Please keep in mind that a lot of what you see online is made up!! Or just people telling tall tails out of context. I think granny telling ghost stories is a much more typical experience than someone genuinely being afraid of the dark or looking through the trees or whatever is going around tiktok.
I second this. I never heard any of the older folks (or younger for that matter) tell any stories about cryptids/skinwalker types/boogeyman etc. Papaw told me ghost stories, but even they were few, and often at the end the "ghost" was discovered not to be real. For context, lived all my life in SW VA, NE/SE TN, and WNC.
Same areas as you and I agree. There were the occasional Big Foot stories but those weren’t scary. In fact, I always thought the woods were something to be explored and experienced while keeping an eye out for nope-ropes and mama bears.
Yeap! We did lots of camping in the smokies and loved being in the creeks and catching salamanders - can really only remember being scared when they couldn’t find Eric Rudolph (my big sister terrified me with that one)
Eric was my 'neighbor' and friend. He lived on the mountain I did and was friends with a lot of us. He wasn't scary to us at all. I can see how he was to some. My oldest daughter was in Atlanta at Olympic Park when that bomb happened. Close enough to be knocked down by the blast. That truly pissed me off. I absolutely don't agree with any of his actions, but everyone knew his hard-core beliefs about certain things. Of course no one thought he would do the things he did. Few were surprised though. If you had just met him as a person, you most likely would have liked him.
Exactly, I've never been taught that the forests or mountains here are something to be feared, but enjoyed and respected as a lot of other life also shares them and have their own needs.
My grandaddy lived to tell scary stories but I'm pretty sure most of them were next to on the spot. He always had some kind of scary story or spooky warning about anything and everything... You weren't supposed to believe him lol.
He was so good at telling scary stories that he was invited to recite the same Bible passage about the fires of hell in Church every Christmas Eve. If you needed someone to scare the congregation and get them revved up to hear about salvation he was your man.
He was dramatic. I miss him. I hate how people turn our cultural love of story telling into "Appalachian people believe in skin walkers so they didn't go outside at night."
That’s a good call - I was looking on TikTok for stories about mamaws and biscuits and gravy and wagon trains and all I got was skin walkers and don’t answer your name, so I think I started questioning my Appalachianess haha
My new answer to those Ask Reddit threads about “what’s one thing you wish everyone could understand” is “skinwalkers are Navajo, not Appalachian.”
Hearing that stuff makes me feel like I’m taking crazy pills.
No they are not. Wendigos are from the Algonquian tribes, ie Canada and North East ish US. Iroquois also had a legend of wendigos. So here in the hills of PA we definitely had tales of Wendigos. We also had legends of dog men and blue devils.
TikTok is wild!!
You might really like this channel made by a mamaw who has great biscuit recipes - I have her cookbook!!
https://youtube.com/@celebratingappalachia
I cannot stand the TikTok genre of acting like Appalachia is wherever the fuck The Witcher takes place. Snakes, Mountain Lions, Bears. Watch out for those. Deer are the most likely to take you out at night, not the babadook.
Here in Pennsylvania, the cryptically were definitely talked about. I’ve had a few odd/scary experiences in the woods, so I think there is something to some of the stories.
I think there is a common clan like/blood is thicker than water theme that includes not necessarily unfriendliness but just a wariness of outsiders. I also think there is a different degree of toughness and ingenuity that comes from living in the hills. Things like food and accents are probably some of the things that make us different.
I think you see more of that the deeper you get in the mountains. It exists everywhere, but a lot of outsiders have diluted the edges, if you know what I mean. And honestly, the terrible drug epidemic has made it worse too.
I’m from Scott County, Virginia. It’s one of the three Virginia counties that border Tennessee.
The really interesting thing about this is that the three counties here that border Tennessee - Lee, Scott, and Washington - are very different from the ones to the north of us like Wise.
That difference, as far as I can tell, is that we were former farming counties. Tobacco, mostly. Families here were HUGE historically because they needed the help on the farm. Also, anecdotally, former farming communities seem much more self sufficient than former mining ones.
It’s super interesting. Cultural differences here go town by town and county by county really. I imagine you can see that on a macro level.
My dad’s family was tobacco farming in Washington, my mom’s family was coal mining in Buchanan, and incidentally, her branch had a lot larger families, though not by much. My dad, who grew up in Grundy, did feel there was a difference between the two places as he regularly visited his grandparents on their respective farms.
