What’s your regional ghost/monster stories?

35 comments

  1. Salem witch stuff maybe (my many x great grandmother was a first accuser), Lizzie Borden.

    Not really any ghost stories growing up — and my house was built in the 1700s. You’d have thought we’d at least cook up something.

  2. there’s a haunted bridge called “Gibbs Bridge” on the Ohio/Michigan border

    apparently a bunch of people in the 1950s hung themselves from a tree.

    the legend is that you’re supposed to drive over it. park your car. turn it on and put the keys on top of the hood of your car. and flash your lights 3 times. and you’ll see the people hanging

    i’ve done it twice. i’ve never seen anything but it’s fun

  3. Local: Resurrection Mary.
    In college: Walworth County Werewolf (made into a cheesy movie “The Beast of Bray Road”)

  4. I live in Louisiana currently so take your pick. We’ve got voodoo, vodou, hoodoo, the Rougarou, vampires, Marie Laveau, Pirates and supposed missing buried treasure, ghosts, goblins, zombies, etc.

  7. Nothing super local, but Sleepy Hollow is maybe an hour away and the Headless Horseman is pretty well known.

    Okay, so I wrote this out and then immediately remembered that the Amityville horror house is much closer to me.

  10. Okay, I’m gonna give you guys a little backdrop.

    It’s true that a lot of “Gothick New England” stuff is overplayed (for one thing, I will go long about how people get Salem and Witches and Puritans wrong, and for another, people coming expecting normies to know about, say, Lovecraft in Providence are in for a disappointment.)

    So, it’s kind of a thing some people go on about, that the whole “spooky New England” thing is a crock. At the same time, I want you to check out this motel that was in the town I grew up in: [https://64.media.tumblr.com/60d8e30455e8dcb6f042064347fb520d/03d4450018385c18-74/s1280x1920/4a66e2c51c90148389a374d085f9e0e22e77437b.png](https://64.media.tumblr.com/60d8e30455e8dcb6f042064347fb520d/03d4450018385c18-74/s1280x1920/4a66e2c51c90148389a374d085f9e0e22e77437b.png)

    …this was uncommented-on. Normal. This sign was how, on family road trips, I knew we’d gotten to town.

    Anyway, now I live in NYC and smart, rational NYC is chock fulla cryptid stories: mole people living in the sewers and subway tunnels, alligators in the sewers, Rudy Giuliani, all that good stuff.

  13. Goatman. Finds relatively large groups of people who don’t know each other that well. Shapeshifts into a human, slips into the group, and then strikes when they aren’t expecting.

    Other local stories just have him as a half goat half man mutant who kills teenagers having sex, because I guess goats are very against pre-marital sex.

    Used to live in galveston which has a TON of ghost legends, my favorite is the story of the guy who after death, imprinted his face on the walls of his old business, as some sort of odd revenge on his kids for selling it. I love the story cause its just so odd. He doesn’t haunt the place, just used his ghostly powers to imprint his face on the wall, to remind his kids he’s disappointed in them for selling the business. That feels like something a parent would do. I’ve heard varying sources on if the face is still there, or was ever really there, people I know have claimed to see it, and people I’ve known have said it’s just a blank wall.

  14. Florida Man where I am now.

    Where I grew up, ghost of a mother wandering the corridors of an old cotton gin factory looking for her son who died after falling down an elevator shaft in the early 20th century

    [https://www.al.com/strange-alabama/2012/03/the_ghost_of_willie_youngblood.html](https://www.al.com/strange-alabama/2012/03/the_ghost_of_willie_youngblood.html)

    [https://www.alabamabackroads.com/prattvilles-lady-in-black.html](https://www.alabamabackroads.com/prattvilles-lady-in-black.html)

  18. I know of a good source for you. Kathryn Tucker Windham wrote a series of 7 books called the “Jeffery” series. Each book featured 13 stories of ghosts from a state in the southern US. The titles are something like: “13 Tennessee Ghosts, and Jeffery”. The title, of course, changes with each state. They are young reader books, but they are a good source of information for local paranormal legends.

  19. We have a city park on the Rio Grande that is named after La Llorona “the weeping woman”. She is said to have drowned her children, and is cursed to wander as a ghost who may steal children to claim as her own.

  20. Here’s a culmination of local folklore I’m aware of:

    By far the most widespread is the Green Man, or Charlie No-Face. The tales say he’s a green-hued man/ghost born from an electrical accident that stalks the roads of Beaver County, PA at night, short-circuiting cars and attacking the occupants. In reality, he was a guy named Ray Robinson who suffered horrific injuries when he was a child in the early 1900s. Most of his face was horribly burned and scarred when he touched trolley wires trying to see into a birds nest. He would walk the road connecting Wampum and Darlington at night and always wore a green jacket. Obviously, seeing him scared more than a few motorists.

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    The second is the Pig Lady of Cannelton. Back in the late 1700s, on a farm near Darlington, in the old mining town of Cannelton, an 18 year old woman came back home to her parents after spending some time in the South. She was supposedly married, but came home without a husband. Her parents left her at home, alone, to go buy livestock in Pittsburgh, and when they returned in a weeks time, she was nowhere to be found. Days went by, and a fowl smell emanated through their home. They found her, headless, beneath the front porch floorboards.

    No one knows who killed her, or why, let alone why they took her head.

    The legend says that if you walk the roads around Cannelton at night, you’ll see a colonial woman wandering the fields. Sometimes she’s without a head, other times has a pig’s head on her shoulders, hence the name.

    ______________________

    The third legend is the legend of Mary Black, one of the stories that gave rise to the Bloody Mary myth. She was an Irish immigrant who came over in 1832, and settled in Ellwood City. Standard witch things while alive (animal sacrifice, Satan worship, killed young women, etc), but most of it came from tales told in the 50s and 60s. The stories I’m aware of her in life was that she was a bit eccentric and stern, but a nice woman well into her 80s.

