In 1900 Booger or Bogle Hole was a remote log cabin settlement in the wooded hills of Big Otter, Clay County, plumb in the middle of West Virginia. It was an isolated spot and its very name denoted its uncanny reputation, a booger being a menacing supernatural being, a frightening ghost or goblin usually seen at night in wild places. ‘I can tell a million tales about that place’, said the well-known fiddler Wilson Douglas, who used to live near Booger Hole. He recalled seeing ghostly figures that disappeared in front of his eyes, including one time a woman all in white, her hair as black as a crow, who cried and wailed, her face hidden from his view.16
The white population had deep Irish and Scottish roots, and the area had a reputation as a rough, lawless backwater. One journalist described it harshly at the time as ‘one of the poorest and most ignorant counties in all the mountain regions... generation after generation they have intermarried, until the type has become incapable of mental or moral effort’. Several large extended families such as the Boggs, Moores, Cottrells, Lyons, and Mccumbers scratched a living from farming, hunting, timber, and nature’s bounty. These were not first- or second- generation immigrants scrabbling for a living in an unfamiliar environment. They were well-established families that formed the backbone of their communities. Some had improved themselves to ‘respectable’ status, others remained dirt poor. Schooling was unwanted and the level of illiteracy high. The life of these hill folk was described well in 1899:
The West Virginia mountaineer lives very close to Nature .. .juicy berries refresh him along the road; nuts drop to his path; “sang” (ginseng), which makes one of his sources of revenue, reveals itself to his eye as he follows the cows to pasture; a cool brook springs up to quench his thirst when weary of following the plough; pine knots are always within reach to make light as well as warmth; mud and stones easily combine in his hand to shape a daub chimney; and a trough dug out of an old tree furnishes a receptacle that is as good for dough at one end as for a baby at the other. Often, however, this close relation to Nature assumes a war attitude, fierce and uncompromising.... When satisfied that he is not expected to pose as a “freak,” but is met on the equal plane of human intercourse, the mountain story-teller seems to enjoy recounting the traditions and beliefs of his people and their forefathers. Leaving himself a loophole of escape, he is very likely to finish his yam with — “tain’t that I believe them things myself. I know they ain’t nawthin’ but superstition; but I kin qualify that right round here, not many miles away, there’s people that believe in witches’.17
It was in 1899 that an elderly widow named Annie Boggs (b. 1827) came to settle in Booger Hole. Shortly after she was joined by her two granddaughters, Prudie, aged eighteen, and Mabel aged two. Annie requested a place to stay from a relative, Squire Boggs, who was described as one of the few intelligent, well-to-do men in the area. Years back he had built a log schoolhouse on his property to educate the local children, but few parents took advantage of the opportunity. By the late 1890s it had been abandoned, and so Annie and her granddaughters were allowed to occupy it. They placed thick blankets over the broken windows, and they set about creating a little garden to grow a bit of com, tobacco, and vegetables. With the help of the squire they made it through the first winter and they settled into the community. Unfortunately Annie possessed some tell-tale attributes: she was elderly, widowed, independent, sharp tongued, and living on the margins.18
In the spring, rumours began to circulate that ‘Mother Boggs’ was a witch. They seem to have originated from the Cottrell family who had received word from relatives in neighbouring Roane County, where members of the Bogg family had also long settled, that Annie had been ejected from there because of her witchery.19 Local misfortunes soon began to be blamed on the suspected witch. One of the most vocal of the accusers was ‘Old Man Cottrell’—probably Marshal Cottrell who was the same age as Annie. He accused her of riding him mercilessly at night. The schoolhouse was avoided, though one of the Cottrell boys was rumoured to be seeing Prudie. There was apparently talk of lynching Annie. On a cold winter’s night in 1900 someone drew aside one of the blankets that served as a curtain at the schoolhouse, poked a rifle through, and shot her in the back.
