A few weeks ago, we asked listeners to share your favorite spooky stories from across Appalachia. This week’s special Halloween episode of Inside Appalachia is packed with ghost stories and mysteries from across the region.
A few weeks ago, we asked listeners to share your favorite spooky stories from across Appalachia. This week’s special Halloween episode of Inside Appalachia is packed with ghost stories and mysteries from across the region.
Museums
Central West Virginia has a new monster museum that pays tribute to Bigfoot. The Sutton museum is small, and located in the back of a store that sells knick-knacks and handmade items by local artisans. The museum was created to document local sightings of what people described as these big, hairy primate-looking creatures.
As if one monster museum weren’t enough for a small town, Sutton is home to two. The Flatwoods Monster Museum is just about a block away. And like the Bigfoot museum, it’s dedicated to a cryptid that’s become part of modern pop culture.
Spooky Season
Fall is a season of spooky sounds, hayrides and pumpkin festivals. It’s a time for bats and owls and black cats. We’ll hear what happens when a self-proclaimed scaredy-cat takes a Halloween-themed wildlife tour.
In 2019, reporter Brittany Patterson went on the “Spooky Nights Tour” at the West Virginia Wildlife Center, where visitors of all ages could see wild animals in the dark. Note, the Wildlife Center has stopped these special tours, for now, but they are still open during the day, so you can visit the wolves, panthers and otters that live there.
Witches
The story of the “Witch of Wildwood” takes place in a small coal camp town outside of Beckley. In the early 20th century a person named Kazimir Kiskis moved to town. Kazimir didn’t fit in with the locals and Kazimir cooked food that smelled unlike anything the locals had ever experienced. One day the locals accused Kazimir of practicing witchcraft, potentially even casting a spell on local children. The night before Halloween, Kazimir was burned at the stake.
We’ll hear Beckley historian Scott Worley explain the story behind the supposed “Witch of Wildwood.”
Skeletons
You can’t have Halloween without skeletons. In this episode, we hear a story about a skeleton named Mr. Death and how an elderly woman outwitted him by enlisting him to help with house-cleaning.
Storyteller Lyn Ford told this story several years ago at the Timpanogos Storytelling Institute in Utah. Ford lives in Columbus, Ohio, but she grew up in Appalachian Pennsylvania and spent childhood summers in East Liverpool, Ohio. She says many of the stories she tells are adapted from folktales she heard as a child.
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Music in this episode is by Colby White, Nora Keys, Slate Dump, Tosca and The Soaked Lamb. Roxy Todd is our producer. Our executive producer is Andrea Billups. Kelley Libby is our editor. Our audio mixer is Patrick Stephens. Zander Aloi also helped produce this episode.
West Virginia Public Broadcasting’s Mountain Stage has announced its new host. After 38 years and more than 900 episodes co-founder Larry Groce is handing the mic over to Kathy Mattea — a West Virginia native who has been making country music since the early 80s.
Mattea is a two-time Grammy Award winner with numerous top 10 hits on country radio. Fans might remember Mattea’s hit “Eighteen Wheels and a Dozen Roses.” She’s also gained significant critical acclaim, with The Washington Post calling her “one of Nashville’s finest song interpreters.”
After guest-hosting Mountain Stage several times, Mattea was asked to take over full time. Inside Appalachia co-host Caitlin Tan spoke with Mattea hosting helm at Mountain Stage and why she decided to take it on.
BRIAN BLAUSER brianphoto@yah
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Kathy Mattea and Larry Groce
**This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.**
Caitlin Tan: Was it a hard decision to accept the hosting position for Mountain Stage?
Kathy Mattea: You know, it’s challenging. It doesn’t look like I should do this on paper. But, I think Mountain Stage is important, I think live music is important, I think West Virginia culture is important, and I was just like, “Yeah, I think I’ve got to say yes.”
Tan: What was your reaction, kind of absorbing this new title and thinking about how this is going to look going forward?
