![]() ![]() Mining stopped, and undertakers from Foglesong Funeral Home were called in to exhume the remains and give them a proper burial at the Zuspan Cemetery. "Finally, in 1986, Mary Somerville’s grave was discovered by strip miners who were working on the edge of the Big Woods. They turned the car around and got the heck out of there, though her screams followed them all the way to town. Several officers came out and found the source of the screaming-a ghostly woman standing in the road with her face scratched and bloody. Thinking that a living woman was in trouble, he did what any sane person would do and called the police. "One night a newcomer to the area heard the screams. Screams with what seemed like no source echoed through the woods.Ī country road leads past the haunt of the Screaming Lady of Mason County, West Virginia. More often than not, it was heard rather than seen. Not knowing about Mary Somerville, they simply called her 'the Screaming Lady.'įor more than a hundred years, the ghost haunted the Big Woods. Some Irish immigrants feared they had brought a banshee with them, though the reports had started before they arrived. "Not long after the family's departure, farmers and woodsmen began to report hearing a woman’s screams coming from the Big Woods at night. Her family left Mason County not long after and resettled in Indiana, but Mary remained, in more ways than one, some say. "Though Mary was obviously missing, the crime was never discovered. They saw that Mary was alone, broke into the cabin, assaulted her, then took her deep into the woods and buried her alive. Maybe they were lumberjacks returning to town, maybe they were laborers returning home. ![]() "As the legend goes, a group of men was passing the farm that night. Perhaps the rest of the family had gone to town or were visiting nearby relatives. Mason County, on the Ohio River in western West Virginia, is renowned for its well-tended farmlands. The two younger boys, John and David, along with daughters Rebecca, Mary, Catherine, and Martha, helped their parents on the farm. The two older boys, William and Weston, were laborers, possibly at one of the lumber mills. "One of the farmers here was David Somerville, who lived a fairly ordinary life with his wife Catherine and their eight children. In just a few years, this little pocket of farmland had gone from being pretty much the middle of nowhere to a major crossroads between the four towns. "The lumber operations by themselves required a small army of laborers, and the clear-cutting provided an easy route from Gibbstown to Clifton, Mason, or Hartford. The mills, looking for old-growth forest, worked their way out from Hartford, Mason, and Clifton, and clear cut enormous tracts of countryside. That was changing, though, in 1850 as the coal mines and salt furnaces of the Bend sought out lumber for their mills and attracted laborers from the country farms. ![]() "More than 150 years ago," Rizer writes, "this area was a pocket of farmland surrounded on all four sides by thick forest known as the Big Woods. Hay lays in windrows on a farm in Mason County where the ghost of Mary Sommerville may yet walk. With his permission, I've reprinted an emended selection from that feature here to ensure I'm hitting the high points of the tale. Only a few months before, he had published a story about the haunting in the Point Pleasant Register, to which he regularly submits features regarding local history. ![]()
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