Shepherdstown, West Virginia, Is So 'Haunted' That The Cops Called In Ghost Hunters

SHEPHERDSTOWN, WV — It's the hottest debate currently dividing the paranormal community: Is the teensy riverside town of Shepherdstown, West Virginia, really "the most haunted town in America," as some of television's most prominent ghost hunters insist? Or has the whole thing been staged to drive ghost tourism to Shepherdstown?

"Honestly, I don't know" if the town is haunted, Shepherdstown Police Chief Mike King said Monday in a phone interview with Patch. "I’m not a ghost investigator. I just know there are things I can’t resolve."

Want more local news from West Virginia? You're in luck: You can now sign up for Patch's free email newsletters and breaking news alerts from the region.

Shepherdstown is a picturesque town of 1,700 people — plus 4,000 or so college students who attend Shepherd University — perched along the Potomac River in West Virginia's Eastern Panhandle. Established in 1762, years before the U.S. was even a country, Shepherdstown is believed to have hosted some of the bloodiest battles in the American Civil War. It's known as the birthplace of the steamboat, the site of turn-of-the-21st-century peace talks between Israel and Syria and, more contemporarily, a hot spot for quirky, small-town theater.

Among ghost watchers, though, Shepherdstown has earned a more sinister reputation as America's capital for paranormal activity.

Monday night at 10 p.m. across the country, season two of the hit TV show "Ghosts of Shepherdstown" will premiere on the Destination America channel. (Find out which channel that is for you here.)

And it was actually King, the town's police chief of six and a half years, who was responsible for getting the series off the ground.

See also:

• Brooklyn Ghost Hunters Plan To Stake Out Wine Bar, Summon Spirits
• Unnerving Hotel Shadow May Be One Of Pleasanton's Legendary Ghosts

King said he and his team of five police officers had been fielding dozens of 911 calls from local homeowners about odd little incidents — alarms triggered by motion censors, bumps in the night, knocks on the door, loud footsteps, lights turning on and off, dishes crashing off the shelf, etc. — that responding officers were never able to trace back to their source.

"Sometimes I think we get more of these calls than any police department in America," King said.

So, a couple years ago, King said he reached out to current "Ghosts of Shepherdstown" host Nick Groff — then-host of two other popular TV shows dedicated to solving paranormal mysteries — and asked him to come help investigate the town's strange happenings.

"If I have a road that has a sinkhole in it, I call the road department," King said. "And I know nothing about ghost hunting. So I called Nick."

Throughout the show's first season, now available to watch online, Groff's team looked into claims of "phantoms" spotted by local residents — including a corpse in the Potomac River, a young girl in a Shepherd University dorm room, a Civil War soldier in a local bakery and a headless woman in one of the town's oldest homes.

Now, for season two, Groff and company will be crossing the borders of Shepherdstown to investigate reports of "poltergeist activity" in neighboring parts of Jefferson County, West Virginia.

"The dark presence is back — and it's spreading," King says in the opening scenes of the season premiere.

The team's first stop: an incredibly creepy wax museum filled with life-sized dolls (complete with human hair and recycled dentures) arranged to reenact gory Civil War battles, slave auctions and other historical events.

The museum is located in the neighboring town of Harper's Ferry (pictured above), just a short bridge trip over the Potomac River from Shepherdstown. "Water is a powerful spiritual conductor," Elizabeth Saint, one of the show's paranormal investigators, says as the team crosses the bridge.

Saint's theory? "It's possible the Potomac River is what is channeling all this spiritual energy from Shepherdstown itself. I really think that Shepherdstown is the eye of the storm in all this."

Ann Khiel Fern, acting manager of the wax museum, tells show hosts she "cannot be in this building for one more minute."

"Sometimes when I go through to make my checks in the museum, the eyes follow me," Fern says. And just the night before, she claims that:

"I was at the desk working, trying to get some paperwork ready, and I heard knocking — and it got louder and louder and louder. And then I heard the most horrific sound. If you think of someone with long, filthy, dirty fingernails just scraping. ... The next thing I knew, the wallpaper started pulsing as if someone were breathing underneath it. ... I lost it. I ran out. I was absolutely terrified."

A former wax museum volunteer named Melissa tells TV cameras that she, too, refuses to enter the building after seeing the ghost of a little girl running through the hallways.

But not all viewers are buying into the action.

In recent weeks, bloggers on the paranormal beat have been questioning the integrity of "Ghosts of Shepherdstown" — and of all the town officials involved in showing the TV crew around, digging up historical records to explain ghost sightings, etc.

To back up their suspicions, critics pointed to a report in one local newspaper that quoted Shepherdstown Visitors Center Director Marianne Davis as saying "some of the locations or ghost stories were changed by the show’s producers 'to make good television.'"

Some also noted that "Terrence," a supposed "witness" who appeared in season one, is in fact an actor whose role in the show is listed on IMDB.

Regarding the scene shot with an actor, a spokeswoman for the show explained in a statement sent to Patch that the person who actually sighted the ghost "wanted their identity to remain a secret" — so producers hired someone to "appear in his place."

However, the spokeswoman said, "the witness consulted on this story to ensure that it was told with complete accuracy."

Show host Nick Groff also took to Facebook to address the growing skepticism. "All of the witness accounts that we investigate are real," he insisted:

Speaking to Patch on Monday, another local resident, Dana Mitchell, founder and lead guide of the Shepherdstown Mysteries Walk, attested that "there is definitely, definitely spirit activity in this town."

"It's all over the place," she said.

Like her town's police chief, Mitchell said she's never gotten any indication that "Ghosts of Shepherdstown" is a fraud.

Mitchell, 65, admitted she was hired as a historical researcher for the show. But she stands by everything she discovered in the process. "All the research I did is as accurate as we know — as accurate as documented history shows," Mitchell said.

The Facebook page for Mitchell's night tour is filled with photos snapped along the route of shadowy, human-like figures; strange swooshes and orbs of light; and a bunch of other spooky little oddities.

Indeed: The legend of Shepherdstown precedes its television debut. Local ghost sightings reported on one popular forum include a woman in a blue dress, white apron, high heels and "old time circle glasses" sitting on one resident's dresser and a "see through little girl" who appeared in the photo of another resident who had been "taking a picture of a hedgehog" in her back yard.

Can't get enough of America's "most haunted town"? The paranormal blog Southern Spirit Guide has a great inventory of all the old buildings rumored to be haunted in Shepherdstown and another list specifically for spooky sites on the Shepherd University campus.

Or, to get even closer to the action, King recommends you listen in on local police radio for a few hours.

"Sit and listen to a monitor long enough," King said, and you’re sure to hear a 911 report that turns out to be inexplicable — the kind that ends in a responding officer saying, "There's nothing going on here. I think the person might be mental."

But the way the police chief sees it, "This amount of people can’t be crazy. And if they are, they should start examining the water, 'cause there’s something in the water here in Shepherdstown."

This story has been updated to include additional details.

Pictured at top: A photo taken in summer 2016 through the window of Shepherdstown's Old English Church by a woman on the local ghost tour. Some see a child standing in the doorway. Photo courtesy of Shepherdstown Mystery Walks