09/05/2026
We thought we knew the story of Burnt House, West Virginia. Then we went back to the historical record.
For years, the unusual Ritchie County place name has been explained by a grisly legend involving murdered peddlers, a roadside tavern, an enslaved woman named Deloris, and a fire that supposedly left her ghost haunting the site.
But while revisiting the story, West Virginia Explorer found a much earlier account that tells a different tale.
In her 1911 History of Ritchie County, Minnie Kendall Lowther says the burned house belonged to the Groves family. She recorded two conflicting explanations for the fire, but neither mentions the Harris Tavern, murdered travelers, or Deloris.
We also found an intriguing connection to the large historic hotel that still stands at Burnt House today. Lowther wrote that Henry Fling acquired the Groves farm in 1859 and was the first to rebuild where the earlier residence had burned.
So what really happened at Burnt House? We went back through the sources to separate what we can document from the remarkable legend that developed afterward.
Here's what we found.
The strange name Burnt House, West Virginia, has long been tied to a grisly ghost story, but an earlier Ritchie County history tells a different tale.