Mattea: You know, I keep talking to my friends about it and saying, “There are so many amazing musicians out there making music that blows your mind.” And so I feel like that part is really good for me. Because as you get older, it’s easy to just kind of be a stick in the mud and sort of not go out of your comfort zone. Part of the challenge for me is I may not instantly like everybody I hear. So I try to get to the essence of what is special about them, like, what is it about this person that connects with the people who love them? And then I get to sort of bring that to new people as I check this person out.
Tan: So you are originally from Cross Lanes, West Virginia, and I’m curious how it feels getting to host a show that was founded and housed out of the Mountain State?
Mattea: Well, you know, I’ve spent my whole life being sort of a West Virginia native daughter. I moved to Nashville when I was 19, and then I wound up getting to take this ride in the music business — touring all over the country and much of the world.
So, I wound up talking about the place that I’m from, and the place that made me. You know, there’s so much stereotypical stuff about hillbilly culture and it’s a chance to bring some of the soulfulness of that to people and break those stereotypes
Tan: As you take the reins, how will Mountain Stage look similar, and are you planning to add anything new?
Mattea: I kind of think of it as one of those Olympic relay races. Larry just handed me a baton, and my job is to keep the thing going without any major glitches — keep the momentum and the center and the spirit of it. I’m thinking, “Don’t mess this up, Kathy! Don’t make it about you!” [laughter]
Tan: [laughter] No! Of course not. What will the Mountain Stage band look like going forward? Will “Simple Song” still be the theme song? And obviously, you are an incredibly accomplished singer yourself. So I’m really hoping we’ll get to hear you singing?
Mattea: Well, as far as I know, the theme song is gonna stay the same. I don’t see any reason to change it.
You know, I see myself as sort of stewarding something that is a container for other people’s music. I don’t see this as like, “Oh, I’m gonna get on that stage. I’m just gonna sing a whole bunch.” You know? That’s not how I feel about it. I feel like part of my job is to take my ego out of it.
Crystal Wilkinson isKentucky’s new poet laureate, the first Black woman to have this title in the state.
Wilkinson grew up in Indian Creek in Casey County. She is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Kentucky, and over her career she has focused a lot of her writing on Black women and their experiences in Appalachia.
She recently spoke with Inside Appalachia’s co-host Caitlin Tan. Wilkinson began by reading a poem that is an ode to tobacco and her grandfather. The poem is featured in her soon-to-be-released collection of poems, ‘Perfect Black.’
**The following has been lightly edited for clarity.
Crystal Wilkinson: ‘Oh, tobacco. You are the warm burnt sienna of my grandfather’s skin. Soft like ripe leather. I cannot see you any other way but as a farmer’s finest crop.
You are a Kentucky tiller’s livelihood. You were school closed in August, the turkey at Thanksgiving, Christmas with all the trimmings.
Crystal — Oh Tobacco.mp3
Listen to the poem here.
I close my eyes, see you tall, stately green, lined up in rows, see sweat seeping through granddaddy’s shirt as he fathered you first. You were protected by him, sometimes even more than any other thing that rooted in our Earth.
Just like family, you were coddled, cuddled, coaxed into making him proud. Spread out for miles you were the only pretty thing he knew. When I think of you at the edge of winter, I see you brown wrinkled just like granddaddy’s skin.
A 10-year-old me plays in the shadows of the stripping room. The wood stove burns. calloused hands twist through the length of your leaves. Granddaddy smiles, nods at me when he thinks I’m not looking.
And you. You are pretty and braided, lined up in rows, like a roomful of brown girls with skirts hooped out for dancing.’
Caitlin Tan: Crystal, that’s beautiful. The imagery that that provokes is incredible. Did you write most of these poems in the past year? Or has it been accumulation of over many years?
Wilkinson: Some of them are fairly new poems. In most ways, this is a book of collected poems, some of them going back for a decade or more. But when I looked at the themes, I realized that the same themes that haunt me now are themes that have haunted my writing for a while.
