, M.C. "Dugie" Tatum, and a host of other employees over the years.

Advertisement from 1974

Any number of these employees probably spent a great deal of time at the funeral home, working late into the wee hours of the morning, and probably spending more than a few overnights in the apartment wing of the building. It is interesting to note, however, that NONE of the buildings owners ever actually lived full time in the building with their families. Each owner maintained a separate private residence in another part of town. So, we speculate that the multiple bedrooms were either for those employees who were tasked with being 'on-call' or who had to work too late to make the drive home worth it...or perhaps as one newspaper ad from 1936 would suggest that those rooms were sometimes rented out to the public. There is a separate entrance on the side of the building which allows access to this section of the building. Could one of these former employees still be looking after the building that for so many years bore his name? It seems very possible, as throughout our evening the majority of the activity WE experienced on our investigation was concentrated on the second floor, especially in the area where the embalmings took place, and the hallway of the apartment wing. Most notably, we had quite a few odd noises picked up, and quite a few times where motion-activated 'cat balls' went off on their own. Personally, I felt extremely drawn to the stairway leading from the apartment wing to the outside exit, and as I was standing at the top of those stairs, our guest investigator who was conducting an Estes Method listening experiment stated that I should 'go down there.' 

Because of the experiences WE had, the potential evidence we caught, and the majority of activity reported by the clients, I feel inclined that there is a strong connection between the activity at Food Among the Flowers and the people associated with the daily operations of the funeral home. But, again we wouldn't be doing our due diligence if we didn't go back even another level...and take a look at the history of the location BEFORE the funeral home was even built. 

The pre-1930 West Side of Charleston was an interesting place. Prior to the Civil War, that entire area was home to several large plantations, including one named Edgewood owned by the James Carr family, and we do know that there was some minor troop movement probably directly through the area where the building now sits. Starting in the 1870s, however, is when the area begins to break up into individually owned plots of land, and the little town known as Elk City would be born. 

The crew prepares for our investigation!

In 1870, J.B. Walker moved to Charleston, West Virginia and began rapidly buying up land west of the Elk River, including land belonging to the James Carr family. He turned around and sectioned the land off, selling this particular plot to William Reveal in 1877. The land was in the Reveal family for ten years until it was sold to the James and Mary Cox family.  It was also owned by the Holians and the Higginbothams, before finally coming into possession into to Mr. Bartlett.  And, according to the Sanborn Fire Maps that are available, we know that at LEAST as far back as 1893, there was a private residence on the property--a two story wooden dwelling. Research is always an on-going endeavor, but as of this writing, I haven't found any significant events involving any of the families that owned the property previously that would make me suspect that we were in contact with them, or did we? Messages about a fire, or being burned kept coming through. Similar feelings of heat, or suffocation, or other things that could be associated with a fire kept popping up. What happened to that wooden dwelling? Was it simply torn down to make room for the new or was it destroyed by a fire at sometime between 1893 and 1912 when we have confirmation from available Sanborn maps that it stood on this corner? 

Spectral Research and Investigations has just begun to scratch the surface into this fascinating piece of Charleston's history, and we're hoping that we will have many more opportunities to come in and gather evidence and continue to compile historical documentation which will let us share the stories that have been hidden among its walls for 90 years. We've already had a wonderful opportunity this past weekend, to rejoin Charleston Ghost Tours and Mountaineer Paranormal, along with teaming up with Haunted Beckley and Amber's ParaWorld for a unique public event! Dining with the Departed: The Wake of Baby Grace offered patrons an eventful evening of delicious charcuterie, complimentary psychic readings, the premier of SRI's evidence compiled into a feature-length video, tours of the building, ghost stories, and of course, a chance to break into groups a do a little hands-on ghost hunting! 

If you missed out on that opportunity, don't worry...SRI's episode of Locked In: The Wake of Baby Grace at Food Among the Flowers, a film shot mostly by, and produced entirely by SRI videographer Kaysee Brabb, has officially been made public on our YouTube page! And...I wouldn't be too surprised if you see this location pop up as the venue for future public events. Stay spooky, everyone...and make sure you check out the links below to support the many people who pulled together to make this investigation and subsequent public event a reality. Stay spooky, ya'll. 

Links of Interest:

Food Among the Flowers Blog by Brian Clary, SRI Founder (SRI Official Website) (Facebook)

Locked In: Food Among the Flowers Video by Kaysee Brabb (SRI YouTube Channel)

Food Among the Flowers Blog by Austin Stanley, Mountaineer Paranormal (MP Website) (Facebook)

Food Among the Flowers

Charleston Ghost Tour Company (Facebook)

Haunted Beckley 

Amber's ParaWorld (YouTube Channel)

Sources: (Complete list coming soon!)

Glenwood Chronicles PowerPoint Presentation (PDF)

Elk City Historic District National Register Nomination Application (PDF)