About This Location
A remote mountain road in Logan County where the body of Mamie Thurman was found on June 22, 1932. The 31-year-old housewife, married to a local policeman, had been shot and stabbed. Her murder case, involving allegations of an affair and a potentially wrongful conviction of the chauffeur Clarence Stephenson, remains officially unsolved.
The Ghost Story
On June 22, 1932, the body of Mamie Thurman was found in a ditch along 22 Mine Road near Holden in Logan County, West Virginia. She had been shot and stabbed, her corpse discarded like refuse on a remote coal country road. Mamie was thirty-one years old, dark-haired, married to a local policeman named Jack Thurman, and at the center of a scandal that would consume the community and produce one of the most enduring ghost legends in Appalachian history.
Mamie had been carrying on an affair with Harry Robertson, a prominent local man, for nearly two years. Robertson readily admitted the relationship when questioned by investigators. His handyman, chauffeur, and hunting companion, a Black man named Clarence Stephenson, was also drawn into the investigation. Despite Robertson's admitted connection to the victim, the grand jury never indicted him. Stephenson, who continually maintained his innocence, was indicted, tried, and convicted of Mamie's murder. He was sentenced to prison at Moundsville.
The case was a miscarriage of justice that even contemporaries recognized. A wealthy white man with an admitted motive walked free while a Black man with no demonstrated connection to the crime served time. The racial dynamics of 1930s Appalachia shaped the investigation and trial in ways that the legal record only partially conceals. Mamie Thurman's murder remains officially unsolved -- no confession was ever obtained, the physical evidence was inconclusive, and the question of who actually killed her has haunted Logan County for over ninety years.
Even Mamie's final resting place is a mystery. When asked, her husband Jack said she was buried at Logan Memorial Park, but no headstone has ever been found for her. A woman murdered, unjustly avenged, and lost even in death -- the conditions for a haunting could hardly be more precisely met.
22 Mine Road is a narrow, winding route that climbs through the hills above Holden, passing through dense forest and old mining territory. Since the 1930s, travelers on the road have reported encountering an apparition believed to be the restless spirit of Mamie Thurman. She appears as a dark-haired woman in clothing from the era, standing at the roadside or walking along the shoulder, most frequently near the spot where her body was discovered. Drivers who slow to offer assistance watch the figure fade into nothing as they approach.
The road's most famous legend involves a gravity-defying phenomenon. According to local tradition, if you drive to the bottom of the hill near where Mamie's body was found, put your car in neutral, and take your foot off the brake, the ghost of Mamie Thurman will push your car back up the hill. Generations of local teenagers have tested this claim, and while the phenomenon likely has a mundane explanation involving the road's gradient and visual illusion, the experience of sitting in a dark car on a lonely Appalachian road and feeling it begin to move uphill of its own accord is genuinely unsettling.
WBOY and WOWK have both covered 22 Mine Road as one of the most haunted roads in the United States, and the Clio historical database maintains an entry documenting both the murder and the paranormal legends that followed. The Appalachian Historian has placed the story in the broader context of West Virginia's 'ghost roads' -- roads where unsolved violence has produced persistent supernatural legends.
Mamie Thurman deserved justice in life and peace in death. She received neither. Her murder was blamed on the wrong man for the wrong reasons, her grave cannot be found, and the road where she was killed has become synonymous with her restless spirit. 22 Mine Road is more than a haunted road -- it is a monument to a wrong that was never righted, and the ghost that walks it is a reminder that some debts do not expire.