Tan: When you say things that haunt you now, can you expand on that?
Wilkinson: Well, you know, issues of girlhood, particularly black girlhood, racism, political awareness and how you gain those things, as a young girl growing up in a rural area. How those sort of socio-political issues affect a rural person, and how they affect an Appalachian person perhaps differently than they would an urban person.
Tan: It’s been a really crazy past year. Obviously, we’ve had the pandemic and quite the presidential election, but our country has had almost this reckoning with social justice issues — everything from Black Lives Matter and police brutality, but then also, more recently, Asian American hate crimes. I’m wondering, what have been your reflections from this past year?
Wilkinson: I think it’s been a difficult year. But, I like to dwell on hope. I see a rising Asian movement that is parallel to the Black Lives Matter movement, and I hope that they become the same movement — that collectively we can make change. I feel like our collective backs are against the wall, and it has to end in change.
Tan: That’s interesting how you’re saying that it becomes a “collective movement” — kind of almost one.
Wilkinson: I can almost start crying when I’m talking about it. But, this sort of injustice that we’re seeing, and the lives that are continuing to be lost, and people being beat up on the streets just for being of Asian descent — this all has to stop in some way. We all have to be a part of stopping it and speaking out.
I see that as marching in the streets and holding the government accountable, holding the people who are doing this violence accountable, but also holding our individual selves accountable and our family members. Even when no one’s watching — stopping people in their tracks when they say something disparaging about another race or ethnicity is the way that we have to combat it. I think it has to both happen on a national level and it also has to be simultaneously happening on an individual level to be able to evoke change.
Tan: I want to rewind quickly. Can you tell me a little more about your granddaddy? I just love the imagery that came from that poem.
Wilkinson: I think as a rural man, regardless of race, my grandfather, his love was quiet. He was really concerned about providing for his family. We all knew that he loved us, but his main thing was the crops and making sure that his daily chores were done. I think I do remember him saying that he loved me, but not without provocation. Not without me saying, “I love you, granddaddy.” And then he would say, “I love you” sort of sternly, but I think that was the generation that he came from.
I remember being sort of taken aback as a child when I would go with him out into the fields — how tenderly he treated and doted on his crops. As an early writer, I made these sorts of observations and that was one that stuck with me, that he really loves this land. And I remember thinking, “Does he love me the same way?” And so then I began to look for signs that weren’t verbal, or that weren’t necessarily physical signs of affection toward me. And so I think those thoughts stayed with me, all of these years, and particularly, these early poems in the first section are sort of an ode to my grandparents.
I was raised by my grandparents, and I was reminded of all of that during this pandemic. Living in the city now, being a professor and being sort of tied to Zoom, I got a little stir crazy. One of the ways that these poems began to bubble up was I started ordering seed last year, and I got out there and dug around in the dirt and planted tomatoes and peppers and sort of gave myself an everyday routine in that way when we were sort of on lockdown. Of course, it took me right back to my childhood and remembering those things that I did when I lived back back home in the hills and the work that my grandparents did daily. I remembered how important it is and was, to have your hands in the dirt — for solace, for nutrition and all those other things, too. But there’s sort of a spiritual connection, I think, that I was able to return to.
Tan: Do you think you will have a garden again this year?
Wilkinson: Yes. I feel my ancestors would be ashamed of me because I was so bad at it. Like I went out there with an attitude, like, “I know how to do this. This is part of my upbringing, part of my muscle memory. Of course I know how to plant tomatoes. This will be great.” And my tomatoes were horrible, and my squash died — it was just a mess.
I’m gonna do it again. Hopefully, redeem myself as a woman of the hills. Hopefully, I haven’t gotten outside my raisin’ and remember I can do better this time.
Tan: Can you tell me a little bit about the title of the collection of poems, ‘Perfect Black’?
