The One Standing at the Fork

I quit urban exploring because of what I saw in that mine. I sold the camera too. I don’t look at what’s on it.

Summer of 2018. Twenty-five, and I was in a club that shot photos of abandoned places. A played-out coal mine in the mountains of West Virginia. Closed down in the nineties, the entrance half-collapsed, mouth gaping open on the hillside. There were three of us. Me and two older guys. Headlamps clipped to our helmets, rope coiled up, all keyed up as we went in. Back then it was just a great photo subject.

The tunnel ran longer than I expected. Water came up to our ankles, sloshing, and rusted ore-cart rails ran off into the dark. The air tasted like iron. We shot pictures and pushed in, deeper and deeper. About thirty minutes in, where the tunnel split into two, one of the older guys stopped.

At the edge of the headlamp beam, right where the dark began, someone was standing.

At first I figured it was another exploring crew. Wearing what looked like miner’s coveralls, facing us, standing there. Not moving. We called out. No answer. One of the guys said, “You a person?” and took a step closer. That was our first mistake. Stepping in put the headlamp light on it.

The part of it above the coveralls wasn’t a person.

There was nothing above the neck. Not cut off and missing — where the head should be, there was just the empty collar of the coveralls. And yet it was facing us. How something with no head turns toward you, I can’t explain. I just felt it, all through my body, that it had noticed us.

We should have stopped there. But none of us could move, and the headlamp kept on it. And that’s when I saw. At its feet.

There was a person. A real person. Down on the tunnel floor, lying face-down in a pool of water. Still in miner’s coveralls. The back was split open. Down the length of the spine, like someone had taken it in both hands and opened it like a book, the ribs spread wide to either side. The inside was empty. Lungs, everything — gone. Cleaned out, so the light off the water rippled inside the hollow ribcage. The ends of the ribs shone white in the headlamp. The blood was old and black, dissolved into the water and smeared across the tunnel floor like a dark ribbon.

And the headless thing stood over it. Over the person at its feet, headless, in a posture like it was looking down at them. Like it was looking at what it had done. Or like just standing there was the whole of what it was.

We backed away without even screaming. The second the headlamp came off it, it sank into the dark. Afraid it’d be there if we lit it again, nobody put the beam back. We ran for the entrance, sloshing through the water. One of the guys went down and tore his knee up, and nobody stopped.

Outside, in the daylight, we threw up for a long time. All three of us. Nobody said anything. What would you even say.

Back home I searched the name of that mine. Urbex forums, blogs, all of it. There were a few logs from other crews who’d been through that mine. Most just called it “a mine with great atmosphere.” But one post snagged me. A crew that went through in 2014 said they saw “something like a mannequin in coveralls” at the fork. Said they got scared and turned back. Someone in the comments asked where the mannequin’s head went. The poster replied, “Yeah, no head lol, somebody must’ve been messing around.”

In 2014 it was standing there, headless, too.

I tried to find out who the person at its feet was. I looked up records of miners who died in accidents at that mine. In 1992 a man was killed in a tunnel collapse, and they never recovered the body, so they sealed the mine like that. Buried. Never pulled out.

I think that’s who it was — the person at its feet. Lying face-down in that pool of water for twenty-six years. But who spread that back open like that?

The thing standing headless over it was wearing miner’s coveralls.