The Pennsylvania State University

The Graduate School

GHOSTS AND THE IMAGINED PAST

A Dissertation in

Sociology

Christine Bucior

Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

August 2019 The dissertation of Christine Bucior was reviewed and approved* by the following:

Alan Sica Professor of Sociology Dissertation Advisor Chair of Committee

Gary J. Adler Assistant Professor of Sociology

Jeffery T. Ulmer Professor of Sociology and Criminology Associate Department Head, Department of Sociology and Criminology

Stephen Browne Liberal Arts Professor of Communication Arts and Sciences

Jennifer Van Hook Roy C. Buck Professor of Sociology and Demography Director, Graduate Program in Sociology

*Signatures are on file at the Graduate School

Abstract

When persons tell ghost stories, they imagine the past. Ghost stories are complete when they include both an account of paranormal happenings and an account of previous, this-worldly events that ghost-storytellers can use to explain those happenings. But ghost-storytelling differs from other activities in which persons imagine the past (like history education, monumentation, and museum-work). For one, there are no barriers to ghost-storytelling. For two, ghost- storytellers do not set out to imagine the past. They do so because the past is useful for their storytelling purposes. Hence, ghost-storytelling gives a “bottom up” view of the past; it shows what ordinary persons, as part of their unselfconscious assumptions about social life, think the past was like.

I explore what that “bottom up” view of the past looks like in Pennsylvania. I ask who it includes. The first chapter maps out the kinds of persons—both in terms of demographic attributes and of social roles—Pennsylvania’s ghost-storytellers say haunt places. I ask when the past occurred. In the second chapter, I outline the historical settings of Pennsylvania’s ghost stories and how ghost-storytellers indicate what those settings are. I ask what kinds of events ghost-storytellers expect it to include. Ghost-storytellers assume some happenings should create ghosts. I address those in the last chapter.

Data for this project come from four sources: twenty ethnographic interviews, three commercial ghost tours (all in Gettysburg, PA), HauntedPlaces.org (an online, user-generated archive of hauntings), and a series of books by an amateur folklorist (the Pennsylvania Fireside Tales).

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Tables…………………………………………………………………………………………... v Chapter 1: Introduction……………………………………………………………………………….... 1 What Ghost Stories Give Us…………………………………………………………….…. 4 The Past in Ghost Stories……………………………………………………………,…….. 7 This Project………………………………………………………………………………… 9 Chapter 2: Who Is in the Past? Representation and Ghost Stories…………………………………….. 19 The Demography of Pennsylvania Hauntings……………………………………………… 20 Military Ghosts……………………………………………………………………………… 28 Academic Ghosts…………………………………………………………………………… 34 Religious Ghosts……………………………………………………………………………. 39 Ghost Brides………………………………………………………………………………… 41 Ghosts of Industry………………………………………………………………………….. 45 Ghostly Domestics………………………………………………………………………….. 50 Ghosts and Crime…………………………………………………………………………… 52 Ghosts of Personal Pasts……………………………………………………………………. 57 Chapter 3: When Is the Past? Time and Ghost Stories……………………………………………….. 61 Part I: Time in Ghost Stories is Not Calendrical…………………………………………… 61 Part II: The Temporal Topography of Ghost Stories………………………………………. 81 Chapter 4: Making Sense of the Who and the When…………………………………………………… 84 Making Sense of the “Sweet Spot”…………………………………………………………. 84 Making Sense of the Hot Spots…………………………………………………………...... 88 Making Sense of Non-calendrical Time Reckoning……………………………………….. 90 Chapter 5: Sensationalism and Ghost-causing Events…………………………………………………. 95 Defining Sensationalism…………………………………………………………………… 97 Sensational Pasts and Ghost Stories………………………………………………………… 99 Conclusion: Ghostly Sensationalism vs. “Real History” or Ghostly Sensationalism and “Real History?”…………………………………………………………………………….. 114 Chapter 6: Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………. 119 References…………………………………………………………………………………………….. 125

LIST OF TABLES

Table 1. Distribution of Ghost Stories by Temporality Type………………………………. 61 Table 2. Distribution of Ghost Stories by Century……………………………………….... 80

Chapter 1: Introduction

On a summer’s night in 2004 or thereabouts, my friend Kat told me a story. She said a ghostly woman could be heard crying at night in Old South Cemetery on South Main Street, close to the town line between Glastonbury, CT (where we lived) and Portland. Weeping Mary, the ghost was called, or maybe Wailing Mary. Why does she cry? In the 1770s, she and her husband owned a mill that produced gunpowder for the Continental Army. The mill exploded one day, while Mary’s husband and all four of her sons were inside. Mary weeps for the family she lost.

I was never brave enough to venture into that cemetery at night, so I never encountered

Weeping or Wailing Mary for myself. As a point of fact, it would not have been Mary that I encountered. It would have been Weeping or Wailing Eunice. Eunice Cobb Stocking was her name. Otherwise, the details of Kat’s story are mostly true. Eunice and her husband, George

Stocking, owned a gunpowder mill on the Roaring Brook, in what’s now Cotton Hollow Nature

Preserve. Like Kat said, the Stockings sold powder to the Continentals during the Revolutionary

War. The mill exploded on August 23, 1777. George, three of the four Stocking sons, and two others were killed in the blast. I found the stone that marked one of those two others’ graves later that summer, or maybe the next. He was interred in Green Cemetery, Glastonbury’s oldest burial ground, which sits (as its name suggests) behind the town green on Hubbard Street.

Historically-minded, I liked to wander there as a teen. Some years later, I learned that a plaque marks the former site of the gunpowder mill (it was put there by the Glastonbury Historical

Society), and that the local chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution is named in

Eunice’s honor (CTDAR 2013). A few years after that, a member of the historical society published an article about the Stocking mill in the town newspaper. A recent, curiosity-driven

1 internet search led me to another article about the explosion of the mill, which appeared in the regional newspaper about a year after that (Marteka 2013).

But I should state explicitly where I did not hear the story of the Stocking gunpowder mill: I did not learn about it in school. Neither did my older sister. This might not seem surprising. She and I left the public-school system in 1999, just as she was about to enter sixth grade and I, fourth grade. But in Glastonbury in the 1990s, students studied local history in fifth grade and third grade. If the explosion had been part of the curriculum, one of us would have learned about it. Instead, it took Kat—and Weeping Mary—to introduce me to that piece of my town’s past. Still, I would be lying if I said that Kat intended her story to teach me about the explosion of the gunpowder mill. We were two girls in our early teens who were looking for a way to pass the time, and who found the prospect of the supernatural thrilling. Weeping Mary and the exploding mill were suitably spine-tingling, was all. If I learned some history from listening to the story, that was coincidental.

Stories like Kat’s are at the heart of this dissertation. I am studying the ways that persons imagine the past when they tell ghost stories. Ghosts and haunting as a type of historical consciousness has been a sociological theme since Avery Gordon’s Ghostly Matters (1997). For

Gordon, haunting is a metaphor for the lingering, but unspeakable, presences of the past that weigh on social life. This is quite different from what I mean when I talk about ghosts and hauntings (terms I use interchangeably) in this dissertation. I mean the words in their usual, folkloric definition. A ghost is a supernatural manifestation of someone, or something, that has died. A haunting refers to the activity of a ghost somewhere in the living world. When I say that

I am interested in ghost stories, I mean I am interested in stories in which storytellers make

2 claims about a ghost in this folkloric meaning, which the storytellers and their listeners may or may not believe.

What do I mean when I say I am interested in “the ways that persons imagine the past?”

Generally, I am talking about what commonly is called collective memory. I eschew that term for two reasons, though. One, it is linguistically problematic (see also Gedi and Elam 1996). A collective memory necessarily implies a collective mind. This is a holdover from the

Durkheimian roots of the concept, at least as it exists within sociology. A collective memory should require that the persons who share it had some experience of the thing that is remembered. A person cannot remember a thing he has never encountered. But, when we sociologists speak of collective memory, we often are talking about “memories” of events that happened decades or centuries ago, long before anyone who we say is “remembering” was alive.

This is why I prefer to keep my terminology centered on the past, rather than on memory.

Second, what I am interested in encompasses something less concrete than what’s usually meant by collective memory. Memories are of something. Another linguistic shortcoming is evident here. Collective memories often include events that never happened—George Washington and the cherry tree, for example—which should make them collective false memories. But this is not what I mean. I mean that collective memories have identifiable content; they are memories of events (the Holocaust, the US Civil War, the Irish diaspora, the Crusades) or persons (Anne

Frank, Abraham Lincoln, Richard the Lionheart) or identities (Nazis, abolitionists, Confederates, soupers) or institutions (the Ghetto, Black slavery, NINA, pilgrimage), and so on. Obviously, I am interested in these things, too. But I also am interested in the more diffused, and less articulable ideas persons have about what the past what like or what it contained. These include not just the events they think happened, but the categories of events they think were possible; not

3 just the persons or identities they think occupied the past, but the kinds of past persons and identities are conceivable to them, and the assumptions they make about those kinds of persons and identities; not just the institutions they think existed, but the suppositions they hold about the web of historical interactions that supported those institutions. They form the background that makes the past possible. Charles Taylor says ideas like these make up the “social imaginary:”

the ways that people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations (2004:23)

Following him, I therefore prefer to use the terminology of “imagining.”

What Ghost Stories Give Us

But why look to ghost stories in order to study the ways persons imagine the past? In part, I am responding to Michael Schudson’s (1997) now-twenty-year-old call for sociologists to pay more attention to the “non-commemorative” ways in which the past is imagined. Schudson admonishes sociologists who study the imagined past (or collective memory) for looking almost exclusively what he calls the “commemorative forms of collective memory” (1997:3). By these, he means “monuments, museums, theme parks, historical films, textbooks, public oratory”

(Schudson 1997:3), and other, similar objects and activities. I prefer to think of them as sanctioned and conventional ways of imagining the past. I call them conventional because both academics and lay persons generally recognize that these objects and activities do the work of imagining the past; indeed, we recognize that this is their explicit purpose. I call them sanctioned because (lay) persons tend to treat the pasts that are imagined in these ways as authoritative, especially since the imaginers who create them are often academic and/or government actors.

There are two problems with this restricted focus. One is that there are a number of barriers to imagining the past in conventional and sanctioned ways. In order to design a monument or a museum, to publish an historical film or a history textbook, or to give public oratory, a person must have a special skillset, a great deal of financial resources, a large amount of political clout or social legitimacy, or (most likely) some combination of all three. The activities sociologists mostly study therefore only represent the past as a very select group of persons imagine it. But obviously, these chosen few are far from the only persons who imagine the past. Bodnar’s (1992) seminal work illustrated how “ordinary people” repurpose, and sometimes subvert, the commemorative symbols and events that “cultural leaders” produce, to take just one example. (“Cultural leaders” his term for the professional, academic, and government actors who create what he calls “official culture,” or conventional and sanctioned images of the past and present.) In order to understand how persons, overall, imagine the past, we sociologists must look for ways to study “ordinary people.”

The other problem is that these activities are self-consciously done. Schudson says that that self-consciousness is a sign that persons turn to sanctioned and conventional activities to imagine particular pieces of the past only because they have reason to fear that other persons will not imagine those pasts otherwise (1997:3-4). I take no position on that particular accusation.

But, it is clear to me that self-conscious activities for thinking about the past will reflect only purposefully chosen, and therefore identifiable, past events, persons, institutions, and so forth.

They will give us sociologists much less insight into the background assumptions about how the past worked and what it is possible for it to contain. For that, we need to look to what Vinitzky-

Seroussi calls the instances of “banal commemoration,” which she defines as “non-mnemonic times and spaces in which a commemorated event or person is mentioned” (2011:52). Banal

5 commemoration takes two forms. One encompasses those conventional and sanctioned ways of imagining the past that slip into workaday life without much notice, like the practice of naming streets after historical figures or events (e.g. the Dan Ryan Expressway and Trafalgar Square).

The other is more relevant; it refers to the ways that persons use references the past, often unthinkingly, in the projects of daily life. Vinitzky-Seroussi uses an example from a conversation she overheard in 2006 between a shopkeeper and her customer in Tel Aviv. To counter the customer’s disbelief about a riot between Israeli police and residents of an Israeli settlement, the shopkeeper offhandedly alluded to Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination (Vinitzky-

Seroussi 2011:55-56). Because these references are not done with the conscious planning that goes into sanctioned and conventional ways of imagining the past, persons are more likely to draw upon their background assumptions about the past when they make them.

I have turned to ghost stories precisely because I think they represent one unsanctioned and unconventional (that is, “banal”) way that ordinary persons can imagine the past. Ghost stories lack the barriers to participation that characterize memorial-building and the like.

Anyone can tell a ghost story. Persons tell ghost stories for a variety of reasons. They might engage in ghost-storytelling as part of an initiation ritual (Tucker 2007), as a safe way to explore anxieties about social life (Ellis 2001; Thomas 2007), or, as Kat and I did, simply for entertainment. Certainly, though, they do not tell ghost stories to imagine the past self- consciously. To be clear, I do not mean that they are not aware that they are talking about the past, or that they do not use parts of the past that also are imagined in conventional and sanctioned ways. Kat’s story alone is enough to disprove both of those statements. I do mean that ghost-storytellers don’t use ghost stories deliberately to tell their listeners what they think the past was like or to prompt listeners to imagine it in their preferred ways. They imagine the

6 past for reasons similar to Vinitizky-Seroussi’s (2011) shopkeeper’s—because doing so is useful for their storytelling purposes.

The Past in Ghost Stories

I have been speaking as if ghost stories necessary contain some reference to the past.

Fortunately for my logic, they do—by their very nature, in fact. Ghosts are dead. To say that a ghost exists somewhere is to establish that that place has some sort of a past. This is so even if the ghost-storyteller does not speculate as to the identity of the ghost or how it came to haunt the place, and thereby provide details as to what that past looked like. Most ghost stories do include this kind of background speculation. De Caro (2015) explains that ghost stories generally adhere to a “dual structure.” Ghost stories obviously include a “ghostly part,” in which storytellers recount incidents of supernatural activity or unexplained phenomena. But they also include a

“historical part,” in which ghost-storytellers provide some context to, or possible explanation of, the haunting, often by tying the supernatural phenomena to “some past event in the ‘real’ world”

(de Caro 2015:27). Bennett (1999; 2011) describes something similar to ghost stories’ historical part in the narrative technique of “connecting up.” For most ghost-storytellers, “hauntings are not random effects but have discoverable causes” (Bennett 2011:3). Since these causes clearly are not physical in nature, and therefore not subject to the logic of propositional cause and effect, ghost-storytellers instead turn to narrative logic to explain their ghosts, and “emplot”

(Polkinghorne 1988; Ricoeur 1984) the ghostly happenings or phenomena against some alleged past events to suggest a causal nexus among them. Ghost stories therefore are complete and sensible only when they include some representation of the past. The quote from an interviewee from which Bennet draws the term demonstrates this nicely. Just having given a rather detailed account of a friend’s relatives’ reported experiences with a troublesome ghost, the interviewee

7 concludes: “Now, I know to make the story REAL, I should say what it was that had CAUSED this, and Wolfgang [the friend] did connect it UP to something, but that I’ve forgotten [sic]”

(Bennett 1999:43). Without the intersecting account of the past, the ghost story is “unreal”—not quite a full story and not really meaningful.

The historical part/the events to which a ghost-storyteller “connects up” a haunting can be more or less detailed. Some ghost stories, like the ones about Black slaves (mostly, Black slave women) that Tiya Miles (2015) discovered are central to Southern tourism, include a great deal of information about the past. Others offer only a few scant facts: maybe a name, or a reference to an historical event. They also can be more or less “accurate.” By this, I mean that the pasts that ghost-storytellers imagine sometimes include pieces of the same pasts that persons who engage in conventional and sanctioned activities imagine. Kat’s story is clear example of this. Or, there can be other evidence that the persons, events, etc. that ghost-storytellers imagine actually exited or actually happened (gravestones or family photographs, for example). On the other hand, ghost-storyteller sometimes “connect up” the ghostly parts of their stories to events or persons that are entirely fictional. The past ghost-storytellers imagine can fall between these two extremes, too. Richardson (2003) find a number of stories like that in her history of ghostlore and ghost literature in the Hudson River Valley. Ghost-storytellers there transfigure

Henry Hudson, an Englishman, into the Dutch Hendrick Hudson, and (more strikingly) turn a

(probably indentured) white servant girl who was killed by her master in the 1760s sometimes into a Black slave woman and sometimes into an indigenous girl. In what follows, I treat all of these types of historical parts equally. I am aiming for the most complete picture possible of the past as ghost-storytellers imagine it. I have not been given any reason to think that less detailed or less accurate historical parts of their ghost stories are less reflective of that imagined past.

This Project

This project analyzes 872 ghost stories from the state of Pennsylvania. In counting ghost stories,

I include every combination of ghost and storyteller. Many times, I collected basically the same ghost story from two or more sources. Each variant is slightly different, however, and so it is worthwhile to consider them all. Pennsylvania was selected somewhat as a site of convenience; I live and study here. However arbitrary, though, its borders provide what I discovered are necessary bounds for this project. Without them, my project easily could have spread through all of English-speaking North America. Although a handful of my stories come out of Philadelphia, and a very scant few out of Pittsburgh, this project mostly moves outside Pennsylvania’s main urban areas. The stories I analyze come from Rust Belt towns, rural valleys, and former coal- mine settlements.

I collected ghost stories from four sources. The first, and most important, is the twenty ethnographic interviews I conducted across the state. I strategically chose my interviewees either for their familiarity with the culture and history of the places where they live (or, in three cases, work), or for their expertise with the paranormal. (There were two exceptions, who came to me by referral.) For this reason, a number of my interviewees actively participate in conventional and sanctioned activities for imagining the past. In the interviews, I asked respondents about the character of their towns, about the most interesting or important elements of their towns’ histories, about any official or commemorative activities by which persons in their towns represent those histories, and about any ghost stories they know from their areas in which they live (or work). The shortest interview lasted about forty-five minutes. The longest one lasted almost two-and-a-half hours. Eighteen of the interviews occurred in person; two, I conducted

9 over the telephone. I audio-recorded all of the interviews, and had them transcribed for later analysis.

Three of my interviewees live in Penns Valley, a rural region at the southeastern tip of

Centre County. It comprises twelve towns: Centre Hall, Millheim, Aaronsburg, Spring Mills,

Coburn, Rebersburg, Madisonburg, Potter Township, Haines Township, Penn Township, Miles

Township, and Gregg Township. The region is very sparsely populated. One of my interviewees (“Amos”) estimates its population at 20,000 persons, maximum, scattered over 254 square miles. That population is mostly Scots-Irish and German, the two European groups who first settled Penns Valley in the 1750s. As this suggests, people who live in Penns Valley tend to have deep genealogical roots in the region. Amos is the first respondent I interviewed in Penns

Valley. He is a white man in his early fifties. He was born in Penns Valley to a family who, he says, has been living there for seven generations. For the past twenty-three years, Amos has taught history at Penns Valley Area High School. Among the classes he teaches is a semester- long study of local history, which he took over fifteen years ago. He incorporates folklore, including ghostlore, into its curriculum. The second, “Luke” is also a white man. He is in his seventies. He is retired now, but he used to teach history at Penns Valley Area High School, too.

He originated the local history class that Amos now teaches. In addition, he is a well-regarded historian of the Civil War. Like Amos, Luke also is a Penns Valley native; he grew up in

Rebersburg, on the east side of the region. By his estimate, his family has been living in Penns

Valley for 200 years. “Caleb” is my third interviewee. He is in his mid-twenties, and also is white. He works with disabled children in the Penns Valley school system. He, too, is from an old Penns Valley family. “We’re some of the early settlers,” he tells me. Caleb is quite historically enthusiastic. He is, quite literally, a life-long Civil War reenactor; he attended his

10 first reenacting event when he was three weeks old. At his interview, he arrives with files full of original historical documents and photographs, which he continually references in the course of our conversation.

The main campus of Penn State University and State College, the town that surrounds it, are in Centre County, as well. I interviewed “Ted,” who used to work as an archivist for the university. He is retired now. He is white and in his early seventies, and originally from northern New Jersey. However, he has lived in State College for more than fifty years now. “I came here as a student in 1965 and accidentally never left,” he says. During the interview, Ted switches easily between talking about the university and talking about the town. The town is dependent on the university, he says. Nevertheless, the only ghost stories he knows are attached to Penn State. He adamantly does not believe them, and also is dubious about their folkloric quality. (Ted has an idiosyncratic definition of folklore, which does not include anything that persons “embellish” to make more entertaining or to use for commercial reasons.) He does not think that any of the campus ghost stories existed before 1990. “Greg” and “Jodi,” a married couple who are both in their late fifties, also are from Centre County. They live in Bellefonte, the county seat; both of them have lived there their entire lives. They are paranormal investigators. In fact, Greg tells me that they met on a ghost hunt. He also says that he has been ghost-hunting for thirty years.

I conducted five interviews with residents of Altoona. Altoona is in Blair County. It used to be a thriving railroad city, but it transitioned into a rust-belt town sometime in the mid- twentieth century. Still, four of the five interviewees expressed enthusiasm about its current hopes for revitalization. “Joe” is yet another high-school history teacher; he works at Altoona

Area High School. He is a white man in his middle-to-late thirties. He has “lived in Altoona my

11 entire life, except for when I was college,” he says. “Joshua” works as a history instructor at

Penn State Altoona, and as a public historian through various organizations in Blair County. He is president of the Blair County Historical Society. In that capacity, he runs the Baker Mansion

Museum, a house museum in Altoona that serves also serves as the Historical Society’s headquarters. Like Joe, he is white, in his mid- or late thirties, and an Altoona native. Prior to taking his current job, Joshua lived in Gettysburg for five years, where he worked as a National

Park Service (NPS) ranger. He expresses contempt for ghostlore several times during his interview. “Jim” is around sixty, and also white. He works for the Altoona visitors’ bureau. He was born in Altoona, as well, but he grew up about fifteen miles away, in Tyrone. From college onward, Jim spent nearly three decades away from the area. He returned to Altoona only in

2010, in order to take his current job. “Robert” similarly is a returned Altoona native. He moved back in 2009, after spending fifteen years in Arizona and Texas. He is in his fifties and white. Together with his wife, Robert heads a team of paranormal investigators; he takes great professional pride in his investigation work. “Angie” is in her sixties or seventies and is of

Armenian descent. She is a relative newcomer to Altoona, having arrived only a few years ago.

