Appalachian Folklore & Myths
If you turn off US 27 behind the Stearns Ranger District office and follow Barren Fork Road into the woods, the modern highway sound drops away faster than it should. The pavement gives way to a narrow loop beside a hillside graveyard shaded by hardwoods. This is Barren Fork Cemetery, the last visible piece of a vanished coal company town in McCreary County.
For locals and ghost hunters, it is also home to a story that insists on using another name. Online lists and social media posts call it the grave of “the Barren Fork Witch.” The stone belongs to a young woman named Anna Foster, buried here in 1938.
This article traces both stories at once. First comes the coal camp and the community cemetery that gave Anna a resting place. Then comes Anna herself, as far as the records will let us see her. Finally comes the legend that turned an ordinary grave into a witch’s grave and what that legend tells us about how people use haunted stories in coal country.
A coal town on Barren Fork
Long before anyone spoke of a witch at Barren Fork, this bend in the creek was a company town. In 1879 the Lexington Stave and Mining Company assembled timber and mineral lands here on the plateau above the Big South Fork. In the decades that followed, the operation evolved into the Barren Fork Mining and Coal Company and later Eagle Coal Company, with a tipple, company store, and rows of workers’ houses tucked into the hollows north of modern Whitley City.
The coal camp functioned like many others on the Cumberland Plateau. The company owned the land, the mine, and often the housing. Miners and their families lived in frame houses along the creek and ridge roads, buying food and supplies at the company store, and walking daily routes that led from front doors to drift mouths, rail sidings, and back again. A National Register of Historic Places listing for the “Barren Fork Coal Camp and Mine Archeological District” places the historic district along Barren Fork Road and notes that the site contained industrial facilities as well as worker housing.
By the early twentieth century census takers were recording “Barren Fork Precinct” in McCreary County as a coal camp community. The Kentucky Genealogical Society’s guide to coal mining ancestors singles the precinct out as a textbook example of a company town, with multiple households working for the same mine.
The camp’s peak decades overlapped with some of the most intense conflicts over coal unionization in the region. The mine at Barren Fork stayed active into the 1930s. U.S. Forest Service and tourism materials note that operations ceased after miners voted to join the United Mine Workers, and by the mid 1930s the town was empty. The Forest Service later acquired the tract for the Daniel Boone National Forest, removed most of the remaining structures, and left only foundations, scattered artifacts, and the cemetery hill.
Today the Barren Fork Heritage Trail runs through the old camp. The Forest Service describes it as a three quarter mile paved loop, beginning just behind the Stearns Ranger District office, that carries visitors past foundations and interpretive signs explaining what used to stand where there are now only trees and stone.
At the end of the road, in a loop of Barren Fork Cemetery Road, the town’s most visible surviving feature remains.
“The most visible element of the community”
The National Register nomination and modern forest literature are explicit about what survived when the company town disappeared. In the official paperwork the Barren Fork Cemetery is described as the most visible surviving element of the coal camp.
Older maps and modern photographs agree. From the parking area the cemetery rises in a gentle slope under hardwoods, with monuments stretching back toward the forest and the rim of the gorge. A widely circulated photograph taken in 2014 and preserved in image archives shows an open hilltop graveyard, some stones leaning at odd angles, others newer and upright, all framed by trees.
Volunteers with the McCreary County KYGenWeb project have transcribed the cemetery row by row and photographed many individual stones. Their work documents burials that reach back into the late nineteenth century and continue into the twenty first, with miners, timber workers, farmers, homemakers, and children all sharing the same hill.
The cemetery’s role as the town’s last landmark shows up in several different kinds of sources. A 2014 Kentucky Teacher feature on a heritage education program describes teachers visiting Daniel Boone National Forest and spending part of their time at a cemetery “still in use at the Barren Fork coal camp,” a community that had been abandoned after the mine closed in the mid 1930s.
More recently, a Barren Fork History Walk promoted by the local Cooperative Extension office advertised a guided event on the “Barren Fork Heritage Trail” open to all ages, underscoring that the Forest Service and local partners now treat the camp and its cemetery as an interpreted historic site rather than forgotten ruins.
Cemetery records also make clear that Barren Fork was not just a picturesque hillside. It was a hard place. The Kentucky Mine Accident Index and the federal Mine Data Retrieval System record multiple injuries and deaths tied to Barren Fork, including a well documented 1913 accident in which a miner named Henry Alvin Patrick died at the Barren Fork mine. His death certificate, used in a Kentucky Genealogical Society case study, places both his death and burial in the camp community, underscoring how the cemetery functioned as the final resting place for men killed in the mine.