    The legends say that if you say her name three times and then go to sleep, she’ll crawl out of her grave and viciously claw at your face.

    After the stories started circulating, people began vandalizing the graveyard her and her family were buried in. They absolutely destroyed it, to the point that city officials just left it abandoned, and her tombstone had to be taken by the local historic society just to keep it from being lost. Disgusting what some people will do.

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    After that, we have our fair share of haunted bridges. There’s a bridge I cross to go to work that is supposedly haunted by the ghost of a woman who was decapitated by a sign. You’re supposed to stop the car and turn off your headlights around 1:00am and turn them back on and she’ll be standing in the middle of the road before either disappearing from view or jumping over the side of the bridge.

    Then there’s Summit Cut Bridge in Beaver County. It’s just a small bridge over some train tracks. Legend is a woman drove her car over the side and died when her car hit the tracks. You’re supposed to see a woman wearing a white dress wandering the road at night, and people see things on the bridge during the day. My cousins and I went ghost hunting one night when I was 12 and we saw the woman in white walking across the bridge and then disappear before we even got to cross. We just turned around and went back the way we came.

    A few miles away from the Summit Cut Bridge, there’s a road called Foxwood. I know people that say you’re supposed to see a man in blue flannel walking the road who will look back at you with glowing red eyes. People have been seeing him since the 70s at least.

    _________________________

    The legend of Hell’s Hollow from my hometown.

    My hometown was a major railroad stop in the mid-late 1800s. There was also a stagecoach line that ran through a patch of dense woods going through a hollow right outside of town. Bank coaches and travel coaches picking up money and rich travelers from the trains would get held up by a local gang of highwaymen that operated out of a cave in the hollow. Whatever they stole would be stashed underneath this big, ugly, gnarled oak tree called the Devil’s Rocking Chair. Legend says anything placed under the tree was under watch by the devil himself and could only be taken by the people who put it there. Anyone else was punished.

    Well, the sheriff of the next town over finally managed to catch one of the members of this little gang and he told them everything about the hideout and the drop spot. Sheriff got himself a posse and they went out to stop the robberies. Sheriff went out to check the tree and the rest went to the cave. When they reached the cave, however, there was nobody there and no sign it was being used. They waited for the deputy to return, but he hadn’t by nightfall. They searched the area, including the tree, but found nothing. Not even the stolen goods.

    A year or so later, a hunter in the woods found a body lashed to the trunk of the big tree. It was just a skeleton by the time it was found, so no cause of death could actually be determined. The legend says the devil stayed true to the bargain.

  21. When I was 11 my dad took my sisters and I to Puerto Rico to meet family and we stayed at my uncles house and he lives in the edge of a forest. Before then, the most exotic place I’ve ever been was Disney world so I wasn’t used to all the wildlife. I heard crazy howls and screams at night and my uncle sold me on the idea that there were real chupacabras out there, of course I didn’t know anything about coyotes with mange lol. It’s even more funny because the week I was there some kind of predator killed a guys hogs and people said chupacabra. Now I know better but it was kind of scary when I was a kid.

  26. In South Arkansas there’s a train track that has a light hovering over it. When you get close enough, there’s no light anywhere and it disappears. I’ve been there personally about 20 years ago. The area is sort of eerie, back woodsy as it is. Then the light just hover over the track, then it disappears. Crazy.

  27. In folklore, the Michigan Dogman was allegedly witnessed in 1887 in Wexford County, Michigan. The creature is described as a seven-foot tall, blue-eyed, or amber-eyed bipedal canine-like animal with the torso of a man and a fearsome howl that sounds like a human scream. According to legends, the Michigan Dogman appears in a ten-year cycle that falls on years ending in 7. Sightings have been reported in several locations throughout Michigan, primarily in the northwestern quadrant of the Lower Peninsula.

    There is also a locally produced song about the Dogman that *will* give you the chills.

    *Somewhere in the Northwoods darkness,*
    *a creature walks upright.*
    *And the best advice you may ever get,*
    *is “don’t go out at night!”*

  28. A place called Gap Road really far up north. A lot of innocent people were taken their to be lynched during the Tulsa Race Riots. It’s super haunted there and the locals (especially the older ones) advise not driving down at night because it’s cursed.

    There’s also stories of a deranged hillbilly or creature with very long arms that runs around at Circle Mountain. That was a story told by an old WW2 veteran/Sheriff to my dad and he said it made him cry telling it because it was so traumatizing.

  33. Bigfoot. I was camping on the banks of a small river by myself once and shortly after sunset, before it was dark, I heard a crashing sound across the river in the trees. Like something big was moving fast. After a few seconds it quieted down and a stone, nearly the size of a basketball, came flying out of the trees and landed in the river.

    I don’t know if it was Bigfoot or not, but I didn’t hang around to find out. I packed up and left immediately.

  34. Payne Road. Outside of Winston-Salem, NC.

    Charlie Lawson murdered his family nearby and then killed himself in a creek which runs under a bridge on Payne Rd.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_the_Lawson_family

    When I was growing up in the 80s and 90s, it was a spooky dirt road with an old white abandoned farmhouse. There were also rumors of a Hells Angels murder and a suicide taking place in that house. Legend was if you turned off your car on the bridge, it wouldn’t restart and you would find children’s handprints all over your car. It was a good place to go to, smoke weed, and scare each other.

    Now it is a paved road and not as spooky.

  35. Flagstaff AZ, we sit on the border of the Navajo rez, and everyone here is hugely terrified of Skin Walkers, like it’s not even something you want to talk about in front of indigenous people

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