Wilkinson: Well, it’s part of one of the poems. There’s a poem called ‘Fat and Black and Perfect.’ So that’s about body positivity. But I started thinking about this idea of blackness. So it became a part of the book as well, as far as an overall theme.
In a way, this book is sort of dispelling these sorts of stereotypes about blackness. I think many people think of blackness as being a rural phenomenon. So I think that so many of us who are from the mountains from Appalachia are sort of dismissed or sort of invisible to mainstream society — others don’t really think that we’re here. So the title also sort of leans into that idea that a rural blackness and an Appalachian blackness can also be a perfect blackness. There is no one way to be black in America.
Tan: I think it’s very important. And another thing that you mentioned was the poem about body positivity. I think that’s such an important topic, and it’s something that a lot of people, especially young people, really struggle with. I think that’s really cool that you touched on that. Is there any chance you’d be willing to read one of the body positivity poems?
Wilkinson: I’ll read this one called, ‘Black Body.’
‘My black body is a boulder, a stop sign. Sometimes I think my body is graceful, a song of freedom. Sometimes I think it is something that every eye casts away. I must concentrate if I want to fit into small spaces, slip into the eye of America’s needle.
crystal — Black Body.mp3
Listen to the poem here.
Twice last week, I went without eating, filling up on self loathing and discontent, only to give in to a slice of pound cake and a bowl of ice cream. To stay awake, I drink a glass of tea and watch the flawed reality of television housewives.
Before bed, I stretch myself out along the couch and place my feet in my husband’s lap. I can’t stop thinking about the little black girl in the back of Lando Castillo’s car. “Mommy please stop screaming so they won’t shoot at you.” At four years old, she saw her mother’s unarmed boyfriend shot, bleeding, dead on the front seat — “I can keep you safe,” she tells her mother.
My body embarrasses the famous white woman at the writing conference, as if my fat will rub off on her if she gets too close. When I’m sick I want buttered, sweet rice and a tender hand moving in circles on my back.
Yesterday I ate meatloaf, mashed potatoes and green beans at the Cracker Barrel in Tennessee. The white waitress called me, “baby doll.” Once, I remember feeling the quickening of babies in my womb. Four tiny hands pressing against my navel, four tiny feet pressing against my ribs.’
Tan: Wow. Crystal, the way you’re able to touch on your childhood memories and then your current day experiences and then the Black Lives Matter movement. I didn’t expect you to be able to touch on all of those and within one body positivity poem. Remarkable.
Anything else you want to share or that you’re looking forward to this summer?
Wilkinson: I just had my second shot. So, I’m looking forward to hugging my children. I’m looking forward to getting out of the house a little bit more and having at least some normalcy to my life. That’s what I sort of hope for, for everybody else to be able to get to that. And maybe we can get some distance from this pandemic. So I’m definitely looking forward to that.
Tan: And better tomatoes.
Wilkinson: Yes, please. I’ll call on my ancestors and hopefully they’ll remind me of who I really am.
Crystal Wilkinson, Kentucky’s new poet laureate, has a new book of poems called ‘Perfect Black,’ available this August.
Alicia Lewis has struggled with a binge eating disorder for most her life. It involves eating large amounts of food in a short period of time.
Like others who suffer with the issue, Lewis, who lives in Huntington, often feels a loss of control and guilt.
But overeating is how she copes with her depression.
When the pandemic hit and she was furloughed from work, she found she was more depressed. So, she turned to food.
“I gained about 30 pounds — I want to say in probably three or four months just from depression eating,” Lewis said. “I was so unsure of what the future was holding, and I was anxious about my husband going to work and bringing COVID home to me or going out and catching COVID, and I was worried about my mother and my family.”
Lewis is not alone. Mental health across the nation has taken a toll since the pandemic began — and this includes eating disorders.
Nationally, more than a third of the country’s population dealing with binge eating disorders reported an increase in episodes after the pandemic kicked off. For those diagnosed with anorexia, more than 60 percent reported an episode, according to a study last year by the International Journal of Eating Disorders.
