SPIRIT TALES AND MAGIC
Our host; Dr.G had his first paranormal experience at only eight years old. With over five decades of storytelling, magic and paranormal story collection he is an award winning story teller on a mission to revive firelight and the telling of stories!
SPIRIT TALES AND MAGIC
Ghosts of the Mines: Tommy Knockers, Warnings, and the Line Between Folklore and Survival
A soft knock in the night can feel like nothing—until it becomes the thread that pulls you into a world of danger, rescue, and old miner wisdom. We start with a real late-night scare and tumble into living folklore: the Tommy Knockers of Welsh and Cornish legend, carried into American coal towns where a tap on the timbers could mean the difference between making it home and never seeing daylight again.
We weave firsthand stories—grandfather Thomas John’s narrow escapes in the dinner hole, a firefighter’s sprint out of a collapsing house after hearing urgent knocks, and a parking-lot jolt that sent a driver moving just before a heavy statue smashed down. Along the way, we explore how communities gave names to the unknown—knackers, bucas, brownies—and how belief served as a practical safety system. Some miners called the knockers tricksters; others gave them the last bite of a pastry in thanks. Newspapers documented Tommy Knocker Weeks and debates over radios underground, as crews worried that music would drown out the tiny signals they trusted with their lives.
This story isn’t about proving ghosts. It’s about how humans listen, how we notice anomalies, and how folklore codifies pattern recognition before science does. Are these warnings paranormal, psychological, or physical cues we only hear when the world quiets down? We look at both sides—omens as lifesavers or scapegoats—and invite you to keep what’s useful: when something knocks where no one should be knocking, pay attention. Share your strangest warning, subscribe for more haunted history and lived experience, and leave a review to help others find the show. What’s the knock that made you move?
Hey everybody, talk to G, Spirit Tales and Magic. How you doing today? So we're on the 12th on a Sunday, and I hope it's been a good Sunday for you. Only 80 degrees here with thunder and lightning and all kind of crazy things. So last night there's a knocking. And I don't know if you can hear it when I do it. Just a knocking. It annoys me enough to get up out of bed. Because it sounds like somebody's knocking on the window. Which is not something that never happens here. I can't say it happens often. Happens more than I would like it to. But it's not that. I come in the studio and I peek out the window and can't see anything. So I start looking at all the other windows, nothing. There's another office. I opened the door that separates this part from the other part. And trying to break into the front door of that office is a guy using a specific tool, and I'm not going to say what it is because it gives people ideas. But there's a little switch I can throw to keep that thing he's trying to break through the door with from working. So I do that. And I go back to bed. Call the police and then I go back to bed. It's Phoenix. The police are hours away. So I have this dream about Thomas John Griffiths. That's my grandfather. And many of you have heard of Thomas John throughout the podcast. I mention him frequently. Very interesting guy. Thomas John was a coal miner. He came here as a child from Wales to get into the mining trades to help his family. And spent his entire life there. He lived through two mining disasters. And Ghosts of Willow Grove, I think, is the name of the podcast. But there I have a podcast a few months back about the Willow Grove mining disaster. He was what he would call not in his home mine. So he would never give anybody the name of this mine, but it was in West Virginia, which was right across the river from where his mine was. So he's down there conducting a class. And he tells the story of you know the Tommy Knockers. And of course, when I first heard it, I laughed. And he goes, I want to laugh, boys. Did you ever hear the rhyme? I'm like, the rhyme? No, I've not heard the rhyme. Late last night and the night before, the Tommy Knockers, Tommy Knockers knocking on my door. I want to go out. I don't know if I can. Because I'm afraid of the Tommy Knocker man. That's a rhyme they used to tell when he was a small child. I said, Do you believe that the tommy knockers are real? He said, Well, there I am. So I'm down in the dinner hole. The dinner hole is an area of the mine where miners sit on their bucket and eat. They have a their lunch boxes round, carries water in the bottom, sandwiches in the top. So we're in the dinner hole, you can just hear banging on the wall. It's banging on the wall. Somebody on the other side with a hammer? He goes, Well, nope. We all got up and ran. We ran as fast as we could. He said about 20 yards from where the dinner hole, where we were sitting at the dinner hole. There was a fire that started. He said, now this particular time there wasn't an explosion. He said we was lucky that day. Everybody got out. They got out because of the knocking. So you tell me. Okay. So according to Marion Webster, some of you are not gonna know who that is, but the the dictionary. A Tommy Knocker is the ghost of a man killed in a mine. Now other references indicate that the folk tale is so much more complicated than that, and it's way more than an average haunting. Currently, Wikipedia expands on that, and the knocker or the knacker, as it's called sometimes, or the buca, which it's also called, is a mythical creature in Welsh, Cornish, and Devon folklore, Duvon folklore. It is closely related to the Irish leprechaun or the Kentish clocker, and the English and Scottish brownie. So not unlike our friend the Sasquatch, the Tommy Knocker has different names