A murder investigation was launched by Deputy United States Marshal Daniel Cunningham (1850—1942), one of the most renowned lawmen in the state, who happened to be staying nearby at the time. He had plenty of business in the area, noting in his old age that ‘near this Bogey Hole many murders and other crimes have been committed’. Around 1897 a watchmaker named Joseph Clark stopped at the old schoolhouse one night, and was never seen again. Officers found a bloody trail leading to a nearby creek. In the summer of 1899 a dirt-poor farmer named Louis Cohen was murdered in nearby Big Otter Creek.20 Around the same time, Cunningham had been tracking down James Wayne who was responsible for a series of post office robberies in the area. Cunningham was a well-known figure in the region due to his involvement in a long-running, bitter, land feud on the border of West Virginia and Kentucky during which his brother Nathan, also a deputy marshal, had been murdered. Dan was also arrested and put on trial for his role in a revenge killing. In 1902, Cunningham would again attract notoriety through his bloody enforcement of injunctions against striking miners at the New River coalfields.21
Back to Booger Hole, though, and Cunningham’s analysis of the bullets that killed Annie suggested that they had been fired from a rifle especially bored out for the purpose. Tracks outside indicated that two people had approached the window. Further inquiries revealed that Old Man Cottrell had borrowed such a rifle from a neighbour a few days before. This was enough for Cottrell and his nephew—the young man courting Prudie—to be arrested on suspicion of murder. They were taken to Clay County Courthouse for examination by Squire Norval Shannon.22 The court room was packed with Cottrell supporters from Booger Hole. They were ordered to leave the guns and rifles they had brought with them outside under guard for fear of disturbance.
Cottrell and his nephew pleaded not guilty to the murder but were adamant that Annie Boggs was a witch, and others in the courtroom were vociferous in support of this claim. The old man explained how she had ridden him one stormy night when there was a surge of water down the Big Otter river:
She called me, I tol’ you, Squire. She called me with a witch-call’. ‘Then you got up out of bed and went out into the night?’ ‘No, it ain’t just that way. You don’t go. You just lies abed shiverin’ an’ sweatin’ an’ asleep all the time. It wasn’t exactly me that went that night or any other night.
It war my seconds, another of me. So I flew out through the window.
That boy there, Linn, he was standin’ shiverin’ outside, all hitched up with a rope of poison oak. She hitched me to him an’ we went up in the air nigh to the moon. When we went too slow a buzz of snake-doctors [dragon flies] stung us up.
A voice from the crowd shouted: ‘Them wa’nt no real snake-doctors. Them was witch flies. Snake-doctors that’s real don’t fly nights’.23 Old Man Cottrell continued, ‘Whatsoever they was they stung right hard. She drove us up to Blue Knob [one of the highest hills in Clay County] an’ hitched us to a pawpaw bush an’ left us there’.24 ‘What did she go to Blue Knob for?’ Asked the Squire. ‘Maybe for a ride, just. Maybe to meet some other witch. Then I expect she did a little pelverin’ [pilfering] thereabouts—eggs an’ milk, or maybe a strip of meat’.
‘What happened next?’ he was asked. ‘We was left there fast to the pawpaw bush, moanin’ an’ cryin’ with the wind an’ rain an’ cold, an not knowin’ what minute the lightnin’ would hit us’. At this point a woman in the crowd interjected,
‘You can’t get stricken by lightin’ when you’re bein’ witch-ridden. Lightnin’ don’t hit witch horses’. After another brief exchange, another woman complained: ‘I wouldn’t tell anything about it. It’s mighty onpearten [unwholesome] to be talkin’ so much abouten witch folk even if she is dead’.
Old Man Cottrell continued nevertheless: ‘She’ll never witch naryun [anyone] no more. I ain’t afraid of her now. She’s done her worst on me. I’ll tell all I know. When the storm begun to die down she come back for us an’ rode us home again. Next mornin’ our hands an’ feet were full of burrs an’ briers. They always are after she’s ridden of us’. Another member of the Cottrell clan now spoke up: ‘Squire, I can swear to havin’ sat by Old Man while he was in bed sweatin’ and groanin’ and him asleep all the time, an’ I knowed she was a-ridin’ of him, an’ seen him next momin’ with his hands an’ feet like as if he’d been trompin’ around a brier bush’.
Cottrell explained that he had been ridden about twenty to thirty times, and to other landmarks in or near Clay County, such as Yankee Dam and Strange Creek. His nephew also testified to having been ridden in a similar manner. Under questioning, Cottrell said he had not tried to kill Annie Boggs, ‘Don’t you know she’d a killed me if I had?’ He told the squire that witches were in the Bible. ‘Preacher read it out in meetin’ last church day, not a month back’. Another woman then piped up and complained of all this talk of witches, ‘I wouldn’t wonder that we was all ridden after this’. To which a man in the room replied, ‘Not by Mother Boggs. That was a right good killin’.