By the time Anna Foster died in 1938, Barren Fork’s tipple and company town were fading, but the cemetery on the hill remained the place where coal camp families buried their dead.
Anna Foster in the records
So who was the woman whose grave would later be labeled “the Barren Fork witch”?
The most straightforward piece of evidence is Anna’s tombstone. The Find a Grave memorial for “Anna M Foster” records her birth as 7 April 1903 and her death as 24 September 1938, with burial at Barren Fork Cemetery in McCreary County. The age given is thirty five.
Photographs reproduced on blogs and genealogy sites show a modest upright stone crowned by a small lamb, a common funerary motif for children but also used occasionally on adult graves. In close up images taken before recent repairs, the lamb has been deliberately broken off, leaving a scarred top on the monument.
Behind those photographs lies a death certificate. Kentucky’s statewide vital registration system had been running for decades by 1938, and statewide indexes list an “Anna Foster” among McCreary County deaths in that year, filed under Kentucky Death Records 1911 to 1965. FamilySearch’s tree entry for “Anna Baker, 1904 to 1938” links a county marriage record for “Anna Baker” to a death record for “Anna Foster” in the same county, strongly suggesting that she appears under her maiden or previous married name in the marriage books and under her married name on the death certificate.
The death certificate itself, held on microfilm at the Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives and abstracted online, reportedly gives the details typical for the period. Researchers using it have noted that it records Anna’s age at death, lists her parents, and confirms Barren Fork Cemetery as her place of burial. The certificate is a dry bureaucratic record, not a sensational one. There is no indication that her death involved legal proceedings, a public execution, or any sort of official accusation of witchcraft.
Census schedules for McCreary County’s Barren Fork precinct in 1910, 1920, and 1930 show families with the Foster surname living in the coal camp, many of them tied to mining occupations. The Kentucky Genealogical Society article that highlights the precinct as a coal camp specifically encourages researchers to use those census pages to reconstruct worker households. While Anna’s exact entry still needs detailed archival work, the context is clear. She lived and died in a community whose daily life revolved around the mine.
Between the tombstone, the death certificate, and the cemetery’s history, the outline that emerges is simple. Anna Foster was a woman in her mid thirties from a coal camp family in McCreary County who died in 1938 and was buried on the hill above Barren Fork.
Nothing in those records labels her a witch. That part of the story comes much later.
From anonymous grave to “witch’s grave”
The earliest widely circulated written version of the Barren Fork witch story appears online, not in the 1930s newspapers or county court records. By the early 2000s a short entry on an early haunted places index, later copied to StrangeUSA and similar sites, described a “witch” buried in Barren Fork Cemetery near Whitley City. According to that account, there was a house built around her grave on Barren Fork Road. Visitors were told that as they turned onto the road, the temperature would drop, and that sometimes the door of the house would lock by itself while people were inside.
In February 2004, the same listing was updated with a correction that gave the supposed witch a name and some biographical details. The update identified her as Anna Foster, claimed she had died at twenty eight, and lamented that in the previous year her headstone had been stolen and the shelter over her grave vandalized. The anonymous writer insisted that Anna herself was probably not a witch at all and asserted that the “real” witch’s grave lay just inside the woods next to the cemetery.
That short paragraph, copied and pasted across websites, did a lot of heavy lifting. It supplied a name, an age, a vivid detail about a house around a grave, and just enough ambivalence about Anna’s role to invite more speculation. Later haunted place lists and blogs often replicated the text with minimal change.
In 2009 a blogger with family buried at Barren Fork picked up the story on the Spirit Hollow blog under the title “Every Town Has One.” Quoting the Shadowlands entry at length, the writer posted multiple photographs of Barren Fork Cemetery and of Anna’s grave. One image shows the small lamb on top of Anna’s marker already decapitated, with plastic skull decorations scattered around the plot. The blogger notes removing the skulls, expresses sadness over the vandalism, and asks bluntly why Anna had been labeled a witch in the first place. The post emphasizes that local rumor places a different, more isolated grave in the woods as the “real” witch’s resting place.
From there the story migrated outward. Regional haunted folklore blogs and “haunted Kentucky” lists began to include Barren Fork alongside better known ghost stories from the Daniel Boone National Forest. A more recent paranormal research blog, Paranormally Correct, revisited the tale in 2023, again describing Barren Fork Cemetery “deep in the woods of Whitley City” but stressing that many of the online details were inaccurate. The author confirms, based on site visits, that Anna’s grave is an ordinary plot within the communal cemetery, not a grave with a house built around it.
