Hog Alley in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia has a man in black who walks it with his eyes on the ground and the wound across his throat plain to see. The guides all give him the same name: Dangerfield Newby, one of John Brown's raiders, dead since 1859.
Hog Alley is a short lane in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, and the man people report there is dressed all in black, his eyes fixed hard on the ground, the wound across his throat plain to see. Ghost-tour guides and West Virginia lore-keepers have described him the same way for decades, and they all give him the same name. He is Dangerfield Newby, and he died in this town on October 17, 1859.
Newby was the oldest of the 21 men who came to Harpers Ferry with John Brown, and one of five Black raiders. He was born enslaved in Culpeper County, Virginia, to a white landowner named Henry Newby and a woman named Elsey, and freed when the family moved to Ohio. He was working as a blacksmith in Ashtabula County when he met Brown. His wife Harriet and their seven children were still enslaved back in Virginia. He had been saving to buy them out, and every time he got close, the man who owned them raised the price.
Harriet's letters were found on his body. One of them, written that August: "If I thought I should never see you on this earth, life would have no charm for me."
Brown's men seized the federal armory on October 16 and took roughly 60 hostages. Newby was killed the next day by a six-inch spike, fired from a rifle, that struck him in the throat. He died instantly, and that was the mercy in it. Townspeople stabbed the body over and over and cut off his limbs, and hogs got at what was left, which is the account of how Hog Alley took its name.
The town's ghosts were fixed in print by 1982, when a Washington Post feature that October promised readers "Confederate spies and phantom armies, a freed slave searching for his family, buried gold, a priest who walks through brick walls, a whimpering drummer boy, staircases that tremble." The freed slave was Newby. He is the signature stop on Ghost Tours of Harpers Ferry, which Shirley Dougherty started in 1970 and which bills itself as the oldest ghost tour in America. The walk forms up on the steps of St. Peter's Catholic Church, year-round, and Rick Garland, the living historian who runs it now, tells the Hog Alley stop with a detail the older versions don't carry: the eyes are piercing blue.
Newby's body went into a packing box with seven other raiders and down into an unmarked pit outside town. In 1899 the box was dug up and carried to the John Brown Farm at North Elba, New York, and the eight of them were reburied together in a single coffin. The man people meet in Hog Alley has lain 400 miles from it since before anyone thought to write a sighting down.
