Laura Wright 
Deep in the mountains of Southwest Virginia, near the community of Pocahontas in Tazewell County, there once stood a three-room log cabin with an ominous reputation.
The area was known as Sinking Creek.
And the little house became known simply as Old Hell’s Cabin.
People told stories about strange noises coming from inside after dark. Visitors heard whispers, groans, and screams. Mysterious lights danced around the roof. The smell of sulfur drifted through the night.
One witness even claimed to have seen a creature resembling a cow with enormous horns of flame.
The man who lived there was considered almost as frightening as the house itself.
His name was Philip Hellingham.
Everyone called him Old Hell.
The Strange Man at Sinking Creek
Hellingham was an elderly bachelor who had spent decades living alone in the cabin.
He was remembered as a tall man with gray hair and equally gray eyes. His solitary habits did little to reassure his neighbors.
People considered him strange.
Some considered him dangerous.
Others believed he was something considerably worse.
Rumors spread that Old Hell was involved in mysterious dealings with the Devil. Some claimed he had actually made a pact with Old Scratch, although no one seemed to know exactly what Hellingham had received in return.
There were other rumors about him as well.
Hellingham supposedly came from a wealthy family in North Carolina and had received an excellent education before somehow ending up alone in a log cabin in the Virginia mountains.
Whatever his past contained, he wasn’t eager to discuss it.
And the people living around Sinking Creek were increasingly reluctant to visit him.
A Reporter Hears About Old Hell
During the 1880s, a reporter traveled through the Virginia mountains searching for an interesting story.
Eventually, he stopped at a saloon.
While enjoying a drink, he overheard several local men discussing the mysterious resident of Sinking Creek.
They were talking about Old Hell.
The reporter listened.
One of the men claimed to have been Hellingham’s neighbor.
He had even attempted to spend a night inside the infamous cabin.
He never made that mistake again.
Whispers in the Guest Room
According to the neighbor, his visit began normally enough.
Eventually, everyone retired for the evening.
As the man attempted to sleep, however, he heard something strange.
Whispers.
At first, he assumed the wind was responsible.
But the room seemed airtight.
He searched for cracks or other places where a draft might be entering.
He found nothing.
Then the whispers changed.
They became groans.
The visitor became increasingly frightened.
Finally, the groans turned into screams.
That was enough.
The man fled Old Hell’s Cabin.
Lights Above the Cabin
After running several hundred yards, the frightened visitor stopped.
Despite everything he had experienced, he was uncomfortable with the idea of abandoning the old man inside the house.
He turned and looked back.
Then he froze.
Strange lights were dancing around the top of the cabin.
At the same time, he smelled something unmistakable.
Burning sulfur.
Whatever sympathy the man still possessed for Old Hell disappeared.
He continued home.
And he swore he would never visit the cabin again.
The Animal With Horns of Fire
Another man listening in the saloon had his own story.
One night, he had been passing Old Hell’s Cabin when he saw a bizarre creature outside.
It resembled a cow.
But there was something impossible about it.
The animal appeared to possess enormous horns made of flame.
By now, the reporter had heard enough.
He wasn’t convinced that anything supernatural was happening at Sinking Creek.
But he knew a good story when he heard one.
He decided to visit Old Hell himself.
His timing proved extraordinary.
Had he arrived only a few hours later, Philip Hellingham might have taken the truth with him to the grave.
Old Hell Was Dying
When the reporter reached the cabin, Hellingham was gravely ill.
The old man asked his visitor for a glass of water.
The reporter obliged.
Then Hellingham began talking.
He knew what people said about him.
He knew his neighbors believed he had dealings with the Devil.
And now that he was dying, he regretted what his reputation had become.
The rumors had grown so powerful that no one would visit him.
No one would even come to help him.
Old Hell wanted the reporter to know the truth.
He wasn’t a servant of Satan.
But he had been hiding something.
Old Hell’s Real Secret
Hellingham confessed that until roughly a decade earlier, he had been an extraordinarily successful moonshiner.
According to his story, he had operated his still for years without his neighbors discovering what he was doing.
The reason was astonishing.
The still was inside his house.
Hellingham showed the reporter a concealed room built so cleverly that it couldn’t be detected from outside the cabin.
The secret chamber had been constructed over a mountain stream.
There, hidden beneath the reputation of Old Hell’s haunted cabin, Hellingham had manufactured his liquor in privacy.
And suddenly, his willingness to let everyone believe the house was haunted made considerably more sense.
Why Old Hell Encouraged the Rumors
When Hellingham first moved into the cabin, some of the strange noises were real.