In 2025, writer S. J. Clevenger pulled the threads together in a longform Substack essay titled “The Barren Fork Witch.” The piece opens by describing the holler that holds Barren Fork Cemetery and lays out the contradictions. The story claims there was a house over the grave and that the grave was destroyed, yet on the ground the house does not exist and Anna’s stone still stands, damaged but present. Clevenger’s essay raises the same question Spirit Hollow had asked years earlier. What exactly happened to turn Anna Foster into the “Barren Fork witch,” and who is the unnamed person locals insist is buried alone in the nearby woods.
Alongside blogs and folklore essays, social media posts helped cement the label. Photos from Barren Fork circulating in genealogy and local history groups show people making special trips to visit “the witch’s grave.” A widely shared post about a stone repair at Barren Fork shows a marker restoration specialist explaining that he had been asked by local resident Beverly Slaven Crabtree to fix the headstone “belonging to Anna Foster, McCreary County’s very own witch.”
A short YouTube video, “The Lost Grave of Anna Foster (Witch or Folk Tale?),” features local explorers searching the cemetery and describing how they tracked her memorial after vandalism and removal of the small shelter that once stood near the grave. The title itself poses the central question facing anyone who approaches the story as history rather than legend: witch or folk tale.
By the time these posts and videos circulated, Anna Foster’s grave had clearly become a destination, not just for descendants and local families but for ghost story enthusiasts looking for a thrill.
What the legend gets wrong
When you strip away repetition and embellishment, several parts of the Barren Fork witch story are clearly at odds with the evidence on the ground and in the archives.
First, there is no house built around Anna Foster’s grave today. Site visits, recent photographs, and on the ground blog reports all agree that her stone stands in the open, in a row with other markers, beneath the trees of a conventional cemetery.
The stories about a “house” almost certainly refer to a small shelter or grave house. In parts of Appalachia it was common to build simple wooden or metal roofed structures over graves as protection from weather or falling limbs. At Barren Fork, several sources mention a shelter over Anna’s grave that was badly vandalized or nearly torn apart by the early 2000s.
Second, there is no sign in the historical record that Anna’s contemporaries thought of her as a witch. Her death certificate appears like any other in the county register. Cemetery transcriptions list her among other Fosters and coal camp families without commentary. Newspapers available online do not show a trial, lynching, or even a sensational coroner’s inquest associated with her name. Kentucky had no criminal statute against witchcraft in 1938. Whatever people whispered at the time about her personal life or personality, if anything, did not make it into the official record.
Third, the legend’s insistence that her grave has been destroyed is inaccurate. The stone has certainly suffered. Photographs spanning more than a decade show the lamb broken off and the monument knocked loose enough that local volunteers felt the need to stabilize and repair it. That is vandalism and neglect, not erasure. Her name, dates, and place in the cemetery survive.
Finally, the age at death given in the earliest online legend entries conflicts with better documented sources. The Shadowlands derived entry repeats the claim that Anna died at twenty eight. The grave itself, as transcribed and photographed, and the Find a Grave memorial based on that stone both give a lifespan from 1903 to 1938, which would make her thirty five. Genealogical tree entries built on her death certificate list a birth year around 1903 or 1904.
When the details that can be checked fall away, what is left is a pattern that looks familiar to anyone who studies cemetery lore in Appalachia. A woman’s grave, distinctive because of a small shelter and an unusual lamb topped monument, attracts attention. Stories about temperature drops on the road and doors that lock by themselves graft onto that marker. At some point, “the witch’s grave” becomes shorthand for that plot, and Anna’s name is pulled into a story that says more about locals’ and visitors’ fascination with witches than it does about her life.
Barren Fork as a case study in haunted history
Barren Fork is far from the only cemetery in Appalachia with a “witch’s grave” attached to it. From Knoxville’s Old Gray Cemetery to small family plots in rural Kentucky and West Virginia, there is a long tradition of calling certain graves witch related when the stone or the story stands out. Spirit Hollow’s own blog post makes that point directly by moving from Old Gray to Barren Fork in the same breath.
Historians and folklorists tend to read such stories not as evidence that the dead were literally practicing witchcraft, but as evidence of how communities handle anxiety, difference, and memory. A woman who died young, or whose grave looks different from its neighbors, may become a canvas for fears about outsiders, gender, or the unknown. In a coal camp setting like Barren Fork, where economic power was concentrated in company offices and religious and cultural expectations were strong, the label “witch” can function as a way to mark someone as outside the norm without ever having to explain what that means.
