Beckley Exhibition Coal Mine

A restored coal mine that offers underground tours in vintage coal cars. The mine operated from the early 1900s and now serves as a museum preserving the heritage of southern West Virginia's coal mining industry. Each October, it transforms into a haunted attraction.

Deep beneath the hills of southern West Virginia, the Phillips-Sprague Mine opened in 1889 when commercial coal extraction was just beginning to transform the region's economy. Full-scale mining operations commenced in 1906, and for nearly half a century, men descended into the darkness each day to extract the black rock that powered America's industrial growth. The mine finally closed in 1953, its coal seams exhausted, and the City of Beckley purchased the property to preserve it as a living museum of the state's most defining -- and most dangerous -- industry.

The Beckley Exhibition Coal Mine opened to the public in 1962, becoming the first historic site in the United States wholly dedicated to educating visitors about coal mining. Today, guests ride through 1,500 feet of restored passageways and entries along 3,000 feet of vintage track in a 'man car' that holds 35 passengers, plunging into tunnels where the temperature holds at a constant 58 degrees regardless of the season above. The guides are veteran miners who share firsthand accounts of the daily labor and peril that defined life underground.

But the miners who lead tours are not the only presences felt in those dark passages. Visitors have long reported encounters that go beyond the chill of the underground air. In the deepest sections of the mine, where the tour cars slow to navigate tight turns, some passengers have reported hearing the distant ring of pickaxes on coal -- rhythmic, steady, the unmistakable sound of men at work in seams that have been silent for over seventy years. Others describe the sensation of being watched from side tunnels that branch into blackness, or catching the faint glow of a carbide lamp in a passage where no guide has ventured.

The coal mines of southern West Virginia were among the most dangerous workplaces in American history. Explosions, cave-ins, and the slow suffocation of black lung claimed thousands of lives across the coalfields during the industry's peak decades. While the Phillips-Sprague Mine's specific casualty records are incomplete, the broader Beckley area was the epicenter of Raleigh County's coal boom, and fatal accidents were a grim regularity. The restored Coal Camp on the surface -- complete with a Company House, Superintendent's Home, coal camp church, and school -- testifies to the total world that mining created, a world where life and death were separated by a few hundred feet of rock.

Theatre West Virginia has embraced the mine's eerie atmosphere by hosting annual haunted attractions in the tunnels. Their 'Cursed Coal Mine' event transforms the underground passages into a labyrinth of theatrical horror -- but performers and crew members have noted that not everything that happens during setup and teardown can be attributed to their own stagecraft. Equipment moves between sessions. Sounds echo from sections of the mine that are closed off and inaccessible. The darkness down there, they say, has a weight to it that feels distinctly inhabited.

The Exhibition Coal Mine draws approximately 48,000 visitors each year, many of whom come seeking an understanding of the heritage that built West Virginia. Some leave with more than education. The mine sits in New River Park, surrounded by the reconstructed buildings of a vanished way of life, and when the last tour car ascends into the daylight, the tunnels below return to the silence they held for decades -- a silence that, according to those who listen carefully, is never quite complete.