Appalachian Folklore & Myths Series – The Murders of Booger Hole: Witchcraft Fear, Vigilantes, and Appalachian Memory
South of the Big Otter interchange, not far from Route 16 and the old roads around Rush Fork, there is a Clay County hollow whose name has outlived nearly every explanation for it.
Booger Hole.
To modern ears, the name may sound almost comic. In the older speech of the region, though, a “booger” was not a joke. It meant something closer to a bogey, a bogeyman, a thing that came out after dark and made children stay close to the fire. The West Virginia Encyclopedia places Booger Hole in the Rush Fork Valley near Ivydale in northern Clay County and notes that the word carried that old sense of fear.
That meaning matters, because Booger Hole is not only a place name. It is a memory. It is one of those Appalachian stories where courthouse record, newspaper report, local tradition, and ghost tale all tangle together until the hollow itself becomes the character.
The story should not be handled as a simple haunted legend. Behind the name were real people, real deaths, and a frightened community that eventually decided the law had failed it. By the time newspapers across the country were writing about Booger Hole in 1917, the hollow had already become known for disappearances, murders, whispered accusations, and a vigilante warning signed by the “Clay County Mob.”
What came afterward was folklore. What came before it was blood.
Rush Fork and the backcountry of Clay County
Booger Hole lay in the country around Big Otter, Rush Fork, Dink, and Ivydale, a rough, wooded part of northern Clay County. Today the area is described by local writers as quiet, settled, and peaceful, with homes and farms where older generations remembered danger. But in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was remote enough for rumor to grow and close enough to the courthouse at Clay for those rumors to eventually become public scandal.
The name was already in print by January 1917, when the Atlanta Georgian reported from Clay, West Virginia, that a special grand jury had been called to examine the “sinister record of Booger Hole.” That article was not writing about a campfire tale. It was writing about a living criminal investigation after the death of Preston Tanner and the attempted lynching of Drew Sampson and his son Howard.
The same account said the authorities meant to investigate not only Tanner’s death but also older crimes that had long been spoken of quietly in Clay County. The names listed in that report read like the beginning of a mountain ballad: John Newman, Joseph Clarke, Henry Hargis, and Lacy Ann Boggs.
Some of the details are difficult to settle. Later sources do not always agree on the number of victims, the exact spelling of names, or the order of events. The West Virginia Encyclopedia gives the usual estimate as six to eight victims. Other accounts say nearly a dozen. Popular retellings sometimes go higher. The careful way to read Booger Hole is to say that a cluster of real deaths and disappearances became, over time, a larger legend of a cursed hollow.
That is often how Appalachian folklore works. A true event does not stay still. It is carried by memory, sharpened by fear, and shaped by the landscape around it.
The old murders and disappearances
The oldest stories connected to Booger Hole involve men who went into the hollow and did not come out. One of the remembered figures was a peddler, often called John Newman in 1917 reporting. Another was Joseph Clark or Joe Clarke, described in later sources as a clock repairman or watchmaker associated with the old schoolhouse.
Then there was Henry Hargis, whose disappearance became one of the central pieces of the Booger Hole mystery.
Newspaper transcriptions from 1905 reported that John Lyons and James Moore were indicted by the Clay County grand jury for the murder of Henry Hargis, a man believed to have disappeared about twelve years earlier. According to that account, Hargis was believed to have been killed for money. The story became even darker when the investigation turned to a body allegedly buried beneath a house, then later disturbed and burned.
The same report said that a woman named Caroline Moore, who had been a child when Hargis disappeared, later gave testimony about what she had seen. A detective reportedly searched beneath the Moore house and found signs of a grave, fragments of bone, hair, buttons, and a whetstone associated with Hargis.
Whether every detail of that old newspaper story can be fully confirmed today is a matter for county court records and original newspaper scans. But even as a contemporary report, it shows why Booger Hole became more than a place with a strange name. By 1905, newspapers were already connecting its violence to buried bodies, family secrets, and witnesses who may have known too much.
That last idea would become central to the death of Lacy Ann Boggs.
