I’m sure you have all heard of the Appalachian Rules:

 If you see something, no you didn’t.

If you hear something, no you didn’t.

 If something whistles at you, you don’t whistle back.

But what happens if you ignore the rules? What will happen if you whistle back or interact with the so-called “wildlife” in the Appalachian Mountains? This is the legend of the Virginia City Ghost Town, located in Wytheville, Virginia.

The Virginia City Ghost Town, originally named “Dry Gulch Junction,” opened as a theme park in the early 1960s. The park was created in order to bring some life into the Wytheville and Bland areas. The park was a hit right away. The old western town theme had people believing that they were really in the Old West, with saloons, magicians, staged gunfights, and the star of the show, a 1905 locomotive ride.

As the years went by and other theme parks began to open, people started drifting away from the Junction, and it slowly began to fall apart. Unfortunately, in 1975, a park employee was performing a few maintenance tasks on the locomotive and sadly lost his life after slipping underneath the train. After that, the park was doomed.

When the park was sold in 1981, it sat abandoned for two decades and became a hot spot for trespassers. The park was so destroyed that even the old train tracks had been ripped up and sold as scrap metal. However, in the year 2000, the theme park was set to make a comeback when a couple bought the land and, with it, what was left of the old Dry Gulch Junction.

As the couple were remodeling the newly renamed Virginia City, they began noticing things: tools missing and reappearing days later in a completely different location from where they had originally been, disembodied voices coming from the old buildings, and loud, pained screams that the owners could never find the source of. Once again, tragedy struck for the park when one of the owners passed away in an unrelated accident, leaving the park uncompleted and, once again, abandoned to those that haunt its grounds.

For this article, I had an anonymous report from someone who tried to locate the old Virginia City. They told me that about halfway up Highway 52, the entrance to the road that took its visitors to the park can be seen from the side of the road. They also talked about piled-up railroad wood and nails at the entrance of the road, almost secretly marking the way to the Wild West, right here in Wytheville, Virginia.

Edited and Reviewed by Kien Powell