Previously, she lived in Wheeling, WV. Angie owns a popular culture/Americana museum, which specializes in Halloween-related artifacts.

Sinking Valley is outside of Altoona, also in Blair County. It is a rural area that is heavy with dairy farms. Like in Penns Valley, families there are genealogically “deep.” “Nancy” is married to a man whose family has lived in the valley for six generations. He marks the fourth generation to own his family’s farm. Nancy herself has lived in Sinking Valley for forty-seven years; she moved there when she married. Though she knows a number of local legends, she does not know any ghost stories from Sinking Valley. However, she does mention two events

12 that she explicitly says did not produce ghost stories. I discuss one of these in Chapter 6. Nancy is white and in her sixties. She volunteers as an historical interpreter at Fort Roberdeau Historic

Site. Fort Roberdeau was a frontier fort during the American Revolutionary War, during which time it protected a lead and iron mine. The original fort was abandoned after the war and eventually was lost to the elements. The current historical site is a reproduction; it was built as

Blair County’s project for the American Bicentennial. “Neil,” another interviewee, is the director of the site. He is white, and about sixty. Neil grew up in Hollidaysburg, which borders

Altoona, but left after college—first, to North Carolina to work for the National Wildlife

Federation, and later to southeastern Pennsylvania to work in parks and recreation. He returned to Blair County about five years ago. Unlike Joshua, Neil is favorably disposed toward ghost stories. He ran a few storytelling events for teen and youth campers in his previous jobs.

“Loren,” a white woman in her early forties, leads me on a tour of the Shamokin

Cemetery. Shamokin is a city in Northumberland County. It was once a thriving coal town.

Now, the coal mines have shut down, and city has deteriorated. Loren suggests it now is economically dependent on the nearby prison. Loren did not grow up in Shamokin, but she used to spend weeks there as a child, visiting her grandparents and uncle. She shows me where in the cemetery her ancestors are buried. Surprisingly, given the association between ghosts and graveyards, Loren does not tell me any ghost stories during her interview. The legends she knows about Shamokin concern bootleggers and salacious love affairs. “Tom” is from the same area; he lives in Mount Carmel, which less than ten miles from Shamokin. Mount Carmel also suffered economically when the coal mines closed, but not to the extent that Shamokin did. Tom is optimistic about its economic recovery. He grew up in Mount Carmel, left for a few years during and after college, and then moved back in 2001. He is white and in his middle forties.

Two of my interviewees run coal-mining museums. The No. 9 Coal Mine Museum is in

Coaldale, Schuykill County. “Ray” has been its president for the past seventeen years; in total, he has done some sort of volunteer work for the museum for that past twenty-three years. Ray never was a coal miner himself. He worked for Bethlehem Steel for forty years. He is eighty- five and white. “Walt” is president of the Broad Top Area Coal Miners Museum. The Broad

Top is in south-central Pennsylvania. It overlaps Bedford, Huntingdon, and Fulton Counties.

Walt describes it as “an isolated, semi-bituminous coal field.” He means “isolated” in the geological sense, but the Broad Top is isolated geographically, too. As Walt says, the towns in the area exist “solely because of coal mining.” Along with his volunteer work at the museum,

Walt has worked as a newspaper reporter with the Huntingdon Daily News for almost fifty years.

He wears a baseball cap that identifies him as a Vietnam War veteran during our interveiw. He, too, is white.

“Ben” is an engineering graduate student at Penn State. He is white and in his mid- twenties. He grew up in Bedford County, not far from the county seat of Bedford. When I ask him to describe his hometown, he says it is “really your stereotypical, small-town, rural America.

Everyone likes to know everyone, get in everyone’s business.” Ben tells me ghost stories both from Bedford and from St. Vincent College, in Latrobe, Westmoreland County, where he received his undergraduate degree. St. Vincent is a small, Catholic, liberal arts college that was founded by Benedictine monks. Ben knows more details about the ghost stories from the college than about the ghost stories from Bedford.

Last, I conducted three interviews in Gettysburg. Gettysburg is unique among

Pennsylvania’s towns for the absolute dominance of the NPS-run Gettysburg National Military

Park upon its social and geographic landscape and for its economic dependence on tourism.

Although there are only around ten thousand residents in Gettysburg, the town receives about four million visitors every year. The first interviewee is “Terrell,” who heads Gettysburg’s tourism board. (It is actually the tourism board for all of Adams County.) Terrell is white and about seventy. Originally, he is from Missouri. He moved to Gettysburg twelve years ago to take his current job. His knowledge of Gettysburg’s ghost stories is tied entirely to its ghost- tourism industry. “Matthew,” the second interviewee, founded that industry. He opened

Gettysburg’s first ghost-tour company in the early 1990s. He also has authored a series of books about Gettysburg’s ghosts, for which he is locally famous. Prior to this, Matthew worked as an

NPS ranger and as a licensed battlefield guide (guides who are government-approved to give tours on the battlefield grounds). He grew up in Cleveland, and took his first job in Gettysburg the summer before his senior year in college. He is white and in his sixties. “Kyle” is the third.

He is white and in his early twenties. Unlike Matthew and Terrell, he is native to the area. Kyle is from Chambersburg, which is about a twenty-five minutes’ drive from Gettysburg. He is a recent college graduate; his degree is in history education. But for now, Kyle works as a guide for ghost-tour company that operates out of a popular bed and breakfast. (It is a different tour company from Mark’s.)

The second source of data is three commercial ghost tours I attended in Gettysburg on three consecutive nights in August, 2017. In the ghost tours, a paid guide (who, in Gettysburg, always is costumed and usually carries a candle lantern) leads a group of tourists on foot to various locations, where he stops to tell ghost stories about them. I purchased tickets for these events, and participated like a regular tourist. Because I feared it would be disruptive, I did not audio-record the ghost tours. My analysis of these data is based on field notes. Each tour lasted approximately an hour, and each covered slightly different geographical space from the others.

The first tour was through Matthew’s tour company. My guide was “Charles,” who is in his thirties and white. He told ten separate ghost stories over the course of the tour. The second tour was through Kyle’s company, and Kyle was my guide. I heard eight ghost stories during that tour. The last was through an unrelated company. My guide was “Andrew,” a white man in his late thirties or early forties, who performed his tour in a kilt. His tour included only four ghost stories, the fewest of any of the three tours.

HauntedPlaces.org is an online, use-generated archive of haunted locations, and is my third data source. HauntedPlaces.org maintains a separate webpage for each location a user submits. I used every webpage about a location in Pennsylvania that existed on (and as it existed on) March 12, 2018. There were 197 of these. Webpages on HauntedPlaces.org all follow a standard format. At the top is the name of the location, and often a photograph of it.

This is followed by a write-up, which describes the location and the ghost stories attached to it.

These vary significantly in length. Some are only a sentence long; others run multiple paragraphs. The vast majority of write-ups are anonymous. The write-up’s author was noted on only forty-three webpages in my sample (about 22%). Below this is a poll, in which visitors can vote “‘thumbs up’ if you think [the location is] haunted, or ‘thumbs down’ if you think it[‘]s all just a tall tale.” The physical address of the haunted place, its GPS coordinates, and a list of nearby towns appear under that. Below that is room for user comments. On the webpages in my dataset, the number of comments ranges from zero to twenty-one. Users on HauntedPlaces.org do not leave biographical details; usually, they are only identified by their screennames (e.g.

Erohiel, Headless Unicorn Guy, Graves), and many post totally anonymously. Authors and commenters on HauntedPlaces.org commonly use “internet speak,” non-standard grammar, non- standard capitalization, and incorrect homophones; their comments and write-ups frequently

16 include misspellings and/or lack punctuation. Below, I reproduce these comments and write-ups as they appear.

The last data source is the Pennsylvania Fireside Tales, a series of self-published books by Jeffrey Frazier, an amateur folklorist from Centre Hall. Frazier describes his books as

“compilations of old-time Pennsylvania folktales, legends, and folklore” (Frazier 2019). Most of these books are not devoted to ghost stories—they also include hunting stories, stories about battles between white settlers and indigenous persons, stories about buried treasure, and so on— but all of them include at least a handful of ghost stories. I used Volumes I (Frazier 1996), III

(Frazier 1999), V (Frazier 2001), and the Pennsylvania Fireside Ghost Tales, which is an anthology of ghost stories only, and which includes a number of stories that are reprinted from earlier volumes. These books are fairly popular within central Pennsylvania. Amos uses them in his Penns Valley history course, and Caleb, Luke, and Neil all mentioned them at some point in their interviews.

The dissertation consists of four chapters, bounded by this introduction and a conclusion.

First, I take two chapters to explore what the past looks like in Pennsylvania’s ghost stories.

Chapter 2 takes stock of who is included. This chapter is devoted to the social categorization of

Pennsylvania’s ghosts. Chapter 3 analyzes when is included. This chapter is concerned with time. I scope out the ways the ghost-storytellers signal when in time their stories take place. I also map the distribution of Pennsylvania’s ghost stories within time. Chapter 4 is a brief interpretive interlude. Here, I tie together who and when to make sense of the overall picture of the past that appears in Pennsylvania’s ghost stories. Last, Chapter 5 focuses on a subset of the past events that Pennsylvania’s ghost-storytellers imagine, which I refer to as ghost-causing events. By these, I mean categories of historical events that ghost-storytellers treat as natural

17 candidates for, or legitimate causes of, ghost stories. The past is proper fodder for ghost stories when it is sensational, meaning that it evokes a strong emotional response from us in the present.

Chapter 2: Who is in the Past? Representation and Ghost Stories

The first question to address is a matter of what: What kinds of pasts, in terms of persons and events, do ghost-storytellers imagine? This is a question of inclusion. All imagined pasts are partial pasts (Zelizer 1995); no-one—and not even everyone, together—can recount everything that happened, even on a single day. Nor, likely, would anyone want to. Instead, persons must choose some elements of the past to imagine, to the exclusion of all others. Which elements they choose significantly affects what they think the past looked like, which is why persons are often strategic about the parts of the past they include or exclude (e.g. Zerubavel 2003) and why

“mnemonic battles” (Zerubavel 1997) about who and what should be represented in academic and public history are so fierce. In this chapter, therefore, I set out to outline who are the ghosts about whom Pennsylvanians tell stories, and to what kinds of events Pennsylvania’s ghost- storytellers “connect them up.”

I am joining a tradition of folkloric taxonomy. The bible of these is Stith Thompson’s

(1953-1958) famed, and comprehensive, Motif-index of Folk-literature. Others have been more specific to ghost-lore. Davies’ (2007) overview of ghost-traditions in Europe is probably the most inclusive; he spells out the various ways ghosts are said to manifest, the “Geography of

Haunting,” the various ways Europeans have interacted (or tried to interact) with spirits, and the many debates over the reality of the spirit world. Others have focused their analyses on smaller geographic areas (e.g. Jones 1944) or on specific types of ghost stories (Beardsley and Hankey

1942; Bennett 1998; Hawes 1968). Although my aim, and my focus on the interactions between ghost-lore and the past, is different, I borrow from these in what follows.

The Demography of Pennsylvania Hauntings

“Are there any particular types that tend to become spirits?” I asked Robert. “Or is it kind of anybody anywhere?” He answered, “As far as we know, it’s anybody anywhere for whatever reason.” The ghost stories I collected bear this out. Pennsylvania’s ghosts are quite diverse.

Indeed, they are so diverse that not all are human. There are seven stories about ghost cats, eight about ghost dogs, and six about ghost horses in my data. I collected four more stories about the

Ingleby Monster, an invisible entity in Penns Valley. Other ghosts are impersonal, by which I mean that they are not “connected up” to any person (or animal). There are examples of EMF

(electromagnetic field, or energy readings paranormal investigators consider indicative of spiritual activity), EVP (electronic voice phenomenon, or noises—usually, as the name implies, spoken words—that appear on electronic recordings, even though no-one heard them at the time they were recorded), and orbs (unexplained balls of light that allegedly are ghostly manifestations) to which historical parts are not tied, as well as phantom touches, objects that move on their own, unexplained footsteps, phantom music, and in one case (at Devil’s Den, according to Matthew) an inexplicable feeling of dread. In other cases, storytellers describe paranormal phenomena that they “connect up” to distinct historical events and actors but which they nevertheless do not say are manifestations of the actors involved. Frazier (2001; 2016) tells a story about two men who fought each other on a handcar near Penns Creek in Spring Mills, for example. One man pushed the other onto a pile of rocks and killed him; since then, near the place of the fight, a handcar can be heard running along railroad tracks that are no longer there.

Frazier never implies that one man or the other has been transformed into a handcar in death.

The phantom sounds are simply the ghostly result of the entire incident.

Among the ghosts that are both human and personal, the following demographic variations appear:

Age

Most ghosts appear as adults. The majority, it seems, manifest at middle age, as ghost- storytellers do not say that they are very young or very old. In about forty-five cases, however, storytellers talk about ghosts specifically of young adults or adolescents. Ten of these are stories about the ghosts of college students (more on these below). A few others are young soldiers. On my ghost tour with Charles, and later from Matthew, I heard about the “party ghost,” a teen-aged

Union soldier who appears in the back corner of a house in Gettysburg whenever the college students who rent it throw parties. Charles speculates that he might be trying to experience the youth that he lost in battle. Another two are phantom hitchhikers—one, a teen girl on Kelly

Road in Industry (according to Mary Melissa Knight Deeter, a commenter on

HauntedPlaces.org), and the other, a girl or young woman at McConnell Mills State Park

(Frazier 2016). Robert tells of two ghostly young adults he and his team encountered in

Baughman Cemetery in Tyrone. One is “a young lady who was killed by her boyfriend over a custody battle.” The other is “a young man who was about twenty-one years old when he died,” and whose bandana-wearing apparition Robert captured in a photograph.

Elderly ghosts might seem a more obvious variety, as persons most commonly die in old age. Nevertheless, I collected only about two-thirds as many stories about elderly ghosts as about adolescent ghosts. Two occupy Robert’s home. “One is an older lady who lived in the house,” he says. “Before our neighbor passed away a few years ago, my wife was explaining about seeing this lady in the house. And what she learned. Just from the way she described her, the elderly neighbor across the street said, ‘Yeah, that was the lady who lived here. She would

21 sit in that window and watch the kids play in the street.’” Robert has never seen the other. But after something invisible bothered his dog (compare Thompson motif E421.1.3, “Ghosts visible to dogs alone”) and after he recorded a man’s spectral voice in his kitchen, Robert and his wife

“did have one of our psychics come in…She said he was an older gentleman, that he was wearing a plaid shirt,” Robert says. “Got a pot belly, a greying beard, ripped-up blue jeans on.”

Caleb tells me, “Where [a friend of his] lives there was an old lady. She was a ghost that haunted the attic…The ghost was bothering them.” Caleb’s friend finally had to call in a local medium. “He talked to the ghost. I’m not sure exactly what he said, but he convinced her not to bother them anymore.” Greg and Jodi say that when they investigated the museum of the

Bellefonte Historical Society, they discovered “the energy of children there” and “a couple of older ladies,” too. Jodi suspects that the “older ladies” were nannies to the children.

Children’s ghosts, like the ones at the Bellefonte Historical Society, are more common than both adolescent and elderly ghosts. I collected nearly 100 stories about them. At Duffy’s

Tavern in Boalsburg, Robert says,

The workers…were telling us they had a little girl in the dining room area. So, we went up there and tried to get in contact with her. While we were packing up, we find out—By asking questions—We hear her say that his name was Michael. So, we stopped and we started asking him a little more. We found out that he was born in the late 1800s, that he was four years old. And we did some research, and back then, up until the age of five, they dressed little boys in dresses. So, we figured, that’s why they thought it was a little girl.

Robert tells me that there is “a little girl in the gift shop” of the Railroaders Museum in Altoona, too. “I don’t know what her name is or how old she is, but she’s a young girl. She’s probably about this high, because I have to be sitting on the floor to be able to play with her.” She communicates with Robert and his team by moving dowsing rods. Jeremy is a ghostly little boy in Kyle’s ghost-tour company’s bed and breakfast. Kyle says he stacks up scattered coins, opens and closes doors, and otherwise plays games with guests. There are two ghosts at the U.S. Hotel

22 in Hollidaysburg, says Joe—a “mean old man” and “a little kid.” Neil says that a boy and his dog haunt Sickle’s Corner by Fort Roberdeau in Tyrone. Another ghostly boy-and-dog pair (Tim and Dutch, respectively) haunt Wintergreen Gorge in Erie, according to an anonymous write-up on HauntedPlaces.org. Tim manifests as a child, even though he died in his twenties.

A very few children’s ghosts are ghosts of babies. Matthew tells me a story from his time as an NPS ranger. At Gettysburg, rangers often live in the houses on park grounds. He says,

One day, I was in the Cemetery Lodge, and I heard a baby crying. I remember exactly what was [sic]. I was taking my dishes out from the dining room into the kitchen, and I heard a baby crying. And I stopped, and I was like, “What is that?” I said, “It sounded just like a baby crying. But there aren’t any kids in here, anywhere here.” And I’m trying to explain it. “Was it the pipes squeaking? No, that wasn’t it. It was a baby crying!” So, I must have mentioned it in the coffee room in the park one day. And somebody said, “Wait. You need to talk to such-and-such, who lived in that house before you.” So, I looked her up and I talked to her, and, sure enough, she had had the same experience. Hearing a baby cry…And, lo and behold, the Cemetery Lodge was built in the National Cemetery years and years after the battle. Just down the street, two doors down the street, was the orphanage that was built for the orphans that the Civil War created. And they had, the first matron was a very wonderful woman. And then, you know, it’s like something out of a Dickens novel. You know, the nasty matron came in. And she caused the kids, for punishment, to stand out on a barrel in the freezing cold. So, there were no doubt children crying at one point or another.

HauntedPlaces.org says that “mysterious sounds” occur at the Eagle Hotel in Waterford, including, “a baby crying.” A commenter called bella [sic] corroborates. She says, “i have been there several times and every time i go there i hear a baby in the upstairs that cries the hole time i am there” [sic]. A phantom baby cries at the Inn at St. Peter’s Village in Elverson, too, according to both its HauntedPlaces.org write-up and to Jess, who comments on

HauntedPlaces.org webpage. Greg and Jodi say that they also recorded the sounds of babies cooing at the Bellefonte Historical Society. Children’s ghosts manifest in a variety of ways— from visual apparitions to physical manipulation of the world. These data indicate that babies’ ghosts make themselves known only by sound.

Gender

Even within stories about human and personal ghosts, gender can be difficult to specify. What gender is a ghostly army, for example, or a full family of ghosts? None of the ghost-storytellers ascribe a gender to ghostly babies. In light of their manifestation, this is not surprising; the cry of a baby boy and of a baby girl are not easily distinguished. A number of children’s ghosts are genderless, too; again, usually these are ghosts who manifest only through sounds, like laughter or footsteps (usually, running). I was able to identify the ghosts’ genders in about 500 ghost stories.

Male ghosts are slightly more common than female ghosts (259 vs. 237 stories), but the difference is a negligible one. There are some clear gendered patterns among these ghosts, nevertheless. Female ghosts are younger overall. I collected thirty-five stories about the ghosts of young women or adolescent girls, and only eleven stories about ghosts of young men or adolescent boys. Children’s ghosts also skew female. There are forty-eight stories about ghosts of young girls in my data, and only twenty about ghosts of young boys. Elderly ghosts are more commonly men (fifteen stories) than women (eleven stories). Ghosts of famous persons are much more likely to be male than female. I collected eleven stories about the ghosts of famous women and thirty-six about the ghosts of famous men. Some of this disparity might arise from the fact that famous ghosts are mostly of political and/or military figures. Until relatively recently, women did not participate in these areas of life to a meaningful extent. I discuss military ghosts in more detail below.

There are a few other notable trends in the ghosts’ gender distribution by social type

(beyond those to which I devote the bulk of this chapter). Ghosts of artistic or literary actors, curiously, are mostly male. Of the nine stories I collected about these, only two involve female

24 ghosts. Olive is a ghost who occupies a desk Angie owns, which once belonged to Augustus

Saint-Gaudens. “She was an Edwardian actress and was probably killed while she was up visiting Stanford White at the garden estate [i.e. Saint-Gaudens’ Cornish Art Colony] and that’s what starts this all off,” Angie says. According to an anonymous write-up on HauntedPlaces.org, the ghost of a “prima ballerina” has been seen “in the Tansky Family Lounge of the William Pitt

Union.” Six other stories involve ghosts of male artists. HauntedPlaces.org says that Edgar

Allan Poe haunts the General Wayne Inn in Merion. Jeremiah Herb, a commenter on

HauntedPlaces.org, says that he encountered the ghost of actor and author Jason Miller in “the bar he died in aka farleys now it is just a store” [sic]. (His comment appears on the page for

Courthouse Square in Scranton.) Josiah Pickett, the painter, haunts the Wedgwood House Bed and Breakfast in New Hope, says its anonymous HauntedPlaces.org write-up; another write-up says that a dancer called Ned can be heard crying in the Haas Center at Bloomsburg University.

Both Joe and Joshua tell me that the ghost of Isaac Mischler watches performances in Altoona’s

Mischler Theater (which he founded). The last story, which I found in an anonymous write-up for West Chester University on HauntedPlaces.org, says that “Phillips Hall has several performing ghosts seen on the stage;” their genders are not mentioned. Medical ghosts seem to be coded female. Of the fifteen stories in my data about medical actors, patients, or disease victims, a male ghost appears in only one. The ghosts’ genders are not mentioned in four more; the other nine are about female ghosts. Most of these are nurses’ ghosts. For example, Rachel is a Civil War nurse who appears at the Gettysburg Hotel, says HauntedPlaces.org; Frazier (2016) says in that Julia Neidigh, who tended to patients during a nineteenth-century smallpox epidemic, has appeared to visitors at the ghost town of Pandemonium. Doctors, however, seem

25 absent from Pennsylvania’s ghost-lore. I discuss a similarly gendered tradition of ghost brides— but not ghost grooms—below.