Lacy Ann Boggs and the witch story
No part of the Booger Hole tradition has done more to push the story toward folklore than the killing of Lacy Ann Boggs, also identified in some sources as Annie Boggs or Lacy O’Brien Boggs.
The simplest version says she was an older woman living alone near Big Otter Creek when she was shot through a window. A 1900 newspaper item, later transcribed by Genealogy Trails from the Daily New Dominion of Morgantown, reported that Mrs. Boggs was sitting near a window when a shotgun blast killed her. It also reported that a man named Cottrill had been jailed on suspicion and that he believed the woman was a witch.
That detail is the door through which folklore entered the case.
Witch belief did not vanish from Appalachian life after Salem or after the eighteenth century. In isolated rural communities, misfortune could still be explained through bewitchment, night riding, curses, spoiled milk, sick livestock, or strange powers attributed to an old woman who lived at the edge of the community. Owen Davies, in America Bewitched, treats the Booger Hole case as part of the longer American history of witchcraft accusations after Salem.
But Booger Hole also warns against stopping at the easiest explanation. Davies argues that the witchcraft story may have hidden a more ordinary motive. The 1905 newspaper account tied Boggs’s killing to the Henry Hargis case. It reported that Boggs had quarreled with another woman and claimed she could find the place where Hargis’s remains had been hidden before her pipe burned out. A few nights later, she was shot.
That line, in one form or another, became part of Booger Hole lore. The old woman with the pipe, the hidden bones, the shot through the window, the witch rumor, and the unpunished killer all fused into one of the hollow’s most enduring tales.
In folklore, the witch explanation survived because it was more frightening. In history, the more troubling possibility is that Boggs may have died because she knew something.
Preston Tanner and the fire
By 1917, the older murders had not been forgotten, but it took the death of Preston Tanner to bring Booger Hole into national newspaper coverage.
The Atlanta Semi-Weekly Journal reported in February 1917 that Tanner’s charred body had been found in the ruins of his home at Booger Hole about ten days before a special grand jury convened. The paper said the grand jury was investigating both Tanner’s death and the mystery surrounding nearly a dozen deaths in the same locality.
Andrew Sampson and his son Howard were held in connection with Tanner’s death. Other sources identify Andrew as Drew Sampson, which appears to be a shortened or variant name used in the reporting. Howard was about twenty one years old. His father was about fifty seven.
The details of Tanner’s death vary depending on the source. Contemporary reporting emphasized the burned home and the investigation into murder. Later local history accounts say Tanner had been struck before the house was burned and connect Howard Sampson to a possible motive involving Tanner’s wife. Those later claims should be handled carefully, but the legal result is clearer in later scholarly and local references: Howard Sampson was convicted of Tanner’s murder and sentenced to life in prison, while the case against Andrew Sampson did not end the same way.
Gerald Milnes, in Play of a Fiddle, cites Henry B. Davenport’s account of the trial and notes that Howard Sampson was found guilty and sentenced to life, while charges against Andrew Sampson were dropped for lack of evidence.
For Booger Hole, Tanner’s death was the breaking point. It was not remembered as one isolated killing. It was remembered as the moment when years of suspicion finally burst open.
The night the mob came to Clay
The most dramatic primary reports from 1917 describe a mob at the Clay County jail.
A transcribed Iola Register item dated January 19, 1917, reported that more than 150 armed men came to the Clay County jail demanding Andrew and Howard Sampson. They were being held for the murder of Preston Tanner and the burning of his home. The turnkey could not be found, the mob fired on the jail, and no one was wounded. Citizens and lawyers pleaded with the crowd not to lynch the prisoners. When the crowd was promised a special term of court and a speedy trial, it dispersed.
The Atlanta Georgian’s account adds that the Sampsons were later moved for safekeeping, with the elder Sampson jailed at Charleston and the younger at Sutton. That same article says the Tanner murder “aroused the county from end to end.”
The mob did not simply vanish. A warning notice appeared around Booger Hole under the name of the Clay County Mob. The notice said the citizens could not get justice by law. It threatened to drive certain people from the county or kill them. It named Henry Hargis, Lacy Ann Boggs, the old peddler, and Preston Tanner as victims to be avenged.
