In almost every historic town in the United States you’ll find ghost tours out the wazoo. New Orleans has tours through cemeteries. Gettysburg has them on the battlefields. We’ve seen the advertisements. We’ve seen the buses. But
in all of our years of travel, we have never taken a single one. That was until our adventure in Cumberland Gap. When the sun went down on our first day, we congregated at the Olde Mill Inn with a group of strangers and a young woman with a lantern. It was time for the tour to commence. We’re not going to spoil the tour for you, because 34
it’s definitely something fun to do when you visit The Gap. However, here’s the short of it: The Cumberland Gap region was home to many dangerous occupations back in the day. It was teeming with coal mines, which meant countless fatalities. It was also the site of the Iron Furnace, where men would manually melt down the iron in a giant furnace in the woods. More than one person was killed either by the sheer weight of the metal or by the furnace itself. The workers in these professions were overworked and
grossly underpaid. So, when they died on the
