TLDR
Logger Edgar Walton saw a headless Confederate soldier floating toward him near the cemetery in 1920. In 1865, two girls who took muskets from the battlefield were pelted by invisible rocks until they returned the weapons. Visitors still hear phantom cannon fire, galloping horses, and see soldiers who fade when approached.
The Full Story
In 1920, logger Edgar Walton built a campfire near the Confederate cemetery on Droop Mountain. He had just gotten the flames going when he heard rustling leaves. He looked up. A headless soldier in gray was floating toward him through the trees, moaning.
Walton's encounter is one of many at Droop Mountain Battlefield State Park in Pocahontas County, but it sticks because of the specificity. He wasn't hiking. He wasn't looking for ghosts. He was a working man settling in for the night beside a small cemetery where Confederate dead from the 1863 battle had been buried in mass graves. The figure came to him.
The battle that soaked this ground happened on November 6, 1863. Union General William Averell brought roughly 5,000 troops against Confederate Brigadier General John Echols and his 1,700 defenders. For nearly six hours, the two sides traded artillery fire, musketry, and hand-to-hand combat across Droop Mountain's steep, forested slopes. Averell's infantry finally broke the Confederate left flank at a position called the Bloody Angle. The total casualties reached approximately 394 killed, wounded, or missing. It was the largest Civil War battle fought entirely on West Virginia soil, and the last major engagement in the state. Echols retreated south. The Union held the mountain.
Two years later, in 1865, two girls named Nancy and Betty Snedegar climbed Droop Mountain to pick berries. They found two muskets in the underbrush, likely dropped during the fighting, and decided to take them home. On the walk back, rocks began flying at them from nowhere. Not rolling downhill. Flying. The barrage followed them all the way home. Stones came down the chimney, hit the walls. It only stopped after the girls carried the muskets back to the exact spot where they'd found them. Whatever owned those weapons wanted them left alone.
The park, which became West Virginia's first state park when it was dedicated on July 4, 1928, sits on 287 acres of the original battlefield. The Civilian Conservation Corps developed it during the Depression. Today it draws hikers, history buffs, and (especially around dusk) people looking for something else entirely.
The reports are consistent across decades. Visitors hear the thunder of galloping horses across the ridgeline where no horses exist. Cannon fire, deep enough to feel in your chest, rolls across the fields on quiet evenings. The smell of gunpowder drifts through the tree line on still days when no reenactments are scheduled. A soldier sits against a tree in a dirty uniform, apparently resting between engagements. People walk toward him. He goes transparent and fades.
On certain nights, a figure sits on the barrel of one of the park's cannons, smoking a cigarette. The uniform is Confederate. The posture is casual, almost bored, like a man on sentry duty with nothing to report. He vanishes if approached.
The headless soldier near the mass grave is the one that appears most often in written accounts. His figure moves with purpose, covering ground as though still following orders. The missing head is the only thing that marks him as something other than a reenactor who wandered off.
This is one of the strongest battlefield hauntings in West Virginia, and the Snedegar sisters' poltergeist story (rocks thrown by invisible hands, stopping only when stolen property was returned) is unusual. Most haunted battlefields offer vague reports of sounds and shadows. Droop Mountain has named witnesses, dated encounters, and a ghost who sits on a cannon and smokes.
Researched from 10 verified sources. How we research.
