22 Mine Road

A deaf man found Mamie Thurman's body on this remote Logan County road in 1932, shot and stabbed, launching a racially charged case where a wealthy banker walked free and his Black chauffeur was wrongly convicted. Travelers report a woman in 1930s clothing at the roadside, and the famous gravity hill legend says Mamie's ghost will push your car uphill in neutral.

Coal truck drivers on 22 Mine Road used to stop for a woman in outdated clothing standing at the shoulder. She'd climb into the cab. They'd make it another hundred yards before looking over and finding the seat empty.

Mamie Thurman was 31 years old when a deaf man named Garland Davis found her body in the briars along Trace Mountain while picking blackberries on June 22, 1932. Two shots to the left side of her head, throat cut ear to ear, neck fractured, powder burns on her face. She'd been dumped in a ditch on this remote coal country road near Holden in Logan County, and the investigation that followed would become one of the ugliest miscarriages of justice in Appalachian history.

Mamie was married to Jack Thurman, a local policeman. For eight years, the Thurmans rented a two-room backyard garage apartment from Harry Robertson, a banker and president of the Logan city commission. Robertson admitted to a nearly two-year affair with Mamie. His Black chauffeur and handyman, Clarence Stephenson, had arranged their meetings by pretending to take Robertson on hunting trips, then dropping him off at rendezvous points.

When investigators closed in, the grand jury never indicted Robertson. Stephenson, who maintained his innocence throughout, was tried on November 10, 1932, convicted, and sent to the state penitentiary at Moundsville. A wealthy white man with an admitted motive walked free. A Black man with no demonstrated connection to the killing took the fall. Even Mamie's half-brother, George Morrison Jr. (a retired Assistant District Attorney from New Mexico), publicly doubted Stephenson's guilt.

Nobody knows where Mamie is buried. Her husband Jack said Logan Memorial Park, but no headstone has ever been found. A woman murdered, wrongly avenged, and lost even in death.

The ghost stories started almost immediately. Travelers on 22 Mine Road reported a dark-haired woman in 1930s clothing standing at the roadside near the spot where Garland Davis found the body. Drivers who slowed to help watched her dissolve as they got close. The coal truck driver accounts are the most persistent: she gets in, rides a short distance, and vanishes.

The road's most famous legend involves the gravity hill. Drive to the bottom of the hill near where Mamie's body was discovered, put your car in neutral, take your foot off the brake. The car rolls uphill. The explanation is almost certainly an optical illusion created by the road's gradient and the surrounding tree line. But sitting in a dark car on a narrow Appalachian road at night, feeling it move on its own, understanding the illusion doesn't help much.

Generations of Logan County teenagers have tested this. It's become a rite of passage, the local version of a dare. WBOY and WOWK have both covered the road as one of the most haunted in the United States. SIXT magazine ranked it 19th. The William G. Pomeroy Foundation installed a "Legends & Lore" roadside marker in Logan County in 2021. The marker reads that Mamie's ghost "is said to roam on Trace Mountain."

During Halloween, a hayride carries paying customers up the mountain looking for Mamie's spirit. The whole community leans into it.

The real horror of 22 Mine Road isn't the ghost. It's that Mamie Thurman's murder was never solved. The wrong man went to prison for the wrong reasons. Her grave can't be found. The road where she was dumped became famous because of her, and the justice she deserved in 1932 never came. If any place in West Virginia has earned its haunting, it's this one.