The list of people ordered to leave included members or associates of families already tied to the rumors and investigations. The message gave some ten days to leave the state and others thirty days. Later local accounts say homes were dynamited or burned and that families fled the hollow.
Whether every later detail can be verified from surviving court records or newspapers, the warning itself is one of the most important pieces of Booger Hole history. It shows that the community saw itself as living after the failure of formal justice. That does not make the mob right. It does explain why Booger Hole became remembered as a place where law, fear, and vengeance all met on the same narrow road.
From crime history to ghost story
Booger Hole’s haunted reputation did not come from one ghost. It came from accumulation.
There were old murders. There were disappearances. There was the woman accused of witchcraft. There was the peddler who vanished. There was the house fire that killed Preston Tanner. There was a mob at the jail. There were warnings nailed or posted around the community. There were later stories of strange sounds, ghostly figures, crying babies, white dogs, and riders passing in the dark.
Mary Lucinda Curry’s 1990 booklet, Booger Hole: Mysteries, Ghost Tales and Strange Occurrences, helped preserve the local storytelling side of the tradition. Bob Weaver of the Hur Herald also wrote extensively about Booger Hole as both murder history and haunted memory, drawing on local accounts and the Curry booklet. Those sources are not the same as a court file or a 1917 newspaper report, but they matter because folklore is not preserved only in courthouses. It is preserved by people who remember what older people told them.
This is where the historian has to balance two truths.
The ghosts are not evidence in a murder case. They cannot prove who killed whom, who lied, who knew too much, or who escaped punishment.
But the ghost stories are evidence of memory. They show how Clay County people and later visitors tried to explain why one hollow gathered so much fear. They also show how a violent local past can be transformed into a warning tale. In that sense, Booger Hole belongs beside other Appalachian places where true crime and folklore overlap, such as Mamie Thurman’s 22 Mine Road in Logan County or other haunted roads tied to death, injustice, and rumor.
In each case, the legend does not erase the history. It grows out of it.
The danger of easy stories
Booger Hole is easy to sensationalize. The name invites it. So do the murders, the witchcraft accusation, the mob, and the later ghost stories.
But the more careful version is stronger.
This was a real Appalachian community, not a Halloween set piece. Its people were not monsters from a hollow. They were families living in a hard place during a hard time, with limited roads, limited schooling, deep kinship networks, old grudges, poverty, suspicion of outsiders, and uneven access to law enforcement. Some were victims. Some were accused. Some were probably innocent of the stories attached to their names. Some may have carried secrets that never reached a courtroom.
The label “Booger Hole” can make the place sound cursed, but what happened there was human. Greed, fear, violence, gossip, jealousy, family loyalty, failed justice, and vigilante anger explain more than ghosts ever could.
Still, the name lasted because it captured the feeling. A bogeyman hollow is not necessarily a place where supernatural creatures live. It is a place where people believe something is waiting beyond the last light.
For Clay County, Booger Hole became that kind of place.
What remains
Today, Booger Hole is no longer the terror that newspapers described in 1917. Modern local accounts describe peaceful homes, farms, and residents who know the stories but live beyond them. The violence that gave the hollow its reputation has passed into history, then into folklore, then into the kind of story people still search for because it feels almost too strange to be real.
But it was real enough for a grand jury.
Real enough for a mob to fire on a jail.
Real enough for newspapers to print the names of the dead.
Real enough for an old woman’s murder to be remembered more than a century later.
The lesson of Booger Hole is not that every ghost story is true. It is that some ghost stories begin when history is left unsettled. When no one can fully answer who killed, who knew, who lied, and who got away, the hollow keeps speaking.
And in Clay County, the old name still sounds like a warning.
Booger Hole.
A place where the bogeyman was never only a creature in the dark. Sometimes, it was the neighbor down the road.
