Appalachian Folklore & Myths
A haunted highway through the coalfields
If you drive US 119 at night, the road feels older than the concrete beneath your tires. The four-lane slices through coal country from Pineville, Kentucky, up through the Tug Valley and Logan into central and northern West Virginia, before continuing on to Uniontown and Punxsutawney in Pennsylvania. It began life in the 1920s as a twisting two lane mountain route and later became Corridor G of the Appalachian Development Highway System, a federally funded attempt to tie the coalfields more tightly to the interstate network.
Along the way, US 119 gathers stories. Some belong to coal, labor, and politics. Others belong to the dead. At Logan County’s Trace Mountain, the modern four lane brushes past a steep side road locals simply call “22.” That short climb, officially 22 Mine Road, is where one woman’s unsolved 1932 murder has fed nearly a century of rumor and, eventually, the claim that her ghost still walks the hill in search of justice.
From there, the haunted language attached to 22 spreads outward along the corridor. Roadside markers, ghost tours, and newspaper features now frame 119 as one strand in a wider web of “phantom riders” through Appalachian history: coalfield murder victims, anonymous crash casualties, long-closed asylums, and the spectral travelers of older mountain folklore.
This article follows those riders, beginning where the modern legend starts, on a hot June morning when a deaf young man went out to pick berries and instead found a body in the briars.
Murder on Trace Mountain
Mamie Morrison Thurman was born in rural Kentucky in 1900 and married Logan City patrolman Alvin “Jack” Thurman, sixteen years her senior, in the 1920s. By 1932 the couple lived in Logan, where Mamie worked as a housekeeper for banker Harry Robertson. Contemporary accounts remember her as stylish, sociable, and active in the Nighbert Memorial Methodist Church.
At some point that spring, Mamie began disappearing from home on certain evenings. Witnesses later told reporters they had seen her around town with Robertson, slipping into cars, walking side streets, meeting near the Key Club in downtown Logan. When Mamie failed to come home on the night of June 21, 1932, her husband and friends assumed she was staying with family. By the next evening, they knew something was wrong.
On June 22, 1932, twenty two year old Garland Davis, a deaf man from the area, climbed Trace Mountain to gather blackberries. Near the top of what locals called 22 Mountain, just a short distance off the dirt road, he stumbled onto a body lying in the briars. Law officers soon identified the victim as thirty one year old Mamie Thurman.
The scene was brutal. Contemporary reporting and an autopsy summary preserved in later histories describe two gunshot wounds to Mamie’s head, a fractured neck, a throat cut from ear to ear, and powder burns on her face. Her purse, with cash still inside, lay nearby. A slip of paper carrying a license plate number lay on the ground, a detail that stuck in the public imagination.
Although it is now remembered as 22 Mine Road, the site in 1932 was known as Trace Mountain Road or simply “22 Mountain,” a narrow track used by hunters and by drivers headed toward old mine workings near the Logan–Mingo county line. Today the climb begins off the modern four lane near Holden, just south of Logan, where US 119 winds toward Williamson and the Tug Valley.
Trials, transcripts, and unanswered questions
Within days, suspicion focused on banker Harry Robertson and his Black handyman and chauffeur, twenty nine year old Clarence Stephenson, who rented a room in Robertson’s attic. Searches of Robertson’s home and automobile reportedly turned up bloodstains, a suspicious mark in a basement wall, and a razor, though the precise evidentiary value of each item remains disputed.
Newspapers across southern West Virginia and beyond covered the case. The Logan Banner, Charleston Daily Mail, and other papers followed every twist: the autopsy; a preliminary hearing that drew more than a thousand people to the courthouse; Stephenson’s transfer to the Mingo County jail amid racial tensions; and whispered talk of a list of “prominent men” rumored to have been Mamie’s lovers.
Digital scans of the 1932 trial transcript for State v. Clarence Stephenson, preserved at the Logan County Circuit Clerk’s office, confirm the basic structure of the case. Stephenson was tried in Logan County Circuit Court that October and convicted of Mamie’s murder. He was later transferred to the state penitentiary at Moundsville, then to the prison farm at Huttonsville, where he died in 1942. Robertson, who admitted on the stand to a two year affair with Mamie, was not indicted.
