Ada's Apparitions: Railroad Ghosts in Mercer County

Ada, WV Photo by JP Mueller: Source

Ada, WV is a small town located in Mercer County…but it’s a small town with a BIG ghost story. Well, BIG might not be the right word, but it is an extremely weird tale of the supernatural. According to an article in the Bluefield Daily Telegraph, this ghostly encounter happened some years before it was published in the August 22, 1937 edition. 

The exact date is not mentioned, but it was a crisp and clear night. Well after dark, Reverend G.W. Lucado was taking a stroll along the railroad tracks (now part of the Norfolk Southern Railway Christianburg District line) between the towns of Pembroke and Ripplemead. Along the way, Rev. Lucado ran into two men, one of whom he didn’t know, and another by the name of Bal Thompson. 

Rev. Lucado struck up a conversation with the two men, and as he was speaking, the two men literally vanished right before his eyes. They didn’t wander off into the darkness or disappear around the bend while walking ahead. They simply poofed out of existence right in front of the reverend. 

What’s interesting is that at least one of these men wasn’t your average spirit from beyond the grave. At the time of the encounter, Bal Thompson was alive and well and claimed that he had been nowhere near that area on the night in question and he certainly didn’t stop to have a conversation with Rev. Lucado. 

In ghost lore, apparitions of the living are not uncommon. In many cases, however, the apparition of a living person is seen as bad luck, or even as a death omen. So, being the curious person I am, I wondered if Bal Thompson had come to an early demise shortly after his apparition was seen. The problem with this quest was a lack of information in the original article, lol. 

Doing a simple search for “Bal Thompson” in the newspaper archives, the WV State Vital Statistics website, and Find-a-Grave, I found some interesting stuff on at least two different men named Bal Thompson…the Bal being short for Ballard. I have no idea whether or not any of these men mentioned are the Bal Thompson of Rev. Lucado’s story, but I thought I’d include them here, just in case. 

The first mention of a Bal Thompson I found was from a Bluefield Daily Telegraph article dated March 15, 1912. This article states that a B.P. (Bal) Thompson, a merchant policeman and former police chief, had shot and killed Edward Young near Charleston. Young was the superintendent of the Kanawha County Infirmary and it is said that Thompson, who had previously worked at the infirmary, had ‘differences’ with Young. To take a tragic tale even further, Thompson committed suicide and passed on April 30th. His Find-a-Grave entry has further information on his suicide. 

Bluefield Daily Telegraph 15 March 1912

There was another Bal Thompson mentioned in a 1921 article of the Hinton Daily News. This Thompson, a constable at Cedar Grove, was suspected of killing Edward Dawes, a watchman for the Paint Creek Collier Company. Obviously, this cannot be the same Bal Thompson who killed Edward Young, but we do have a bit of synchronicity happening here. Two men named ‘Bal’ Thompson, both members of law enforcement, unlawfully murdered men named Edward. There’s also a Find-a-Grave entry for a Ballard P. Thompson, buried in Kanawha County, who died in August of 1921, a month after Dawes’ death. Was this another case where a Bal Thompson took the life of another…and then his own?

Hinton Daily News 21 July 1921

There’s also a Bal Thompson who was killed in a mine accident in Stotesbury in 1925. His death certificate is available on the WV Vital Statistics website.

So that’s 2-3 Bal Thompsons making the news prior to the ghost story article being published. I honestly wasn’t aware that Bal was such a popular name/nickname. But, even if it was popular, it doesn’t seem to be a very LUCKY name, as at least two Bal Thompsons made the news for murder. Given this scenario, is it possible that Reverend Lucado ran into the living apparition of Bal Thompson, doomed to walk the tracks with his future victim? Is it even imaginable that the unidentified man was one of the murdered Edwards, ‘haunting’ his murderer even before the act even occurred? Stranger things have happened out on the railways of West Virginia and beyond…

Bluefield Daily Telegraph 22 August 1937