This is a space for readers to gather and share their own strange stories, local legends, paranormal encounters, and unexplained experiences. Ghosts. UFOs. Cryptids. Haunted roads. Weird lights in the woods. Whatever’s been lurking around the edges of your life.

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The arrogance of government has a street address. Below a luxury resort in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, it sits tucked behind velvet drapes and polished stonework, humming quietly in the dark. During the Cold War, the federal government carved out a full-scale underground shelter beneath the Greenbrier resort and stocked it, staffed it, and kept it ready. The bunker was never meant to save the public. When the bombs started falling, when city people turned to vapor and suburbanites turned to ash, Congress would be sealed away underground, safe and functional, debating legislation into microphones while the fallout settled across the mountains above them.

Everyday Americans would be out there burning. Succumbing to radiation sickness, to the diseases that follow the collapse of water and sanitation and food supply, to all the ordinary horrors that trail behind annihilation. Meanwhile, the people who authorized the weapons, signed the treaties, and rattled the sabers would be preserved in a climate-controlled room, ready to govern a country that no longer existed. The machinery of governance would survive even if the governed did not. Funny how Congress can barely function on a calm Tuesday, but planned to operate just fine at the end of the world.

Appalachia once again serving as the quiet buffer between power and consequence. The region has always been remote enough to be secure, stable enough to be ignored, and close enough to matter only when someone powerful needed something. The bunker’s location had nothing to do with the safety of the surrounding population. It had everything to do with distance from accountability. If the world ended, the people making the decisions would make them far from the damage they helped cause.

The bunker was never used, and that fact gets treated as a relief, even a kind of success. But an unused thing can still reveal plenty about the people who built it. The existence of the Greenbrier Bunker shows a willingness to plan for survival without reckoning, to assume that governance could continue stripped of context, consequence, and community. What would Congress have governed from down there? Ash and wasteland. Survivors who were never given a seat at the table, never offered a spot on the list, never considered part of the plan at all.

When the bunker was exposed in the 1990s, the story got repackaged as a curiosity. A museum piece. A Cold War relic worth a guided tour and some polite fascination. The existential dread got sanded down into trivia, into something you could put on a souvenir coffee mug. But the weight of the place did not go anywhere.

The Greenbrier Bunker is not a monument to fear. It is a monument to hierarchy. It answers, plainly and in concrete, the question of who was expected to endure and who was expected to disappear. It reveals that survival, at least in the planning stages, was never meant to be shared equally. Appalachia held that secret quietly for decades, the way it holds most things, without much choice in the matter. The mountains absorbed another burden they never asked for, the contingency plan for annihilation. If the unthinkable had happened, history would have continued underground, recorded by people who never heard a single scream from above.

The bunker is sealed now. Decommissioned. Declared safe and irrelevant.

But it stands as evidence that when this country stared down extinction, the plan was never to save each other. The plan was to save the paperwork.

The Greenbrier
101 W Main St, White Sulphur Springs, WV 24986

You know the feeling? Late at night, staring at a wall, running back through every failure and wrong turn. Every thought you’d bury if you could. And that quiet certainty sitting on your chest, that if anyone ever saw you, the real you, they’d leave.

So maybe you’re like me, and you go walking. Out past the last light, into the woods, trying to outrun the noise in your head until you find a patch of ground where you’re truly alone.

Then you hear it. Soft, wet weeping just off the trail.

You can ignore it. Keep walking. Most do. Or you can step off and push through the brush, careful not to spook it.

And there it is, a small twisted creature trying to make itself smaller still.

The Squonk.

One of the few things in American folklore that doesn’t want anything from you. It doesn’t want to trick you, eat you, or even scare you. It just wants to be left alone, too afraid to be seen.

The legend comes out of the hemlock forests of northern Pennsylvania. Hard country. Long winters. The kind of place where men made up creatures to pass the time and sometimes told the truth by accident.

It was first written down in Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods, With a Few Desert and Mountain Beasts by William T. Cox. He describes the Squonk as so ashamed of its own appearance that it spends its life crying over it. Its skin doesn’t fit right. Covered in blemishes. Always hiding, and usually found by the sound of its sobbing. And if you get close enough to catch it... It doesn’t fight. It doesn’t run. It dissolves into a puddle of itself and disappears.

These days the Squonk gets dressed up and made endearing. A fluffy mascot that’s easier than admitting why it sticks with us. Its not the creature people recognize but the feeling. We all have a little Squonk tucked away somewhere.

So the next time you hear it, you can do what you always do. Walk past. Pretend it isn’t yours. Or you can try to wrestle it into submission. Most people make a mess of that. Or you can sit with it for a spell, until it grows quiet and its eyes go dry. Because if you won’t stay, why would anyone else?

Get ready for the 4th Annual Squonkapalooza

August 1, 2026 • Johnstown, PA

Squonkapalooza is a FREE all-ages cryptid festival celebrating the Squonk and other creatures of Appalachian and Americana folklore and cryptozoology at Bottle Works in Johnstown, Pennsylvania.

