This spooky season West Virginians and Mountain State visitors can take part in the Paranormal Trail, organized by the Department of Tourism. The trail has 18 different haunted or scary locations, including everything from an old lunatic asylum to a haunted amusement park.
West Virginia was rated by Forbes as one of the most haunted states in the union. Lauren Bodnar from the Department of Tourism said having a variety of spooky spots in the state helped them come up with the Paranormal Trail.
“So we’ve seen a lot of research about scream tourism, which is basically people traveling to spooky sites, like the ones that are featured on the trail,” Bodnar said. “West Virginia has a haunted history in different sections of the state.”
Last year the tourism department launched the waterfall trail, where travelers and hikers could visit certain waterfalls in the state, check in, and win prizes like tee shirts and water bottles. Bodnar says this was so successful that they decided to create other “trails” in the state, like the Culinary Trail that launched earlier this year, and now the paranormal trail.
“We kind of paired those things together, like the fact that people are traveling to be scared,” Bodnar said.
She said that the digital passport system that the tourism department has used, powered by Bandwango, has been very popular.
Briana Heaney/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
“We really just kind of paired those together and came up with the Paranormal Trail,” Bodnar said.
Visitors will receive a branded sticker for checking into three locations, a branded beanie for ten locations, and paranormal trail art print created by a local artist if they check into all 18 locations.
One of those locations is the Lake Shawnee Abandoned Amusement park just outside of Princeton.
The attraction is small, a little pond surrounded by a couple of old structures, the rusty remains of what were once amusement rides. Nature has already started reclaiming the old rides, now engulfed in vines. They are decorated in dirty stuffed animals, windchimes, and other tokens that visitors have left behind.
Chris White owns the property and gives haunted tours.
He travels around the grounds in a beat up old van. At each stop he pulls out pictures from his trunk. The pictures depict old skeletons, or artifacts he said were found on the property. Photography is strictly prohibited.
Briana Heaney/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
White said the property has an extremely haunted history. It was once a Native American burial ground. He showed the visitors where Marshall university held a dig.
“So whenever we started finding (Native American artifacts), that’s when my father said, ‘stop doing the bulldozing. Let’s call Marsh University. Get those guys down here’. They dug a little deeper. They started uncovering bodies.” White said.
He said they uncovered hundreds of skeletons.
Hundreds of years later an amusement park was opened on the grounds. White said a little girl who died tragically while on the swing ride now haunts the park.
“According to the paranormal investigator, she hangs out where the swing used to be, over here,” he said, while pointing to the old swing ride. “She can move back and forth to the park. She’s not bound to a certain area. She’s not bound to this park.”
Briana Heaney/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
This is just one of the many locations here in the Mountain State that are considered to be haunted. The Paranormal Trail stretches from both panhandles to the southern coalfields.
Other spooky destinations along the trail that are ADA accessible are the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum, Moth man Museum, Flatwoods Monster Museum (NOTE: there’s one step to get into the building, but the website mentions it is ADA accessible), Glen Ferris Inn, Blennerhassett Hotel, Hotel Morgan, and Cryptid Mountain Mini Golf.