Race

In contrast to the Southern ghost stories that Miles (2015) analyzed, in which Black characters— especially enslaved Black characters—play a lead role, the ghosts in the stories I collected are almost entirely White. More accurately, almost none of the ghosts in the stories I collected were described racially; in the American politics of markedness and unmarkedness (see e.g. Zerubavel

2018), however, that is enough to suggest they are White. In a few stories about White ghosts, storytellers do mark them ethnically. Amos tells the story of Malachi Boyer, who fell in love with the indigenous “princess” Nita-Nee; when they tried to elope, Nita-Nee’s brothers ran them down, returned Nita-Nee to their father, trapped Boyer in Penn’s Cave, kept him there until he died. “So, the rumor is that to this day you can still hear him calling out on moonlit [nights],

‘Nita-Nee. Nita-Nee.’” Amos specifically describes Boyer as a French trapper. Frazier (2016) writes about the Getz family, parents and son, who drowned on Christmas night in the lake surrounding their homestead in what is now Ricketts Glen State Park, after the boy tried to use his new ice skates on too-thin ice. Hikers and campers at the park hear disembodied, “foreign sounding” voices where their farm used to be. The voices sound foreign, Frazier says, because the Getz family were German. In another volume (Frazier 2001), he tells a story about the ghost of Michael Keppler, who was crushed by a train in what is now Chickles Rock State Park.

Keppler was an immigrant from Bavaria. Nevertheless, these ethnically-noted ghosts make up a very small minority of my sample.

I collected only eight stories about Black ghosts. Ghost-storytellers imagine the history of Black slavery in five. In three of them, they explicitly identify their ghosts as enslaved

26 persons or formerly enslaved persons. I discuss these in detail below. The storyteller in one more prompts the listener to imagine Black slavery without discussing it outright. Stacey mccoy

[sic], who comments on the HauntedPlaces.org page for the Red Rose Inn in Jennersville, says that her former home in Kennett Square is haunted. “I seen a colored lady in the attic from civil war time [sic],” she says. The central role of slavery to the Civil War, juxtaposed with the

“colored lady” certainly is suggestive. Was this ghostly woman a slave? Still another of these stories is ghostly without necessarily including Black slaves’ ghosts. Caleb tells me there is a man in Penns Valley who is well-known for “watcher witching or water dowsing…What he does, he’d take two sticks, and, of course, they cross.” Caleb says this man discovered a slave cemetery near Potters Mills. “See, the slave markers weren’t marked. They had to do the water witching.” Caleb is imagining a hidden past here. He says that Black slaves were so undervalued that normal means of memorialization—like gravestones—were not afforded them.

Only supernatural means, like water witching, can bring their past to light.

Stories about indigenous ghosts are slightly more common in my data. I collected ten. In all but one case, storytellers who mention them imagine past conflicts between European settlers and indigenous persons. Frazier (1999) says that an Iroquois warrior’s ghost guards a trail in the forests of Potter County; he is there to prevent Europeans from encroaching on Iroquois land.

Native Landlord left the following comment on the HauntedPlaces.org page for the Riverside Inn in Cambridge Springs:

A friend and myself were given a tour in which I felt the floor begin to roll. The air was heavy of all who passed thru this place in time. I’am native american and I felt the spirits of my people surrounding the inn seeking revenge for the taking of the land and will forever. [sic]

Here, he is not only imagining past conflicts. Native Landlord says these conflicts persist into the present and will into the future; his people “will forever” seek revenge “for the taking of the

27 land.” Another of Frazier’s stories (2003; 2016) similarly re-presents old conflicts between

Whites and indigenous persons over land. He says that the cemetery on the Cornplanter Grant was moved, following the construction of the Kinzua Dam in 1964 and the subsequent flooding of the grant. Afterward, “the Cornplanter Indians began to hear strange sounds coming from the cemetery late at night.” Frazier says that these were the spirits of the Seneca whose graves had been moved (including Chief Cornplanter himself), and who were peeved at the disturbance.

Demography can only tell us so much. Whether a ghost is Black or White, male or female, young or old says little about the kind of past a storyteller is imagining with that ghost.

For that, I now turn to an analysis of the types of social roles and situations Pennsylvania’s ghost-storytellers include in their narratives.

Military Ghosts

Military ghosts are among the most common. There are more than 100 (115) ghost-teller combinations tied to military events in my data set. More than half (66) are associated with the

American Civil War. Perhaps this is not surprising, as most of those ghosts (57) haunt places in and around Gettysburg. The rest are associated either with the American Revolutionary War or the general American colonial period, with two exceptions. Caleb tells a story about a headless ghost at Fort Niagara who died during the French and Indian War. The anonymous author of its

HauntedPlaces.org write-up reports that the USS Olympia, which is docked in Philadelphia, is haunted by ghosts tied to “her violent past as a warship.” She was active between 1895 and

1922, and saw action during the Spanish-American War

Some are ghosts of famous military figures. Matthew, for example tells two stories about the ghost of Colonel John Reynolds, the highest-ranking Union officer to die at the Battle of

Gettysburg. One I also heard on Andrew’s ghost tour: A family of tourists in Gettysburg looked

28 through the window of a business one night and saw Reynolds lying on a cot, and a weeping woman sitting next to him. They assumed that they were looking at a display of mannequins.

The family returned to the business the next day and, not seeing the tableau in the daylight, asked the business-owners where the mannequins might be. The business-owners were confused; they did not put up any mannequins at night. “And the interesting part about that, also—not only that they actually had a vision into the past—was the fact that that was the building Reynolds was brought to after he was shot after the first day’s battle on out the battlefield,” says Matthew.

“After he was shot, he was taken to the George George House, it’s called.” Matthew continues,

And the other one is when the seminarian saw his face floating in his room. Okay, and this was, you’ll have to go back a bit. About an hour earlier, he woke up in the middle of the night. He woke up and one of his buddies down the hall was screaming. “What the heck is he doing?” he thought. “Oh, he’s just doing one of his army yells or something.” He fell back asleep. He woke up about an hour later, and there was this face floating. And it—He said, “It was dark. He had a beard. And I closed and opened my eyes half a dozen times. I just prayed. Finally, I yelled at him, ‘Get out!’ And he disappeared.” And I said to him, “If I showed you some pictures, would you be able to pick him out?” He says, “I think so.” So, I got kind of several Civil War officers, and he looked and said, “That’s him.” And it was Reynolds. He picked him. That was the guy he saw. Now, the interesting thing also is, he was in one of the dormitories out there in the seminary, which is basically on the pathways where they brought—And you could draw a line from the George George House to where Reynolds was shot, and it would go through where that dormitory is.

Luke talks about a woman who believes she is the reincarnation of Jonathan Letterman, the medical director of the Union army. On his ghost tour, Andrew tells the story of Captain

William Miller, whose disgruntled spirit used to occupy Soldiers National Cemetery, until his

Medal of Honor (which he won for actions he took at the Battle of Gettysburg) was properly marked on his gravestone. Frazier (1996) recounts stories about the ghosts of General Lewis

Armistead (who still could be heard shouting “Give ‘em cold steel, boys!” decades after Pickett’s

Charge) and William Langley (the Confederate sharpshooter of Alexander Gardner’s famed photograph). Graves, a commenter at HauntedPlaces.org, also writes about Langley’s ghost, although he does not mention his name. And not all the ghosts of famous soldiers trace back to 29 the Civil War. Per their anonymous HauntedPlaces.org write-ups, General “Mad” Anthony

Wayne’s ghost haunts two places: the cauldron at the Watson-Curtze Mansion in Erie in which his body was boiled to the bones several years after he died, so that it could be moved to his family’s cemetery in New York, and the road along which his bones were carried (now US

Route 322). Frazier (2016) also writes that General Edward Hand still moves objects around in his home at Rock Ford Plantation. According to their HauntedPlaces.org write-ups. Lafayette,

Benedict Arnold, and Arnold’s wife, Peggy, all appear in Philadelphia’s Powel House and

Elizabeth Graeme and her husband, Henry Fergusson, haunt Keith House in Graeme Park. A

HauntedPlaces.org commenter called sandra [sic] reports seeing George Washington in his

Continental Army uniform at Valley Forge.

Nevertheless, the vast majority of military ghosts are common soldiers, or (if officers) are not of historical renown. Their stories still can be quite dramatic. Kyle tells a story about “the soldier out in the farmhouse in the outskirts of town,”

[…] the story goes that he was unconscious out on the battlefield. His men brought him out to one of the farms, I think it was the Thompson farm, thinking that he was dead. And they put him in a pile of dead bodies. And, you know, he wakes up under this pile of dead bodies and he can’t get out and he’s trapped and he’s yelling, and yelling, and yelling to get out, and nobody hears him. And he eventually suffocates from being, you know, with all of these dead bodies on top of him. And the story goes that [at] that hospital-farm, to this day, you can still hear him yelling and screaming.

Luke also tells this story. Instead of by yells and screams, however, the ghost in his variant manifests quite violently; it once threw a teenage girl down the stairs in the Thompson farmhouse. Luke tells another dramatic, Gettysburg ghost story, too: After the battle, the Union army kept wounded Confederate prisoners in the seminary building at Pennsylvania College

(now Gettysburg College). Two captured Confederate generals were kept upstairs; the rest of the prisoners were held in the basement. On July 4, 1863, it rained heavily. “The basement

30 flooded,” says Luke, “and they [the prisoners] drowned. Overnight. They [the Union guards] went down to find them, and the candles were there, and they were out.” Students at Gettysburg

College now avoid the basement—“The ghosts of those Confederate soldiers are there.”

But more often, the historical parts of soldier-ghosts’ stories are not so detailed. In many cases, the fact that they are soldiers is all there is. Mitchell is another ghost of the Battle of

Gettysburg, with whom Robert says he and his team communicated through flashlights and other pieces of paranormal equipment. Robert says:

We talked to him probably about five minutes or so, and then it would all die off, and about two minutes later it would pick up again. And we started asking him why, where he had gone. And by using the lights to answer questions, we determined that he was actually a soldier, and we were in an old hospital, and he was making his rounds to make sure that everything was secure, and then he’d come back to talk to us.

Neil says that there are two soldier-ghosts at Fort Roberdeau. One is Major Cluggage, the former commander of the fort, whom French and Indian War reenactors saw warming his hands against the fire in the officers’ quarters one night in the 1980s. (Neil first learned this story from

Frazier [1999].) The other is a nameless sentry or ranger; visitors report seeing him patrolling a cornfield outside the historic site. Kyle says that, at Devil’s Den, “if you turn around, there might be a Union soldier or a Confederate soldier standing behind you on the rocks.” A headless horseman who rides down Allen’s Lane in Philadelphia is “a Revolutionary War soldier who lost his head in battle,” says the anonymous author of a HauntedPlaces.org write-up. Another anonymous write-up reports that Hessian soldiers appear in the Powder Magazine Museum at the

Carlisle Barracks and at the General Wayne Inn in Merion Station, where they are accompanied by “a British officer looking for a locket.” Ghosts of Revolutionary War soldiers also are found at Valley Forge and around the Brandywine River, according to HauntedPlaces.org and commenters Shari (Valley Forge) and Erohiel and Jessica (Brandywine River).

Ghostly battles are another phenomenon. An anonymous write-up on HauntedPlaces.org tells of a phantom Civil War battle that occurs at Sachs Covered Bridge in Gettysburg, and another one describes a ghostly Revolutionary War battle at the Phillips’ Rangers Monument in

Saxton. The ghosts at the Lightner Farmhouse in Gettysburg, its write-up says, are “reliving the

[Civil W]ar.” The battles sometimes are only heard. Kyle says that “there’s countless people who have stories about, ‘Oh, I was driving through the [Gettysburg] battlefield last night, and I heard a cannon go off,” or ‘I heard musket fire.’” HauntedPlaces.org corroborates. The anonymous write-up for the Triangular Field says that, “Visitors to this site have reported the harrowing sounds of battle, even though nothing appears to be happening.” A commenter called

Susan (a paranormal investigator) says she and her clients have heard phantom gunfire on Little

Round Top. Charles tells a memorate on his ghost tour about hearing an invisible horse gallop up behind him—and past him—while he was biking in the Eastern Cavalry Battlefield Site at

Gettysburg. Invisible Revolutionary War battles also can be heard at Growden Mansion in

Bensalem and at the Brandywine River, say uncredited write-ups at HauntedPlaces.org. Less frequently, phantom battles are detectable by other senses. Matthew says that visitors to

Gettysburg tell him they inexplicably have smelled rotten eggs. “And you know,” he continues,

“one of the main components of black powder, the main propeller of the Civil War, was sulfur.”

In Penns Valley, a popular story about the Ghost of Swamp Church ties military history to the civilian life that Pennsylvania’s soldiers left behind. The version below comes from

Amos, although I also collected variants from Luke and Caleb and from Frazier (1996):

The legend goes that back during the Civil War, a local man and a local woman were engaged to be married, and he enlisted before they got married. The two of them had intimate relations prior to his departure and in the process, she became pregnant. Well, he’s off at war serving, and while he’s gone, she—being in the family way—starts to show. And the locals started to figure that she had stepped out on him and had an affair. And there was no verification or proof that it was him who was actually the father. And he was killed in the Battle of Chancellorsville. So, with him having been killed at the Battle of 32

Chancellorsville, May 4th […], when he was killed there was no way to verify it, and she was pretty well shunned by the community. She ended up leaving.

Fast forward sometime in the 1950s. There was a family that lived near the church. Their last name was Schultz. The Schultz family, the husband and wife were sitting on their front porch. And around the Swamp Church and along the different creeks and streams in May, you’ve got your peepers (little frogs), and you’ve got fog as the temperature is changing. So, there’s a fog near and around their home and around the church, because they weren’t that far from the church. And as this fog is rising, they’re on the front porch sitting in the evening and they see an image coming down the road. And they called out to it. And there was no answer. They found it really strange. And, all of a sudden, the lights went on in the church. So, they got up and they walked down to the church, and they went in. And they saw an image of someone, or something, that appeared to be standing up at the pulpit, facing the pews. And as they’re looking at this with the lights on, this image starts to come down from the pulpit and is walking down the aisle and seems to be reaching out in each direction, as this ghost or image or whatever it is, apparition, is going down the church. It leaves the church, and the lights go out.

And Mr. and Mrs. Schultz were kind of startled by this, of course. They talk to the neighbors the next day, and one of the neighbors said, “Oh, yeah, we’ve heard that that’s happened before.” As legend has it, this woman who had been shunned by the community—her ghost or her spirit comes back every year on the night when her betrothed was killed and haunts the church on that night, until the congregation accepts her.

The action of this story occurs far from the battlefield; its drama has to do with the historical enforcement of sexual norms. But all three of my interviewees and Frazier (1996) emphasize that the ghost’s lost fiancé was killed at the Battle of Chancellorsville. This fact makes up the bulk of the story in Luke’s variant.

A soldier in the 148th, Company A, he was going to war. He had a girlfriend, and she got pregnant. Weren’t married. And in the first battle they were in, this is the Battle of Chancellorsville. And in that action at Chancellorsville—There were some men from Company A. Not many, because there weren’t any real heavy. The first real heavy fights were at the Wheatfield at Gettysburg on July 2nd—he was killed on May 3rd. And every night or day on May 3rd since, there’s this apparition of a woman walking down the road there [at Swamp Church].

He begins to tell the sexual drama, but is distracted along the way by the military history. Luke returns to it after only he has reflected on the current state of the Swamp Church building, and only very briefly. “But anyhow,” he says, “she’s carrying a baby. And the congregation’s there,

33 and they—She comes in and they reject her. And they tell her, [it’s] because she’s a fallen woman, because she had this child out of wedlock.” In Amos’s story, the military and the domestic dramas feed into each other. If the woman’s fiancé had not died, he implies, he could have legitimized their child upon his return from the war, and thereby salvaged the woman’s standing in her community. But for Luke, the sexual drama is an afterthought, an excuse to get to the real excitement—the history of Company A. Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that Caleb, who tells the ghostly part of the story first, does not say that there is a love story or a family drama that explains the woman’s apparition. Instead, he says, “There’s a Civil War story to this ghost story.”

Academic Ghosts

Academic settings—especially colleges and universities—have a tendency to collect ghosts (see generally Tucker 2007). Pennsylvania’s are no exception. More than fifty ghost-teller combinations in my data are tied to academic places. Often times, the ghost themselves are academic figures. Thirteen are ghosts of students. Ben says that one occupies a shower stall in his old dorm at St. Vincent’s College in Latrobe. “In the bathroom,” he says, “if you’re taking a shower, your water will get hotter because—I think the story is he died, and as he died he reached and turned the hot water on as high as it will go and really burned himself.”

HauntedPlaces.org lists two ghosts arising from notorious student deaths. An anonymous write- up says that Betsy Aardsma haunts the site of her still-unsolved murder in the Pattee Library stacks at Penn State. Lillian Vickers haunts Bryn Mawr College’s Merion Hall, where she jumped out a third-story window in 1901 after she set herself on fire, say both the unnamed author of its write-up and BH’12, who comments on its HauntedPlaces.org page. Contemporary reports differ as to whether the fire was accidental (a result of Vickers’ attempt to self-treat her

34 self-diagnosed leprosy) or a suicide. If Vickers did kill herself purposely, she is in good company ghost-wise; college ghosts often are “connected up” to student suicides. Drutz, a ghost at West Chester University; a pregnant coed called Wanda at Cedar Crest College in Allentown; and an unnamed, female student at Grove City College all hanged themselves, according to write-ups on HauntedPlaces.org. Grove City College’s write-up says that a second coed’s suicide explains the anonymous ghost who scratches the walls in one of its dormitory. Another anonymous author on HauntedPlaces.org says that Harriet is the ghost of a student who killed herself at the University of Pittsburgh.

Faculty and college administrators account for fewer campus ghosts. According to the uncredited write-up on HauntedPlaces.org, “a former university president” haunts Penn State’s

Schwab Auditorium and its botany department. Ted suggests that the president it George

Atherton, who “created and cemented the foundation of the modern Penn State” between 1882 and 1906. He, however, places Atherton in Old Main building, according to campus lore. It is

Atherton’s wife who haunts the Old Botany Building. From there, she can keep watch over her husband’s grave; Atherton was buried behind Old Main, across the street. (Ted also affirms that

Penn State students say that Schwab Auditorium is haunted. He does not say who that ghost might be.) Ben says that Boniface Wimmer, the Benedictine monk who founded St. Vincent’s in the 1860s, returns each Founders Day and “walks through every red door on campus to make sure the campus is still functioning.” The university president fulfills his duty even after death.

In only one story is the ghost a member of the university staff. P.J., who left a comment on

HauntedPlaces.org, says that he has encountered the ghost of a custodian in a restroom in the basement of the performing arts center at Grove City College. According to legend, the custodian was a great theatre-lover.

Wimmer, the founder, and Atherton, the near-founder, are matched by two other ghosts whose stories recount the beginnings of the universities they haunt (both on HauntedPlaces.org).

Lucy Packer can be found in the Linderman Library at Lehigh University; her father was Asa

Packer, who established Lehigh in 1866. Colonel George Weistling is said to have appeared in the background of a photograph taken at Penn State Mont Alto in 1907—even though he died some sixteen years before. Weistling used to own the land on which the Mont Alto school was built.

Sometimes, campus ghost stories have little to do with the academic life of the school; in fact, it is almost incidental that some of these stories occur at colleges or universities. Among the ghosts HauntedPlaces.org lists at the University of Pittsburg are “a prima ballerina in the

Tanksy Family Lounge of the William Pitt Union…a grandmother who rumples the quilts and bakes phantom bread in the Early American Room at the Cathedral of Learning; and a mason who wears a black tux in Alumni Hall.” Ben talks about Jenny, another ghost at St. Vincent’s

College.

So, there’s St. Benedict Hall, which is the freshman dorm…I think it was recently built, though, in the early 2000s. I think that story is that they built it over unmarked graves, so like an unmarked cemetery, and so they were unearthing those remains. The story is they found the remains of what now is known as Jenny. So there’s Jenny the ghost who inhabits St. Benedict Hall. And she’s supposed to be, like, a friendly ghost, but ornery. So, she’ll do things like she’ll knock all your stuff off your walls, flip your beds, call the elevator, things like that.

Jenny could have haunted any building; there is nothing unique to tie her to St. Vincent’s

College except that she used to be buried there. (Compare Thompson motif E235.6, “Return from dead to punish disturber of grave.”) Her ghostly activities show no tie to the university setting, either. She just as well could perform them in an apartment building as a dorm. The only piece of campus past that her story allows St. Vincent’s students to imagine, then, is the

(fairly recent) construction of the residence hall. That act of building is the center of Ben’s story.

He repeats that the dorm was built over unmarked graves, and that the builders unearthed skeletons. Other ghosts are only coincidentally associated with academic settings. Sometimes, they occupy buildings that were later incorporated into college campuses. The following story, for example, is one of the many that appear in an anonymous write-up about Moravian College on HauntedPlaces.org

Alpha Sigma Tau Sorority House was once an estate house, in which the maid Alicia became pregnant by the owner. When he found out about the baby, he threw Alicia down a staircase that has since been removed. Alicia is said to haunt the building, making noises, turning on and off the attic light, and turning over pictures of men.

Alicia’s story says nothing about the history of the college proper. But it does remind its readers

(who, presumably, mostly are Moravian College students) that campus buildings may have separate pasts of their own. The detail that the staircase on which Alicia died has been removed accentuates the pre-college nature of her story. Now that the sorority house is part of the campus, it has been transformed; any physical traces of the violent past that the storyteller imagines here have been removed. Gettysburg College presents a contrary case, in which already-academic buildings were repurposed for decidedly non-academic ends. I already have mentioned two ghost stories that reference this history (John Reynolds’ floating head and the

Confederate ghosts in the basement of the old seminary building). A third story, especially as

Matthew tells it, brings the element of repurposing to the fore. (A stunted version of this story also appears on HauntedPlaces.org.)

There’s an elevator in Pennsylvania Hall at Gettysburg College. Pennsylvania Hall was one of the largest structures in the area. When the armies came through, surgeons confiscated or commandeered those buildings, and they—for hospitals, because they knew that wounded were going to be flooding in. So, it was used as a hospital at the time of the battle. Stories of limbs being piled up in hideous pyramids as they amputated the limbs and threw them out the windows. So, fast forward to the 1980s. A couple of administrators—It became the administration office. And a couple of administrators were working late one night. I knew them. They’re two women. Eleven o’clock, they’re like, 37

“Okay. Let’s go.” So, they got on the elevator. Press the button for the first floor. The elevator went down into the basement. And you know, these two women just want to go home. So, they’re pushing the buttons, and the doors open. And there’s a scene of a Civil War hospital in front of them. They see men back in the—just as they described them. They see men back in the corners, all along the wall. And they see them waiting to be operated on. There was a table, a makeshift table, with a surgeon with a saw. A bloody apron. They’re punching the button; nothing’s working. Finally, doors close, they go up, get to the first floor, and run over to security guard. And, I knew the security guard. He later became chief of security at Gettysburg College. He said, “Oh, yeah. They were scared to death. But I had to find out what was going on.” He said, “You know, I thought it was a fraternity, making—you know, scaring people.” He said, “And really, within two minutes, were over there, you know. Because—just jogged over there.” Got on the elevator, doors opened. Nothing. In fact, there was even a cinderblock wall that held— within ten feet of the elevator that you had to go around. And all the cages, where they kept the supplies and everything for downstairs. All whitewashed. The cinderblock wall with all the electrical. So, what did these women see?