This trend seems to exist in West Virginia, as well. Jess Luzier, Charleston Disordered Eating Center clinical director, said she saw dozens more people requiring services when the pandemic first hit.
“People who were in early or even sustained remission from eating disorder behaviors, many of them struggled with relapse when the COVID-19 pandemic hit us,” Luzier said.
Eating disorders are complex psychiatric illnesses — no one chooses to have one, said Luzier. Their severity can depend on a variety of factors.
“Dieting history, perfectionism or impulsivity, self-esteem, body esteem, even things like participation in sports that emphasize weight can affect the development of eating disorders,” Luzier said.
For many, these factors have only gotten worse as more people are practicing social distancing and spending time by themselves at home.
But there is something else that can make eating disorders even worse, and Luzier said it is especially true to West Virginians — limited access to affordable food.
“I don’t know where my next meal is going to come from, or I’m not sure that I can pay for groceries this week, most commonly is going to be loss of control eating episodes, or binge-eating episodes,” she said.
Food insecurity has gotten even harder for people living in rural food deserts in the middle of a pandemic, Luzier said. Food pantries were literally running out of food this time last year.
“And that was really scary for a lot of people,” Luzier said. “It led to this hyperfixation on food, and, ‘Will I have food?’ Because none of us knew what was going to happen.”
As more West Virginians have access to the COVID-19 vaccine, and the world begins to return to a sense of normalcy, Luzier said eating disorders and poor food access will still be here. This makes treatment crucial.
She recommended researching on NEDA’s website and visiting a primary physician first.
As for Lewis, she is hopeful and in “recovery” from her eating disorder.
In the last year, Lewis received a gastric bypass surgery to limit her appetite. She lost the 30 pounds she gained at the start of the pandemic, re-entered trauma therapy and is learning again how to care for herself.
Lewis said she takes comfort from this mantra: “We are human, you are human. And we’re in a pandemic, these are unprecedented times,” Lewis said. “‘You are human’ was what I needed to hear after struggling all year with my weight and my eating and my depression because there were so many days where I felt less than human.”
If you or someone you know needs help with an eating disorder, call the national helpline at 1-800-931-2237.
On a recent episode of Inside Appalachia, the show reflected on the past year of the pandemic, as well as the long road to recovery for people’s social lives, jobs and health.
The show featured Appalachians who had been interviewed before, including Robert Villamagna.
Villamagna is an artist based in Wheeling, West Virginia. He repurposes old metal — like coffee cans or antique toys — and turns them into art pieces. He was named West Virginia Artist of the Year in 2016.
Inside Appalachia featured Villamagna at the start of the pandemic. He offered advice to fellow artists on how to maintain creativity during quarantine.
“Hang in there,” he said. “And if you’re an artist, go make your work regardless. Just try to find some time in the day to make work and share it with your friends.
In August 2020, Villamagna contracted a serious case of COVID-19. He was hospitalized twice.. He stressed how important it is to take the virus seriously.
“What unfortunately, I think, is going to convince somebody who has not been convinced, is that either they wake up with this, or a family member wakes up with this,” he said in a 2020 interview. “Because, I kid you not, you’re in for the fight of your life…You can’t believe that there’s something that can get inside of you that has so many different facets. And it’s not the damn flu. It goes way beyond that. It can bring with it so many things. This thing, this thing is so for real.”
Robert has since recovered and is making art again.
Inside Appalachia’s Co-host Caitlin Tan spoke with Robert Villamagna, to reflect on the past year.
**The following has been lightly edited for clarity.
Caitlin Tan: So Robert, catch us up to speed — how are you?
Robert Villamagna: Well, you know, it seems like everything is pre-COVID or post-COVID. And I got through having it. My wife and I both. It took several weeks. Sometimes I think that we got better faster than we actually did. As a matter of fact, a few weeks ago, I actually played back that interview you did with me, just after I got out of the hospital, and when I heard my own voice I thought, “Is that me?” I was really weak. I was really beat up.