They frightened him too.
Eventually, he investigated.
The explanation was surprisingly ordinary.
Water flowing beneath the house created some of the sounds.
Wind moving across the chimney created others.
Hellingham realized that his neighbors could easily mistake those natural noises for something supernatural.
And he had an idea.
Why correct them?
A haunted reputation could be extremely useful to a man operating an illegal still.
Building a Haunted House
Old Hell began deliberately making his cabin more frightening.
He devised a system of pipes beneath the floor of the guest room that carried and amplified strange sounds.
He also ran a type of wiring across the pipes.
During storms, the arrangement could produce a white-blue light.
Visitors heard impossible noises.
They saw strange illumination.
They left terrified.
Then they told their neighbors.
The stories spread.
Soon almost no one wanted to approach Old Hell’s Cabin.
Which was precisely what Hellingham wanted.
The Perfect Cover for a Moonshiner
Hellingham admitted that he had deliberately allowed the stories to grow because he wanted privacy.
His neighbors had apparently developed an irritating habit of visiting whenever it suited them.
For an ordinary hermit, that would have been annoying.
For a man secretly making illegal liquor inside his house, it was dangerous.
So Old Hell turned local superstition into a security system.
No fences were required.
No guards.
No threatening signs.
He simply persuaded people that the Devil lived there.
After that, they stayed away on their own.
But What About the Lights on the Roof?
The reporter remembered the story he had heard at the saloon.
What about the mysterious lights dancing around the cabin?
Hellingham had an answer for that too.
According to him, the witness had seen St. Elmo’s fire.
That particular phenomenon had not been one of Old Hell’s tricks.
It had simply happened.
And for a man deliberately cultivating rumors of supernatural activity, it couldn’t have occurred at a better time.
Nature had contributed to the legend.
Old Hell’s Final Hours
After talking for another hour, Hellingham realized the end was approaching.
He lay down upon his bed.
Then he asked the reporter for one final favor.
There were letters inside a trunk.
Hellingham wanted the reporter to contact his family and loved ones after his death.
The reporter agreed.
Soon afterward, Philip Hellingham died.
But the trunk revealed that not every rumor surrounding Old Hell had been invented.
The Man Old Hell Had Been
The documents confirmed that Hellingham really had come from North Carolina.
His family was respectable.
He had grown up with financial security and received a good education.
Then gambling changed his life.
According to the account, Hellingham had been playing cards with a childhood friend when an argument erupted.
The confrontation became violent.
Hellingham killed his friend.
Afterward, he fled North Carolina.
Eventually, he disappeared into the mountains and began the strange second life that transformed Philip Hellingham into Old Hell.
The End of Old Hell’s Cabin
Hellingham’s cabin didn’t survive much longer than its owner.
Approximately a year after the reporter heard Old Hell’s confession, lightning struck the house.
The mysterious cabin burned to the ground.
For anyone inclined toward superstition, the ending was almost too perfect.
The man accused of making a pact with the Devil died.
Then fire came from the sky and destroyed his house.
Even after the cabin disappeared, local people continued claiming that the land itself was cursed.
The Truth Behind Old Hell’s Cabin
The legend of Old Hell’s Cabin is unusual because revealing the supposed explanation doesn’t make the story less interesting.
In some ways, it makes it better.
The whispers and screams had explanations.
So did many of the strange lights.
Philip Hellingham wasn’t secretly conducting rituals for the Devil.
He was operating a still.
And he discovered something about human nature that has served smugglers, hermits, and storytellers rather well over the centuries:
People are less likely to investigate something they’re afraid of.
So he gave them something to fear.
The natural sounds produced by the creek and chimney provided the beginning. Hellingham supplied the rest.
Pipes beneath the floor made the cabin groan.
His electrical arrangement created eerie illumination.
Coincidence provided St. Elmo’s fire.
And frightened witnesses transformed everything else into folklore.
But there is something rather sad beneath the cleverness of the story.
The deception worked too well.
As a younger man, Hellingham needed people to leave him alone. He wanted privacy for his illegal business, so he encouraged everyone to believe Old Hell’s Cabin was a place they should never visit.
Decades later, when he was elderly and dying, people still obeyed.
Nobody came.
The reputation that once protected him had become a prison.
In the end, the reporter arrived almost by accident and gave the dying man one final opportunity to explain himself.
Philip Hellingham had spent years convincing everyone that the Devil lived at Sinking Creek.
When he finally needed another human being to knock on the door, everyone believed him.
About the Author