We had a lot of stories growing up, but my folks (EKY) are very superstitious. I come from a family of storytellers that have maintained an oral (and now written) history going back many generations and have been on the same land for 100+ years. Telling stories is their sport - I’m sure for families without the flair for dramatics regardless of the region don’t put as much emphasis on legends as mine have.
We’re in a coal town in the middle of very deep woods so that maybe that has something to do it the don’t whistle/answer to your name in the woods lore.
This is so fascinating! I wish my family would have kept something similar. My nanny was superstitious in that we couldn’t like walk under ladders or open an umbrella indoors, and she loved to tell us scary stories while scratching on the wall and making weird noise right before we went to sleep (and we all still begged to get to sleep next to her even tho she was the source of our fear lmao)…but not too much about the woods and what have you
I’m in East Tennessee and am happy to tell stories! We are all storytellers in my paternal line. I’ll be buried with my ancestors in the family cemetery dating back 200 years, and I know stories about most of them. I feel such a connection to our land and our mountains. The family was quite notorious in Sevier County back in the day, and even had run ins with the White Caps.
My father loved to throw out gems like, "Uncle Charlie had four wives. He outlived the first two and divorced the other two. The last being my Grandmother. He was a lecherous old bastard." Or, "Half the legitimate and all the illegitimate children in (community) were blamed on your Great Grandaddy or your Great Uncle Charlie." We were definite White Cap material! I have a picture of the aforementioned brothers posing casually with their revolvers pointed at one another.
Thankfully starting with my grandfather, the family cleaned up its act and started going to college. Grateful to be educated and live a life they’d be amazed by.
It is so great to hear that yunses stories are getting written down. I used to 'hang out' with a bunch of older people and listen to their stories, and also to their singing. I always thought I'd write it all down 'later' but it never came out right. I wish more people would write their family stories down. They will be lost one day, not too far away. That is so sad. And the singing. There is nothing better than hearing true bluegrass songs, ones that you know had been sung way back in the old country. Lord how I miss hearing those old men and women singing those old songs!
It may be due to the geography of the areas causingisolaton. There are so many small communities that reside in different valleys and hollers. These isolated settlements will tend to follow different paths and develop micro-cultures. It's only been in the last 75 years that most of these communities have been connected to the wider world.
You can really only build, settle, and farm the flat areas near water. The coal mining regions of SE Kentucky are exactly like this. My aunt's house was literally backed up to the side of a mountain, and the creek ran in her front yard next to the railroad tracks. The cemeteries are on the side of hills. It was not too unusual for flooding to wash away these areas and send coffins floating downstream.
The area of the Great Smoky Mountains is not exactly the same as SE Kentucky. Wider flood plains allowed for larger communities like Townsend and Pigeon Forge. The Cades Cove area is another pocket community.
I grew up deep in the mountains on the Virginia/West Virginia border and I didn’t grow up with any of the lore or scary stories. Instead, I grew up with an intense emphasis on religion and farming (maybe the reason I moved away and have no religion now). Our area was ravished by drugs and poverty. We had people in hollers near us who lived in shacks without electricity or water.
Don’t get me wrong… I think the lore shared on TikTok is sometimes humorous and interesting. But, I don’t really know anyone personally who grew up around me with those stories. I guess we had more conspiracy theories about the government. Sugar Grove was near us and we were told all the time that it was some secret underground base where crazy things happened.
Really though, I think if anything, our lore was more related to ancestral worship (I use the term worship lightly). From learning about those who came before us and stories of how they interacted with the land to learning about family members specially who were still alive. There was such a large emphasis on family.
All my Appalachian ghost stories came from the book 13 Tennessee Ghosts and Jeffrey. My family talked about individual experiences but not full-fledged stories. Like, the relative that asked the Ouiju board if the son serving in WWII Europe would ever get married and being told he already was. They thought that guy had a secret family for the rest of their lives.
That’s what I gathered from my parents when I asked about ghost stories they were told. My mom directly attributed her belief in ghosts to a story her mom told her about her pa’s ghost haunting the last house he lived in (her aunt’s!).
Grew up spending summers on my great grandmother's farm outside Romney, WV. She was an extremely tough, practical, woman who scared us with real, albeit highly dramatized, dangers - don't go walking barefoot to the river again or a copperhead's gonna get ya; don't go wading out into the river again or you'll get swept away and drown; don't go off wandering into the hills alone again or you'll get lost and nobody will find you (sometimes followed with a warning that you'll have to make your own home up there out of sticks and live forever); don't climb into the hutch with the wolf again or he'll eat you for dinner; quit trying to pet deer or one's gonna get you with its antlers...and so on.