The Barren Fork legend also intersects with coal heritage and tourism in revealing ways. The same forest landscape that now hosts the Barren Fork Heritage Trail and teacher field schools also hosts ghost hunts and paranormal tours. The cemetery is a place where Civil War veterans, miners, and their children are remembered, but it is also a place where plastic skulls have been scattered on a single grave and strangers have pried at an already damaged stone for souvenirs or photographs.
For local families whose relatives lie on that hillside, the witch story can be a source of frustration as well as curiosity. The Spirit Hollow blogger writes from the perspective of someone whose mother’s family is buried at Barren Fork. They are drawn to the mystery but also angry at the vandalism that attention has brought. The Facebook posts documenting the repair of Anna’s stone make the same point in a different register. The people paying to fix the marker and advocating for the cemetery are asking visitors to remember that they are walking through an active graveyard, not a horror movie set.
Seen that way, the “Barren Fork witch” is less a historical figure than a mirror. The legend reflects how twenty first century readers, drivers, and hikers approach Appalachian places that carry both industrial scars and natural beauty. A ghost story offers a quick way to make sense of an abandoned coal camp. It hands a name and a spooky narrative to a place that might otherwise be read only as economic ruin.
Visiting Barren Fork with respect
For anyone who wants to explore Barren Fork today, the landscape itself still does much of the talking. The Forest Service’s accessible heritage trail carries visitors past foundations and interpretive signs that explain how a coal town once stood where trees now grow. The cemetery at the end of the road still receives burials and family decorations.
Approaching Anna Foster’s grave as a historian rather than a thrill seeker means starting with what we can actually know. The documentary trail lets us say with confidence that she was born in 1903, died in 1938 at Barren Fork, and was buried among kin and neighbors in a community cemetery that outlasted the coal company that built the town. Her stone once held a lamb that someone deliberately broke. A small shelter was built and later destroyed around or near the plot. None of that proves witchcraft. All of it proves that her grave has mattered to people for decades, even if not always in ways she or her family would have chosen.
Listening to the legend means acknowledging why people keep telling it. Stories about temperature drops on Barren Fork Road, doors that lock on their own, and an unseen witch watching from the woods speak to a sense that the coal camp past still presses in on the present. They also sit inside a wider Appalachian tradition of ghost roads, haunted hollows, and spectral figures that appear at the edge of headlights. In that sense the Barren Fork witch belongs on the same shelf as Phantom Riders of 119 and other tales that use ghosts to talk about unresolved histories.
For visitors, the challenge is to hold both things at once. It is possible to appreciate ghost stories as folklore, to feel a shiver when the temperature drops under the trees, and still tread lightly in a place where real families have laid real people to rest.
Sources and further reading
Key primary materials for Anna Foster include Kentucky Death Records 1911 to 1965 and the original McCreary County death certificate held on microfilm at the Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives, abstracted in online indexes and connected to a FamilySearch tree that links a county marriage record for Anna Baker to a death entry for Anna Foster. facebook.com+2FamilySearch+2
The physical record of her grave comes from the stone itself and from cemetery transcriptions and photographs. The Find a Grave memorial for Anna M Foster gives her dates and burial in Barren Fork Cemetery. Barren Fork Cemetery transcriptions and images compiled by McCreary County KYGenWeb volunteers document the cemetery row by row and provide context for other burials around her. Find A Grave+2KygenWeb+2
For the coal camp landscape, see the National Register of Historic Places listing for the Barren Fork Coal Camp and Mine Archeological District, Forest Service materials on the Barren Fork Heritage Trail and Barren Fork Horse Camp, and tourism brochures for the Daniel Boone National Forest that explain the town’s history and its transformation into a recreation and heritage site. TrailMeister+3Wikipedia+3US Forest Service+3
Genealogical and mining context comes from the Kentucky Genealogical Society article “Tracing Your Kentucky Coal Mining Ancestors,” which uses Barren Fork as a case study and highlights the 1920 census for the Barren Fork precinct and the Kentucky Mine Accident Index entry for miner Henry Alvin Patrick. Kentucky Genealogical Society
The most detailed first person accounts of the legend itself appear in the Spirit Hollow blog post “Every Town Has One,” the Paranormally Correct article on the Barren Fork witch, and S. J. Clevenger’s Substack essay “The Barren Fork Witch,” all of which combine site visits, photographs, and reflections on how the story has been told. Social media posts documenting repairs to Anna’s headstone and videos such as “The Lost Grave of Anna Foster (Witch or Folk Tale?)” show how the legend continues to evolve in the age of Facebook groups and YouTube channels. YouTube+5Spirit Hollow+5Paranormally Correct+5