The Ghost of Indian Draft

 

The deep valleys of Indian Draft and the surrounding gaps of Stony Creek hold some of the most haunting, tragic, and bloody frontier lore in all of Pocahontas County. The WPA historical records reveal that this secluded draft was once a place of violent ambush, devastating raids, and an eerie supernatural encounter that remains famous in local memory.

The history of Indian Draft unfolds through three distinct eras of tragedy:

1. The Tragedies of the Drennan Pioneers

The Drennan (historically spelled Drennon or Drinnon) family were among the very first white settlers to attempt to establish homesteads in the Indian Draft wilderness. They paid a terrible price for occupying these ancestral tribal lands:

• The Murder of Mrs. Thomas Drennan: The home of pioneer Thomas Drennon was violently broken up in a raid. While the homestead was looted, his wife was taken captive by the raiding party and marched into the mountains. A few miles from her home, on the rugged slopes of Elk Mountain, she was murdered.
• The 1784 Lawrence Drennan Raid: Near the mouth of Indian Draft, where it meets the Greenbrier River, stood the home of Thomas’s brother, Lawrence Drennon. In 1784, a war party descended upon the home. Henry Baker was shot and killed as he climbed a fence, returning from his morning wash. Another settler, Richard Hill, managed to leap over the fence and escape into the brush unharmed. Tragically, two other men, John and James Bridger, were slain in the same encounter. The family’s schoolteacher at the time, Patrick Slator, survived, and the clearing where they built their lives became known to history as the School House meadow.

2. The 1765 Pursuit and the Tragedy at Island Ford

In 1765, another devastating raid occurred at the Bath Alum settlement. A raiding party took several prisoners—including a Mrs. Mayse, her young son Joseph, a Mrs. Sloan, and her infant daughter—and began the long march back toward the Ohio River.

A brave local militia pursued the captors, catching up to them just as they crossed the Greenbrier River at Island Ford (near the site of the later Marlinton tannery). When the militia opened fire, a chaotic skirmish erupted:

• In the panic, the captors killed the infant Sloan baby by dashing its head against a tree.
• The gunfire spooked a pack horse carrying 13-year-old Joseph Mayse, throwing him into a thick patch of stinging nettles. The boy lay hidden, survived the clash, and was rescued (though he would later lose a leg fighting at the Battle of Point Pleasant in 1774).
• The raiding party managed to escape the militia, fleeing deep into the mountain gaps by climbing directly up the narrow valley of Indian Draft with their three remaining captives. The body of the murdered Sloan infant was tenderly buried by the militia along Marlin Run.

3. The Ghost of Soldier John Drennan

While Indian Draft was a place of historical warfare, its most famous legend is a quiet, chilling ghost story from the War of 1812.

A young local man named John Drennon left the valley to fight for his country, but tragically died of disease while stationed at Norfolk, Virginia. At the time, news of the war and the fates of local soldiers took weeks to travel back to the mountains.

According to the record, a young boy named William Gay, Sr. was riding his horse back from a mill on Knapps Creek, taking the familiar path home through Indian Draft. As they rode, the horse suddenly stopped, trembling with terror.

The boy looked toward the side of the trail and saw young John Drennon wrapped in a blanket, resting in a fence corner. Before the boy could call out a greeting, his horse bolted at breakneck speed, fleeing the draft in a panic.

When the boy reached home, he excitedly told his family that he had seen "Soldier John" resting by the road on his way back from the war, and that they would surely have news of the conflict soon. But John Drennan never walked through the family's door, and his physical body was never found in the valley.

The mystery was finally solved weeks later when fellow local soldiers David Cochran and John R. Flemmons returned from the front lines. They brought the tragic news that young John had died in Norfolk. When the community compared the dates, they realized with a collective chill that the exact day and hour of John Drennan's death in Norfolk coincided perfectly with the moment young William Gay saw his silent, blanket-wrapped spirit resting in the fence corner of Indian Draft.

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📜 I can draft a detailed historical report compiling all of these dramatic frontier skirmishes and pioneer accounts across Pocahontas County if you want to preserve these WPA oral histories in a single document.