wherever it is. Now the Cornish described the creature as a little person, two feet tall, with a big head, long arms, and a wrinkled face. It's got white whiskers, wears a tiny version of a standard miner's garb, and commits random acts of mischief, such as stealing miners' unattended tools and food. The name comes from the knocking on the mine walls that happens just before cave ins. Actually, the creaking of the earth and the timbers before giving away. Some miners, the knockers were malevolent spirits, and the knocking was the sound of them hammering on the walls and supports to actually cause the cave in. To others who saw them as essential, well-meaning, practical jokers, the knocking was their way of warning the miners that some life-threatening collapse or life-threatening problem was imminent. Now, according to some Cornish folklore, the knockers were helpful spirits of people who had just previously died in the mine, and they wanted to warn their brother miners of impending danger. To give thanks for the warnings, some of the miners cast the last bite of their tasty pastries into the mine for the knockers. This dimage known like men or the Cornish equivalent of the Irish leprechaun or the English brownies, like we said. So I wanted to go back into West Virginia history. Now, the Cornish miners worked in Western Pennsylvania coal mines from about the 1820s, and that's where the legend begins here. But where I grew up close to West Virginia, there were a lot of mines. They were all over the place. So I thought it'd be fun to search that and see if we can find some Tommy Knockers there. In West Virginia newspapers, at least the ones you can still find, there were only two references. So there was a book, a work of fiction that was widely circulated back in the 1900s called Tommy Knockers, The Miner's Ghosts. And I want to say that Harry Beardsley and Leslie Weekly had uh authored that book. And I don't have that in front of me, so if I'm wrong, I apologize in advance. There is a mention of the Tommy Knocker Week, August 5th through the 10th, in a 1970 column by James Dent. That's weird. When he was asked why they held this Tommy Knocker Festival, he said, Well, a press agent thought of it, and a lot of miners responded. There were other mentions in calendars of events and in some other minor newspapers. Some headlines like this is a week of recognition for the Cornish cousin of the leprechaun. But there was no information on who was sponsoring the event or how it was supposed to be observed. So they say in modern day mining, today's mining, we no longer hear the knockers. A lot of the old timers, like Pap, Thomas John, said that the knockers have gone radio silent because of radios in 1929. So a radio columnist, and I want to say it was Graham McNamee, um shared some concerns of miners that having radios in the coal mines would chase the little fellows out. And one reader wrote, Sometimes coal miners think we haven't got a friend in the world. But we always know Tommy knockers are looking out for us. Many has the live that has been saved by these we beings and they're knocking. They shared a history about a miner who took exception to a suggestion that there would be radios on every level of the mine, so the miners might be able to hear some music when they were at the dinner hole. Would you drive the few Tommy knockers we have left out of the mine? He screams, with all this squealing and blathering coming right through the earth. It's bad enough for them as it is down here, and here you are with these radio boxes making such a great din that fills the mine. How could we even hear them knocking if they weren't panicked and already driven away by this nonsense? I suppose if you believe in the Tommy knockers, he makes a good point. You're not going to hear them knocking if there's too much din. The Lincoln State Journal in Nebraska, I believe it was Sunday, November the 17th, they uh they ran that article. So let's circle back for a minute to the idea of haunting of a mind by a recently dead man. There's a kind of shadowy belief, scarcely reduced to a proposition now, that the spirit of anyone killed in a pit hovers around the spot until after the body is consigned to sacred earth. Now, this idea is doubtless due to the custom of suspending work in a pit. When a fatal accident happens, all the men engaged of that part of the working area come up out of the mine and do not descend again to that shaft until the funeral, when the casket is placed all the way down into the vault and covered by the earth. The Bluefield Daily Telegraph, I believe, 1936, had a story about an incident from 30 years prior to that, that in I believe it was the Pocahontas mine, the spit of a man killed in a mine explosion came to a mine foreman to tell him that they had buried the body in the wrong place. The body that was buried under his name was not his body. This is something that must be corrected. The spirit directed the foreman to a spot or from the drift mouth, the opening of the mine. Where a little digging you can find my body. You must get it out and bury it in a real cemetery, or I will not be able to rest. The only name mentioned was Dan Fraser. He's a well-known mining executive who could no doubt shed some further light on this highly interesting narrative if he were there. In 1963, Bill Conley, president of the Education Foundation, wrote about ghosts in coal mines. He was asked, why are you leaving women out? It was because of miners' superstitions. But as Thomas John would tell you, sometimes a ghost of a miner's wife will search a mine looking for her husband who died there. He says it's because of the darkness you see in the mines that many are said to be haunted. Light reflection causes ghosts of white mules which have been killed in the mines, or a man who dies in a slate fall. He may return looking for