Sources & further reading
Atlanta Georgian. “Sinister Record of Booger Hole.” January 30, 1917. Georgia Historic Newspapers, Digital Library of Georgia. https://gahistoricnewspapers.galileo.usg.edu/lccn/sn89053729/1917-01-30/ed-1/seq-6/ocr/
Atlanta Semi-Weekly Journal. “Lynching Near, Special Grand Jury Convenes.” February 2, 1917. Georgia Historic Newspapers, Digital Library of Georgia. https://gahistoricnewspapers.galileo.usg.edu/lccn/sn86090947/1917-02-02/ed-1/seq-2/
The Pittsburgh Gazette Times. “Jury to Probe Mysteries of Booger Hole.” January 29, 1917. Referenced through surviving newspaper index and later local reproductions. https://www.hurherald.com/obits.php?id=58722
The Iola Register. “Mob Attacked Jail.” January 19, 1917. Transcribed at Genealogy Trails, Clay County, West Virginia Crime News. https://genealogytrails.com/wva/clay/crime_news.html
Daily New Dominion. “Mrs. Boggs Murdered.” November 2, 1900. Transcribed at Genealogy Trails, Clay County, West Virginia Crime News. https://genealogytrails.com/wva/clay/crime_news.html
Sedalia Evening Sentinel. “Henry Hargis and Mrs. Lacy Ann Boggs Murders.” April 18, 1905. Transcribed at Genealogy Trails, Clay County, West Virginia Crime News. https://genealogytrails.com/wva/clay/crime_news.html
Friend, Ferrell. “Booger Hole.” e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia. West Virginia Humanities Council. Last revised February 8, 2024. https://www.wvencyclopedia.org/entries/573
Davies, Owen. America Bewitched: The Story of Witchcraft After Salem. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/america-bewitched-9780199578719
Curry, Mary Lucinda. Booger Hole: Mysteries, Ghost Tales and Strange Occurrences. Maysel, WV: Frog Pond Printery, 1990. https://books.google.com/books/about/Booger_Hole.html?id=bwwfHAAACAAJ
WorldCat. “Booger Hole: Mysteries, Ghost Tales and Strange Occurrences.” WorldCat bibliographic record. https://search.worldcat.org/title/25769747
Milnes, Gerald. Play of a Fiddle: Traditional Music, Dance, and Folklore in West Virginia. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_cultural_history/2/
Milnes, Gerald. Play of a Fiddle: Traditional Music, Dance, and Folklore in West Virginia. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2009 paperback edition. https://books.google.com/books/about/Play_of_a_Fiddle.html?id=eVR4bqMxKgEC
Davenport, Henry B. Tales of the Elk and Other Stories. 1943. Reprint, Gauley Bridge, WV: Thomas Imprints, 1992. https://www.worldcat.org/search?q=Henry+B.+Davenport+Tales+of+the+Elk+and+Other+Stories
Weaver, Bob. “‘Hurrah for Booger Hole’: Murder and Myth in a Clay County Holler.” Hur Herald. February 20, 2026. https://www.hurherald.com/obits.php?id=58672
Weaver, Bob. “Ghostbusting Booger Hole Brought Tragedy to Teens: True Stories and Myths Continue.” Hur Herald. February 20, 2026. https://www.hurherald.com/obits.php?id=58722
Clio. “Booger Hole, West Virginia.” Created by Samantha Sheppard, updated by Caleb Crawford. The Clio. Last updated November 2, 2018. https://theclio.com/entry/22859
West Virginia Ghost Stories, Legends, and Haunts. “Booger Hole, Clay County.” West Virginia Haunts and Legends. https://westvirginiahauntsandlegends.com/Booger_Hole.htm
Find a Grave. “Preston Tanner.” Memorial ID 172834743. https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/172834743/preston-tanner
FamilySearch. “Clay County, West Virginia Genealogy.” FamilySearch Research Wiki. https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Clay_County,_West_Virginia_Genealogy
Appalachian Regional Commission. “Appalachian Counties Served by ARC.” https://www.arc.gov/appalachian-counties-served-by-arc/
Author Note: Booger Hole is one of those Appalachian stories where the legend is powerful because the history underneath it was real. I tried to tell it as both a crime-history subject and a folklore story, while keeping the victims and local memory at the center.