Thirteen Days

Here is a ghost folktale from the 1900s West Virginia oil fields.

The son of a young farmer was pitching hay one day when he fell on his pitchfork and was killed. A worker from a nearby oil derrick discovered the body.

He had just pulled the pitchfork out of the young man’s chest and was standing over him when four farmers came along and saw him.

These men were tipsy, for they had stopped after work for a drink. They became angry because they knew the boy’s father. They accused the oil worker of murdering the young farmer.

Irrationally, they decided to dispense justice immediately. One of the men got a rope and threw it over a limb of a tree while the other three dragged the protesting oil worker over to the tree.

They slipped the rope around his neck and asked him if he had any last words. He spat in their faces and announced that he would see all of them in hell. The oil worker threatened they would all die similarly within thirteen days.

The farmers hanged him and then assigned one man in the group, to bury the body. This man remained behind to place the body in a wagon.

He started for the woods. He drove his wagon along a road that was above a steep embankment.

His horses became spooked, and the wagon turned over, flipping him out. He fell twenty feet where his neck landed between two branches killing him instantly.

When his body was discovered, it was deemed an accident. The remains of the oil worker were not found.

At the scene, witnesses stated they saw a dark figure standing in the woods near the accident.

Three days later, the body of the second of the four men was found hanging from a hay mow in his barn. It appeared he had slipped on the clean floor and had fallen onto a rope used to haul things up to the loft.

Again, witnesses stated that they saw a dark form standing near the barn.

The two remaining men started to suspect the oil worker’s prediction was coming true--they wondered who would be next.

Nine days later, the third man was found hanging by the neck between two steel crosspieces on an oil derrick.

Several oil workers saw a a strange dark figure in the woods near the derrick, after the body was found hanging.

The next night, which was the thirteenth day, the fourth man was found hanging from a rafter in his kitchen-- an apparent suicide.

The man’s wife saw a dark form lurking around their farm for several days after her husband took his own life. He then stopped appearing.

Did the ghost of the innocent oil worker help his prediction come true?