haunting the ghost towns | brenton, wv

Fingers of lightning tore holes in the black skies as an angry cloudburst drenched the surrealistic landscape. It was 3 A.M. on a cold, wet morning in late November 1967, and the little houses scattered along the dirt road winding through the hills of West Virginia were all dark. Some seemed unoccupied and in the final stages of decay. Others were un-painted, neglected, forlorn. The whole setting was like the opening scene of a Grade B horror film from the 1930s. Along the road there came a stranger in a land where strangers were rare and suspect. He walked up to the door of a crumbling farmhouse and hammered. After a long moment a light blinked on somewhere in the house and a young woman appeared, drawing a cheap mail-order bathrobe tightly about her. She opened the door a crack and her sleep-swollen face winced with fear as she stared at the apparition on her doorstep. He was over six feet tall and dressed entirely in black. He wore a black suit, black tie, black hat, and black overcoat, with impractical black dress shoes covered with mud. His face, barely visible in the darkness, sported a neatly trimmed mustache and goatee. The flashes of lightning behind him added an eerie effect. “May I use your phone?” He asked in a deep baritone, his voice lacking the familiar West Virginia accent. The girl gulped silently and backed away.

from "The Mothman Prophecies" by John A. Keel

up some holler in red jacket, west virginia

Cass, West Virginia (1970)

Old Pugh homestead 1969

Autumn killed the Summer with the softest kiss

Blackwater falls/ Davis, WV

October 21st

Forgotten playhouse in Princeton, WV

Appalachia in its entirety

Map of Appalachian subranges (I consider Appalachia to be anything in the Appalachian Mountains so; Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Maryland, West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, North and South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama)

Broken glass around the foundations of old miners’ homes in Nuttallburg, West Virginia

Gary, WV. 2018

Photo credits Al Benbow / @apb.graphics on Instagram

some appalachian nostalgia. grew up in west virginia, these photos are mine.

btw it’s pronounced app-uh-lach-uhn.

mcdowell county, west virginia

Elkins, West Virginia (2005)

The Hatfield family of the Hatfield-McCoy feud, West Virginia and Kentucky, 1897