Booger Hole sits in the Rush Fork drainage of Big Otter Creek, in the rolling hills of northern Clay County. The road through the hollow climbs up out of the Rush Fork bottom and into a series of side hollows where farms were carved out of the woods in the nineteenth century. The community was never large - a few dozen families at most, scattered across ridges and along creeks. The post office, when there was one, was tiny. The name appears in late-nineteenth-century records and on USGS maps from the same period. Various theories have been advanced for its origin. The most credible is straightforward: the woods here are deep, the hollows close in, and at dusk on a winter night the place earns the word booger without any further explanation needed.

In 1917 a series of unexplained killings struck the community. Contemporary press accounts, including a feature in the regional papers titled Mysteries of Booger Hole, reported about a dozen homicides within a relatively short period. Victims included men and women, neighbors and outsiders. The county sheriff investigated. A special grand jury was convened to hear evidence. Some suspects were identified: David Sampson and his son Howard were charged with the murder of Preston Tanner, and Howard was ultimately sentenced to life in prison. But most of the other killings went unpunished, and the community remained convinced that justice had not been fully served. The community itself, frustrated by the lack of progress, organized what they called a mob - in the early-twentieth-century usage meaning an informal committee of citizens determined to take action. They posted notices threatening to get bloodhounds and detectives and run the murderer to the ends of the earth. The threats produced no arrests. The cases remain officially unsolved more than a century later.

Local folklore eventually attached the violence of 1917 to the name Booger Hole, suggesting that the boogeyman of the woods had been responsible. The historical record is clear, however, that the community already had the name before the killings - the spirits, if you wanted to invoke them, were a retrofitted explanation. More plausibly, the murders were the work of one or more residents whose identities the small isolated community either could not figure out or could not bring themselves to expose. Paranormal investigators have included Booger Hole in their travels through Appalachia for decades. Documentary teams have shown up periodically. The hollow has appeared on lists of America's most haunted places, of West Virginia's strangest unsolved crimes, and of the country's oddest town names. Residents who still live there are accustomed to occasional visitors with cameras.

There is no Booger Hole signage. There is no historical marker. The hollow is reached by driving northeast from the small village of Ivydale on a series of county roads that climb into the Rush Fork drainage. Farmhouses and small cabins sit at irregular intervals along the road. The woods press in on both sides. In daylight, the place looks like a great many other quiet hollows in Clay County, with the same hardwood forest, the same patchwork of pasture and second-growth timber, the same crumbling outbuildings that mark the slow demographic decline of the central Appalachian uplands. At dusk, with a low fog settling in the creek bottom and shadows gathering in the ravines, the etymology of the place name begins to feel less arbitrary. The 1917 victims were real people whose deaths were never accounted for. That is the part of the story that should not be lost in the folklore.