Despite his claims of innocence, the hostility Cottrell expressed towards Boggs and the obvious motive for murder, Squire Shannon felt he had no alternative but to indict Cottrell and have him brought to trial. It never happened though. Dan Cunningham recalled many years later in his unpublished memoir on the criminal history of the area that Cottrell’s sworn statement about his witch torments could be found in the old dockets belonging to the Squire. But Cunningham noted that the ‘corpus delicti’ was never proven, and to the best of his knowledge the murderers of Annie Boggs were never brought to justice.25 They were—and they were not, as we shall now find out.
In February 1905 the case of Annie Boggs was resurrected with the arrest of her former neighbours, Frederic Moore, his twenty-eight-year-old sister Rosa Lyons, and another female acquaintance. Moore apparently confessed to shooting Boggs with the help of his two female accomplices. He was fifteen at the time and lodging with his sister and John Lyons. What their interrogation revealed was that the murder of Annie Boggs was not connected with her witchery but the threats she made regarding her knowledge of another murder in the neighbourhood. Booger Hole was clearly buzzing with mystery, gossip, and rumour. It transpired that Annie Boggs had quarrelled with Rosa Lyons, nee Moore, wife ofjohn Lyons.
In anger, Boggs threatened Rosa that ‘she could light her pipe and before it burned out could go to the place where the ashes of Henry Hargus were’. A few days later she was dead. Fred Moore was never convicted of the killing.
Who was Henry Hargus?26 He was the son or nephew of Margaret Moore, a women with an adventurous and shady past, hence the undetermined nature of Henry’s relationship to her. Margaret’s first husband had been a volunteer in the Union Army. After his death she formed a relationship with a man named Minner. In the 1870 census we find her keeping house in Union, Clay County, with her four-year-old son James, two daughters, and a twenty-four-year-old farm labourer George Minner—possibly her stepson. James was apparently the offspring of her lover after the death of Minner, a man named James Fletcher from Calhoun County. Margaret secured an officer’s widow’s pension by fraudulent pretences to the sum of several thousand dollars. Several hundred dollars of this she gave to Henry Hargus before she was arrested and imprisoned for fraud, while James Fletcher was imprisoned for a murder near Charleston. She gave nothing to her son James, though.
Around 1883 Hargus disappeared from his home in Booger Hole. He was rumoured to have been murdered but no-one was caught and the body never found. But while under arrest, James Wayne had told Dan Cunningham that John Lyons and James Moore had murdered Hargus, and they had told him where the body had been hidden. Cunningham apparently dismissed the claim at the time, believing Wayne was trying to mitigate his own crimes. Still, many years later, Cunningham would recall that on passing through Booger Hole on several occasions he would stop and chat with James Moore: ‘while in conversation... he would leave me and go out to a rock, stump, or log or tree and gaze as though something was coming up out of the ground. Moore would do this at least three times in 30 minutes. He would spend about five minutes at a time in this harrowing manner’.
After his mother’s incarceration, the teenage James had lodged with a farmer named James Lanemn in Union, working as a farm labourer. By 1900 he was thirty-four and had worked as a labourer in Booger Hole for several years. It was here that his past caught up with him. Following the arrest of Fred Moore and Rosa Lyons a detective named A.W. Sell, of Clay, got to work and found that Caroline Moore, elder sister of James and Rosa, had also been talking about how John Lyons and James Moore disposed of Hargus’s body. Sell conducted a search under the Moore’s cabin and found clear evidence of a grave. The body had been burned, but bits of bone, hair, and clothing remained. One cuff button bore the initials of Hargus and there was a whetstone inscribed with his name. This was enough to arrest Lyons and Moore. During the Grand Jury hearing, Caroline Moore broke down and recalled how on the night of the murder, Lyons and her brother had wrapped her up in a sheet so that she could not witness them burying Hargus’s corpse. She managed to gnaw a hole in the sheet, however, and saw the two men bring a body swathed in a sheet into the house. The body was later exhumed, burned, and reinterred. Aaron Runion, who had married into the Moore family, testified that he had overheard Lyons and James Moore saying ominously that Caroline ‘knew too much about something’. This time the Grand Jury considered there was enough evidence to indict the two men. But, again, no-one was found guilty.