These ghosts are military ghosts as much as they are academic ghosts. More so, in fact; the historical part of their story is strictly military in nature. Nevertheless, Matthew’s story is very much an academic one. It takes place on a college campus, and the primary characters in the ghostly part are college administrators. The security guard’s “rational” explanation for the ghostly event also situates the story firmly within academic life; he suspects it is all a prank by a group of fraternity brothers, a college staple. The drama of the ghostly part is in the disruption of normal academic activities by the sudden and unexpected appearance of these long-dead military men. That drama mirrors the past Matthew recounts in the historical part of the story: that some

155 years ago, the normal, academic life of Pennsylvania College was upended by the sudden and unexpected appearance of very much living military men and the three days of havoc and weeks-long, chaotic aftermath they brought with them.

Religious Ghosts

Swamp Church is not the only haunted church in Penns Valley. Amos, Caleb, and Greg (who investigates in Penns Valley at times) all tell ghost stories about Egg Hill Church, as well. Amos says there are at least three different versions of the story.

The story is that Egg Hill was the scene of a horrific event. A pastor—One version of the story is that the pastor went downstairs to the Sunday school, killed all of the children, came upstairs, poisoned all of the parishioners with the communion wine, and they all died. Another version is that the parishioners were upset with the minister and they hanged him in the church. Another is that he killed everybody and then he committed suicide. And then he hanged himself.

Caleb is disinclined to dismiss the story out of hand. “Either he did it or he didn’t. It’s hard to tell,” he says. “There’s not enough documentation to say that he actually did it.” Still, he says,

“it’s kind of hard to believe somebody would do that.” For Amos and Greg, it is too hard. Amos does not think the documentation about the story is simply insufficient. Instead, he says affirmatively that “there’s no shred of truth or evidence to any of that having taken place.” Greg points out that the historical part of the story—the version he has heard, at any rate—does not make any sense.

How is it possible for one guy, okay, and supposedly a passive man of God, to kill an entire—Let’s say it’s this many people, okay? One guy. Why didn’t someone stop him, okay? And two, he buried them all by himself? You know what I mean? In the backyard, one at a time, dug a hole. Think about that. Think about that.

Not only are the logistics of the church massacre improbable; the identity of the perpetrator makes the event unlikely, too. A “passive man of God” is not the one Greg expects to kill a roomful of congregants. With this commentary, Greg is using the ghost story to imagine what the past in Penns Valley was not like; namely, it was not filled with religious violence.

Inasmuch as Greg rejects the story of the murderous preacher, he also is rejecting a longstanding folkloric motif of clergy and other religious actors behaving badly. He is not the

39 only one to do so; this motif is curiously underrepresented in Pennsylvania’s ghostlore. There is one ghost at Villanova University who, HauntedPlaces.org says, “is a pregnant nun who had an affair with a priest and committed suicide.” (Compare the stories Gabbert [2015] writes about at

St. Ann’s Retreat in Utah.) She, however, is the only other religious ghost in my dataset who is depicted negatively or is “connected up” to a nefarious event.1 One other ghost is ambiguously depicted. According to HauntedPlaces.org, the Topton House Pub/White Pam Tavern in Topton is haunted by “a priest who hates Christmas decorations. He takes them down, tears them up and leaves them on the floor.” (The anonymous author of its write-up does not say what, precisely, the priest has against them.) This ghost is grumpy, but not dangerous or wicked. Far more ghosts of religious actors are neutral figures—neither particularly friendly nor particularly ill- tempered, and not “connected up” to events of significant moral character. I already have mentioned Ben’s stories about Boniface Wimmer. Another Benedictine monk, he says, haunts

St. Vincent College’s Sauerkraut Tower, which “used to be the water tower for the whole of campus,” after he fell off a ladder into a well and drowned there. Kandis, a commenter on

HauntedPlaces.org, says that she has seen ghostly nuns “walking down the hall in the south tower” at Pittsburgh’s Allegheny General Hospital. At the Grand Midway Hotel in Winder, “the statue of a nun has been known to move around of its own accord. It has even been known to appear in people’s dreams and talk to them,” says Callum Swift in a HauntedPlaces.org write-up.

By and large, it appears that Pennsylvanians do not use ghost stories to imagine the past anti- religiously.

1 As far as non-ghostly folklore is concerned, though, I also heard this from Ben: student legend holds that a complex of tunnels underneath the campus at St. Vincent’s were built to allow the Benedictine monks to meet with the nuns at their sister-college, Seton Hill, to violate their vows of celibacy and continence. 40

In one story, a religious ghost is explicitly positive. According to an anonymous

HauntedPlaces.org write-up, a ghost named Leah haunts Washington Square in Philadelphia.

The write-up says that “This park contains an 18th-century burial site for the African-American community,” and that Leah is there “to protect the site’s thousands of graves.” Leah’s defining feature is that she is Quaker.

Ghost Brides

The most popular ghost in Altoona is the White Lady of Wopsy. Joshua calls it the “crème de la crème of all local ghost stories in the local area,” and says that it is “the one that everybody hears growing up.” Joe confirms that, “It’s something that, if you’ve grown up in Altoona, it’s story that you have heard.” Robert, too, has “heard countless stories of the lady in white.” According to Joshua, there are multiple versions of the story:

One rendition is that a local bride was left standing at the altar and she went up to the top of Wopsononock Mountain, which is the mountain just right here behind us, and she heaved herself off the top, having been rejected at the last minute as such... People have said that there will be a woman in a white dress out roaming the roadside, or she’d be out there in the woods. And some motorists have gone even so far as to pick up the woman as a hitchhiker on the road, and she wouldn’t speak, and they’d turn around and she wouldn’t be there. They would see this apparition by the road, and later they would hear her nails scratching on the roof of their car as they go driving up and down the mountain. Another story, there used to be a big, grand resort up at the top of the mountain, once gain as a get- away from all the industrial soot down here. A couple was on their honeymoon up at that resort. The husband cheated on their honeymoon up at that resort. And in a fit of rage driving back home—Sometimes it’s a car; sometimes it’s a horse and buggy. There are a lot of different variations to this tale. As you well saw, there are a lot of curves on that road. And there are still accidents to this day on that stretch of road. And the car, the horse and buggy, plunged off the side of one of those steep curves and the bride lost her life that way.

Joe tells yet another variant:

Wopsy Mountain is one of those mountains [that border Altoona] …Wopsononock, that’s Wopsy for short. Back in the day there was a woman that—her and her husband just got married. They were driving up this road called the Buckhorn and the carriage fell of the

road. Her and her husband died and she apparently walks Mount Wopsy looking for her husband.

In Robert’s rendition, the vehicle is a car. Another driver ran the honeymooning couple off the road. “And she was thrown from the car and killed, and her husband was thrown down the hill.

And she’s out there looking for her husband.” A similar version appears on HauntedPlaces.org.

Per the write-up,

The Devil’s Elbow is a dangerous curve along Wopsy Road that has a story about a ghostly white lady. Legend has it that she was a new bride on her honeymoon at the Wopsononock Hotel, which burned down long ago. As their carriage rounded the Devil’s Elbow, there was an accident and both were killed. The ghostly bride is seen along the road with a candle, looking for her husband, whose body was never recovered from the wreckage. Some stories say she is a hitchhiker ghost or that she stops young men to see if they are her husband.

The only other story in Altoona that possibly rivals the White Lady’s concerns a haunted wedding dress that is said to have belonged to Anna Baker, the daughter of a nineteenth-century iron magnate whose former home (a neo-Classical mansion) now houses the museum of the Blair

County Historical Society. It is the only Altoona ghost story Jim knows. He says,

Anna was Elias Baker’s daughter, and she was raised in Baker Mansion. I think that she might have been abandoned at the altar, or her wedding never came to fruition, I think. If I understand correctly. I may be off kilter on that one. Her dress is on exhibit, I believe at Baker Mansion. There’s some kind of legend that she comes back every once in a while, and kind of makes her presence known at Baker Mansion.

Robert adds in an extra historical detail, and brings up the most popular aspect of the ghostly part.

At Baker Mansion, with the daughter that never got married and was actually living in the mansion until she died. She was distraught because she had bought her wedding dress and I guess made all sorts of plans, but the gentleman that she was going to marry ran off without her…They had her wedding dress on display there for the longest time, and they say that after they [the Bakers] had died off and the family members had moved out of the mansion, I can’t think of the gentleman’s first name, whoever the town of Bellwood is named after had moved into the mansion. And one of their daughters had gotten married in the mansion. So, it was kind of like her spirit was rivalling the one who had actually

gotten married. And her wedding dress was said to be in an enclosed glass case, and you could see it move from time to time.

“However,” Robert adds, “through research, we found out that that was all a set-up to get tourists into the place.” Joshua tells me the same; previous docents at the mansion would “step on a loose floorboard, and that would give the sensation that the dress was moving of its own accord.”

The wedding dress in question never even belonged to Anna Baker, he says; the original dress that gave rise to the story was Annie Bell’s (of the Bell family of Bellwood), and the historical society now cycles the various nineteenth-century wedding dresses in its collection in and out of the Baker Mansion display. But that does not stop the stories from circulating. In the variant

Joshua has heard, Anna was not abandoned on her wedding day. Instead,

Anna fell in love with one of the ironworkers employed by her family. And it was kind of one of those forbidden love stories. The high-class society girl living in the $15,000 mansion—that’s how much it was constructed for—in contrast to the poor son of the industrial worker who lived in the $50 cabin. So, it’s one of those forbidden love stories. And either her dad, Elias, or her brother, Sylvester, would not allow it, because that was beneath her social standing. And she was so excited for, and looking so forward to, marrying this love of her life that she actually had a wedding dress prepared for this momentous day. But, because she never actually got married, her wedding gown remained in mourning, I guess, if you want to call it that. And it remained a tangible testament to lost love and a life not lived and things like that […] And it was in a wooden case, a glass case, and visitors would say that the dress moved inside the case. People who would be walking their dogs or something like that at night would say that they saw the dress floating in the windows at night. People would say that they were chased out of the house by the dress that was running around in the hallways. Those are the stories I’ve heard.

We have, then, two very prominent ghost stories in which Altoona storytellers imagine unfortunate brides. As various as their accounts of White Lady are, all of the ghost-storytellers can agree that she was a young bride, that she met with some tragedy on or shortly after her wedding day, and that she died on Wopsy Mountain as a result of that tragedy. With the story of

Anna Baker’s wedding dress, ghost-storytellers imagine quite a bit of Altoona’s past. All of the storytellers talk about the Baker family; Jim and Joshua identify some of its members by first

43 name (Elias, Anna, Sylvester). From Robert’s variant, we learn that the Bakers were not Blair

County’s only leading family. There was the family after whom Bellwood is named, too.

Joshua imagines a past riven by class-barriers, and in which women were subordinate to their male relatives—brothers included. But still, the drama of all of their stories centers on Anna

Baker’s aborted wedding. Something about the past, these storytellers say, was unkind to young women’s hopes for marriage.

Altoona’s ghost-storytellers are not alone in this theme. A number of ghost brides appear on HauntedPlaces.org. Sharon Anderson submitted the write-up for the Cranberry Manor Bed and Breakfast in East Stroudsburg. She says that “a guest took a photo in the Victorian room and upon review of the photos it was discovered that in the mirror there is a woman in a long white gown holding a bouquet of flowers.” This phantom appears in the garb of a bride, even if

Sharon Anderson does not explicitly call her one. Hotel Canneaut, in Canneaut Lake, is home to

Elizabeth, a ghost whom the unnamed author of the write-up describes only as “the doomed bride.” According to its anonymous HauntedPlaces.org write-up, City Tavern in Philadelphia hosts two specters. “One is the spirit of a deceased waiter; the other is a young bride.” Julia, a commenter on City Tavern’s page, gives a longer version of the bride’s story. She writes that she heard screams from a disembodied woman while she was eating dinner at the tavern before a commercial ghost tour. “During the ghost tour,” she continues,

we stopped at the City Tavern and our tour guide told us the story of why the tavern was haunted. I found out that there was a party for a wedding and the men were downstairs and the women were upstairs. There was a candle on the table and it got knocked over and the room upstairs caught on fire. When the women tried to get out, the door was locked so they all burned to death. So i [sic] believe i [sic] heard the spirit of the bride burning to death in the fire.

The (again, anonymous) HauntedPlaces.org write-up for Buck Hill Falls in Mountainhome says that “a woman committed suicide in room 62 just before her wedding, and her ghost has been

44 seen.” Frazier (2016) tells another story about a bride’s suicide; it shares elements with Joshua’s variant of Anna Baker’s story. This bride also was an ironmaster’s daughter (this time, named either Catherine or Mary Ann), and she also fell in love with a laborer. Like Anna, she also could not marry him—in her case, because she had been betrothed since birth to the son of her father’s friend. “She tried to resign herself to her fate,” says Frazier, “even to the point of trying on her wedding dress the night before her wedding day. However, when she looked in the mirror, it became too much to bear and she sank deeper into her depression.” She ran to a nearby bridge and threw herself off. A forester in Trough Creek State Park once saw a strange white mist above the creek where the bride drowned herself “form itself into an image of a young woman in a white wedding dress,” Frazier says (2016:39).

Curiously, there is not a matching tradition of ghostly grooms. Men seem to be immune to the tragedies in the historical parts of the ghost bride’s stories. Because “the men were downstairs and the women were upstairs” at the wedding party at City Tavern, Julia can explain how the groom, but not the bride, was able to escape the fire. Anna Baker was so distressed about her forestalled wedding that her dress “remained in mourning;” Joshua, however, does not give any indication that her truelove was similarly troubled. The same is true of Frazier’s

Catherine or Mary Ann. True, the groom also is killed in some variants of the Wopsy legend.

But none of the storytellers suggest that he has become a ghost. They use his death to motivate the appearance of the White Lady, whose story they really are telling. Marriage in the past as

Pennsylvanians imagine it is very gendered—dramatic for women, but not for men.

Ghosts of Industry

As I noted above, in the stories about Anna Baker’s haunted wedding dress and Frazier’s story about the ghost bride at Trough Creek State Park, ghost-storytellers imagine the role of the iron

45 industry in Pennsylvania. The brides are ironmasters’ daughters; in Joshua’s and Frazier’s stories, their forbidden lovers are ironworkers. Overall, accounts of industrial ghosts are not uncommon. In some cases, storytellers focus on wealthy industrialists, like Anna’s and

Catherine or Mary Ann’s fathers. An anonymous write-up on HauntedPlaces.org says that

“chocolate mogul Mr. Hershey himself is said to linger in spirit” at the Hotel Hershey.

According to another anonymous write-up,

The Frick Mansion [in Clayton] was home to industrial magnate Henry Clay Frick and his wife Adelaide Howard Childs, who began living there in 1883 and the family moved to New York in 1900. Their youngest daughter, Helen Clay Frick, kept up the mansion all those years and then moved back in in 1981. She died three years later at age 96.

Both Helen and Adelaide now allegedly haunt the mansion. Two commenters on the

HauntedPlaces.org page—one going by Shirley, the other by A visitor—both claim to have experienced a sudden, unaccountable sadness in Adelaide’s bedroom while they were touring the mansion. They imply that Adelaide’s spirit had something to do with it. Edgar Kaufmann’s first wife haunts Fallingwater, says Chris Berglund in a write-up on HauntedPlaces.org. Lilliane

Sarah, a commenter on the webpage who says she once was a docent there, reports that Mrs.

Kaufman once slammed a door closed to demonstrate her displeasure after Lilliane Sarah spoke with a tourist about Edgar’s infidelity. And according to an anonymous write-up for 1833

Umpleby House in New Hope, “Mill runners Colonel Buckley and Mr. Black are said to haunt this inn. Look for the light from the Colonel’s lantern bobbing through the halls.”

Ghostly workers are slightly more common. Jacob Sauer is a blacksmith at Fort Mifflin in Philadelphia, who “is said to keep plying his trade from beyond the grave,” says the unnamed author of its write-up at HauntedPlaces.org. Frazier (2016:157-164) similarly writes about a haunted blacksmith’s shop in the ghost-town of Greenwood, in what is now Greenwood State

Park. Park rangers have heard disembodied voices asking “typical shoptalk questions,” like

“When’s it going to be fixed?” They also have heard the phantom sounds of the blacksmith’s forge in operation or of a hammer striking the anvil in the shop. Steel workers haunt the

Carnegie Library of Homestead (actually in Munhall), according to its uncredited

HauntedPlaces.org write-up. Another anonymous author on HauntedPlaces.org says the

Railroad Inn in Marietta “is said to be haunted by the men who worked nearby.” What those men did for work is not stated. Ray says that, some years ago, he and a number of other volunteers were doing renovation work at the No. 9 Coal Mine Museum. They were lifting a large beam, without equipment. “We got up so far and it was getting too heavy,” he says. “And all at once it seemed like it floated up the last part and went up. And the one Irishman that we had with us, he swears that that was the miners from past helping us do that.”

Ghost-storytellers sometimes emphasize the dangers inherent in many of Pennsylvania’s industries. Frazier (2016:8-10) tells of two brothers who worked as lumbermen in what is now

Ricketts Glen State Park. He says that “the two men were sawing down a particularly large tree and misjudged the direction and rate of its fall. It’s recalled that the tree came down so fast that the younger brother never had a chance to dodge it. He was crushed like an eggshell by the forest behemoth, and his death was instantaneous” (Frazier 2016:10). Park visitors, now report hearing “moans and screams in the wind” near the place where the accident occurred. Frazier

(2016) also says that the phantom screams that in an old mill in McConnells Mill State Park are from the spirit of a worker who was caught in the mill’s machinery.

In light of their well-earned reputation for danger and their importance to the

Pennsylvania economy, railroading and mining are, unsurprisingly, especially well-represented in these stories. Joshua says that paranormal groups who have investigated the Altoona

Railroaders Museum “supposedly made contact with a railroader who received, like, third-degree

47 burns after a steam-valve burst.” Frazier (2001; 2016) gives two accounts of railroad ghosts. I have mentioned one, the phantom handcar, above. The other is a headless ghost who carries a lantern; he also manifests near Penns Creek. Frazier says this is the spirit of a switchman who was caught in the tracks one night while he was changing the points, and subsequently was decapitated by an oncoming train. In two more stories, he links supernatural activity to mining accidents. A miner named Abraham Lincoln Maurer heard disembodied sounds—footsteps, a door opening and closing, and “noises that reminded me of the sounds a horse makes when it dies”—in a passage of a coal mine on the Allegheny Mountain (Frazier 1996:122). Says Frazier

(1996:121), “Sometime before Maurer started working in the mine, there had been an accident in one passageway where some coal cars broke loose and careened down through the shaft. The speeding cars were filled with coal, and as they rolled along out of control they ran over and killed several mules and some miners.” At the Annie S. Mine in Antrim, “men began to see the smoky apparition of a miner” and a phantom light like a miner’s lamp (Frazier 1996:124).

Frazier says that old miners in the area “connected up” these phenomena to two cave-ins at the mine that each killed a man. The story of the Mather Miners appears on HauntedPlaces.org.

“Miners died in an explosion at the beginning of the 1900s here and many townfolk believe they are still coming to and from work to this day,” Kathy says in the write-up. Mark, a commenter on the webpage, speculates that one of them occupies his home.

Both Greg and Walt tell ghost stories which again “connect up” to fatal mining accidents.

Their ghosts are not the dead miners themselves, though; in both cases, they are the miners’ wives. Greg says that his is another “White Lady” (see Thompson motif E425.1.1). As a child, he saw her appear at the end of a dirt road in Bellefonte, where his grandmother lived.

This particular White Lady was married to a fellow that worked in the mine pit back then, on that road. One day, he went to work and he never came home. And she pined for the rest of her life and she walked that road, and you can see her walking that road looking for 48

her husband. And the reason that she’s white is because she comes out of a pile of lime that’s there. She just forms at this pile of lime and she wanders through the woods and down the road. And she’s looking for her husband. Never going to find him.

Greg does not bother to describe the incident that killed the White Lady’s husband; he simply

“went to work and never came home.” This suggests that, in Greg’s image of the past, dying on the job was a not-uncommon event for miners. It was still quite disturbing for their families, of course, just as the bulk of Greg’s story indicates. But it does not (cannot) drive the story in its own right. The real drama is the tragedy of the White Lady’s widowhood. Walt takes an opposite view.

There’s one mine here. There’s a lot of mine accidents. People were killed in the mines, and one ghost story is around these mines. They have hot air, cold air in the mines coming out. They have to ventilate the airs through the mines. Coming out and there would be like a haze form up around it on a hot summer night, and they claimed they could see a woman carrying a ladder. And it was supposedly the guys wife. This is after he died, fifty, seventy-five years ago. Carrying the ladder and looking for him. Because they either didn’t recover him or [she’s] trying to find out what the cause was of it. Was it something the company did? They didn’t take care of the miners. Or was it a safety concern? The guy was killed in a mine, so she’s out looking for him.

Walt is concerned mostly with the fact of the accident itself. His ghostly miner’s wife exists only as a vehicle to talk about the accident. True, like Greg, he does not give any details. But that is the point. The ghostly woman in Walt’s story is “trying to find out what was the cause of it.” Quite unlike Greg, Walt does not take mine accidents as a simple reality of life in the past.

The fact that the miner died indicates that something went wrong. “Was it something the company did?” he wonders. Here, Walt is imaging a past that Joshua and Frazier only hint at in their stories about Anna Baker and the suicidal bride. It is a past full of conflict between industrialists (“the company”) and their workers.

Ghostly Domestics

In twenty-five stories in my dataset, ghost-storytellers speak of ghosts who keep house, either in domestic service or as innkeepers. Four are stories of murdered maids. I recounted Alicia’s story above. The other three (all on HauntedPlaces.org) are variants of a story about the

Accomac Inn in York. As the unnamed author of its HauntedPlaces.org write-up has it:

…according to legend, young Johnny Colye fell in love with his family’s hired girl. When she didn’t return the feelings, he killed her in the barn, and was eventually arrested and hanged for the crime. His grave is said to be on the property. Both Johnny and the girl he murdered (thought to be named Molly) are said to haunt the restaurant to this day.

