Coffin Hollow and Other Ghost Tales Read Online Free PDF Page A

sound. I wondered why nobody was living in it since there weren’t enough houses in the area.
    My mother told me about the only family that had ever lived there. She couldn’t remember their names, but they had come to this particular farm as one of the earliest families and settled near what is now the town of Harman, West Virginia. The man and his boys were very rough in their language and in their actions, but they knew a great deal about farming and the construction of buildings. They had built this house. It was one of the first buildings in the neighborhood.
    The whole family seemed to have a mean disposition. They would lie, cheat, or steal if it meant any kind of personal gain. Their unfortunate neighbors would shake their heads and say, “They will not get away with all of this. They will get their punishment. Just you wait and see.”
    One evening a peddler stopped at their house and asked to spend the night. They agreed only after he had offered to pay them well. During the night the father crept into the peddler’s bedroom and killed him. He removed several hundred dollars from his wallet too. He then went back to bed, planning to bury the peddler in the morning.
    With the coming of daylight some visiting neighbors arrived. The women of the household kept the visitors outside while the man tried to find a place to dump the dead body. There were some loose boards in the kitchen floor; the man tore them up and he and his sons buried the peddler there. When the visitors finally came into the kitchen they found the men repairing the floor “in order to keep the house in good condition.” This should have been the end of the story but the peddler’s death would not go unavenged.
    Almost every night after the murder, the ghost of the victim roamed the house. It kept tearing at the boards, trying to get to its body, and visited the murderer several times each night. The man was so frightened that he could neither sleep nor eat. Yet he did not take his family and move away. There seemed to be some strange power forcing him to stay in that house.
    One night, when he could stand the visits of the ghost no longer, he fled from the house screaming and has never been heard of since. His family ran to a neighbor’s house and told their story in hopes that the ghost wouldn’t visit them there. They returned to the house the next day, gathered all their possessions together, and nobody has ever heard of them since that time.
    I can’t say whether the house is haunted or not, but nobody has lived in it since its first occupants. The old folks of this area stay far away from the place because they say they can still hear the ghost of the peddler at night, tearing at the boards of the kitchen floor and trying to get to its body.

    8: The Black Dog Ghost
    During the American Revolution, near Connellsville, Pennsylvania, a spy and his dog were captured by the British and taken back to headquarters to stand trial. That very night the spy was sentenced to death and was taken out in the yard to be shot. When he was outside, he tried to escape and was cut to shreds by a soldier with a sword. When the dog saw this, it leaped at the swordsman with a fierce growl, but the soldier turned in time to stab the large black hound with his sword. As the dog lay on the ground dying, it stared at the soldier with a fierce look of hate. The soldier laughed and gave the dog a hard kick in the side to finish it off.
    That night, while another soldier was coming back from guard duty, he noticed a large black hound lying near the campfire, just like the one his comrade had killed. When he walked over to the dog, it disappeared before his eyes. The soldier went to tell the man who killed the dog what had happened and to warn him that he should be careful, since he would be on duty that night. The soldier took it as a joke. He told his comrades the story and made fun of his friend who had warned him.
    That night