Our childhood is full of them. Shapes in the closet, something breathing under the bed, a figure standing just past the reach of the nightlight. We know they cannot be real, but that is hardly the point. They feel real, and that is not a mistake. They give form to the first fears we cannot explain. They are the first rough drafts of understanding.

Our mo…

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A Dream of Daylight Available on Kindle.
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Deep in the gut of West Virginia there’s a place where families spread blankets and children chase each other through the grass. Pocahontas County locals have heard things for generations. Gunfire. Distant shouting. Something mournful bleeding out of the tree line at dusk when the light goes bad.

There’s a lookout tower in the park. Climb it and the whol…

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When the deadly Dogman tears into a group of campers, Cryptid Carl expects just another job and maybe a strange new specimen for his collection. Instead he discovers something far worse.

A sickness is spreading through the waterways of West by God, and Carl finds the same darkness seeping into his own mind. If he cannot stop it soon, the madness swallowi…

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In 1887, two lumberjacks working along the Manistee River reported seeing something that did not fit into the natural order of the woods. They described a creature with the body of a man and the head of a dog. It stood upright, watching them, before retreating into the timber.

The account survives in fragments, passed down more through local retellings t…

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Black Water releases March 31, 2026, and your honest review will play a real part in helping this book and this series find its footing. Early readers make more difference than most people realize, and I don…

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Once upon a time, I was in a job interview. When they asked me where I was from, their eyes went wide at the answer.

West Virginia.

In the imagination of coastal snobbery, West Virginia is a mythical place they aren’t quite sure where to…

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In the 1730s, in what is now Frederick County, Maryland, the **Schneller Geist**—the _Quick Spirit_—first took shape. German settlers described a winged, reptilian creature that flew low over farmland and hills, screeched through the night, and attacked livestock and people alike. It was often said to drink blood.

Nearly two centuries passed before the S…

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In the late 1920s, a coal operator named Conley T. Snidow had big dreams and wild ambitions. He bought a stretch of land outside Princeton, West Virginia. It was raw, wooded, and unwanted. Where others saw waste, he imagined a dance hall, a man-made lake, and rides lit by bulbs and laughter. The park offered cheap distractions to families desperate for …

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“Cryptid Carl is for readers of Robert R. McCammon and Christopher Buehlman—a pulp adventure steeped in Appalachian folklore, following a half-feral drifter who hunts cryptids with the darkly comedic savagery of Evil Dead.”

A Brutal, Blood-Soaked Thrill Ride Through Appalachian Folklore. Cryptid Horror at its Finest.

A half-feral drifter raised in the sha…

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Horror has rules, even when it pretends it doesn’t. Break them and the story responds. Exploit something weaker than you. Open a door you were warned about. Treat people as disposable. The punishment is never fair. It’s proportionate in the way God’s wrath is proportionate. Horror is moral the way gravity is moral. It doesn’t argue. It demonstrates. Ste…

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On September 12, 1952, something burned hot across the night sky over Braxton County, West Virginia. Like any rational people staring up into the unknown, the locals assumed it was a meteor. A group of boys, joined by a few adults carrying flashlights, followed the glowing tail into the hills outside Flatwoods, hoping to find a prize: space rock.

They fo…

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Dead center in West by God Virginia, there’s a place I’d like to send a fair few loudmouths on X. Not to tour, but to stay awhile.

The Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum was built on hope. The mid-19th century idea that the mentally ill weren’t possessed or criminal, just people who needed help. Reform was in fashion. Asylums were going to be humane now. Mor…

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“Cryptid Carl is for readers of Robert R. McCammon and Christopher Buehlman—a pulp adventure steeped in Appalachian folklore, following a half-feral drifter who hunts cryptids with the darkly comedic savagery of Evil Dead.”

A Brutal, Blood-Soaked Thrill Ride Through Appalachian Folklore. Cryptid Horror at its Finest.

A half-feral drifter raised in the sha…

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The other night I watched a film called The Substance. It bills itself as psychological body horror. The premise: a wildly successful Hollywood starlet ages out of relevance and gets discarded. Boo frickin’ hoo. She’s rich. She’s beautiful. She’s comfortably retired with a milquetoast love interest who worships the ground she walks on. A soft landing by…

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The story of the Mothman doesn’t begin with folklore, but a police report.

It was 11:30 p.m. on November 15, 1966, when Roger was cruising his Chevrolet Bel Air with Linda, Steve, and Mary. They drove out past town, where the maze of earthen bunk…

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In the urgency of World War II, the feds tore up eight thousand acres of forest and farmland along the Ohio River. A temporary measure that left a permanent scar. They erected a maze of earthen bunkers, rail spurs, and chemical stockpiles. Half-sunk, moss-covered concrete igloos are arranged across the landscape with ritualistic precision. The purpose w…

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