Wayne William Bush, a commenter on HauntedPlaces.org who describes himself as a paranormal investigator, both affirms and corrects the story. “The girls [sic] name is actually

Emily Myers who Johnny Coyle killed,” he says. “The grave stone for Johnny is located adjacent to the Accomac property and is accessible with a little climb of a step [sic] hill. We have collected multiple EVPs, shadow figures, orbs and a possible picture of Emily.” Joseph

Zielinski, another commenter, replies that he and his girlfriend “got a lot of Emily talking and crying out for help” during a “voice box session” at the inn. Frazier (1996) tells a story about

Sarah, a nineteenth-century barmaid at the Farmer’s Hope Inn in Manheim. The innkeeper, John

Koch, used his authority to pressure her for sexual favors; she died giving birth to his daughter.

The inn’s current patrons now see Sarah’s spirit “running from the barroom to the front dining area” to evade the ghost of Koch. In the past as Pennsylvanian ghost-storytellers imagine it, women servants seem to have been in danger frequently from amorous employers.

Of course, unfree domestic servants faced even greater dangers. I collected three stories about the ghosts of enslaved persons. One story is quite brief; in a comment on

HauntedPlaces.org, Bobby Kane says that he “talked to a slave which was named Pete this was in the officers quarters” [sic] at Fort Mifflin in Philadelphia. But the two more detailed ones both

50 emphasize the precarious situations in which their subjects found themselves. Amos says that

Homan’s General Store in Spring Mills was once part of the Underground Railroad.

Students of mine who have worked there report having seen things in the basement and up in the attic. An image of what appears to be a woman in the corner with two children. African American in nature, characteristics that they may have been former slaves who were escaping or using that route.

He does not indicate whether the family succeeded in their escape; that they continue to haunt the “station” suggests otherwise. Frazier (2016) is quite clear that the ghost of a slave-woman at

Pandemonium, now a ghost town in Colonel Denning State Park, should be “connected up” to her failed escape. She had travelled north on foot, and arrived at Pandemonium in the middle of the night.

Although she moved along as stealthily as she could, she nonetheless was heard by the town’s canine population, which let loose such a loud chorus of warning barks and howls that the young woman, fearful that she might be discovered and returned to her slave masters, picked a tree with a thick cover of leaves and climbed into it to hide. (Frazier 2016:140)

A hunter’s pack of coonhounds discovered her, and alerted to the tree. The hunter mistook her for a bear and shot her. Frazier (2016:141) says that “from time to time the State Police are called to investigate what appears to be someone with an old-time kerosene lantern walking through the cemetery” where she was buried in an anonymous grave.

Innkeepers generally make for happier ghosts. There are two notable exceptions in my data. I mentioned Frazier’s story about the lecherous John Koch above. At the Black Bass Hotel in New Hope, an anonymous write-up at HauntedPlaces.org says, “A ghostly pool of blood appears on the floor in the tavern, a remnant from the time when early innkeeper Old Hans was stabbed to death in a brawl.” Otherwise, however, they are friendly and dedicated to their businesses. Mr. Duffy, the original owner of Duffy’s Tavern who “died in the hallway” of the inn, still lingers there, says Robert. Robert suspects he stays simply because “he enjoys his

51 building. He likes it. He doesn’t want to leave.” Mr. Duffy continues to keep watch over the tavern. Robert says that when he and his team investigated there, they recorded a video of an orb that approached the camera “and then goes back to where it started from. So, we kind of dubbed that as Mr. Duffy, coming to check to see what we were doing.” Frazier (2016:126-127) tells a similar story about Stanley Peiffer, one of the later owners of the Farmer’s Hope Inn.

“Apparently, Stanley loved his establishment so much when he was flesh and blood that he enjoys coming back for a visit himself every now and then.” He stands at the inn door and welcomes new guests. Chris Rickerhauser, a commenter on HauntedPlaces.org, says he encountered helpful innkeeping ghost at the Sun Inn in Bethlehem. His comment reads:

I went into the Sun Inn to use the phone to call a cab one night. A heavyish set woman in clothing of the 18th century came up to me. I told her what i needed and she looked very confused. She didn’t understand what a “payphone” was but she said that ” Around the corner you can get a Coach to take you home “. A couple of weeks later i went there with my Wife abd told the waitress my story. She said the payphone was to the right of me and that there was no lady matching my description. Was i speaking to a full apparition? [sic]

Despite the barrier of understanding—which, he implies, results from her being out of her time— the ghostly woman in his story still tried to help Chris Rickerhauser get what he needed (a ride home). Innkeepers, much more than servants, are linked to traditional notions of hospitality.

This might explain the different places those two roles occupy in the landscape of

Pennsylvanians’ ghost stories.

Ghosts and Crime

There are old ties between ghosts and crime. Davies (2007) observes that jail cells and gibbet sites are traditionally haunted places, and that murder victims are traditional identities of phantoms. There are almost thirty-five motifs in the Thompson index that link ghostly activity to murder, theft, or some other crime. It is no surprise, then, that ghost-storytellers in Pennsylvania

52 imagine criminal pasts in the historical parts of their stories. Contrary to Davies’ (2007) accounts of European ghosts, very few are of crime victims. I have just discussed the stories about Emily

Myers (or Molly) at the Accomac Inn. Two stories tell of murdered prostitutes. Callum Swift, who composed the HauntedPlaces.org write-up for the Grand Midway Hotel in Windber, says one of the hotel’s ghosts “is believed to a prostitute who was walled up on the second floor and left to die.” Robert says that when he and his wife visited the Birdcage Theatre in Arizona,

Robert’s wife connected with the spirit of “one of the dancers and prostitutes there” who “got beat by a guy, and I guess he crushed the side of her face.” At Axe Murder Hollow in McKean,

“an axe murderer supposedly went on a rampage,” says Chris Berglund in a write-up at

HauntedPlaces.org. “One of the victims, a young woman, has been reported running and screaming as if she is being chased.” An anonymous write-up at HauntedPlaces.org says that

Amity Hall in Duncannon was the site of a familicide-suicide, “and some witnesses claim to have seen reenactments of the grisly murder.” Emily, a little girl who was murdered, haunts the

Red Rose Inn in Jennersville, according to another anonymous HauntedPlaces.org write-up. She is accompanied by Indian Joe, who was hanged for killing her; “however, it was learned after the execution that Indian Joe was innocent of the crime.” (Compare Thompson motif E234.4,

“Ghost an unjustly executed man.”) And Frazier (1999; 2016) writes that “Hairy” John Voneida and his companion, Twila Montray, remain in the state park that bears his name (Voneida, as a beech tree) more than a century after “a few local miscreants” beat them to death.

Much more common are ghosts of murderers and other criminals. Robert says that an acquaintance’s paranormal investigation team was “chased out of” the US Hotel in

Hollidaysburg “by a spirit with an axe…. Apparently, when he was alive he killed several women in the hotel with an axe.” HauntedPlaces.org says that a ghost at 133 Kiester Road in

Slippery Rock is “Sam Mohawk a Native American mass murderer who was hanged for murdering a woman and her five children near the place this house stands.” “Ralph Crossmire, executed for murdering his mother, haunts his former cell,” Chris Berglund writes in the

HauntedPlaces.org write-up for the Old Jail Museum in Smethport. “People who occupied it after his death would report seeing him. Now, as a museum, guests and employees report that

Crossmire is more of a prankster than a threat.” Frazier (1996; 2016) tells the story of Burt

Delige, who haunts the Scotia Barrens in State Game Lands 176. Delige raped and murdered his former employer’s widow and was hanged for it. Hikers in the Game Lands have reported a mysterious black mist by his grave. I heard two stories from Amos about prisoners who were brought to the Eutaw House, a restaurant and inn (now closed) in Potters Mills. One, a horse thief, was hanged from a tree next to the inn. Sometime in the twentieth or twenty-first century,

Amos says, “this person [at the Eutaw House] who woke up in the middle of the night looked out and saw what they said looked like somebody hanging from a rope and the creaking of the rope is what woke them.” Another was a prisoner, who “was being transported by the authorities over to Bellefonte, that’s where the jailhouse was.” (Amos does not mention his crime.) On their way there, the prisoner and the authorities stopped for the night at the Eutaw House. The prisoner killed himself during the stay, Amos says, and “the rumor is that that person continues to haunt the upstairs attic area, and would hold the door shut so that people couldn’t come upstairs.” There are ghosts of hanged criminals at the Jean Bonnett Tavern in Bedford. In the eighteenth century, says an anonymous write-up on HauntedPlaces.org, the tavern “was also used as a courtroom.”

In Gettysburg, Kyle tells me that “one of the buildings we go to up the street on one of our other walks is the old county jail. And there’s, you know, stories of police officers at the

54 building who have had weird things happen to them in there. And the story is that it’s old inmates, who don’t really care for police officers very much.” The building in question (where I stopped on my ghost tour with Charles) is now the Gettysburg Municipal Building. Kyle’s story allows him to imagine the various changes in town geography that have occurred through time, such as the repurposing of town structures. Several other stories about prisons and prisoner ghosts appear on HauntedPlaces.org. The unattributed write-up for Philadelphia’s Eastern State

Penitentiary begins, “Hundreds of prisoners are said to call this state pen home.” Among them is

James Clark, a victim of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre who appeared to Al Capone during his incarceration. “Visitors have reported being followed around the building by the apparitions of criminals, and have seen and smelt someone lighting a cigarette when there is no one around,” says Callum Swift in the write-up for the Historic York Prison. Chris Berglund composed the write-up for Holmesburg Prison, also in Philadelphia. He says,

Prisoners here were described as lab rats for unusual experiments that could prove fatal. Of the dead, some people have reported seeing figures resembling former prisoners. Sounds of panic, doors slamming, and riots (as if history is repeating itself) have been heard. Electronic devices malfunction so be sure to come prepared if you plan to investigate.

And, in the Old Jail Museum in Jim Thorpe, says the write-up, “Legend has it that…a bloody handprint on one of the jail walls keeps coming back even if it is painted over.” Walt references this story, too. Jesse Quoak cursed his gravestone in the Broad Top City Cemetery (Walt was unable to tell me the reason for the curse), so that visitors now see his face in the rock. Walt says that the story is “Sort of like up in the hard-coal region, where the guy that they hung put this hand on the wall…Maunchunk originally, then Jim Thorpe. It was [in] the jail up there.”

Phantom blood—and in some variants an execution—also is at the center of a ghost-and- crime story in Penns Valley. Here is how Amos tells it.

There’s a tombstone in Millheim across from the Millheim Food Mart. It’s a real large, prominent tombstone. There’s a picture of it. But, anyhow, D.A. Musser, who was one of the more prominent people in Penns Valley, is buried there. Now, Musser is a deep- standing, long tradition name. There are still descendants of the Musser family here in Penns Valley. We talk about names and how they’re connected. Stover, Musser, Bosterman, Bearley, you know, they are all long-standing Penns Valley names. You still find descendants of those people.

So, D.A. Musser passed away, but he passed away and when he died there were some doubts about some things earlier in his life. His wife had died under mysterious circumstances, and many people accused him of having killed her. And he was never proved to have done that, but it kind of was the talk or the rumor and it kind of hovered over him later in his years, that he was guilty of this. And he swore going to his grave that he was innocent. After he was buried, the gravestone’s put up. Something appears on the gravestone, in the stone itself. And the locals said that it looked like a dagger, a knife. And it bled. There was literally something that would drip or ooze out of this. Whether it’s an impurity or whatever in the headstone, don’t know. I’m not sure whether the headstone was replaced or not, and then it happened again. And everybody says that it was a sign that he truly was guilty and that he had killed this person and had gotten away with it. It had gotten so bad and so many people were coming and seeing that actually there is a metal plate that is put over that part of the headstone. To this day. Yeah, to try and quiet the locals and keep people from going. He was buried in, like, 1888, so that was very active as far as the stories go at that time. The legend lives on.

Caleb reverses the meaning of the mysterious token. He says that Musser—Daniel Musser, in his version—was hanged for an unspecified crime. Caleb continues,

Right before he had died, his last words supposedly were, “Let there be a bloody dagger appear on my tombstone” if he didn’t commit the crime. If he didn’t. Not too long after his tombstone went into place, there appeared an image of a bloody dagger. They had to hide it. They turned it around, the tombstone, because it’s right along [Rt.] 45 as you’re going into Millheim, on the left across from the UniMart. You can see it today.

Frazier’s (1999) tells this story, too. (Amos is pointing at a photograph in his book.) He offers no fewer than five potential historical parts. Some of them mirror Caleb’s variant; Musser was executed for a murder he did not commit. Others resemble Amos’ version, and say that Musser eluded punishment for a killing (sometimes paired with a robbery). Despite their contradictions, all of these stories share a similar theme: truth will out. For Caleb, Musser was able to acquire some justice in the afterlife, inasmuch as the bloody dagger supernaturally exposed the wrong of his execution. As Amos has it, even Musser the ‘prominent’ Penns Valley citizen could not 56 escape the consequences of murder. His guilt was revealed quite dramatically postmortem. It follows him through history, too. (Amos says, “the legend lives on.”) Both Amos and Caleb also hint that the truth about Musser’s crime (or lack thereof) was inconvenient to some powerful, if unnamed parties. In both of their stories, someone tried to hide the bloody dagger on his gravestone. But in both cases those actors fail. Here, the supernatural provides a powerful conduit through which truth can expose itself. In legend form, it also provides a conduit for transmitting that truth across time.

Ghosts of Personal Pasts

So far, I have discussed only those ghost stories in which tellers imagined public pasts; these were the most common. Nevertheless, ghost-storytellers gave accounts of very personal ghosts, too. In some cases, ghost stories allowed a teller to talk about lost friends and loved ones. Greg says the following about his father:

My dad hung out for years. My dad wasn’t the greatest guy on the planet, and he hung out for years afterwards. He is finally gone, but he came to my sisters and I [sic] and did things with each one of us. He’d hide my car keys. I could smell his cigarette smoke in my house and I don’t smoke. He’d come to my sister in a dream. He’d come to my other sister as far as snacks. Once he figured out we were okay, he relaxed and he crossed over. We didn’t hold any grudges on him and he was worried about that and I had my talk with him and so did my two sisters. Now he’s wherever he’s at. Once in a while he’ll come around, but nothing like he was after he first passed.

Greg includes small details about his father (e.g. that he was a cigarette smoker) and an important one about their relationship—namely, that it was difficult. He also says that, in his ghostly guise, Greg’s father and his children were able to come to terms with each other, at last.

In fact, he suggests that his father’s sole reason for “hanging out” after he died was to mend his relationships with his children. Greg’s story both re-presents his family history and reframes it in a more ideal way, which emphasizes familial love and care over whatever difficulties Greg

57 and his sisters had experienced while it was happening. He offers second story just after this one, which similarly centers on his family’s care for each other.

Jodi: Your aunt did, too.

Greg: Oh, and my aunt. She passed away. That was kind of a shocker thing. She was very diabetic and she went into diabetic shock and my uncle didn’t revive her […] So she passed away in her home. My girlfriend at the time, when that happened, was a psychic. I don’t know if you believe or not, but you’ve dabbled, you’ve heard.

Interviewer: I’ve heard. Yeah, a little bit.

Greg: Well, my cousin called to tell me that her mom had passed, but my girlfriend and I went to the house and my girlfriend—We were sitting around the table that very night and my aunt was still there. And it was really wild, because my girlfriend is sitting there not paying attention to anybody else on the table, but I can see her wheels turning. She was having a conversation with my aunt, who was behind my uncle, standing. Standing behind my uncle. She basically said to my girlfriend, “Well, everybody’s okay here; I’m going to go.” Then she was gone. Never to be heard from again.

There are details of life here—Greg’s aunt’s diabetes, most importantly, and also Greg’s previous romantic relationship. But the more important theme is about Greg’s aunt’s relationship with her family. She could “go” once (and only once) she was certain that the rest of her family were “okay.”

Caleb tells stories about ghosts of more distant relatives. There is a log house in Penn

Township, he says, that his family has owned for more than 150 years, and that is haunted.

My cousins that were living here went upstairs. They had drawer, they were open. Of course, nobody was up there. Now, rumor has it that my I-don’t-know-how-many-greats uncle lived at that home at one time in about the 1920s or ‘30s. Rumor has it that he killed himself in that home, that he jumped out the window. Then there are other stories in the family in which people said there was something medically wrong with him, that he jumped out the window but he survived the jump. We don’t know if that’s true, what happened. Sometimes my relatives would talk to his ghost.

Caleb’s story offers a slightly vaguer picture of his family’s past than Greg’s. There are two different versions of the past, and Caleb is not certain which is true. Although his family “would talk to” his distant, and deceased, uncle, the ghost does not seem to be eager to establish one of

58 them over the other. Caleb is surer about the past he imagines in a later story about the log house; for one thing, there are documents to support it. He says that when

my great-great-great-grandparents lived there, they had funerals in it. They really didn’t have a funeral home at the time, back in the late 1800s, that they could go to, so they’d have the funerals right there in the house. The front room there is where they had it. They said at night, that’s where some of the activity happens, in the kitchen. I have some post mortem pictures of some of the dead bodies in there.

In ghost stories, the public and the personal are not always distinct. Ghost-storytellers sometimes link their family pasts into well-known ghost stories. An anonymous write-up on

HauntedPlaces.org says that Summit Cut Bridge in Beaver Falls “has a ghostly white lady.

Legend has it that she fell off the bridge onto the railroad tracks in 1894. Her spirit is said to appear around midnight on rainy nights, walking along the tracks.” The first comment on that page is from peggy robinson [sic]. She says, “Her name was josephine cox married to leroy cox which were my great great grandparents” [sic]. Above, I mentioned Mary Mellissa Knight

Deeter, who left a comment on the HauntedPlaces.org webpage for Kelly Road in Ohioville; she has heard that the road is home to a phantom hitchhiker. Mary Mellissa Knight Deeter says that she does not believe the story. Nevertheless, she still notes that the ghost is allegedly a relative of hers. “My Aunt said she had a cousin die there in her teens, during the 70’s & she is suppose[d] to be that ghost,” she writes. Grace, another HauntedPlaces.org commenter, adds to the ghost stories at Hill View Manor in New Castle. She says that her grandmother used to work as a nurse there, and that one of the elderly residents often bought her flowers. The patient died in the early hours of the morning one Halloween (his birthday). She writes,

On that day there will be random flowers on the table with my grandmother’s name on it, but the weird thing was that was after the manor closed down in 2004. Till this day the flowers just randomly show up on Halloween.

I heard another of these stories second-hand. Joshua says that a few years ago, he became determined to find the “kernel of truth” behind the Wopsy story, the ghostly part of

59 which he firmly disbelieves. “I began keyword searching the local newspaper archives,” he says.

“And I would use Wopsy, Wopsinonic, car crash, death, things like that to try to find out what could be the inspiration for all this.” Eventually, he found an article from 1926 about a then- recent car accident on the mountain. A man and woman, whom Joshua suspects were illicit lovers, were driving on the mountain, probably while intoxicated. The woman was thrown out of the car and killed; the man was left unscathed. He was tried for manslaughter, but acquitted.

Joshua wrote a piece for the Altoona Mirror (the local newspaper), in which he speculated that this event was behind the stories about the White Lady. After the story ran, Joshua was contacted by that woman’s great-grandson: “He said, ‘You told the story exactly as how it was handed down to me…And I was told from a very young age,’ he said, ‘that my great- grandmother was the White Lady of Wopsy.’” Here, a very, very public story and a story of familial past coincide.

Chapter 3: When Is the Past? Time and Ghost Stories

Ghost-storytellers imagine the past. But when is that past, exactly? And how does a ghost- storyteller indicate that something is in the past? In this chapter, I analyze the temporality of the past as it appears in ghost stories. The chapter precedes in two parts. In the first I address the question, “How do ghost-storytellers mark time in ghost stories?” As shall be seen, they very rarely rely on the calendar to do so. In the second section, I explore the temporal “topography” of ghost stories. This section describes how Pennsylvania’s ghost-storytellers distribute their stories (unevenly) within historical time.

Part I: Time in Ghost Stories is Not Calendrical

For the most part, the past as Pennsylvania’s ghost-storytellers imagine it is nowhen in particular.

Almost half of the ghost stories in my sample don’t include an historical part at all (426 out of

872). In another 183, ghost-storytellers render (often, highly-detailed) historical parts, but do not include information that allows a listener to date them. And there is something queer about the remaining 263: although it is possible for a listener to chronologize them, in only a little more than a third of them (ninety-nine)2 do ghost-storytellers actually reference the calendar. (See

Table 1) Their references tend to be unspecific, too. Ghost-storytellers set their historical parts in a definite year or on a definite date in only a quarter (twenty-three). Frazier says that the Rock

Ford Planation’s “haunted reputation seems to have its roots with the suicide of the [General

Edward Hand’s] son John, who shot himself in an upstairs bedroom in 1807” (2016:148). Dawn, who comments on the HauntedPlaces.org page for Growden Mansion in Bensalem, writes, “I live on Griscomb Drive around the corner from the Mansion [and] there is a ghost from 1810 in

2 The numbers below add up to more than ninety-nine because some ghost-storytellers used more than one technique to tie their stories to the calendar. 61 my basement.” (This is the total of her comment.) Says the anonymous author of the

HauntedPlaces.org write-up for the Phillips’ Rangers Monument in Saxton,

In 1780 during the Revolutionary war, a group of rangers were engaged in a battle against the Iroquois who were fighting on behalf of the British. The natives outnumbered the rangers some five to one and the Rangers eventually surrendered. After their surrender the Rangers were tied to nearby trees and slaughtered after a period of torture. It is claimed that they still haunt the spot of their deaths and that especially on the anniversary of the battle (July 16) you can see them locked in their doomed battle against their enemy. [sic]

Amos tries to put an exact date to the story of Swamp Church. “So with him [the fiancé] having been killed at the Battle of Chancellorsville, May 4th,” he begins. But then he catches himself:

“May 4th? May 3rd? Oh, darn. I don’t remember if it was May 3rd or May 4th.”