In 1917 the murder of Annie Boggs once again made headlines when residents of Booger Hole formed a lynch mob to rid the community of several individuals who were suspected of having been involved in a series of murders that stretched back to the Hargus affair. As well as the killings already mentioned, a peddler named John Newman had also disappeared while passing through Booger Hole, and Thurman Duffield of Calhoun County had been fatally shot by Laura Sampson, wife of farm labourer Harvey Sampson. Thurman’s brother Scott launched a posse to arrest her, and, during a shoot out, her hand was shot off. At the subsequent trial Sampson claimed self-defence and was acquitted. Things came to a head in 1917 because of the recent murder of a respected Booger Hole resident named Preston Tanner who had burned to death. It was widely believed that neighbour Howard Sampson and his father Andrew were responsible for setting fire to his home. An old resident recalled many years later that Howard had taken a fancy to Preston’s wife and wanted him out of the way. The more prosaic motive was the sum of $30. The Sampsons were arrested along with Fred Moore, although Fred was later released while the Sampsons stood trial for murder with Howard sentenced to life imprisonment. While Andrew and Howard lay in jail awaiting trial in Clay, a mob of sixty men from Booger Hole attempted to storm the jail and exact lynch law. If there was any doubt about their intentions, the following poster was pasted around Booger Hole
We the citizens of Clay county seeing that we cannot get justice by law, have organized the Clay county mob. We have pledged our lives to drive these people from our county or kill them. If we cannot catch and hang you, we shall sneak upon you and kill you as you killed Henry Hargis,
Lucy Ana Boggs, the old peddler and Preston Tanner.
If before you leave there is any stealing, killing or burning, we will get bloodhounds and detectives and run you to the ends of the earth. Bill Sampson, Kooch Sampson, Fred Moore, and Aaron Runyon are hereby notified to leave the state in ten days. Rose Lyons, Bill Moore and Elizabeth Sampson are notified to leave in thirty days.
Clay County Mob
An old citizen of Booger Hole recalled in 1971 how the Clay County Mob got their way in the end. He was awoken one night in his youth by dynamite explosions ripping through the valley. He looked out of his bedroom window and saw the glow of burning buildings. Five families were forced out of the area by daybreak.27 One can guess their names. Booger Hole no longer exists on the map. The spot now consists of Rush Fork and the nearby settlement of Dink, and has become an area visited for its supposed high level of paranormal activity.28
Apart from their brief space in the limelight as witch believers, the Cottrells of Booger Hole were not mixed up in any of these foul deeds. Indeed, in the mid-twentieth century the Cottrell family members played a significant role in restoring the reputation of the place, preserving the fine craft skills of the much- maligned hill folk. Jenes Cottrell became well-known in folk-music circles as ‘The Banjo Man from Dead Fall Run’. A brief newspaper feature on him in 1965 described how the sixty-three-year-old lived in the old farm the family had built around 1904 between Booger Hole and Ivy dale, living pretty much as they had done in his parents’ day.29 There were no mains water or electricity, and Jenes made all his own furniture and grew his own food. He regularly demonstrated traditional wood-turning techniques at local fairs in the 1960s, and the banjos he made ingeniously from pressure cookers and other used parts are sought after today. His sister Sylvia (O’Brien), another fine banjo player, likewise continued the same hill-folk life on the family farm after Jenes’s death. An interview with her in the 1980s takes us back to the life and beliefs of the area of the beginning of the century.
Sylvia (b. 1909) and Jenes (b. 1902) grew up next to members of the Boggs family and she no doubt heard of the murder of Annie and the many other goings on at Booger Hole. It may explain her cagey response when asked by an interviewer if she knew any witch stories, ‘Ah, I don’t know. I’ve heard some talk about witches taking milk from cows. And I think they did do that’. She went on to describe how a 50-cent piece would be put in the bewitched chums. When the interviewer asked if it was the silver that was efficacious or the motto on the coin ‘In God We Trust’, she said it was the motto. Still, years later, shortly before she died, Sylvia felt the urge to write down numerous stories of witches and supernatural happenings for the West Virginia ethnographer Gerald Milnes.30
So this case is something of a red herring. I could easily have been fooled into assuming that Annie Boggs had been shot as a witch if I had stopped my research at the conclusion of the trial of Old Man Cottrell. This would have been an understandable moment to terminate interest in the case, leaving the reader with the suspicion, fuelled by prejudice against the perceived backwardness of hillbilly folk, that the Cottrells had got away with murder. After all, I have provided accounts of numerous such shootings, and Cottrell and his nephew seem good candidates despite their protestations of innocence. It was only by following these peoples’ histories in the years after the event that an entirely different story emerged, and the identity of the murderer and the reason for the crime were revealed. Assumptions about the relationship between witchcraft belief, rural isolation, and lack of education are pernicious. As we shall now see as we move westwards.