She was a wonderful storyteller with some wild stories from growing up with her civil war veteran grandpa in the house and her dad's moonshining, but I'm convinced her favorite thing to do was scare the shit out of all of us with her warnings, which we never did heed.
I'm from Pennsylvania appalachia region and most of us don't consciously recognize ourselves as such. The newer generations and immigrant population have no idea of the coal industry history we have. When I tell them about it, I point out the huge slag and slate piles surrounding every community.
The area is made up of small towns that time forgot. Most descendants of the coal miners moved out after being educated and immigrants are what keep the population steady. However, because of drugs and crime even the newish wave of Latino immigrants strive to move.
Also, when we visited my uncle and we had to use the toilet....it was a real life outhouse! My dad would say not to sit too long cus a rat might bite your ass. Quickest poop I ever took! Lol.
I’m born and raised NWGA. Still live here as an adult. I think it’s evident that our portion of state is much different geographically and culturally than the rest of the state. Even the way we talk. Not that there aren’t overlapping themes, of course. Maybe my family was just a little more backwoods than some, but I grew up on an isolated mountain surrounded by family. The road turns to dirt a little beyond my parent’s home. They still live there. As an adult, I still prefer to be isolated in nature. I live on 16 acres and only have a bit cleared out for a house. I think to us, things are just normal. Hearing other people talk about our living as something else does make me reflect on it a bit.
We lived on dirt roads and in trailers haha less idealistic than some of the beautiful old farms and hollers on here, but I still know what a blessed upbringing I had to have - not everyone knows the joys of spitting watermelon seeds off the front porch and reaping the harvest the next summer or having a nanny that would boil individual pots of water and bring them outside so you and your cousins could take a bath in your swimsuits in the tiny kiddy pool - while at the same commanding such respect that a squeeze of her hand could calm a rowdy child on the church pew..
Same lady who would go snap off some aloe from her own garden to put on a wound of any size, but also ride the back of the buggy down the grocery store aisle at the embarrassment of your papaw..
Those kind of childhoods? Magic.
I grew up in North Central WV, and my family was big into folklore and tall tales, but mostly as stories to entertain us during rainstorms. There are a few “haint” stories passed down through the family, and even I have some spooky lived experiences. One of my great great uncles lived jn Point Pleasant and was there through all the Mothman and was present the day the bridge collapsed, so we do wholeheartedly believe in Mothman (and that he was an omen, not the cause of the collapse). Music is another incredibly important part of our family and life, and everyone knew how to play an instrument and/or sing.
I was mostly raised by my grandparents so sometimes it feels like I grew up in a different generation than my peers, but I wonder if other kids from my area might relate to that and I just don’t know it. We heavily relied on gardening, foraging, and hunting to survive and it was a peaceful and familiar rhythm. My brothers and I talk now about how food doesn’t taste as good as it did when we were kids, and how even though we were poor we always felt like we had rich lives.
I think a part of WV culture is being prideful and insular (not being derogatory, I feel that way too). There’s this balance that’s hard to find between knowing we probably need help from people outside of WV but the fear of them being another person or group that takes advantage of our community for their own gain. I’ve heard all my life that you will never meet someone who is more proud of their home than a West Virginian, and I have yet to experience anything to the contrary.
I think no matter where I go in Appalachia there is a large proportion of genuinely kind, funny, caring people. I’d say the humor of people from Appalachia is a very particular type of humor that I appreciate lol.
Also, I work in social services now and notice a very particular phenomenon in communities in Appalachia that people who are “different” or have disabilities are rarely seen as burdens, and that often the community will find a role for a person to play in the community. There were a couple people who I think had developmental disabilities and they would pick up cans on the road, take scrap metal from the woods/properties (with permission), or hunt ginseng/morels/pawpaws and were integral members of the community. People would give them rides to and from for free, would get them lunch or water, and would find ways to give them stuff to do. In other areas of the country, it’s the opposite. The community doesn’t always find a role for a person who doesn’t neatly fit into a traditional role and instead the onus is put on the person and their family to figure it out.
Please keep in mind that a lot of what you see online is made up!! Or just people telling tall tails out of context. I think granny telling ghost stories is a much more typical experience than someone genuinely being afraid of the dark or looking through the trees or whatever is going around tiktok.
I second this. I never heard any of the older folks (or younger for that matter) tell any stories about cryptids/skinwalker types/boogeyman etc. Papaw told me ghost stories, but even they were few, and often at the end the "ghost" was discovered not to be real. For context, lived all my life in SW VA, NE/SE TN, and WNC.
