The Wizard Clip

Middleway, in West Virginia’s Eastern Panhandle, has carried the nickname “Wizard Clip” for more than two centuries, and its people have been called Clippers. The name comes from a story about the family of Adam Livingston, a German immigrant farmer. The state historical marker near Kearneysville dates the beginning to 1794, when a stranger died at the Livingston farm; other accounts place it closer to 1800. In the usual version, the traveller fell ill during the night and asked for a Catholic priest, but Livingston, or in some tellings his wife, would not send for one. The man died and was buried nearby.

What followed is the heart of the legend. The West Virginia Encyclopedia, drawing on a 1903 local account, lists logs leaping out of the fireplace, a rope across the road that a knife could not cut, ducks beheaded by unseen shears, and clothing and linens cut into crescent shapes. The shears gave the haunting its name. Local clergymen could not help; the Livingstons eventually turned to a Catholic priest, Father Dennis Cahill, and according to church records quoted in a 2025 Shepherdstown Chronicle column, his prayers and masses brought quiet to the house. Livingston deeded land to the Catholic Church in 1802, and the property is now the Diocese of Wheeling-Charleston’s Priest Field Pastoral Center.

Historians read the story as much as a social document as a ghost tale. The Chronicle column points out that Virginia in the late eighteenth century was hostile to Catholics, and that the Church’s interest in acquiring land in the Panhandle is part of the context. It also notes parallels with German folk healing known as braucherei, and Appalachian beliefs in healers and witch masters. Whether the legend is a record of a poltergeist, a folk belief given a physical form, or a story shaped to demonstrate the Church’s spiritual authority is something the sources leave open.

The Wizard Clip is often called West Virginia’s earliest ghost story. Its fullest early printed telling in the sources consulted here is the 1903 local history cited by the state encyclopedia, and in 2019 the William G. Pomeroy Foundation and the West Virginia Humanities Council placed a marker for it. The farm itself is private property, so the marker is the place to read the story.

Reported rumblings, objects thrown, fires, dead livestock, and above all fabric and leather cut by unseen shears into half-moon shapes, centred on one German-American farm family.

The Livingston farm near Middleway in Jefferson County; the land is now a church-owned retreat property and is not open for casual visits.

Local newspapers and television specials have retold the story, and the nickname “Clippers” for Middleway’s residents still survives.