Marrtown

The Marr family brought with them from Scotland a belief system centered on the banshee — the Irish and Scottish death-fairy who attaches herself to specific clans and announces imminent death. In the Highland and Scots-Irish tradition, the banshee's appearance is not a metaphor; she is a distinct entity with a specific appearance: typically robed in grey or white, sometimes astride a white horse, with eyes reddened from grief.

Thomas Marr told his wife on multiple occasions that he had seen a grey-robed rider on a white horse while traveling between the family farm and the Little Kanawha toll bridge at night. He could never discern the figure's face.

In the legend as told, Mary Marr woke with a sense of dread before dawn on the night her husband died. She looked out the window and saw the white horse and its rider approaching the front of the house. She went outside. The rider was an old woman with eyes that appeared to glow with an unnatural light. The woman said that Thomas was dead and told Mary to say her prayers. Then the horse and rider were gone. Within the hour, a coworker arrived at the farmhouse with the news that Thomas Marr's body had been found in the river. This river version is later folklore; a February 12, 1874 newspaper notice places his death near the freight depot.

The banshee returned when Mary Marr died — accounts describe a horrible scream filling the house at the moment of her death. Members of the extended Marr family have reported encounters with the entity across generations, maintaining a tradition that frames the appearances as genuine ancestral contact rather than fiction.

The banshee legend's appearance on Creepy Canada in 2006 brought it to a wider regional audience without reducing it to sensationalism — the episode treated the Marrtown tradition with historical context. The Banshee of Marrtown story is also told on the Haunted Parkersburg Ghost Tour, a separate operator's seasonal walking tour that begins at the Blennerhassett Hotel in downtown Parkersburg.