Table 1. Distribution of Ghost Stories by Temporality Type No historical part 426 Temporality unclear 183 Possible to date 263 Total 872

Instead, ghost-storytellers situate the historical parts of twelve stories in a decade, and of twenty-one stories in a century. Joshua has heard stories that David Woods Baker, brother to

Anna, also haunts Baker Mansion. He “was killed in a steamboat explosion on the Hudson River in the 1880s.” According to the anonymous author of its HauntedPlaces.org write-up, the

Bechtel Mansion Inn in East Berlin “has been visited by strange noises, residual smells, and a ghost named Flossie who is said to have died in the house in the 1920s.” The anonymous author of the HauntedPlaces.org write-up for the Ship Inn in Exton (built in 1796) says, “Those who have seen [its ghost] believe him to be from the 1700s as well, but his identity and story are unknown.” Ghost-storytellers offered a range of dates in which the historical parts of eleven stories might have occurred. Joe says of the White Lady of Wopsy’s crash, “I want to ballpark it in maybe the 1800s, early 1900s. Maybe the 1880s, 1890s.” Tom tells me that a fire in the

Green House, a bar in Mount Carmel, killed one or two people, and that his older sisters used to

62 say “that they were still protecting the house or the bar or the Green House.” “I’m going back a ways,” he says of the story. “I’m going back [to the] late ‘70s, early ‘80s here.” Jim begins to set Anna Baker’s story in a century, but then switches to a date-range. “She probably lived in the mid- to late-1800s,” he says. “I would say she probably was jilted at the altar. I guess I show my age there. That sounds like an old expression. I think that probably was in the late 1800s, maybe the early 1900s. I’m not really sure.”

In another forty-three cases, ghost-storytellers link the historical parts of their stories to the calendar using “anchor dates.” These are explicitly not dates in which the ghost-storytellers say that the events in the historical parts of their stories occurred. Rather, they mark incidents against which the events of the historical part can be situated. (The analogy is to Tversky and

Kahneman’s [1974] “anchoring and adjusting” heuristic.) Most of the time, they provide an upper and/or lower temporal boundary for the events of the historical part. Joe says that the old man and the boy in the U.S. Hotel probably were alive “when the hotel was actually a hotel in the 1800s.” When in the 1800s? “I want to say that it opened in 1839,” he says. “And it’s been open off and on. There was a fire in the 1930s that destroyed it, but then they rebuilt it. So, I’m imagining the first time the hotel was there.” Note, though, that these forty-three stories include eighteen in which the temporal setting of the historical part still is unclear. Luke tells me that a house east of Rebersburg acquired a reputation of being haunted after a man hanged himself there. He says, “when I was growing up, this was in the ‘50s, we’d go by the house, and my parents would tell me that that’s haunted.” We do not know for certain when the suicide occurred; we only know that it must have been before the 1950s.

Ghostly identities

So, if time only rarely is attached to the calendar in ghost stories—and only loosely attached, when it is—how do ghost-storytellers mark time? The answer is (perhaps unsurprisingly) similar both in stories that we listeners can situate against the calendar and those which we cannot.

First, their stories are littered with characters whose identities suggest a temporal setting. Ghost- storytellers rely on this technique in 141 stories. Usually, the character in question is the ghost him- or herself (119 stories); occasionally, however, it is another actor. In eighty-one stories, the relevant character is a specific person, oftentimes with a name. (It is the ghost in sixty-two stories, and another character in nineteen.) In thirty-five stories, this character is quite famous.

Because he or she is familiar to listeners, listeners easily can place the character within the flow of events. George Washington, the Marquis de Lafayette, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin,

Alexander Hamilton, and Betsy Ross all are famous for their activities during the American

Revolutionary and Federalist Eras. Stories about their ghosts—who appear, respectively, at

Valley Forge; Powel House (Philadelphia); Baleroy Mansion (Philadelphia); Independence Hall

(Philadelphia), Library Hall (Philadelphia), Christchurch Burial Ground (Philadelphia), and

Growden Mansion (Bensalem); the First National Bank (Philadelphia); and the Betsy Ross

House (Philadelphia), all according to unnamed authors on HauntedPlaces.org—implicitly are set in that timeframe. An anonymous HauntedPlaces.org write-up for the Carlisle Barracks says that “The campus is also said to be haunted by Jim Thorpe, the school’s star athlete, who has been heard playing basketball at night in the Old Gymnasium. Thorpe’s apparition also has been spotted at the Letort View Community Center…” Since Thorpe is famous for his athletic accomplishments in the first two decades of the twentieth century, his apparition suggests that point in time. Amos uses a famous character’s activity as a timeframe in its own right. He says,

Millheim Hotel is supposedly haunted. The former owners nicknamed the ghost Milly. The reason they called her Milly is because the story goes that Millard Fillmore, when he was President, would come by train on his way back to New York, to Buffalo. He would stop on occasion and stay at the Millheim Hotel. And he acquired a mistress. And this mistress became pregnant with his child. And when he stopped and found out that she was pregnant with his child, he never stopped again because scandal like that, of course, we couldn't have in the political spectrum with the President and she died of a broken heart. And legend has it that she stills haunts the Millheim Hotel today waiting for Millard Fillmore to return and reacquaint themselves. The owners there in the past have said that odd things happen. (Emphasis added.)

In one case, a ghost-storyteller uses a famous character to anchor his ghosts temporally. Mark, a commenter on HauntedPlaces.org, says that he was visited by the ghosts of a girl and her mother one night at the Red Rose Inn in Jennersville. Some months later, he says, he saw a painting in the inn’s dining room; “it was donated to William Penn which depicts in the lower right corner the girl and her mother” [sic]. We do not know precisely when these ghosts are “from.” Mark does tell us that, at very latest, their life-spans overlapped with Penn’s.

Non-famous, but still specific, characters can work in the same way. An anonymous

HauntedPlaces.org write-up says, “West Chester University’s Ramsey Hall is believed to be haunted by namesake Dorothy Ramsey.” West Chester students who are familiar with Ramsey can place her approximately in time (although, we listeners who have no connection to the college are left none the wiser). A commenter called Jim left the following on the

HauntedPlaces.org page for the Philips’ Rangers Monument:

we did a investigation out here and it felt like someone is watching you. we saw some shadows around our van and heard like a dog haling on the evps and our chimes went off a few times and we had trouble with our recorders and our cam and our co founder felt someone sitting with her on the steps she believe that it was one of the rangers sitting with her and she felt like her insides were being cut open and his name is A. Shelly [sic]

If “A. Shelly” is indeed a ranger, he must have been killed in 1780. In seven stories, ghost- storytellers use non-famous characters to anchor their accounts temporally. I recounted Greg’s stories about the ghosts of his father and his aunt in the previous chapter. Obviously, those

65 stories happened during Greg’s lifetime. Ray tells me that a woman who visited the No. 9 Coal

Mine Museum snapped a picture in the shaft. In her picture was the image of a man. He says,

“it looked like a buddy of mine that died and his ashes are interned in our mine.” Although we listeners do not know precisely when Ray’s “buddy” lived and died, it must have been sometime during the last eighty years—and probably more recently than that. Robert’s story about the ghost of the young man with the bandana is similar. In full:

We had the Baughman Cemetery in Tyrone, which isn’t far from Altoona. We have a young man who was about twenty-one years old when he died. We got permission to go into the cemetery for a year. At one point, we got a picture of a young man’s face, and he’s got something across his forehead with an odd design. It’s—you can’t tell what it is. It’s not a hat. So, we contacted the caretaker, and she actually told us about this young man who had passed away and was buried in that corner of the cemetery, ’cause it’s a small area. And she got us in contact with his parents, and the parents sent us pictures of their son. And in all the pictures, he’s got a bandana on with an odd design on it. And if you put the two together, you can tell that it’s the same person. We were interviewed for the Tyrone newspaper and we were telling this story, and the reporter started crying. It turned out that she was his girlfriend at the time that he passed away. So, we were figuring that he might have known that we were having that interview, and he wanted to make himself known, so that he could have some kind of contact with her. We had that.

There are two time-limiting characters in this story: the young man’s parents and the newspaper reporter.

In the remaining sixty-one stories, the character is one of a social type. Just like the ghosts of famous persons, some suggest a definite place in history. Even if storytellers do not reference dates or specific battles, the ghosts of Union (six stories) or Confederate soldiers (nine stories) they talk of indicate that their tales occur during the Civil War. So do the ghosts of unmodified soldiers whom ghost-storytellers place at Gettysburg or other places associated with the Civil War (twelve stories). The ghosts of Hessian soldiers that anonymous writers on

HauntedPlaces.org place at the Carlisle Barracks and the General Wayne Inn in Merion; of the

British officer the writer also says occupies the General Wayne Inn; of the Continental soldiers that anonymous writers at HauntedPlaces.org say occupy Powel House in Philadelphia and 66

Cliveden in Germantown and that Neil says haunt Fort Roberdeau; of “Amos and other Colonial soldiers” whom an anonymous author on HauntedPlaces.org puts at Fort Mifflin in Philadelphia; of the simply-Revolutionary-War soldiers Jessica (a HauntedPlaces.org commenter) says she and her family have interacted with near the Brandywine River, that an anonymous write-up on

HauntedPlaces.org says rides down Allen’s Lane in Philadelphia, and that another anonymous write-up says haunts the basement of the King George Inn in Allentown; and of the undescribed soldiers that HauntedPlaces.org commenters Erohiel and Shari write about at the Brandywine

River and at Valley Forge (respectively) all are necessarily tied to stories about the American

Revolution. Stories about the ghosts of enslaved persons (whom I discussed in the previous chapter) must be anchored against the Emancipation Proclamation.

Others social types, however, are much less temporally specific. Amos says that Malachi

Boyer (see previous chapter) was a French fur trapper. His profession suggests a frontier setting, where open forest for trapping is plentiful, and so implies that Boyer’s story occurs when

Pennsylvania was the western edge of Euro-American civilization. Boyer’s nationality hints that his story takes place while France still had significant colonial holdings in North America. An historically astute listener therefore might assume that Boyer and Nita Nee tried to elope sometime between 1534 and 1763. Nevertheless, neither attribute is historically conclusive, and

Amos certainly does not try to establish any definitive chronology for the story.3 Time is even less certain in the stories about the switchman that Frazier (2003) says can be found at Penn’s

Creek and another headless switchman he says haunts the Horseshoe Curve in Altoona, or about the “lamplighter’s ghost” that an anonymous write-up on HauntedPlaces.org places at Fort

3 Other French fur traders gang-rape and murder Sarah, a young indigenous woman who haunts Penn Tavern in Fisher’s Ferry, in one of Frazier’s (2016) stories. However, he provides anchor dates for that account. He says, “the earliest white men to penetrate this area were French fur traders who came here in the early 1600’s [sic], and it was they who built the inn in 1703” (Frazier 2016:181). 67

Mifflin in Philadelphia. The first two evoke for listeners an age when train travel was dominant and before the development of automated or remote-controlled rail systems (that is, a time when railroad points had to be switched by hand). The last indicates a setting before the development of electric lighting. But neither Frazier nor the anonymous storyteller pins down just when these days of mechanical points and gas-, oil-, or wax-burning streetlights happened.

Ghostly Attire

Closely related to ghost’s identities is their mode of dress. Davies (2007:40) argues that some social types are more likely than others to appear in ghostlore simply because they wear recognizable clothes, which make them easy to identify (in the UK, “nuns, monks, Roundheads and Cavaliers”). And, he says, these clothes also allow (living) persons who encounter ghosts to set them in time. Storytellers in my data rely on ghostly clothing for this purpose, as well; I observed the technique in thirty-three stories. Contra Davies (2007), storytellers highlight ghostly dress in order to identify a spirit in only eight of them. Neil first describes Cluggage as

“a figure in a full Continental Army outfit.” Frazier (2016) introduces him similarly. Before he names Captain Miller’s ghost, Andrew says that he always appeared in the uniform of a Union cavalry officer. Frazier (2016:152) describes a ghost at Rock Ford Planation who wears “18th century servant’s garb.” In the other twenty-five, storytellers use ghosts’ attire as a temporal marker on its own. Sometimes, they directly connect clothing styles to the calendar—in every case, by identifying them with a century (seven stories). On the HauntedPlaces.org page for the

Eagle Hotel in Waterford, bella’s [sic] comment reads,

my husband said while he was in there rest room a elderly man asked him if he had seen his wife but he said the man was almost see through and had a very old looking outfit on he said maybe the late 1800s [sic].

Recall that the ghost Chris Rickerhauser says he encountered at the Sun Inn in Bethlehem (see previous chapter) was wearing “clothing of the 18th century.” In an eighth, borderline case, a commenter called katy [sic] on HauntedPlaces.org says she saw a man in the window of the Ship

Inn in Exton; “he was dressed in clothes not from this century.” But most of the time, ghost- storytellers use dress simply to conjure the feeling of age. Carrie comments on the

HauntedPlaces.org page for the Inn at St. Peter’s Village. She says, “I saw a woman (ghost) coming down the stairs, and from what I could see, she had her hair pulled up in a bun and a long flowing skirt (like they wore in the old westerns).” Greg says that he encountered the ghost of a woman in his apartment one night; “her hair […] she had it down over her face a little bit, and she was wearing one of those old-time nighties.” Leslie, who comments on the

HautnedPlaces.org page for Fort Mifflin, and the anonymous author of the write-up for Hotel

Bethlehem both describe ghosts who appear in “period clothing”—though from which “period,” precisely, neither says. Noelle on HauntedPlaces.org describes an experience she had at

Independence Hall:

just went there today and I was in a good mood felt amazing but then the second I walked in it felt like something went through me and I got really depressed and angery and I felt like I was being shoved and something was followe me my head hurts so bad now and I cant explain the feeling when I was walking down the stairs my dad notice that I was standing straight and cupcakes arms and I realized that in the olden days they had ball gown dress [sic]

Noelle’s story implies a sort of ghostly possession; her curious stance at the end—“standing straight and cupcakes arms”—presumably is the posture of the spirit who has taken over her.

How should she account for the posture? Noelle turns to clothes, “ball gown dress.” Tight bodices and stomachers prevent slouching; wide skirts push out the hands. And just as Davies

(2007:40) predicts, “the clothes define the period.” Noelle says that “ball gown dress” was

69 typical of “the olden days.” Again, though, she does not specify the chronography of those

“olden days.”

Events and Eras

Events are another key marker of Pennsylvania’s temporal landscape in ghost stories. There are fifty-eight stories in my sample in which ghost-storytellers marked time this way. In more than half of them (thirty-one), the key event is the Battle of Gettysburg. A number of these overlap with stories about Union or Confederate soldiers (either about specific ones or about Union and

Confederate soldiers as social types). But not all. Kyle tells me about Gus, one of the inmate ghosts who haunts the Gettysburg Municipal Building.

Now, we don’t know if that’s his real name. But it’s said that during the battle, before the battle, he was kind of like the town drunk in town. And he was locked up in the jail during the battle. And as the battle goes on, he’s left in there. And he’s left in there for days and days and days after the battle. And he passes away from starvation and dehydration. So, the story goes that he’s the main spirit in the building today. (Emphasis added.)

On his ghost tour, he also explains that another of the ghosts in his company’s bed and breakfast is the (civilian) man who owned the house during the Battle of Gettysburg. Matthew flags his story about the Civil War hospital at Gettysburg College (recounted in the previous chapter),

“When the armies came through…” Melissa Havern, who comments on the HauntedPlaces.org page for Little Round Top, says that she “woke to the sounds of a fife and drum band” one morning while she was staying with some friends who live at the border of Pennsylvania and

Maryland. After her friends assured her that there were not any band practices or reenactment events that could account for the sounds, she says, “I was convinced that I heard hauntings from the Battle of Gettysburg.” Charles uses the Battle of Gettysburg as an anchor event. The ghost who haunts the Gettysburg Ghost Company’s headquarters, he tells his tour, is probably a

70 carriage-detailer named Watts, who ran his business out of the building before the battle. Kyle does, too. He says that “once a year, every year,” Gettysburg police respond to a single-car accident on the battlefield grounds. The driver always says, “I was avoiding a man on a horse.”

Neither man nor horse is to be found. Is there any speculation as to who the man might have been, I ask? Kyle answers, “It could be anyone from, as far as somebody in the battle, trying to get somewhere to give an order or to take an order. Or it could be somebody who lived here anywhere before or after the battle.” In another nine, the event is another Civil War battle, or the

Civil War in general. The Swamp Church story, in all four variants I collected, is the obvious example. Frazier says that another ghost from Farmers Mills lost his head in the Battle of Mossy

Creek “and his confused ghost…has come home to find his missing skull” (1996:26). He also uses the Civil War as an anchor event; to place the story of the slave woman who was killed at

Pandemonium (discussed in the previous chapter), he says, “The woman’s odyssey began sometime prior to the Civil War” (Frazier 2016:139).

Ghost-storytellers use the American Revolutionary War, or Revolutionary War battles, to mark time in another ten. An anonymous author writes on HauntedPlaces.org that

Grumblethorpe, in Germantown, is “Allegedly haunted by General James Agnew, who was shot and died in the front hall of Grumblethorpe during the Revolutionary war” [sic]. Another anonymous write-up describes the Brandywine River thus: “Site of the Revolutionary War’s

Battle of Brandywine, this area is said to be rich with wartime ghosts. Soldiers, and even horses, haunt the area, and you may even hear sounds of battle echoing from long ago.” The final time- maker is quite vague; when, exactly, is “long ago?” It is only from in two, nested markers at the beginning of the description that the reader can find a real temporal setting—during the Battle of

Brandywine, during the Revolutionary War. Still another anonymous write-up, this time for

Valley Forge, reads in full,

There isn’t an American alive who doesn’t know the story of Valley Forge and the deprivations and hardships the Continental army suffered there. Although no physical battle was fought here, the battle against low morale, the elements, and hunger was a fierce one and many believe that those who lost that fight still remain. Visitors to the park claim to have seen men in army dress and some have reported what appears to be a man hanging from a tree.

Inasmuch as storytellers rely on events to situate their stories in time, they implicitly presume that the events are familiar to their listeners. Here, the anonymous author makes that presumption explicit. “There isn’t an American alive who doesn’t know the story,” he says. In other words, All you readers know when I am talking about.

Events slip into eras, by which ghost-storytellers mark time in seventeen stories. Some, like the Civil War and the American Revolution are both: Says the anonymous write-up on

HauntedPlaces.org for Soldiers National Museum in Gettysburg, “Rosa Carmichael is said to be the spirit who haunts this museum. According to locals, she operated an orphanage located at this very site during the Civil War era.” Similarly, the anonymous write-up for Moravian College says that, “A Revolutionary War-era nurse is said to haunt the Music Building.” Angie uses both an event and an era to set Olive’s story temporally (mentioned in the previous chapter). Olive, she specifically notes, “was an Edwardian actress.” But first she introduces the story: “Anyway, it's about a woman who goes up to New Hampshire and she goes missing. This is the time of the

Evelyn Nesbit, Harry Thaw scandal with Sanford White.”

Other eras stand on their own. Amos tells the following story about the Headless Dog of

Coburn:

Legend has it that during the Great Depression, hobos would ride the trains, right? And Coburn was one of the stops where the hobos would jump off.

The hobos would jump off the train in Coburn, look for a day's wages somewhere, maybe a hot meal, place to stay and then get on the train and keep going. There was one guy who would frequently stop in to Coburn, and he always had this dog with him.

Well, they would jump the trains. They didn't have the money to buy the ticket, so they were jumping the trains and one day he slipped and his dog went underneath the train and was beheaded.

So, he ended up going on his way, but this dog continues to look for its master and supposedly haunts a stretch of road going in and out of Coburn along what used to be a toll road, or the old pike as it was called.

The Great Depression, as a period, provides a rich temporal setting for Amos’ account. He says it is a time when travel was accomplished by train, when work was paid for by the day—and, implicitly, in cash and under the table—and, most importantly (for its repetition forms the center of his story), when hobos fare-jumped on their way to earn their daily bread.

Nevertheless, Amos’ story is unique in this regard. Other storytellers who set their stories within eras do not include nearly as much detail. Usually, they simply name the era.

Vicky Reeves comments on the HauntedPlaces.org page for the Tillie Pierce House Inn in

Gettysburg. She says, “Captured a great picture of a little Victorian boy on the attic stairs, in the mirror on wall. I gave Tillie Pierce Inn a copy. You can see his white collar and shoes on the step.” The anonymous write-up for Hotel Iola likewise mentions “faces wearing Victorian-style collars materializing in the mirrors.” (Note the use of clothing to mark time in both these stories, as well.) To account for the hauntings at the Annie S Mine (see previous chapter), Frazier

(1996:125) says, “Old miners that had worked in the deep mines in the area remembered that around the turn of the century a man had been killed in a cave-in at the Annie S.” “The turn of the century” is one of the many temporal markers Caleb uses to set his story about the Dog of

Coburn, too. In his variant, the ghostly dog might be headless or might have three heads.

These last two examples point to an important caveat: neither events nor eras are completely divorced from calendar time. “The turn of the century” certainly is a culturally, technologically, socially, and politically distinctive and meaningful historical setting it its own right. All the same, its name marks a calendrical change, from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. This is an extreme case. But in fifteen other stories, ghost-storytellers note the temporal setting both using an era or an event and using calendar time. The author of the

HauntedPlaces.org write-up for Allen’s Lane says that “although the story dates from the

Revolutionary War period of the 1700s, the horseman has been seen as recently as the 1980s by two policemen.” Frazier (1996) quotes the following story from a licensed battlefield guide at

Gettysburg; the guide is retelling his father-in-law’s experience.

He claimed that when he was passing the Angle, which is where Pickett’s Charge hit on the third of July, 1863—now this was at nighttime; he’s driving around midnight. He claimed he could hear sounds like, ‘Give ‘em the cold steel, boys!’—which is supposed to be what Armistead, the Confederate General [sic], said as he comes [sic] over the wall. He’s supposed to have hollered that (Frazier 1996:42).

He tells another story about the “wailing child” in Pine Creek Gorge (Frazier 1996:72-73). The

Seneca avoided passing through the gorge so that they would not hear the ghostly screams of an infant they had thrown from a cliff, sacrificially, to appease a rain deity. Says Frazier’s anonymous source for that story, “They figured if they would do that it would change the weather, because for three years there had been no rain. It didn’t rain for three years” (Frazier

1996:72). So here, the temporal setting is an event—the three-year drought. Frazier’s source sets the story against another event, too: a massive wildfire that followed the drought and contributed to the Seneca’s desperation. “‘The Big Burn’ is what the Indians call it” (Frazier

1996:73). But his source also says, “The three years of no rain was back in the early 1600’s

[sic]. There’s definite proof” (Frazier 1996:72).