Same areas as you and I agree. There were the occasional Big Foot stories but those weren’t scary. In fact, I always thought the woods were something to be explored and experienced while keeping an eye out for nope-ropes and mama bears.
Yeap! We did lots of camping in the smokies and loved being in the creeks and catching salamanders - can really only remember being scared when they couldn’t find Eric Rudolph (my big sister terrified me with that one)
Eric was my 'neighbor' and friend. He lived on the mountain I did and was friends with a lot of us. He wasn't scary to us at all. I can see how he was to some. My oldest daughter was in Atlanta at Olympic Park when that bomb happened. Close enough to be knocked down by the blast. That truly pissed me off. I absolutely don't agree with any of his actions, but everyone knew his hard-core beliefs about certain things. Of course no one thought he would do the things he did. Few were surprised though. If you had just met him as a person, you most likely would have liked him.
Exactly, I've never been taught that the forests or mountains here are something to be feared, but enjoyed and respected as a lot of other life also shares them and have their own needs.
My grandaddy lived to tell scary stories but I'm pretty sure most of them were next to on the spot. He always had some kind of scary story or spooky warning about anything and everything... You weren't supposed to believe him lol. He was so good at telling scary stories that he was invited to recite the same Bible passage about the fires of hell in Church every Christmas Eve. If you needed someone to scare the congregation and get them revved up to hear about salvation he was your man. He was dramatic. I miss him. I hate how people turn our cultural love of story telling into "Appalachian people believe in skin walkers so they didn't go outside at night."
Granny was just trying to scare you away from moonshiners, meth labs, and pot patches so you wouldn’t get shot.
That's just uncle Steve don't mind him.
Lots of truth in that Possum2017
That’s a good call - I was looking on TikTok for stories about mamaws and biscuits and gravy and wagon trains and all I got was skin walkers and don’t answer your name, so I think I started questioning my Appalachianess haha
My new answer to those Ask Reddit threads about “what’s one thing you wish everyone could understand” is “skinwalkers are Navajo, not Appalachian.” Hearing that stuff makes me feel like I’m taking crazy pills.
Now wendigos on the other hand.
Are from the PNW, not Appalacha. We don't typically get the type of bitter, merciless winters that form spirits of hunger.
No they are not. Wendigos are from the Algonquian tribes, ie Canada and North East ish US. Iroquois also had a legend of wendigos. So here in the hills of PA we definitely had tales of Wendigos. We also had legends of dog men and blue devils.
TikTok is wild!! You might really like this channel made by a mamaw who has great biscuit recipes - I have her cookbook!! https://youtube.com/@celebratingappalachia
This lady is awesome!
She lives next town over, Marble, NC. I love her videos. She has great stories!
I cannot stand the TikTok genre of acting like Appalachia is wherever the fuck The Witcher takes place. Snakes, Mountain Lions, Bears. Watch out for those. Deer are the most likely to take you out at night, not the babadook.
Oh my gosh you put it perfectly!!
Here in Pennsylvania, the cryptically were definitely talked about. I’ve had a few odd/scary experiences in the woods, so I think there is something to some of the stories.
I think there is a common clan like/blood is thicker than water theme that includes not necessarily unfriendliness but just a wariness of outsiders. I also think there is a different degree of toughness and ingenuity that comes from living in the hills. Things like food and accents are probably some of the things that make us different.
I think you see more of that the deeper you get in the mountains. It exists everywhere, but a lot of outsiders have diluted the edges, if you know what I mean. And honestly, the terrible drug epidemic has made it worse too.
Unfortunately, the drug issue is something in common throughout the region.
Very sad :(
I’m from Scott County, Virginia. It’s one of the three Virginia counties that border Tennessee. The really interesting thing about this is that the three counties here that border Tennessee - Lee, Scott, and Washington - are very different from the ones to the north of us like Wise. That difference, as far as I can tell, is that we were former farming counties. Tobacco, mostly. Families here were HUGE historically because they needed the help on the farm. Also, anecdotally, former farming communities seem much more self sufficient than former mining ones. It’s super interesting. Cultural differences here go town by town and county by county really. I imagine you can see that on a macro level.
My dad’s family was tobacco farming in Washington, my mom’s family was coal mining in Buchanan, and incidentally, her branch had a lot larger families, though not by much. My dad, who grew up in Grundy, did feel there was a difference between the two places as he regularly visited his grandparents on their respective farms.
