Like most evocative American place names, Scary's etymology has produced more than one plausible explanation, none of them definitively documented. One common local story attributes the name to Native American legends about strange events along the creek - panther screams in the night, perhaps, or a ghost story dating from the earliest period of European settlement. Another theory points to early settlers' uneasy reactions to particularly steep and shadowed sections of the creek's lower reach. Whatever the origin, the name was firmly in local use by the early 1800s, well before the Civil War battle that made it briefly famous. The community spelled itself Scary and the creek behind it Scary Creek, and that has been the consistent local usage for two centuries. The post office, established in 1886, operated under that name until it was discontinued in 1931 as rural delivery routes consolidated.

On July 17, 1861, Union and Confederate forces fought across the creek and the road that crosses it. The battle was small by Civil War standards - about 1,300 Federal troops against about 900 Confederates - and the casualties were modest: 14 Union killed, around 30 wounded, between one and five Confederate killed and a half dozen wounded, including Confederate field commander Lt. Col. George S. Patton Sr. But the Confederate victory was the first in the Kanawha Valley, an early sign that Federal control of the trans-Allegheny region would not come easily. Two highway markers commemorate the battle, very close to each other along U.S. Route 35. They tell the story in the spare prose of state historical marker writing. The actual battlefield is mostly private land, now a quiet bend of farm and forest where, on July afternoons, the cicadas drone the way they did in 1861.

Scary, like dozens of similarly small unincorporated places along the Kanawha River, grew up around the practical geography of river crossing and overland travel. The mouth of Scary Creek offered a small protected landing for flatboats and later for steamboats. U.S. Route 35, the modern road, follows roughly the same line of march as the older James River and Kanawha Turnpike and earlier wagon roads. The community's economy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was primarily agricultural - corn, hogs, garden truck for the Charleston market. The 1931 closing of the Scary post office was part of a broader rationalization of rural mail service in the early Depression years; it did not mean the community itself was dying, only that the federal mail system was consolidating service points. People still lived in Scary. People still live in Scary now.

The American highway system produces a particular kind of low-grade fame for places with memorable names. Scary, West Virginia, has been a stop on the regional 'photograph the funny sign' circuit for as long as there have been postcards. Visitors driving U.S. 35 between Charleston and Point Pleasant occasionally pull over at the historical marker, take a picture of the sign, and continue on. The community is unincorporated, which means it has no town government, no town hall, no defined population count - it exists as a postal address, a road sign, a historical marker, and a clutch of houses. The Charleston metro area surrounds it; the Kanawha Valley industrial economy hums in the distance. Scary itself remains what it has been since the late 1700s: a particular bend in the river with a particular creek behind it and a name that, for whatever reason, somebody two hundred years ago thought made sense.