Temporally-laden Incidents, Objects, and Sounds

Storytellers do not rely only on major events to set their stories in time. The minor events and incidents that make up the historical parts of their stories suggest temporal settings, too. Twenty- four stories in my data contained these sorts of temporally-laden incidents. In eight, the incident is a hanging. I mentioned most of these in the previous chapter (Burt Delige, Sam Mohawk,

Indian Joe, Johnny Colye, Caleb’s variant of the bleeding tombstone story, the ghosts at the Jean

Bonnet Tavern, and the horse thief’s ghost at the Eutaw House). Along with recounting it,

Frazier (2016) gives the full date of Delige’s execution, and the anonymous author of the

HauntedPlaces.org page for the Accomac Inn situates Colye’s crime and execution “in the

1800s.” The storytellers who narrate the rest of these tales engage in the now-familiar pattern, instead. None of them attaches an exact temporal setting to his story by saying that its ghost is of a hanged man; each of them, however, does indicate that its setting is very much “not now.”

In another nine stories, the relevant incidents are tied to technologies that suggest time.

Joshua says that “paranormal aficionados” who have investigated the Altoona Railroaders

Museum “have supposedly made contact with a railroader who was—received, like, third-degree burns after a steam-valve burst.” This man must have lived and died sometime during the era of steam locomotives. Vickie Reeves says of her “little Victorian boy” at the Tillie Pierce House

Inn (see above), “I believe we were told that a little boy may have been killed by a horse and buggy and taken to this house after the accident.” Frazier (2016) and Kyle both tell a similar story about a boy named Jeremy, who haunts the Farnsworth House Inn (also in Gettysburg). In contrast, another four stories pivot on an automotive accident. Robert tells me about a house his team investigated in Mount Union.

We had a young boy over there that was talking about a friend he was talking to. He was probably about seven or eight years old, and he was describing a friend he had in his room. He was describing a car accident. He was describing the emergency vehicles that showed up to help him. And he was going into some really strong detail about what was happening to his friend during the accident.

The anonymous write-up on HauntedPlaces.org for the Tannersville Inn declares, “Locals say that many years ago, a man in his 30s or 40s was killed behind the building in a hit-and-run accident. His ghost has been seen an upstairs room, often lying on the bed or sitting on the sofa.”

In three of these stories, a ghost-storyteller also relies on the calendar or an event or era to mark the temporality of the historical part: Vickie Reeves calls her ghost “Victorian,” Kyle says that

Jeremy was killed after the Civil War, and Frazier (2016:18-19) says that a young woman who haunts McConnell Mills State Park died in a car accident “sometime in the first half of the twentieth century.” In the others, though, the technology itself does the work. Stories about automobile accidents must occur in the twentieth or twenty-first century, after the car was invented and put into mass production. Stories involving accidents with horse-drawn vehicles must take place earlier, before cars became the dominant mode of transportation.

The importance of technology in these examples brings out another tool ghost-storytellers use to create temporal settings. Namely, they rely on temporally-laden objects. The White Lady of Wopsy story provides an interesting illustration. In every variant but one (Joshua’s first account), the storyteller agrees that the White Lady died in some sort of a vehicular accident.

But there is significant disagreement about what kind of vehicle she was driving. Joe says that it was a horse-drawn carriage; so does the anonymous author of the HauntedPlaces.org page for the

Devil’s Elbow. Robert, however, says that it was a car. The news story Joshua found to account for the legend (see previous chapter) also involves an automotive accident. As he gives the usual historical part of the Wopsy legend, though, he acknowledges the overall ambiguity. He says

76 straightforwardly, “sometimes it’s a car; sometimes it’s a horse and buggy.” As above, the difference in technology among the variants suggests a difference in time. Nevertheless, all of the storytellers are recounting basically the same incident. It’s the physical things involved in that incident that create the temporal distinction.

Including the Wopsy variants, there are eighteen stories in my data in which ghost- storytellers use objects to shape their time-settings. One other also relies on a horse-drawn vehicle. “A ghostly girl and a phantom carriage have been reported” at the C. Stouch Tavern in

Womelsdorf, according to an anonymous write-up on HauntedPlaces.org. Pre-electric light sources appear in five. A candle features importantly in Julia’s story about the ghost bride at

City Tavern in Philadelphia (see previous chapter), and Allison, who comments on

HauntedPlaces.org, says that mysterious “lights that look like candles can be seen in the upper windows at all hours of the night” at the Selma Mansion in Norristown—even while the mansion is under renovation and unoccupied. Frazier (2016:17-18) and the anonymous author of the

HauntedPlaces.org write-up for 1833 Umpleby House in New Hope both write about ghostly lanterns. The anonymous author of the HauntedPlaces.org write-up for Bryn Mawr College—

Merion Hall and BH’12, who comments on that page, agree that the fire that killed Lillian

Vickers was specifically a kerosene fire. (The write-up also lists the year in which Vickers died.)

In two others, the “object” is actually a location. Robert says that he and his team played ring- around-the-rosy with a group of phantom children in a one-room schoolhouse in Gettysburg.

Neil tells me a story he learned in Colorado, in which a little girl leads a doctor through a snowstorm to the “frontier cabin” where she lives, so that he can tend to her mother, who lies dangerously ill. Only once the girl’s mother recovers does she tell the doctor that her daughter has been dead for some time.

Ghost-storytellers use phantom sounds to establish a place in time for eleven of their stories. Again, some of these connect to old technologies. Frazier (2016) tells two stories about ghostly noises at the blacksmith’s shop that once served the town of Greenwood, in what is now

Greenwood Furnace State Park. In one, park rangers hear a hammer striking the shop’s anvil, as if a blacksmith were hard at work. Predictably, when they investigate the shop, they find it empty. In the other, “the park assistant one night heard a sound like the forge would have made was it was in operation” (Frazier 2016:161). But the most common sound is music; it appears in five different stories. I have mentioned Melissa Havern’s phantom fife and drum band (see above). On his ghost tour, Kyle says that guests at his company’s bed and breakfast sometimes will hear someone playing a Jew’s harp in its attic. He clarifies that the Jew’s harp was a popular instrument during the Civil War era. According to the anonymous author of the write-up on

HauntedPlaces.org for the Altoona Railroaders Museum, “Big Band music has been heard lightly playing” in the building. Joshua tells me this story, too. He says that the same “paranormal aficionados” who have spoken to the railroader (above) “say they’ve done recordings in there, and their recordings will pick up Glenn Miller, Betty Goodman [sic] music from the 1930s and

1940s, when that building was being used often.” Just so at Carlisle Barracks, “[g]hostly band music is said to come from the bandstand, tunes from around the turn of the century,” according to its anonymous write-up on the HauntedPlaces.org page. (Note the overlap between sound and calendrical time, in the one case, and sound and era in the other.)

Relative Time and Personal Time

In nine cases, ghost-storytellers indicate when in time their stories are set based on the proximity of those settings to the present. At the Grand Midway Hotel in Windber, “Staff have reported a wild apparition known to through [sic] chairs, push people around and smash bottles. The

78 apparition is believe [sic] to be a man who died in a barfight over a century ago,” says Callum

Swift in a write-up on HauntedPlaces.org. Frazier (1996) offers a variant of the Wild Hunt (see

Thompson motif E501). He says,

In the Pennsylvania version of the tale, somewhere in our mountains, hundreds of years ago, there was a settlement that was plagued by a long period of drought. Crops died and game became so scarce that deer, the main source of the pioneers’ meat, and other forest animals disappeared altogether. People were starving, and one determined man vowed he would take his horse and his pack of dogs and scour every valley and every ridge, even searching through the sky if he could, until he found deer to drive back to the settlers. The man never returned. That is why, so states the legend, on certain fall nights, you can hear noises in the sky that sound like hoofbeats, cries of a pack of hounds, and reports of gunfire; the hunter is still searching for the deer. (Frazier 1996:88-89, emphasis added)

Despite the mythical aspects of this story, Frazier avoids situating it in a mythic non-time. The characters in this story are “pioneers”—a real, historical identity, which therefore requires a place in historical time (and also suggests where that placement is). In other words, it requires a setting in the same sort of time as we listeners occupy. Frazier therefore puts the story in relation to the time we occupy; it occurred “hundreds of years ago.”

Greg and Walt both set their stories about the ghosts of miner’s widows this way. Walt says the hazy form of a woman carrying a ladder (see previous chapter) began to appear “after

[the miner] died, fifty, seventy-five years ago.” When I ask Greg when the miner in Bellefonte died, he first pleads ignorance; “I was seven years old,” when he encountered the White Lady and heard her story, he says. But, after saying a little bit more about the mine, he says, “But it was, my grandfather worked there almost fifty years to this point. So, we’re talking way back, you know what I mean. To the beginning days of that mine. […] I’m going to say it’s been seventy years now, probably. At least seventy years.”

On his way to setting the historical part of his story against the present, Greg anchors it against his grandfather’s biography. Six other storytellers in my sample used this kind of

79 personal time to create the backdrop for their tales. Caleb also relies on a grandparent’s life story. The massacre at Egg Hill Church (see previous chapter), he says, happened “quite a long time ago, before my gran was even born. Actually, before my gran was young, I should say, because she doesn’t remember that one.” It’s more common for ghost-storytellers to use their own lives as a dating system. Four of them do. Before Tom situates the story of the Green

House within a date range, he first sets it within his personal timeline. “There’s one story I remember,” he says, “I was young; I was maybe about seven or eight. And this one place called the Green House—it was a bar behind my house—caught on fire one night.” In a comment on the HauntedPlaces.org page for the Topton House Pub/White Palm Tavern in Topton, robyn [sic] likewise writes, “also when i turned 15 one of my best friends friend died there. […] and i believe his ghost forever haunts the apartments above the white palm” [sic]. Steve Walter SR leaves a long story about a haunting in his childhood home in Rose Valley in a comment on the

HauntedPlaces.org page for the Benjamin Kirk House in Media. Once when he was ten, he says,

“I was laying in bed, and saw a small glowing figure across the room. I was about to go over and see what it was when it advanced to me, growing in size. It was my Grandfathers face, who had died in the next room 5 years before I was born” [sic]. For him and robyn alike, personal ghosts seem to require personal time. (Note that Steve Walter SR also uses his biography to set the ghostly parts of his story.) When Julia was managing the Econolodge in Clearfield through a hectic re-open, she encountered a mysterious “man in a very old brown suit” in its kitchen, “and the way I took it he was telling me what a great job I was doing,” she says on its write-up on

HauntedPlaces.org. To explain this apparition, she says, “The very first GM committed suicide in his room there when it first opened many years before I got there [emphasis added].” Her career forms the basis for situating this ghost in time.

Part II: The Temporal Topography of Ghost Stories

As I noted above, it is possible for a listener to set 263 of the stories in my data within the calendar—either because the ghost-storyteller actually references calendrical time, or because a different technique he uses allows the listener to tie the story to calendrical time for himself.

These stories are not spread evenly through time, however. I show the distribution of the ghost stories by century in the table below.

Table 2. Distribution of ghost stories by century† 1st century 1 17th century 3 18th century 55 18th or 19th century* 2 19th century 128 19th or 20th century* 12 20th century 57 20th or 21st century* 4 21st century 2

*The ghost-storyteller indicates a stretch of time in which the historical part of the story is set (e.g. by referencing an era or suggesting a range of dates), but that setting overlaps with a calendrical change between centuries. †The table total sums to 264. Frazier (1996) offers two potential historical parts for the ghost story at the Annie S mine, and they occur fifty years apart in two separate centuries.

The one story with an historical part set in the first century is an anomaly; its ghost does not even come from Pennsylvania’s past. Ben says that there are two statues of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the cemetery at St. Vincent’s College that display unusual behavior, according to campus legend. One moves, and the other weeps blood. For the purposes of this study, we may put that story to the side. Without it, the table shows that Pennsylvania’s past as ghost-storytellers imagine it begins only in the seventeenth century. This “first” past is a scant past, though; there

81 are merely three spirits that ghost-storytellers “connect up” to events in the 1600s. Almost twenty times as many ghosts arise in the eighteenth century (fifty-five), and the glut of ghost stories are set in the nineteenth century. At 128, there are about two-and-a-half times as many ghost stories set then as there are in any other century. About as many ghost stories are set in the twentieth century as are set in the eighteenth century (fifty-seven), and the number peters out to its seventeenth-century levels in the twenty-first century (two). The distribution here is almost normal, with its center at the nineteenth century. This suggests that there is something of a temporal “sweet spot” for ghost stories. The pasts to which they are “connected up” cannot be too distant pasts; as Davies (2007:38) writes, ghosts have a “shelf life.” But they cannot be too recent pasts, either. Only two stories in my data are tied to events that happened in the current century, and only five more are “connected up” to persons or events from the turn of this century.

But this distribution does not give the full picture. Ghost stories are not distributed equally within centuries, either. Eighteenth-century ghost stories cluster around the

Revolutionary War. Of the fifty-five stories they set in that century, ghost-storytellers “connect up” forty-four to Revolutionary events or figures. This is eighty percent of the total. The Civil

War is likewise dominant among nineteenth-century ghost stories. Ghost-storytellers say that seventy-three out of 128 stories about nineteenth-century ghosts (about fifty-seven percent) are linked happenings during that conflict. And one more is something of a borderline case. Greg and Jodi say that their friend owns a desk that used to belong to Andrew Curtin, and that Curtin’s

“energy” still occupies it. Earlier in the interview, Greg tells me this about Curtin (a Bellefonte native): “Andrew Curtin was the Civil War governor. Abraham Lincoln asked him to be his running mate and vice president; he said, ‘Nah, I think I'll hang back and be governor of

Pennsylvania.’” When he discusses the “energy” in the desk, Greg does not bring up Curtin’s

Civil War activities explicitly. He suggests that Curtin’s legal career could explain it just as much as his political career. But based on Curtin’s identity, it would not be amiss to call this a

Civil War ghost story, too, and thereby to bring the total to seventy-four.

Ghost stories set in the twentieth century do not clump around any single event or era.

But the bulk of them take place in the first half of the century. In seventeen cases, or about thirty percent of the whole, ghost-storytellers clearly set the historical parts of their stories in the century’s first three decades (i.e. before 1930). They use vaguer phrases like “the beginning of the 1900s” or “the early 1900s” to situate their stories in these early decades in four more.

Perhaps more importantly, only seventeen ghost stories in all of my data are “connected up” to events that ghost-storytellers unambiguously indicate happened after 1950. (This number includes the six ghost stories that are or might be set in the twenty-first century.)

The eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century patterns suggest that, in addition to a temporal “sweet spot” for ghost stories, there are also historical “hot spots”—i.e. points in time that attract ghost stories much more than other points. The eighteenth-century and twentieth- century patterns indicate that the “sweet spot” is smaller than the first table suggests. In the first place, it begins later. Only fourteen ghost stories precede the 1770s. In the second place, it ends earlier, in the middle of the twentieth century rather than its end.

Chapter 4: Making Sense of the Who and the When

In the past two chapters, I have spelled out who Pennsylvania’s ghost-storytellers imagine is in the past and when they imagine that past happened. In this chapter, I want to make sense of what these things tell us about the overall picture of the past as Pennsylvania’s ghost-storytellers imagine it. As I will show, the who and the when are linked. Understanding the topography of time in Pennsylvania’s ghost stories can help us understand their peculiar cast of characters.

Making Sense of the “Sweet Spot”

Let us begin with the historical “sweet spot” for ghost stories. Overall, the sweet spot indicates that the past as Pennsylvanians imagine it is bounded. First, it must have a beginning.

Beginnings separate “history” from “prehistory,” or the period of time that is socially relevant from the rest of “irrelevant” time (Zerubavel 2003:91-95). Glassie’s (1982) Ulster Irish, for example, begin to reckon history—including local history, which they care about most—from the coming of St. Patrick. “Without endangered souls, people are not fully people” (Glassie

1982:163). Ireland’s past therefore can have anything useful to say to the Irish of the present only from Christianization onward. Pre-Christian Ireland is rightly consigned to the unserious, unhistorical realm of folklore (Glassie 1982:162). Zerubavel similarly says that beginnings’ ability to separate the relevant from the irrelevant explains why opponents in political and ethnic conflicts often fight fiercely about when, precisely, the conflict began (2003:101-110).

The past as Pennsylvania’s ghost-storytellers imagine it begins either sharply in the 1600s or fuzzily in the 1770s. As noted, none of the historical parts of the ghost stories in my sample are set before the 1600s; very few (only fourteen) are set before the American Revolution (the

1770s). The American Revolution makes for an obvious historical beginning. It is the political founding of the United States, and foundings are typical beginning-points in history. Inasmuch

84 as Pennsylvania’s ghost-storytellers begin to imagine the past with the Revolution, they are identifying Pennsylvania’s past with that of the United Stated. I discuss this more below. What of the 1600s? This is when Europeans first began to settle Pennsylvania. Again, it is an obvious beginning. Only with European settlement did this piece of the North American continent become Pennsylvania, as an entity. Nevertheless, choosing this beginning marks that the past that Pennsylvania’s ghost-storytellers imagine strictly is the past of those European settlers and their descendants and after-comers. It cuts out of the past centuries of indigenous inhabitation.

As such, that Pennsylvania’s ghosts are almost entirely white now should come as no surprise.

Neither should the specific paucity of indigenous ghosts, nor the fact that (except in the case of the “wailing child” at Pine Creek Gorge) indigenous ghosts only ever appear in Pennsylvania’s ghost stories when they are in conflict with Europeans. Pennsylvania’s storytellers don’t imagine indigenous persons as part of past until they begin to interact with European settlers.

Beginnings establish a lower bound for the past (to analogize chronology to mathematics). The other end of the sweet spot indicates that the past has an upper bound, as well. The past must end. Or in other words, at some point, the past becomes the present. As

Mead (1934:176-177) reminds us, the present in truth is “specious;” it slips into the past as soon as we are aware of it. But, he also acknowledges, we do not experience it that way. Instead, our experience of the present includes “some of the past and some of the future” (Mead 1934:176).

Preston King, an historian, explains that “some of the past” can be however much of the past is relevant “for any given purpose” (2000:34). We expand or contract the “amount” of past we include in the present in order to meet our situational needs. He calls this variable-past-plus- present the “extended present,” which roughly means the period of time we recognize that we occupy, but of which we still are able to make an account (King 2000:30-36). The extended

85 present, therefore, can be the present hour, day, year, decade, or century. Any of these periods becomes part of the past only when it is sufficiently distant that we no longer see ourselves to be

“in” it. Bevernage and Lorenz analogize this kind of time-reckoning to an icicle: “‘the past’ is somehow supposed to ‘break off’ from ‘the present’ on its own, by its growing temporal distance of increasing ‘weight’” (2013:34).

The endpoint for the past as Pennsylvania’s ghost-storytellers imagine is not nearly as sharp as its beginning. Whereas there are no Pennsylvania ghost stories in my sample whose historical parts precede the 1600s, there are at least two whose historical parts occurred in the

2000s. But, there is a fuzzy endpoint, after which the historical parts of ghost stories gradually trickle off (similar to the fuzzy beginning point of the 1770s, before which historical parts trickle in). In only eighteen stories in my sample do ghost-storytellers “connect up” ghostly activity to something that happened after 1950. For Pennsylvania’s ghost-storytellers, the distance at which present breaks off into past therefore seems to be about seventy years. Seventy years is the traditional span of a human life (threescore and ten), although it is approximately eight years shy of the average life expectancy in Pennsylvania (Lewis and Burd-Sharps 2013-2014). Even with that slight disparity, the seventy-year cutoff suggests that events must pass out of living memory before they become part of the past. The human lifespan is the most inescapable period of time in which we live. In this way, Pennsylvania’s ghosts contrast directly with the medieval and early-modern, European ghosts that Davies (2007) studies. These ghosts usually appeared only for a few years after their deaths, and often only to friends or family (Davies 2007:38-39)

Avery Gordon (1997) describes haunting as the presence of absence. She means it metaphorically. But that description, in combination with the need for the past to be past—i.e. to be the period we no longer occupy—can help explain the identities of many of Pennsylvania’s

86 ghosts. They occupy the absent identities, the identities that the living no longer do. Ghostly slaves like Pete at Fort Mifflin or the family in the basement of Homans General Store represent a social role that (mercifully) is entirely gone from social life. Other ghosts fill social positions that still exist in the modern world, but that have undergone such significant changes as to be practically unidentifiable with the positions as the ghosts fill them. Affluent families still employ housekeepers, for example, but they have little in common with maids like Emily

Myers/Molly at the Accomac Inn or like Moravian College’s Alicia. Innkeepers today (mostly) are bureaucratized employees of large, national hoteling corporations, not friendly entrepreneurs like Mr. Duffy or Stanley Peiffer. Still other ghostly identities are marked by their relative absence in the present, compared to their abundance in the past. The best examples are ghosts of industrial workers: the scalded railroader at the Altoona Railroaders Museum and the headless switchman near Penns Creek, the Mather Miners and Greg and Walt’s miners’ widows, the lumberman at Greenwood State Park who was crushed beneath a tree. Pennsylvanians still work as railroaders, miners, and lumbermen (although, significantly for other industrial ghosts in my data, not as ironmasters). But my interviewees are quite aware that noticeably fewer work these jobs than did so in the past. Joe says that Altoona “was a railroad town, but since the railroad isn't used that much anymore, it kind of moved out. Norfolk Southern still has a shop here, but they employ a fraction of what they did in Altoona's heyday.” Jim says it is becoming an “ed and med” city, meaning that the major contributors to its economy are its hospitals and Penn

State Altoona, not the railroad. Loren has much to say about the disappearance of coalmining in

Shamokin. “There used to be coal mines all over the place,” she remembers. Now, she says,

“it’s a desert town.” In this sense, Pennsylvania’s industrial ghosts resemble the industrial ghosts that Richards (2003) finds in the Hudson River Valley. The stories she analyzes about them

87 originated in the 1930s and 1940s, when the Hudson River Valley’s industry, though not dead, had shrunk significantly from its peak at the end of the nineteenth century and was feeling the sharply negative effects of the Great Depression. “In this context, workmen, too, were becoming items of romantic memory” (Richards 2003:171).

