Tommy Knockers & Mine Ghosts

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

This piece by Eva Smith-Carroll originally ran on the West Virginia Memories site. It is reprinted here with permission.

Late last night and the night before,
Tommyknockers, Tommyknockers
knocking at the door.
I want to go out, don’t know if I can,
‘Cause I’m so afraid of the Tommyknocker man.
(Children’s rhyme)

According to Merriam-Webster, a tommy-knocker is “the ghost of a man killed in a mine.” Other references indicate that the folktale is more complicated than a mere haunting.

Wikipedia expands on the subject: “The Knocker, Knacker, Bwca (Welsh), Bucca (Cornish) or Tommyknocker (US) is a mythical creature in Welsh, Cornish and Devon folklore. It is closely related to the Irish leprechaun or clurichaun, Kentish kloker and the English and Scottish brownie. The Cornish described the creature as a little person two feet tall, with a big head, long arms, wrinkled face, and white whiskers. It wears a tiny version of standard miner’s garb and commits random 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 earth and timbers before giving way. To some miners, knockers were malevolent spirits and the knocking was the sound of them hammering at walls and supports to cause the cave-in. To others, who saw them as essentially well-meaning practical jokers, the knocking was their way of warning the miners that a life-threatening collapse was imminent.”

“According to some Cornish folklore, the Knockers were the helpful spirits of people who had died in previous accidents in the many tin mines in the county, warning the miners of impending danger. To give thanks for the warnings, and to avoid future peril, the miners cast the last bite of their tasty pasties into the mines for the Knockers.”

“These impish, gnome-like men are the Cornish equivalent of Irish leprechauns and English brownies. Germans called them Berggeister or Bergmännlein, meaning ‘mountain ghosts’ or ‘little miners.’ The Tommyknockers were first heard of in the United States when Cornish miners worked in the western Pennsylvania coal mines in the 1820s.”

I searched “tommyknocker” and “tommy-knocker” in West Virginia newspapers and only found two references.

• A work of fiction that was widely circulated in the early 1900s: “Tommy Knockers – The Miners’ Ghosts” by Harry Beardsley in Leslie Weekly. (The Bluefield Daily Telegraph, Friday, June 18, 1909, Page 3.)
• A mention of Tommyknocker Week, Oct. 5-10, in a 1970 column. James Dent said the week was held “because a pressagent thought of it.” (The Charleston Gazette, Monday, Oct. 12, 1979, Page 12.)

There were other mentions in calendars of events in other newspapers. The week was a recognition of the “Cornish cousin of the Leprechaun.” There was no information on who was sponsoring the week or how it was to be observed.

If modern-day miners no longer hear knockers, there is a theory that the
tommyknockers may have gone radio-silent because of radios. In 1929, “Radio” columnist Graham McNamee shared some reader concerns that radios in the mines might chase the little fellows out. One reader wrote:

“Sometimes we coal miners think we haven’t a friend in the world, but we always know the Tommy Knockers are looking out for us. Many’s the life that has been saved by these wee things with their knocking…” He shared a story about a miner who took exception to a suggestion that there should be radios on every level of a mine so the miners could have music when they work. “‘Would ye drive out the few Tommy Knockers we have left?’ he yells. ‘With all this squealing and blathering coming right thru the earth, it’s bad enough for them as it is. With one of these radio boxes with its great din filling the mine, how could we hear them knocking, even if they weren’t panicked and driven away?’”

“Radio Causing Distress Among ‘Little Folks’ In Old County,” Radio by Graham McNamee, The Lincoln State Journal, Nebraska, Sunday, Nov. 17, 1929, Page B-Eleven

And, circling back to the idea of the haunting of a mine by a recently dead miner: “…there is a shadowy belief, scarcely reduced to a proposition, that the spirit of anyone killed in a pit hovers round the spot at any rate until after the body is consigned to sacred earth. To this idea is doubtless due the custom of suspending work in a pit when a fatal accident happens. All the men engaged in that part of the working come up out of the mine and do not descend the shaft until after the funeral.” (Footnote: South Wales Daily Post, 1 March 1894) (The Pit of Ghosts: Exploring The Haunted Mines of Victorian Wales, by Mark Rees, author of “Ghosts of Wales: Accounts from the Victorian Archives,” Jan. 4, 2018.)

The Bluefield Daily Telegraph had a 1936 story about an incident from 30 years prior that occurred in “the Pocahontas minefield.” The spirit of a man killed in a mine explosion came to a mine foreman to tell him they had buried the wrong body under his name. The spirit directed the foreman to a spot far from the drift mouth where “by a little digging you will find my body. Get it out and bury it in a cemetery.” The only name mentioned was Dan Frazier, a “well known mining executive, who could no doubt shed some further light on this highly interesting narrative.” (“Spirit Reveals Where Body Was,” The Bluefield Daily Telegraph, Sunday, Dec. 13, 1936, Page 3.)

In 1963, Phil Conley, president of the Education Foundation, wrote about ghosts in the coal mines. Living women weren’t allowed in because of miners’ superstitions. But sometimes a ghost of a miner’s wife searches a mine looking for her husband who died there.

“Because of the darkness in the mines, many are said to be haunted. Light reflection causes ‘ghosts’ of white mules which have been killed in the mines…” A man who dies in a slate fall may “return for his tools which he had hidden.” Mr. Conley wrote that, “It is claimed that in the early days of mining in West Virginia the room where the accident occurred was closed until new miners came to the works who had not heard about the accident.” (“Many Miners Are Superstitious” by Phil Conley, president, Education Foundation, The Post and Register, Beckley, W.Va., Sunday, Aug. 25, 1963, Page 6.)

More articles on mine disasters:

Worst mine disaster in US history(Opens in a new browser tab)

The high cost of carbide miner lamps(Opens in a new browser tab)