The Forgotten Horror of the Lake Shawnee

A man bought a piece of land in southern West Virginia in nineteen twenty-six and built an amusement park on it. He didn't know what was already there. He didn't know what was going to come. This episode tells the layered story of Lake Shawnee. It starts in the year 1282, with a wave of sickness that swept through a Fort Ancient village and killed too many of its children.

It moves forward to 1775, when a colonial settler named Mitchell Clay brought his wife and fourteen children to a stretch of bottomland by the Bluestone River, where they became the first white family in what would later be Mercer County. It carries you into August of 1783, when a Shawnee war party came down out of the woods on a summer morning and three of the Clay children died, two in their own yard and one at a stake in Ohio.

It walks through the forty years that Conley Trigg Snidow ran one of the most beloved amusement parks in southern West Virginia, the Sunday afternoons that thousands of coal mining families remembered as the happiest days of their childhood, and the two specific deaths that finally closed the gates in 1966. And it ends with what archaeologists from Marshall University and Concord College pulled out of the dirt in the late 1980's, when a man named Gaylord White started digging on the property and found out, in the worst possible way, what his grandfather's generation had built on top of.

The Ferris wheel still stands. The swings still hang. And the ground underneath all of it still holds everyone it has been holding for hundreds of years. This is the story of a single piece of dirt in Appalachia, and what it remembers.

Have a forgotten historical mystery, disturbing event, unsolved crime, or hidden conspiracy you think deserves investigation?

Send your suggestions to [email protected].

Disturbing History is a dark history podcast exploring unsolved mysteries, secret societies, historical conspiracies, lost civilizations, and the shadowy stories buried beneath the surface of the past.

Follow the show and enable automatic downloads so you never miss a deep dive into history’s most unsettling secrets.

Because sometimes the truth is darker than fiction.