The Headless Horseman of Greenbrier County, Long ago, when the Civil War carved its way through the hills and hollows of West Virginia, a lone Confederate courier rode hard through the thick mountain fog. His name has been lost to time—some say he was called James, others just call him “the rider.” But what they all remember is how he died.
It was a moonless night near what’s now Greenbrier County. The rider carried a sealed satchel pressed tight to his chest—dispatches, orders, secrets meant for a Southern outpost deep in the mountains. He was known to be fast, quiet, and loyal. A man who could disappear into the trees like smoke and reappear miles away with barely a leaf out of place.
But that night, he didn’t vanish.
Somewhere along a narrow ridge trail—just wide enough for a single horse—he was ambushed. Union soldiers, maybe scouts or deserters, stepped from the trees like ghosts and dragged him from his horse before he could reach for his pistol. They accused him of spying, of sneaking behind the lines, and gave him no trial, no mercy.
They killed him there in the dirt.
And then, for reasons no one can truly explain… they cut off his head.
They say they buried it separately.
Others claim they kept it as a warning.
But most agree—it was never found.
The horse returned to camp alone, its sides lathered in sweat, its saddle stained with blood.
As for the rider—his body was buried in an unmarked grave somewhere off the ridge. No cross. No name. Just silence.
But it didn’t stay silent for long.
The first to hear him was an old trapper living alone near the trail.
One foggy morning, just before dawn, he woke to the sound of pounding hooves—fast and frantic, echoing down the hollow. He opened his door and saw nothing. No rider. No horse. Just the sound, fading into the mist.
Then came the sightings.
A figure in gray, mounted on a black steed, galloping along the old roads without a head. No face. No eyes. Just a dark stump where the neck ended—and in its place, a streak of blood that never dried.
He appears on cold nights, when the air feels wrong and the fog rolls in low and thick. His horse’s hooves don’t always touch the ground. Sometimes, he glides. Sometimes, he waits—just off the trail, watching. Hunting.
Looking for the head they took from him.
The Truck-Chase Incident – 1978
In the fall of ’78, a group of teenagers were driving along a back road near Droop Mountain Battlefield, returning from a Halloween hayride. According to their report, the fog rolled in unnaturally fast, and soon they were completely enveloped. That’s when they heard horse hooves behind their truck—loud, sharp, and fast.
One kid looked back and swore he saw a rider in gray, slumped low over the saddle—but no head.
They floored it. The hoofbeats followed them almost half a mile before vanishing completely. When they got to town, the back of the truck was splattered with mud and a streak of something red. No blood was found, but the story stuck.
The Campground Encounter – Early 2000s
Campers at a small site near the Greenbrier River Trail were woken up in the middle of the night by the sound of galloping and what one person described as a “snorting, monstrous horse breath” just outside their tent.
They saw hoof prints circling the campsite—but no prints leading in or out. And no animal tracks. Just those deep horse-shaped indentations in the soft dirt… and one camper claimed he briefly saw a dark figure on horseback with a glint of metal where a face should’ve been.
Time-Slip Moments
There are multiple stories of people hiking or biking in the area who experience missing time after hearing galloping, only to look at their phones and find that hours have passed.
In one report from 2019, a woman hiking near the Civil War earthworks at Droop Mountain heard hooves, turned around, and everything got eerily quiet. When she came back to herself, the sun had dipped way lower than it should have. She later described the experience as “like being watched by something angry that shouldn’t exist anymore.”
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Source: A Guide to Haunted West Virginia by Walter Gavenda (Author), Michael T. Shoemaker (Author)