From the beginning, not everyone was convinced the right man had gone to prison. Logan residents speculated about wealth, race, and power. Later writers for LoganWV.us, drawing on trial coverage and interviews with surviving relatives, have argued that the case was shaped by 1932’s bitter local politics and by the looming national election that would sweep Franklin Roosevelt into the White House.
Even Mamie’s burial remains uncertain. Her death certificate reportedly lists Logan Memorial Park as her place of interment, yet other records suggest her body may have been returned to Marion County, Kentucky. The confusion has become part of the mystery.
What is clear, from the court record and from contemporary reporting, is that the road on Trace Mountain became a crime scene. In the years that followed, that same mountainside road slowly turned into something else in the public mind.
From court record to ghost story
For decades after 1932, published accounts focused on the crime itself. The early newspaper reports and the trial transcript are silent about ghosts. Instead they dwell on evidence, speculation, and the spectacle of a packed courtroom where people brought their own chairs and lunch baskets to watch.
The ghost did not fully emerge in print until later in the twentieth century. By the 1970s and 1980s, local oral tradition had already begun to place Mamie’s spirit on Trace Mountain, walking near the spot where her body was found. In more recent decades, folklorists and writers have recorded those stories and tied them more explicitly to the landscape of 22 Mine Road.
A widely circulated 2018 piece for AppalachianHistory.net, “The unsolved murder of Mamie Thurman,” retells the discovery of her body “where it had been dumped on 22 Mountain,” then notes that many locals believe her restless spirit still haunts the scene.
A Clio entry created by a local historian emphasizes that 22 Mine Road, 22 Mountain, and Trace Mountain all refer to the same place and notes that visitors have reported seeing an apparition there. The entry describes hayrides around Halloween that carry paying customers up and around the mountain in hopes of glimpsing “Mamie’s spirit,” a sign that the site has become part of the area’s ghost tourism economy.
In 2021, the West Virginia Humanities Council and the William G. Pomeroy Foundation installed a Legends & Lore roadside marker in Logan County. The marker text states that after Mamie’s 1932 murder, her “ghost is said to roam on Trace Mountain,” explicitly linking an officially recognized piece of roadside public history to a ghost tradition rooted in local memory.
Paranormal focused websites have carried the story even farther. WestVirginiaHauntsAndLegends.com locates Mamie’s apparition on 22 Mine Road, describing a woman in 1930s dress walking “along the roadway” near where her body was dumped and repeating the claim that if you park at the bottom of the hill and put your car in neutral, it will roll uphill, as if pushed by unseen hands.
A 2017 first person account on WVGhosts.com, written by a surveyor, describes an encounter with a tall, silent figure in old fashioned clothing near a junction off 22 Mine Road. The writer adds a grim flourish, repeating an unverified local belief that the roadbed itself contains the bones of immigrant and poor laborers killed while building the mine road.
Historians have not substantiated that specific claim about bodies in the roadbed, and it may reflect the way many industrial era ghost stories graft broader anxieties about labor exploitation, racism, and class onto particular landscapes. Regardless of its factual basis, the image of a road literally built on the bones of workers has stuck.
22 Mine Road in the age of haunted highways
By the twenty first century, 22 Mine Road had entered a wider national conversation about “haunted highways.” The route lists of ghost hunters, paranormal travel blogs, and even rental car magazines now place the road among the most famous haunted drives in the United States.
A 2024 feature in WVNews, “The Haunting of 22 Mine Road,” notes that the road’s haunted reputation “began with the tragic death of Mamie Thurman” and reports that the road was ranked among the top haunted roads in the country by a travel outlet. The article retells familiar elements: the polka dot dress, the woman on the roadside, and the cars that seem to roll uphill when left in neutral.
Regional newspapers join in. A 2023 piece in the Mountain Citizen of nearby Martin County, Kentucky, asks bluntly whether Mamie’s ghost still haunts 22 Mine Road and describes the haunting as extending along both the mountain road and the adjacent stretch of US 119.
By the time Wikipedia compiled its “List of reportedly haunted highways,” 22 Mine Road at Holden appeared as the West Virginia entry, described as a haunted road associated with Mamie’s 1932 murder and subsequent ghost sightings.
