The Christmas Eve Hitchhiker

Route 310 across from
Valley Falls Road

Being from the Huntington area, and working with investigation teams based in that city, the most (in)famous phantom hitchhiker that I'm familiar with is the ghostly woman in white who haunts the 5th Street Hill area, begging cabbies and bus drivers to give her a ride to the bottom of the hill, where she promptly vanishes around Ritter Park.

I'm not sure of exactly when it was, but several years ago, I started seeing the story of another phantom hitchhiker in the state. Up in the northern part of West Virginia, between Grafton and Fairmont, was a woman in red. The Lady in Red has been seen along Old Grafton Road (WV-310) near Valley Falls Road. Drivers have noted a woman with long, dark matted hair wearing a matted gown, walking alongside the highway. She appears to be sopping wet, with her gown closely clinging to her skin, and her hair dripping down her back. Whatever the weather, she appears to be hunched over, struggling against a strong wind that may or may not be present.

Occasionally, she frantically waves down a passerby, and occasionally, a Good Samaritan will stop and offer her a ride. Those who have notice the woman emits a scent of old fashioned perfume---and death. She struggles into the vehicle, and then softly asks the driver to take her to Cook Hospital in Fairmont. Unfortunately, Cook Hospital hasn't existed since 1938-9, when a bigger hospital, Fairmont General, was built. Nevertheless, the drivers take the woman to the Gaston Avenue address. As they pull up in front of the NON-hospital site and go to open her door for her, they find her seat empty. She has vanished. 

Former Cook Hospital
Fairmont, December 2019

The most well-known sighting of the Lady in Red comes from a truck driver in what I'm guessing was the 1960's or very early 1970's. It was Christmas Eve, a little before midnight. The truck driver, working for the Owens-Illinois Plant was carrying a load of powdered glass to the Fairmont factory along WV-310 when he was flagged down by a woman in a red dress.

He helped her into the passenger side of his truck, and since she was shivering violently in the cold, December air, he draped his coat around her shoulders. As she always did, she quietly asked him to take her to Cook Hospital. Being local to the area, he tried to reason with her that Cook Hospital no longer existed. But, he pitied the poor thing, alone and shivering on the side of the highway, and so he drove her the 10 miles into Fairmont to the site of Cook Hospital. As expected, when they arrived and he went to help her down out of the seat, she had vanished, leaving only his own coat lying in the seat where she had once sat.

The trucker was already running late when he stopped to pick the woman up, and the side trip to the hospital was another several miles out of his way. Therefore, his bosses weren't happy and he was fired for his tardiness. It is said that he contacted the well-known folklorist and collector of ghost stories, Ruth Ann Musick, who was then able to contact his employers and get his job back!

To this day, no one knows who the fancily dressed woman in red is, or why she was so desperate to get to Cook Hospital. Was she a nurse/nursing student trying to get back home after a night of partying, yet met a terrible accident along Old Grafton Road in the rain? Was she involved in an accident on the way to or from a Christmas party and trying to make it to the hospital to receive treatment? We may never know for sure. 

Cook Hospital, 1906
Source: WV History on View

In December of 2019, my husband and I did try to see the lady in red for ourselves. We waited until nearly midnight, then drove up and down the area where WV-310 meets with Valley Falls Road. Valley Falls Road leads directly to Rock Lake; could this lake have something to do with why the woman appears to be sopping wet...or was she simply caught in a storm, fighting against both rain and wind? The night my husband and I went out searching, the weather was unseasonably warm and mild. To our disappointment, despite next to no traffic, no woman in red was observed either. We went ahead and drove into Fairmont to take a look at the old Cook Hospital. At the time, it was being converted from office space for the Marion County Board of Education to low-income apartment space. Nothing spooky was noted there, either. 

Obviously, this story contains a lot of the same phantom hitchhiking tropes that are found around the world---a mysterious person, usually a woman, and usually dressed inappropriately for the weather, asks motorists to take her to an address that may no longer exist (or when they get there, find out that the woman did live there, but has been dead for many years). When the motorist goes to let her out of the car, they've found she has mysteriously vanished without a trace. We don't get that closure that many of these stories have, however. We never get her back story. We never know why she was out, and why exactly it was the hospital she was desperately trying to return to.

What we do get is even MORE mystery. This story has elements borrowed from a few other West Virginia tales. For example, in Ruth Ann Musick's book, Coffin Hollow and Other Ghost Stories, there's a story called 'Vision in the Snow' about a cab driver during the Great Depression who was fired after picking up a disappearing woman in late December. The rationale was that the cab company couldn't afford to be picking up customers that didn't pay their fare, despite their status of being alive or dead. (I read this story on my TikTok if you're interested!)

So there's at least two stories from WV where someone was fired after picking up a phantom hitchhiker, and both have a direct connection with author and professor, Ruth Ann Musick. Further, our lady from this story isn't the only Lady in Red out hitchhiking West Virginia roads. As seen in the book, Cry of the Banshee, by Susan Sheppard, Rt. 50 (the road between Salem and Clarksburg) is home to a ghostly woman in red. When the moon is full, motorists have said to have spotted a woman wearing a red hooded coat, walking along the side of the road. Those who stop to ask the woman if she needs help are shocked to discover that under the scarlet hood, the woman has no face. Allegedly, this woman is also said to follow motorists home, pacing outside of their home, peering into their windows with her faceless visage.

Clarksburg is not far from Fairmont at all, so it seems strange that despite the huge disparity between these two ghostly hitchhikers, they both appear in RED, as opposed to the classic white. The Route 50 hitchhiker doesn't actually hitch a ride...unless you count following people home ::shudder::...which makes me prefer an encounter with the Fairmont ghost any day, especially around the Christmas season! 

For more on this story, Haunted West Virginia is the place to go!