ATHENS, Ohio - A weeping angel, headless train conductor and phantom watchman populate a book by a shoemaker-turned-author who collected tales told for years in southeast Ohio.

        Lawrence Everett grew up hearing the stories from his father and grandmother, who had heard them from older relatives.

        A writing instructor at Hocking College told him, “Write what you know,” so he used the stories for homework assignments two years ago.

        This year, Mr. Everett, 36, turned the project into a self-published book, which he sells online and in local stores.

        “I never considered myself an author,” he said. “It's ironic. Any of my English teachers in high school, they would probably flip out.”

        The book, Ghosts, Spirits and Legends of Southeastern Ohio, joins various Web sites and other books devoted to the regional tales.

        Storytelling is part of the area's heritage. Early settlers, many of them illiterate, lived in small communities isolated by the rugged hills. Through storytelling, each generation passed down family and community traditions to the next.

        “It seems like nobody down here has anything better to do, so they tell stories,” Mr. Everett said.

        “It's part of our culture, absolutely,” said Joy Padgett, director of the Governor's Office of Appalachia.

        “Put a bunch of guys around the stove of the country store or ladies at a quilting bee, they're going to be spinning yarns. It's part of the social structure to tell these stories.”

        One of the familiar stories Mr. Everett tells is Vinton County's Moonville tunnel story. The most-popular version describes how a train engineer, after learning that his wife was having an affair with the conductor, waited until his colleague was on the tracks inspecting the train. Then he moved it, decapitating the man.

        The conductor is said to be buried in the nearby Moonville cemetery. One night, Mr. Everett and a friend brought a video camera to the site. He said an orb of light trailed them.

        “I don't know if it was the headless conductor or ... something you can explain,” he said. “But I've shown the videotape to people, and nobody can explain what it is.”

        The weeping angel is in the West State Street Cemetery in Athens and is said to shed tears down her stone face.

        Another story is about what's called The Stain, an hourglass-shaped silhouette marking where the body of a missing patient was found on the masonry floor of the old Athens Lunatic Asylum.

        Then there's the tale of the watchman who was guarding an iron ore furnace when he fell in, screaming. On stormy nights, visitors to Lake Hope State Park in Vinton County supposedly can see him perched on the furnace's ruins.

        A newer popular myth is that the Ohio Department of Natural Resources stuffs baby rattlesnakes in water balloons and drops them from helicopters to cull the wild turkey population.

        Department spokeswoman Carol Wells said the untrue story is passed along with the latest twist in the oral tradition: Folks now say the agency is developing gel-filled packets to cushion the snakes' landing.

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