Tan: Yeah, it really puts it into perspective, that in a way you had a near death experience. Does it leave you with any new outlook on life?
Villamagna: It’s kind of funny, because whether it was a near-death experience, I don’t know about that, but I do know is this: I was the most scared probably of about any time of my life. I was really, really, really frightened.
It felt so great to each day get a little bit better. I’m thinking about it now, I’ll have little flashbacks. But since then, I got back to working in the studio just about every day. And right now I have a small solo show, which is the first thing I’ve done in over a year as far as an exhibit. That’s been really good.
Tan: And you just got your second dose of the vaccine correct?
Villamagna: [laughs] I did. The reason I’m laughing is because I’m thinking, “This makes absolutely no sense to me. Like, wait a minute, I’ve been through this COVID thing. Why is it that I get the vaccine and it knocks my socks off?” Granted only for 48 hours.
Tan: I know I’ve been really reflective on what this last year has looked like for me. Are you feeling sentimental? Are you feeling hopeful?
Villamagna: I feel more hopeful and am looking more forward to being with other people.
Tan: As an artist, Do you feel like having social interactions is important for you?
Villamagna: I do. And I got a feeling that I might speak for a lot of people who are visual artists, or maybe writers — anything where you’re in the studio.
You’re not hanging out with other people in the studio, and so sometimes at the end of the day, or maybe on a weekend, you’re really looking forward to getting together with other people. And it’s usually, of course, going to be other artists, other writers — you get to change ideas, you get to talk and you get to reflect on the world with each other. And then when you don’t do that for a year, to me that’s kind of crazy. So as an artist, I’m really looking forward to it.
Tan: Robert, one of my favorite things about talking with you is you have a very lovely, poetic way of saying things, and you just seem to have a lot of wisdom.
I think a lot of us were happy that maybe there’s the light at the end of the tunnel, but it’s still scary, and it still feels like it could be a long ways away. And I’m wondering if you have any kind of comforting words or words of wisdom you might share with us?
Villamagna: That’s so heavy.
I don’t believe that we’re out. But at least we’re easing up with the pandemic, things are getting better. And guess what else is happening? Spring is coming. We still got some cold days and some wet days and stuff like that. But wow — this winter, we’re finally closing the door on it. And I think, “Wow, that’s like a double combination.” You know? It’s like going to the movies and getting both popcorn and candy. So that’s how we’re getting it right now, and I think that’s kind of awesome.
Appalachia has had hundreds of years of connection to Wales — people have been immigrating back-and-forth between the two regions since the late 1600s.
Our Inside Appalachia team has continued this through its Folkways program, by connecting teenage students in both Wales and West Virginia.
Courtesy Mackenzie Kessler
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Mackenzie Kessler, a high school student from Fayette County, West Virginia, has been exchanging audio messages with teenagers in Wales.
Originally, students from Merthyr Tydfil, Wales shared “audio diaries” with students in Lincoln County, West Virginia in 2019 and early 2020. They recorded themselves discussing serious subjects, like what life is like in current or former “coal country,” and more fun topics like favorite foods and what these teens do for fun. Subjects included Tudor’s Biscuit World, “plain pizza,” Doritos with salsa and the FIFA World Cup video game. Can you guess which choices were from Wales and which were from West Virginia?
Throughout 2020, the Inside Appalachia team helped the Merthyr Tydfil students, Ela Cudlip and Sam McCarthy, connect with two teenagers in Fayetteville, West Virginia, Brooke Thomas and Mackenzie Kessler. As one might imagine, the pandemic was on their minds.
Other topics discussed in the audio diaries include first love, getting a driver’s license and thoughts about the future, i.e. to go to college or not. These were topics that are universal for everyone in their teens – regardless of where they live.
This story is part of our Folklife Reporting Project, a partnership with West Virginia Public Broadcasting’s Inside Appalachia and the Folklife Program of the West Virginia Humanities Council.