his tools that he had hidden. It is claimed that in the early days of mining in West Virginia, the room where an accident occurred was closed until new miners came along to the works who had heard nothing about the accident, and then that room could be reopened. Now, Pap tells a story of many mines. It was a family-owned coal mine. And I knew where the entrance to that mine was. It was just across from the back entrance of the fairgrounds where I grew up. And it had been sealed. You could only get about three or four feet into it. You had to crawl, it was a little terrible entrance. And he tells of spirits in that mine. And several miners had seen a lady asking if they had seen old Tom. Now, of course, his name is Thomas John, and he's spooked because he thinks Tom, I'm Tom. Is there another Tom? And as it turns out that the first accident in that mine killed a man named Tom. The second accident in the mine is his other version of the knocking because they heard the knocking and they ran. And it wasn't like the current mines back then. You didn't get on what they call the man trip or the scooter or whatever it is that's taking you down. You ride for two hours to get to the face just to start your workday. These were openings in rock that you crawled into with a pick and a and some other hand tools. It was very rough, and a lot of people were killed. Fast forward to the last conversation that Thomas John and I would ever have. Of course, nobody knew it at the time. It was a fairly long one. But uh we touched base about the the knocking, because there was an incident in a fire that I was in as a firefighter where I heard a lot of knocking and went to the basement with one of my friends. And seconds later, all the air horns on all the equipment outside are blowing. Now that's a signal that something very bad in the house is going to collapse. You need to get out, get out now. You don't even take the hose, you just drop it and run. But prior to that, the knocking upstairs made us go downstairs where it ended up that I had to grab him and we ran through a garage door because someone had put padlocks in the side of the garage door. But anyway, if we had stayed upstairs about another two minutes, most likely would have been dead. Thomas John always appreciated that story. And he he had this grin that he got every once in a while. He says, I'm gonna give you something to think about. He said, Okay. Okay, so they left the mine and went out into the community. He said, They're still there. So when you hear the knocking on your house, on your car, maybe it's time to leave the area because the Tommy knockers are still watching. It's interesting the things that we believe in and the ghost stories. And I I could tell you countless ghost stories about just knocking, knocking on windows, knocking on car windows. My mom tells a story of leaving Trans-Alegheny one day. That's the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum, Weston State. And it's very dark outside, there's no parking lot lights, and it's storming, and she's in her car when she hears something knock on the trunk. Now, her story is she's sitting in the car, the car's running, she's her cigarette lighter in the car is broken, so she's looking for a match to light a cigarette. We don't do that these days, but that was pretty normal back in the day. She hears the knocking, she puts the car in gear and floors it, and she leaves. Now, when she's telling me this story, I can be a little bit of a smart aleck sometimes. No, really? But I said, oh, and gee, we're just in time to discover that there was a blanket in the backseat with a man under it and an axe, right? She looks at me and she says, No smart ass. That's not what I was gonna say. She said, I flew her the car and I get out. She said, and I hear this big crash. A piece of the building on the top of the building had come loose and had fallen right where her car was parked. I said, a piece of the building? She said it was actually a statue, like a gargoyle or something. So you were actually saved by the knocking. Because I don't know. She goes, maybe I, you know, I was perceptive enough that I saw it falling out the corner of my eye or something. She was a psychologist, so she always tried to analyze everything. What's your Tommy Knocker story? Do you have one? Or what's the thing that warns you? We've talked about that several times. The Mothman, the Tommy Knockers. Is it our nature to have something be your, for better lack of terms, savior? If something crazy like that happens right before a disaster. And it always goes two ways. We've talked about that, no up without a down. So the Mothman comes and warns you, and you run away and you're saved, or the bridge collapses and it's because the Mothman was there. So there's always two ways to look at that story. But going through the notes of a lot of ghost stories, the knocking is there. I think about Thomas John often. And I just wanted to throw that in there. Thomas John was a little superstitious given where he had come from. And I believed even though he would never admit it, he believed in the Talmud Hawkers. Something saved his life many times in the coal mining business. There are a lot of stories of ghosts of the mines, and especially ghosts of the mines in the old west, and we'll cover those. But send me your ghost stories. Do you have something like a Tommy Knocker that you want to tell us about? Because we'd love to hear it. The world that exists all around us all the time. And every now and then, for whatever the reason, we catch a glimpse of it, and the dead get in. Tominockers are definitely paranormal. So hey. Tell a ghost story, even if it's about the Tommy Knockers. We'll catch you tomorrow, which is the 13th day, and we're gonna talk about why 13 is not a lucky number, or why it is. Good afternoon from Phoenix. We appreciate you.
