State employees at the West Virginia State Capitol in Charleston call the dark, body-shaped mark in the West Wing floor the Suicide Stain. Night staff tell a second story too, about a maintenance man who died on the job and still walks the marble halls.
The West Virginia State Capitol in Charleston has a dark, body-shaped mark set into the terrazzo floor of its West Wing, a few steps from Room W201. State employees call it the Suicide Stain, and they will point it out to you.
Theresa Racer, who writes on West Virginia hauntings, went and looked at it in 2013. It discolors at least 6 pieces of the expensive tile, and it sits slightly raised off the floor. Read from the right angle, she wrote, the shape resolves into "a head, along with two arms, and a lower body curled into the fetal position."
The story attached to it arrived anonymously. A commenter identifying as a state employee left it on her blog: "There has always been a rumor that a state employee embezzling money committed suicide right outside Room 201W in the main Capitol building with a dark, body-shaped stain in the terrazzo floor to prove it." The dates offered ran anywhere from the 1930s to the 1960s. "Many of us state employees would like to figure this one out," the tipster added. "Come by and see it."
The building keeps other company. Ghost accounts give the Capitol two figures walking its marble halls: an unidentified woman, and a maintenance man said to have died of a heart attack while on duty. Nobody names him. Nobody dates the death. In February 2012, a janitorial staffer with 15 years in the building told a visiting paranormal group about a pre-dawn shift cleaning an office in the House Finance hall on the second floor. A figure walked past the glass door. He knew that nobody should be in that section of the building at that hour, went out to look, and found no one in the area.
Racer went hunting for the embezzler and turned up a strong candidate. John C. Bond, state auditor, was accused in 1926 of writing state checks to friends, to family, and to people who did not exist, then pocketing the money. He resigned in 1927, was committed to Huntington State Hospital while awaiting trial, and drew 6 years at Moundsville. "He didn't off himself though," she wrote. "He died in a Charleston hospital in 1943." 12 years later she was still at it, and still reporting no documentation of a suicide inside the Capitol at all.
One man who has worked the building's late nights and early mornings for 30 years says he has never seen or heard a thing, and thinks the House Finance sighting is probably untrue, since staff and delegates keep those hours constantly. He does not dispute the floor. "The stain is indeed there," he wrote, "but noone has been able to verify that it was caused by a suicide."