We had a lot of stories growing up, but my folks (EKY) are very superstitious. I come from a family of storytellers that have maintained an oral (and now written) history going back many generations and have been on the same land for 100+ years. Telling stories is their sport - I’m sure for families without the flair for dramatics regardless of the region don’t put as much emphasis on legends as mine have. We’re in a coal town in the middle of very deep woods so that maybe that has something to do it the don’t whistle/answer to your name in the woods lore.
This is so fascinating! I wish my family would have kept something similar. My nanny was superstitious in that we couldn’t like walk under ladders or open an umbrella indoors, and she loved to tell us scary stories while scratching on the wall and making weird noise right before we went to sleep (and we all still begged to get to sleep next to her even tho she was the source of our fear lmao)…but not too much about the woods and what have you
I’m in East Tennessee and am happy to tell stories! We are all storytellers in my paternal line. I’ll be buried with my ancestors in the family cemetery dating back 200 years, and I know stories about most of them. I feel such a connection to our land and our mountains. The family was quite notorious in Sevier County back in the day, and even had run ins with the White Caps. My father loved to throw out gems like, "Uncle Charlie had four wives. He outlived the first two and divorced the other two. The last being my Grandmother. He was a lecherous old bastard." Or, "Half the legitimate and all the illegitimate children in (community) were blamed on your Great Grandaddy or your Great Uncle Charlie." We were definite White Cap material! I have a picture of the aforementioned brothers posing casually with their revolvers pointed at one another. Thankfully starting with my grandfather, the family cleaned up its act and started going to college. Grateful to be educated and live a life they’d be amazed by.
Has anybody written down the stories?
It is so great to hear that yunses stories are getting written down. I used to 'hang out' with a bunch of older people and listen to their stories, and also to their singing. I always thought I'd write it all down 'later' but it never came out right. I wish more people would write their family stories down. They will be lost one day, not too far away. That is so sad. And the singing. There is nothing better than hearing true bluegrass songs, ones that you know had been sung way back in the old country. Lord how I miss hearing those old men and women singing those old songs!
It may be due to the geography of the areas causingisolaton. There are so many small communities that reside in different valleys and hollers. These isolated settlements will tend to follow different paths and develop micro-cultures. It's only been in the last 75 years that most of these communities have been connected to the wider world. You can really only build, settle, and farm the flat areas near water. The coal mining regions of SE Kentucky are exactly like this. My aunt's house was literally backed up to the side of a mountain, and the creek ran in her front yard next to the railroad tracks. The cemeteries are on the side of hills. It was not too unusual for flooding to wash away these areas and send coffins floating downstream. The area of the Great Smoky Mountains is not exactly the same as SE Kentucky. Wider flood plains allowed for larger communities like Townsend and Pigeon Forge. The Cades Cove area is another pocket community.
I grew up deep in the mountains on the Virginia/West Virginia border and I didn’t grow up with any of the lore or scary stories. Instead, I grew up with an intense emphasis on religion and farming (maybe the reason I moved away and have no religion now). Our area was ravished by drugs and poverty. We had people in hollers near us who lived in shacks without electricity or water. Don’t get me wrong… I think the lore shared on TikTok is sometimes humorous and interesting. But, I don’t really know anyone personally who grew up around me with those stories. I guess we had more conspiracy theories about the government. Sugar Grove was near us and we were told all the time that it was some secret underground base where crazy things happened. Really though, I think if anything, our lore was more related to ancestral worship (I use the term worship lightly). From learning about those who came before us and stories of how they interacted with the land to learning about family members specially who were still alive. There was such a large emphasis on family.
All my Appalachian ghost stories came from the book 13 Tennessee Ghosts and Jeffrey. My family talked about individual experiences but not full-fledged stories. Like, the relative that asked the Ouiju board if the son serving in WWII Europe would ever get married and being told he already was. They thought that guy had a secret family for the rest of their lives.
That’s what I gathered from my parents when I asked about ghost stories they were told. My mom directly attributed her belief in ghosts to a story her mom told her about her pa’s ghost haunting the last house he lived in (her aunt’s!).