The end result is that a very specific piece of Logan County geography has become the anchor point for a much broader narrative, one in which US 119 serves as a kind of spine for ghost stories that blend true crime, folklore, and tourism.
A phantom without a name: the Springhill Jane Doe
The haunted language of US 119 is not confined to Mamie. Far north of Trace Mountain, in Fayette County, Pennsylvania, another story clings to the route, even though it rarely gets labeled a ghost story in formal print.
In July 1986, a tractor trailer driven by Joseph DeLuca crashed and burned along US 119 near Springhill Township. When emergency personnel searched the wreckage, they found the body of an unidentified white woman in the cab. She carried no identification, and no one came forward to claim her. She became known only as “Springhill Jane Doe,” a woman with no name, no hometown, and no past the authorities could trace.
Local coverage in western Pennsylvania newspapers at the time reported the crash and the mystery. Later features revisited the case as advances in forensic science offered hope of identification, describing the wreck as a nighttime scene on US 119 and quoting investigators and tow truck drivers whose memories of the crash still felt vivid decades later.
On social media, true crime enthusiasts and community groups sometimes describe Springhill Jane Doe in haunting language, calling her a “ghost with no history” or a “haunting puzzle” that has trailed the highway for nearly forty years. That language is metaphorical, not literal, yet it sits comfortably beside accounts of phantom hitchhikers and roadside apparitions. In an era when anonymous crash victims can be identified by DNA years after their deaths, a woman who remained without a name for so long begins to feel like a modern version of the nameless spirits that older folklore places on lonely roads.
Other charged places along 119
US 119’s route ties together many sites that have accumulated ghost stories, whether or not those legends mention automobiles.
In the Tug Valley, where the road crosses the Tug Fork between Williamson, West Virginia, and South Williamson, Kentucky, the local convention and visitors bureau actively markets “Haunted Tug Valley” alongside its Hatfield–McCoy history, coal heritage, and outdoor recreation. Their online materials highlight supposedly haunted sites around Williamson and along the river, most of them easily reachable from the 119 corridor.
Farther north, the Trans Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in Weston, a massive former state hospital at the junction of US 119 and US 33, draws thousands of visitors a year for history tours by day and ghost tours by night. Guidebooks and travel features routinely describe it as one of West Virginia’s most haunted sites.
Even beyond the official corridor, county tourism boards make use of the region’s ghostly reputation. Greene County, Pennsylvania, whose rural highways connect back toward US 119, has branded itself “one of the most haunted counties in America,” offering itineraries of paranormal sites, UFO stories, and cryptid lore.
Taken together, these places do not form a single, continuous “haunted highway,” yet they help explain why a road like 119, with its close ties to coal mining, boom and bust economies, violent labor struggles, and spectacular mountainside crashes, is such fertile ground for ghost narratives.
Phantom riders in Appalachian tradition
The phrase “phantom riders” is not a new invention. Long before cars and four lanes, Appalachian storytellers passed down tales of ghostly horsemen clattering along ridgelines, revenant soldiers riding home from wars, and spectral travelers who flagged down wagons on lonely roads.
James Gay Jones’s classic 1975 collection, Appalachian Ghost Stories, and Other Tales, gathered many such stories from West Virginia and neighboring states. His book blends folk narratives of haunted places, true experiences, and tall tales, with several involving spirits encountered along paths, bridges, and mountain roads.
More recent work continues that pattern. Allie McCauley’s Ghosts of Cades Cove promises stories that range, in the publisher’s words, “from phantom riders on foggy mountain roads to cabins that breathe with the past,” blending Smoky Mountain history and ghost lore.
Arcadia Publishing’s Haunted America series includes Haunted Roads of Western Pennsylvania, which explores legends along rural highways, bridges, and back roads in the very region where US 119 winds north toward Indiana and DuBois.
Collections like Frank Spaeth’s Phantom Army of the Civil War and Other Southern Ghost Stories move a step further, describing “first hand encounters with specters and phantoms” on battlefields and Southern backroads alike.
