Trending
The new, multi-million-dollar Brooke County Judicial Center in Wellsburg was built on disturbed ground to hide the deep haunted history of the witch trials that took place at the old courthouse, by those black-robed justices who fear the spirit images of the secret truth that has been purged from the court records.
The former museum was a spooky land, the site where people gathered during these times torn down in hopes that people would forget and discourage visitors to the troubled patch of sod. It is said, that parallel time is known to exist where you can see the vapor of the common folk who once lived along the cobbled streets a foretime ago near the Ohio River, where the fog is sure to add to an uncanny otherworldly atmosphere and unveil the eidolon of the undead.
I was first approached about the story in the Brooke County Library in Wellsburg many years ago. Those who came before pointed out that the gallows that were across from the county courthouse apparitions twist slowly in this undead anchor when the cold night breeze brings on many spine-chilling All-Hallows' Eves.
I am a folklorist telling the haunted phantom tales I have compiled ... and among the witches, warlocks and haunted places is the vampire craze. It was a scene only Dracula and his blood-spattered ilk could love. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, New Englanders were gripped by a vampire panic. In desperation, they began dismembering suspected vampires in hopes of driving off the terror and death that threatened to upend their lives
Henry Howe, the famous historian, after visiting, established those that who settled in Wellsburg, Va., were mostly from New England (according to my source, "West Virginia Old and New"), many streaming to what was then the gateway to the west and a low point to cross into the Ohio country and its great river.
During the time known as the year with no summer -- 1816 -- they were fleeing hunger from cold and crop failure.
The town of Charlestown in Ohio County, Va., which is now Wellsburg in Brooke County, was on national TV in October 2018 on the Travel Channel for its haunted house "Paranormal Survivor" and "My Ghost Channel," several years earlier on the Biography Channel.
The Brooke County vampire story is likely rooted surrounding the events associated with the first public cemetery in Wellsburg, which was located on the northwest corner of 12th and Main streets and laid out about 1814. This cemetery was abandoned in 1876, at which time the graves were moved to the present Brooke Cemetery located on Pleasant Avenue in Wellsburg.
People at that time were suffering from consumption. The suffering chose a more experimental method: Drinking blood from freshly slaughtered animals. Beginning in 1874, newspapers across the United States reported on ill people trekking to slaughterhouses to receive this lifeblood.
In a newspaper article in The Daily Cleveland Herald, there was an interview with a man who partook in this "blood cure." The man, C.H. Stickney, tells the reporter he "drinks half a tumbler of blood twice a day" and reports that 10 to 12 others attended the abattoir with him. He even goes so far as to recommend a particular slaughterhouse, Brighton Slaughter House in Boston, commending their staff on their generosity and helpfulness to the ill.
This Halloween Thursday, Oct. 31, between astronomical twilight and midnight, the veils between the spirit world and the thinness in the darkness will be lifted. The apparitions that make their way into your home can be found in stories told in front of ancestors' hearths that date back centuries.
I will be presenting a program at Brooke County Library in Wellsburg in the Elmer Vincent Room at 11 a.m. that day.
On this 31st of October, the real history will scare you a lot more than a tall tale of the bogeyman.
Happy Halloween.
(Traubert is a resident of Wellsburg)