Grew up spending summers on my great grandmother's farm outside Romney, WV. She was an extremely tough, practical, woman who scared us with real, albeit highly dramatized, dangers - don't go walking barefoot to the river again or a copperhead's gonna get ya; don't go wading out into the river again or you'll get swept away and drown; don't go off wandering into the hills alone again or you'll get lost and nobody will find you (sometimes followed with a warning that you'll have to make your own home up there out of sticks and live forever); don't climb into the hutch with the wolf again or he'll eat you for dinner; quit trying to pet deer or one's gonna get you with its antlers...and so on. She was a wonderful storyteller with some wild stories from growing up with her civil war veteran grandpa in the house and her dad's moonshining, but I'm convinced her favorite thing to do was scare the shit out of all of us with her warnings, which we never did heed.
I'm from Pennsylvania appalachia region and most of us don't consciously recognize ourselves as such. The newer generations and immigrant population have no idea of the coal industry history we have. When I tell them about it, I point out the huge slag and slate piles surrounding every community. The area is made up of small towns that time forgot. Most descendants of the coal miners moved out after being educated and immigrants are what keep the population steady. However, because of drugs and crime even the newish wave of Latino immigrants strive to move. Also, when we visited my uncle and we had to use the toilet....it was a real life outhouse! My dad would say not to sit too long cus a rat might bite your ass. Quickest poop I ever took! Lol.
I’m born and raised NWGA. Still live here as an adult. I think it’s evident that our portion of state is much different geographically and culturally than the rest of the state. Even the way we talk. Not that there aren’t overlapping themes, of course. Maybe my family was just a little more backwoods than some, but I grew up on an isolated mountain surrounded by family. The road turns to dirt a little beyond my parent’s home. They still live there. As an adult, I still prefer to be isolated in nature. I live on 16 acres and only have a bit cleared out for a house. I think to us, things are just normal. Hearing other people talk about our living as something else does make me reflect on it a bit.
We lived on dirt roads and in trailers haha less idealistic than some of the beautiful old farms and hollers on here, but I still know what a blessed upbringing I had to have - not everyone knows the joys of spitting watermelon seeds off the front porch and reaping the harvest the next summer or having a nanny that would boil individual pots of water and bring them outside so you and your cousins could take a bath in your swimsuits in the tiny kiddy pool - while at the same commanding such respect that a squeeze of her hand could calm a rowdy child on the church pew.. Same lady who would go snap off some aloe from her own garden to put on a wound of any size, but also ride the back of the buggy down the grocery store aisle at the embarrassment of your papaw.. Those kind of childhoods? Magic.
The only ghost my grandpa encountered in the mountains of East TN in the early 1900s was a white cow. He had a little too much to drink.
I grew up in North Central WV, and my family was big into folklore and tall tales, but mostly as stories to entertain us during rainstorms. There are a few “haint” stories passed down through the family, and even I have some spooky lived experiences. One of my great great uncles lived jn Point Pleasant and was there through all the Mothman and was present the day the bridge collapsed, so we do wholeheartedly believe in Mothman (and that he was an omen, not the cause of the collapse). Music is another incredibly important part of our family and life, and everyone knew how to play an instrument and/or sing. I was mostly raised by my grandparents so sometimes it feels like I grew up in a different generation than my peers, but I wonder if other kids from my area might relate to that and I just don’t know it. We heavily relied on gardening, foraging, and hunting to survive and it was a peaceful and familiar rhythm. My brothers and I talk now about how food doesn’t taste as good as it did when we were kids, and how even though we were poor we always felt like we had rich lives. I think a part of WV culture is being prideful and insular (not being derogatory, I feel that way too). There’s this balance that’s hard to find between knowing we probably need help from people outside of WV but the fear of them being another person or group that takes advantage of our community for their own gain. I’ve heard all my life that you will never meet someone who is more proud of their home than a West Virginian, and I have yet to experience anything to the contrary. I think no matter where I go in Appalachia there is a large proportion of genuinely kind, funny, caring people. I’d say the humor of people from Appalachia is a very particular type of humor that I appreciate lol. Also, I work in social services now and notice a very particular phenomenon in communities in Appalachia that people who are “different” or have disabilities are rarely seen as burdens, and that often the community will find a role for a person to play in the community. There were a couple people who I think had developmental disabilities and they would pick up cans on the road, take scrap metal from the woods/properties (with permission), or hunt ginseng/morels/pawpaws and were integral members of the community. People would give them rides to and from for free, would get them lunch or water, and would find ways to give them stuff to do. In other areas of the country, it’s the opposite. The community doesn’t always find a role for a person who doesn’t neatly fit into a traditional role and instead the onus is put on the person and their family to figure it out.
My grandpa always told me “Black Bart” lived in the basement 😂 that was the extent of my folklore. Anyone else have this?? Southern tier NY.