None of these books focuses on US 119 or Mamie Thurman specifically. What they demonstrate instead is how deep the motif runs. A lone traveler on a mountain road who suddenly finds a ghostly figure in the headlights is only the latest variation on older tales that used horses instead of cars. When modern storytellers describe Mamie as a vanishing hitchhiker, or when a surveyor on 22 Mine Road meets a silent stranger whose clothes belong to another era, they are tapping into a very old narrative reservoir.
History, tourism, and ethics on haunted roads
For historians, the challenge is how to honor both sides of the story. On one hand, there is the “hard history” of the Mamie Thurman case: the court record, the newspaper coverage, the social context of Logan County in the early 1930s, and the continued debates about whether the man who went to prison was actually the killer. Books like F. Keith Davis’s The Secret Life and Brutal Death of Mamie Thurman and Dwight Williamson’s essays on LoganWV.us wrestle with that history in detail, making clear how class, race, gender, and local politics shaped the investigation and the trial.
On the other hand, there is the folklore that has grown up around that history. The ghost stories are not courtroom evidence. They are evidence of something else: the ways people in southern West Virginia have processed a brutal unsolved murder, the exploitative underside of coal boom wealth, and a justice system many residents have viewed with skepticism.
As haunted road lists and paranormal tour scripts spread online, a new layer appears. 22 Mine Road is now a destination for thrill seekers who want to film their car rolling “uphill” or capture an apparition on video. Local tourism organizations walk a fine line between encouraging visitors and trying to prevent trespassing, vandalism, and disrespect toward both living residents and the dead. Even the WV Humanities Council’s marker program acknowledges that legends and lore are part of community heritage, but encourages applicants to ground those legends in careful research.
For US 119 as a whole, the “phantom riders” framing offers a way to think about continuity across time. Traveling the corridor today, one passes near the site where Mamie’s body was found in a blackberry patch, the stretch of highway where a Jane Doe died in a fiery crash without a name, the hulking asylum whose empty wards now host ghost tours, and countless lesser known spots where someone once whispered that a strange figure stood in the road at night.
The ghosts in these stories do not all agree with one another. Some demand justice. Some are unnamed. Some seem to exist purely to give shape to a sense of unease about how Appalachia has been used and discarded. What they share is a landscape: a road through the hills, a ribbon of asphalt and concrete that carries coal trucks, commuters, and, at least in the imagination, a long line of phantom riders who never quite made it home.
Sources and further reading
Logan County Circuit Court, State v. Clarence Stephenson (1932). Trial transcript, Logan County Circuit Clerk, Logan, West Virginia, available as scanned PDFs on the clerk’s website. Logan County Circuit Clerk
“The murder of Mamie Thurman remains a mystery” and “A 1932 murder leaves many questions today,” LoganWV.us, 2023 and 2025. Logan County, WV History and Nostalgia+1
Dave Tabler, “The unsolved murder of Mamie Thurman,” AppalachianHistory.net, June 22, 2018. Appalachian History+1
“22 Mine Road,” Clio entry, created by Jamie Sparks, 2015. Clio+1
“Mamie Thurman,” William G. Pomeroy Foundation Legends & Lore marker, Logan County, West Virginia, 2021. wgpfoundation.org+1
“Ghost of Mamie Thurman, 22 Mine Road,” WestVirginiaHauntsAndLegends.com; “Haunted 22 Mine Road,” WVGhosts.com. West Virginia Haunts and Legends+1
“The Haunting of 22 Mine Road: One of America’s Most Haunted Roads in West Virginia,” WVNews, October 29, 2024; related feature on haunted coal roads. WV News+1
Coverage of the 1986 Springhill Township crash and “Springhill Jane Doe” case in western Pennsylvania newspapers and follow up true crime features. Find a Grave+2WV MetroNews+2
James Gay Jones, Appalachian Ghost Stories, and Other Tales (McClain Printing Company, 1975); Allie McCauley, Ghosts of Cades Cove (The Appalachian Descendant, 2023); Thomas White and Tony Lavorgne, Haunted Roads of Western Pennsylvania (Arcadia Publishing, 2015). Amazon+2The Appalachian Descendant+2
“U.S. Route 119,” Wikipedia; “US Route 119 – Corridor G,” EastCoastRoads.com, for route and corridor context. Wikipedia+1