Making Sense of the Hot Spots

It should come as no surprise that there are “hot spots” in Pennsylvania’s past. That historical time flows unevenly is a generally-acknowledged fact. The terminology itself (hot spot) comes from Levi-Strauss: he says, “there are ‘hot’ chronologies which are those periods where in the eyes of the historian numerous events appear as differential elements,” and, on the contrary, cold periods where “very little or nothing took place” (1962:259). But even before him, Sorokin argues that a social and qualitative conception of time is necessary, in part, because “quantitative time…makes equal what is unequal, and vice versa” (1943:208). The same stretch of quantifiable time (hours, days, years) can be “packed with eventfulness” or can be practically stagnant (Sorokin 1943:212). Much more important is where the hot spots are. Zerubavel says that hot and cold spots are indicative of social “norms of historical focusing [sic] that dictate what we should mnemonically ‘attend’ what we can largely ignore and therefore forget”

(2003:27). The hot spots indicate which parts of the past Pennsylvania’s ghost-storytellers are inclined to think about most, which indicates which parts they find most important.

As I noted in the previous chapter, there are two hot spots, the American Revolutionary period and the Civil War. Together, the ghost stories set in these periods account for about a quarter of the ghost stories that include an historical part (117 out of 446) and almost forty-five percent of the ghost stories whose historical parts can be situated against the calendar (117 out of

264). They both are war periods, and wars are a traditional topic of commemorative activities in

88 the United States. (Look only to Memorial Day and Veterans Day and to countless town-square war memorials.) That Pennsylvania’s ghost-storytellers consider wars historically important certainly would explain a trend in their ghosts—namely, that soldier is the single most common ghostly identity. But obviously, the American Revolutionary and the Civil War share something beyond just the fact that they are both wars. They also are two key points in the United States’ national narrative—the two key points in that narrative, arguably. Inasmuch as Pennsylvania’s ghost-storytellers are attracted to these points in the past more than all others, it suggests that they recognize the primacy of that national narrative. They imagine the past most frequently in national terms. (This contrasts with Bodnar’s [1992] findings.) Or perhaps this statement is too extreme. All of the haunted places that host the Revolutionary or Civil War ghosts in these stories still are Pennsylvania’s haunted places; the past events that ghost-storytellers imagine happened at those places still are local or state pasts. Pennsylvania’s ghost-storytellers, then, are imagining most often those pieces of local pasts that interconnect with the national narrative, or that they can incorporate into the national past. In Anderson’s (2006) terms, Pennsylvania’s ghost-storytellers are imagining their state and/or their towns into the national community. The converse statement even might be more accurate than that—they are imagining that national community into their state and their towns. In some cases, they are laying local, ghostly claim to iconic national figures. George Washington is eternally part of Valley Forge; sandra [sic] on

HauntedPlaces.org has made sure of that. Benjamin Franklin forever haunts Philadelphia and

Bensalem, and Anthony Wayne rattles his cauldron in Erie. Andrew and Matthew locate John

Reynolds at the George George House and Gettysburg College. Other ghosts—like the headless

Union soldier Frazer (1996) says returned home to Farmers Mills, the Revolutionary War sentry

Neil places in the cornfields by Fort Roberdeau, or the Confederate soldiers that Luke puts in the

89 basement of Gettysburg College’s seminary building—are like to so many “unknown soldiers”

(Anderson’s [2006:9-10] national symbol par excellence), localized.

Ghost-storytellers’ desire to link Pennsylvania’s past and the national past can explain a number of other, nationally-famous figures in their ghost stories: Jim Thorpe at the Carlisle

Barracks, Edgar Allan Poe at the General Wayne Inn, Milton Hershey at the Hotel Hershey, even

James Clark at Eastern State Penitentiary (because, with his ghost, Pennsylvania’s ghost- storytellers connect Al Capone to Pennsylvania). With these stories, though, we have moved beyond the temporal “hot spots” into the rest of Pennsylvania’s past.

Making Sense of Non-calendrical Time Reckoning

If one thing is certain, Pennsylvania’s ghost stories put the lie to Levi-Strauss’s claim that “There is no history without dates” (1962:258). Clearly, there is. We find quite a bit of the imagined past in these stories, despite their lack of dates. Granted, Levi-Strauss used the word “date” to refer to something broader than placement on a specific calendar (let alone placement on the

Gregorian calendar, specifically). A date is whatever allows for “apprehending the relation between before and after [sic], which would perforce dissolve if its terms could not, at least in principle, be dated” (Levi-Strauss 1962:258). But these, too, are scant in the mass of stories in this dataset. Glassie (1982) could take the various stories his Irish informants told him and weave them together into a single chronology. “Mrs. Timothy’s Remarkable Walk” happened before the Famine, but after the “Ford of Biscuits Battle,” which itself happened after the “Battle of O’Reilly and Maguire,” and all of which happened after St. Patrick was in Fermanagh

(Glassie 1982:653). But it is impossible to do the same with these Pennsylvania ghost stories.

Did the White Lady of Wopsy’s wedding-night tragedy occur before or after Anna Baker found her wedding blocked? And was that before or after Alicia’s employer threw her down the stairs?

Did Alicia die before or after the Swamp Church ghost lost her fiancé at the Battle of

Chancellorsville? There is no way to tell.

In many ways, the possibility of a dateless past should not be surprising. Lowenthal points out that, both among academic historians and history teachers “dates and chronology are out of fashion” (2015:355). Instead, he argues, academic history and historical instruction have become “thematic.” For students who learned history thematically, ideas about the past therefore are jumbled. They apprehend the past as “a grab-bag of epochs and empires, significant figures and social movements cut adrift from context” (Lowenthal 2015:356). Time is made up of one, broad “before.” The description applies well to the temporal reckoning in Pennsylvania’s ghost stories. There are exceptions, of course. With the anchoring technique, ghost-storytellers necessarily put the historical parts of their stories in relation with some other historical event.

But, many ghosts do exist in a vague “before.” As noted in the previous chapter, out of the 446 ghost stories that include historical parts, 183, or about forty percent, cannot be situated against the calendar at all. Noelle’s ghosts at Independence Hall originate only “in the olden days.”

Never once in the interviews does a ghost-storyteller situate the timing of one of his stories against another. Kyle does so once on his ghost tour; while we sit in the attic of his tour company’s bed-and-breakfast, he explains that Jeremy lived and died after the Civil War-era ghosts he just told us occupy the building. Out of the tour guides, though, he is the only one.

Just so, when ghost-storytellers set their historical parts at, or at the time of, famous past events or within historical eras, they usually let them stand on their own. They occasionally rely explicitly on listeners’ own abilities to situate those events or eras in a larger historical narrative

(like the anonymous author of the HauntedPlaces.org write-up for Valley Forge did). But those instances are uncommon. As Lowenthal (2015:356-357) predicts, the scattershot nature of these

91 settings sometimes leads ghost-storytellers to imagine impossible temporal overlaps between events and/or persons. When Robert tells me the story of Anna Baker, he says that one of her brothers “died in the war.” I ask, “Which war?” He responds, “I believe it was World War II.”

I showed above that ghosts’ identities often serve as temporal markers, especially when the ghosts are famous figures. As I noted, we listeners can situate a story about a ghost of a famous person against the calendar easily, as long as we know when that person lived and died.

But, in doing so, I may have done violence to the ways that ghost-storytellers actually use famous persons to mark time in their stories. For example, I say that the ghost of Jim Thorpe at the Carlisle Barracks logically must be “from” the 1900s or 1910s, as that is when Thorpe attended Carlisle Indian School and when he performed his famous athletic feats. But the anonymous author at HauntedPlaces.org says no such thing. All he says is that Jim Thorpe haunts the gymnasium and community center. This is again exactly as Lowenthal (2015) suggests. Ghost-storytellers tend to treat famous historical persons as free-floating entities.

They do not try to place famous historical figures in the flow of historic events. An incident from my interview with Amos demonstrates this disconnect between historical figures and chronology. When Amos finished telling me the story of Milly (Millard Fillmore’s abandoned mistress at the Millheim Hotel), I ask him whether he believes it. He won’t say one way or the other, but he tells me that some of his former students worked at Millheim Hotel, and that they experienced strange things. I then ask whether he thinks the historical part is true. It could be, he says. He’s not sure whether Penns Valley is on the most direct route from Washington, DC to

Buffalo, but he’s not willing to rule out the possibility Fillmore passed through. But then he stops and thinks. What years was Fillmore president, he tries to remember. Together, we come up with the 1840s or 1850s. (Fillmore served from 1850 to 1853.) Then, no, Amos says, it can’t

92 be true. The railroad didn’t come to Penns Valley until after the Civil War. And yet, whenever he had told the story before, Amos unproblematically imagined President Millard Fillmore

(possibly) taking a train to Millheim to liaise with his mistress.

Is this a deficit in the ways that ghost-storytellers imagine the past? As the examples from Amos and Robert demonstrate, it can lead ghost-storytellers to imagine the past

“inaccurately,” or (less provocatively stated) in ways that historical record and evidence do not support. But I will not call it a deficit. Even Lowenthal (2015:367; 322), despairing as he is of dateless history, acknowledges that this form of thinking simply mirrors the ways that persons think about everyday life. The long quote he takes from Agatha Christie bears repeating here:

[People] date things by events, they don’t date them by years. They don’t say, “that happened in 1930” or “that happened in 1925” …[sic] They say “that happened the year after the old mill burned down” or “that happened after the lightning struck the big oak and killed Farmer James” or “that was the year we had the polio epidemic” …[sic] The things they do remember don’t go in any particular sequence…[sic] There are just bits poking up here and there (in Lowenthal 2015:322)

Ghost-storytellers don’t say “That happened in 1777;” they say, “There isn’t an American alive who doesn’t know the story of Valley Forge.” There is nothing strange about imagining the past like this, then. In fact, following Sorokin (1943), we might argue quite the reverse: the way

Pennsylvania’s ghost-storytellers think about time when they imagine the past is fundamentally how social time works. Sorokin argues that social time in qualitative. In contrast to the

“homogenous, empty time” that Anderson (2006) says characterizes modern thinking, it is a hodge-podge of different periods and events, each of which has a fundamentally different character from each other (Sorokin 1943:202). Its purest units are experiential; they capture lived social phenomena, like “childhood,” “youth,” and “old age” or “courting,” “kiss,” and marriage” or “revolution” and “reaction” (Sorokin 1943:202-204)—or, like “the automobile era,”

“when Big Band music was popular,” and “when railroad points had to be switched by hand.”

Because these units cannot be measured meaningfully by the calendar, they have a peculiar strength (among their many). They do not link events together arbitrarily, by virtue of their temporal coincidence or succession, or divide them arbitrarily by lack of those things (Sorokin

1943). So, for example, because “the Civil War” is not the same temporal unit as April 1861 –

April 1865, Ben is never tempted to call Andreas Wimmer a Civil War ghost—even though he thinks Wimmer died in the 1860s. Qualitative, social time only links events together if there is a real, social reason for them to be linked.

Instead of a deficit, I will call this kind of time-reckoning a tradeoff. The temporality of the past that ghost-storytellers imagine is not verifiable against existing evidence about the past;

President Millard Fillmore still cannot have taken a train to Millheim. It also isolates pieces of the past away from its inescapable flow. Jim Thorpe is quite literally timeless at the Carlisle

Barracks, which limits the historical meaning ghost-storytellers can attribute to him. But it also allows ghost-storytellers to imagine other true things about living in time, which calendrical measurements do not. Ghost-storytellers imagine time past by imagining the real conditions in which past persons lived (with automobiles or with horses; in period dress; as Hessian or Union or Confederate soldiers). They also imagine time in the past in disparate chunks that they interconnect only when warranted, because that is how they experience living in time in the present. Which aspects of the past are more important to imagine is a matter of taste; I will not take a position on it here.

Chapter 5: Sensationalism and Ghost-causing Events

On the HauntedPlaces.org page for the USS Olympia (docked in Philadelphia), an anonymous write-up reads:

The USS Olympia was a Navy cruiser from 1895 until 1922, and, now restored, she is stationed as a part of the Independence Seaport Museum. Her violent past as a warship may have led to her various hauntings: shadowy forms, unexplained voices, and spooky apparitions.

But the one commenter on that page, who goes by Paul, disagrees. He says:

The ship did not have such a violent hisoty. it was SOTA for the end of the 19th centruy and obsolete by 1906. The fklag ship at the battle of Manilla that was such a one sided afair it would be hard to imagine any violent ghost haunting her. She is a wonderful example of pre-dreadnought technology with lavish appointments and frosted glass doors inside. Parked just accross the Delaware from the USS New Jersey an Iowa class Battleship and the ultimate expression of Dreadnought technology it is a faciniating look back in time, but i don’t think she’s haunted. [sic]

We should be clear about the nature of the disagreement. The original, anonymous author and

Paul share a baseline assumption: there are some sorts of historical events that produce paranormal activity. The original author says that the Olympia’s “violent past as a warship may have led to her various hauntings” (emphasis added). He is suggesting a cause-and-effect relationship. Paul does not question the overall validity of that relationship. In fact, the challenge he offers depends on it. Paul is skeptical of the validity the cause-and-effect relationship only as it applies specifically to the case of the Olympia. The Battle of Manilla, he says, “was such a one[-]sided af[f]air [that] it would be hard to imagine any violent ghost haunting her.” The ship’s past is too boring to create ghosts, in other words. This indicates that

Paul does indeed expect some kinds of historical events to act as causes for ghostly activity. But to do so, they must be the right kinds of historical events.

I take this idea—that there are categories of historical events that ghost-storytellers treat as natural candidates for, or legitimate causes of, ghost stories—as the point of departure for this

95 chapter. Claims about ghostly causation, like the ones above, strike me as quite different from the statements about ghostly identity that I analyzed in the second chapter. In those statements, ghost-storytellers explain who a ghost is; in the causal claims I am analyzing here, they are explaining why a ghost exists at all. Especially because of statements like Paul’s, these claims suggest to me two things. (1) Ghost-storytellers recognize ghost-causing events as a particular subset of historical events, which are different from others in some way. (2) They see ghost stories as the proper means by which they can (or perhaps, should) imagine this subset of events.

The purpose of this chapter is to explore what kinds of historical events belong in that subset.

My argument is that ghost-causing events are sensational events. By this, I mean that when ghost-storytellers indicate that certain historical events caused a haunting, they expect that event to produce an emotional reaction in their listeners or readers (usually, shock), they highlight the human emotionality involved in those events, or they do both.

Before I begin, a few caveats are in order. First, this chapter is based only on a small part of my data. Statements like Paul’s are quite rare. Even milder statements, like the anonymous author’s cause-and-effect claims, are nowise common. I am analyzing the places where ghost- storytellers indicate that certain past events should or do create ghosts because they seem to tell me something important about the ways that ghost-storytellers imagine the past, not because they form a frequent pattern. Second, my analysis does not even consider all of the events or situation that ghost-storytellers suggest are ghost-causing. There are a number of cases in which ghost- storytellers explain a haunting without referencing the past. For example, ghost-storytellers suggest that some places are haunted because they are near cemeteries, or because they are funeral homes (compare Thompson motifs E334.2.2, “Ghost haunts burial spot;” E722.3.1, “Soul cannot go far from grave;” an E722.3.1.1, “Soul remains about dead body”). These cases tell me

96 little about the question I am approaching in this chapter. Their themes also have been analyzed before (Davis 2007:45-64). Last, although I do argue that tellers treat ghost stories as the peculiarly appropriate way to imagine and talk about ghost-causing events, I do not say that ghost stories are the only way that persons imagine or talk about them. In fact, a number of the statements I analyze below explicitly indicate that ghost stories cannot be the only way the persons talk about certain events. Some of my interviewees tell me about historical events that did not create ghosts or ghost stories, but that they suggest could or should have done so.

Clearly, there must be some other way by which persons talk about these events in order for my interviewees to have learned about them.

Defining Sensationalism

What is sensationalism? A proper definition is in order, since the word is something of a “devil term” (Weaver 1953) or “snarl word” (Francke 1978); a story (especially a news story) is sensational to the degree that the person who labels it so does not want others to take it seriously.

As old as this usage is, it is not the original one, nor is it the one that I mean here.

Sensationalism is tied to the word “sensation”—i.e. feeling. That which is sensational gives rise to feelings or emotions among those who experience it. Of course, these are not just any feelings. Sensationalism distinctively refers to that which gives rise to especially strong emotional responses. Jervis (2015) explains that this meaning arose in the second half of the nineteenth century. The reigning belief then was that modern life presented persons with the risk of overload, or “nervous exhaustion,” through its continuous production of new stimuli. To protect itself, the human mind therefore created a “stimulus shield,” or a filter of consciousness, which jettisoned the shocks of those stimuli into the so-called unconscious, thereby “making everyday experience manageable” (Jervis 2015:5). (This is comparable to the “blasé attitude”

97 that Simmel [1902/1971] says is characteristic of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century urban dwellers.) “A corollary was that for something to be truly ‘sensational’ it needed to break through the shock defense altogether” (Jervis 2015:5). Sensationalism must be more shocking, and produce a more intense reaction, than everyday life. Thus, as Moran (2007) says in her study of anti-Catholicism in Victorian sensationalist literature, sensationalism comes to be defined by “its emphasis on extremes of emotion (and language); its association with the shocking, unorthodox and countercultural” (Moran 2007:3).

Perhaps for this reason, Melman (2011) observes that, historically, sensationalism has been tied most to feelings of horror. She identifies the Chamber of Horrors in Madame

Tussaud’s wax museum and the Tower of London (once it has ceased its original operation as a prison and had become an historic site) as prototypically sensationalist sites. As these two sites suggest, moreover, she also argues that sensationalism was a driving factor in popularization of history in the nineteenth century. This hints that packaging sensational pasts into ghost stories in directly in tradition with the ways that ordinary persons have imagined the past—for not the least reason, because ghosts generally are expected to inspire fear.

From the other side, Bennett’s (2011) study of phantom hitchhiker stories also suggests that there is link between ghost-storytelling and the sensational, or something close. She argues that these ghosts arise out of “bad deaths.” Traditionally, she says, to die badly is to face “mors repentina”—literally, a “hasty death.” This is a death that comes suddenly, and for which a person is unprepared. In pre-modern times, its badness arose from the fact that it destroyed expectations about how life and death ought to “work.” Death was supposed to be an orderly and predictable end to life’s trajectory, not the result of random happenstance. For Bennett’s twentieth-century phantom hitchhikers, mortes repentinae are bad because they leave the dying

“alone and separated from the ones we love” (Bennett 2011:12), or because they deprive dying persons, who usually are young in these stories, of life’s joys. In either case, mors repentina certainly is unorthodox and may well be shocking—which, as noted, gives it two features of sensation. Bennett’s analysis downplays the role of sensationalism in these stories, however.

Although she notes that about half of the ghosts in her analysis died in “decidedly unpleasant”

(Bennett 2011:11) ways, Bennett does not suggest that the lurid or dramatic details of their dying accounts for their return from the dead. Instead, she notes that phantom hitchhikers are interacting with the living in an effort to return home. These stories are more sentimental than sensational.

Sensational Pasts and Ghost Stories

Shockingly Bad Deaths

Pennsylvania’s ghost stories are different. Bad deaths still explain the presence of ghosts. But unlike Bennett (2011), I did not find that dying badly means dying alone or simply dying young.

Instead, the badness of dying does in fact depend on the shocking way in which death arrives.

Violent deaths are expected to be ghost-causing events. This is especially true of suicides and murders. As she explains that, to her knowledge, there are no ghost stories in Sinking Valley,

Nancy tells me the following:

Oh, there was one guy who hanged himself. But, again, I never heard anything scary about that. His father was a very wealthy farmer here in the valley, and that was, like, mid- 1800's. The son was messed up as sometimes the kids of really rich people are, so. He committed suicide, but that was in the mid-1800's. I never heard anything. He could be still haunting the barn, I don't know, because he killed himself in the barn.

Twice, Nancy declares that she “never heard anything scary” about the suicide. She is suggesting that the situation is counter to expectations: normally, she would have heard something scary about a place where someone killed himself. Otherwise, the fact that there is

99 not a ghost story about this particular young man’s suicide would pass without notice. At the end of this not-ghost story, Nancy also posits a direct cause-and-effect relationship between the suicide and at least the possibility of a haunting. The young man “could still be haunting the barn […] because he killed himself” there, she says. Frazier draws a similar, causal link between suicide and ghostliness in his story about Anna Monsel’s ghost, who haunts the former town of

Greenwood in Greenwood State Park. Monsel hanged herself in 1904, when the iron furnace that supported the town closed. Says Frazier, “It appears Anna’s spirit is a restless one, either because of her self-inflicted death or because her gravesite is not marked with a tombstone”

(2016:156, emphasis added).

On HauntedPlaces.org, a commenter called Bob draws links between ghosts and suicides, murders, and other disappearances. He left five comments on the HauntedPlaces.org webpage for the Omni William Penn Hotel in Pittsburg over the course of about a half-hour on October

13, 2014. The first one reads, in full,

I had a feeling it was haunted from the moment I started down the hallway to my room. Then I googled it, and found this page. I’ve been researching, and haven’t yet found any dead girls [this is in reference to a previous comment about a “murdered coed”], but a few shootings. Like this one…

A link to a newspaper story from the 1970s follows. Each of other the four other comments also is followed by a link to a newspaper story. They read (in order): “And here’s a disappearance:”

“Here a resident left for no reason to commit suicide in the woods:” “Another suicide…” and

“Several suicides, actually…” Bob never actually says that any of these events caused the

William Penn Hotel to be haunted. But it is implied. Bob “had a feeling [the hotel] was haunted,” and so he started “researching.” Researching what? Based on his links, historical events. Why? The only answer that ties the research and the feeling of hauntedness together is: in order to find an explanation for the ghosts. By listing all of these events, Bob is indicating

100 that any one of them would be a sufficient cause of the haunting at the William Penn Hotel. But why these events? What draws all of them together? All of them leave a person dead, or presumably so, which is a prerequisite for a ghost. But also, all of them are the kind of events to which persons respond with horror or thrill (or both). Suicides are violent, shocking affairs. So are murders—especially shootings, like the one in the news story to which Bob links in his first comment. Disappearances have the thrill of mystery. Bob adds a level of mysteriousness to the first suicide he mentions; “a resident left for no reason to commit suicide in the woods,” he says

(emphasis added).

Horror and thrill characterize the Blair County Historical Society’s advertisement for a

“Haunted History Tour” of Altoona. A quick word of caution is necessary here. During his interview, Joshua says that the Blair County Historical Society was borrowing the format of this tour from the Allegheny Portage Railroad Historic Site, another nearby historical preservation and education society. “They advertise them as ghost tours,” Joshua says. “But really what it is, is they share true stories of murder, mayhem, dismemberment, and disaster that occurred on the railroad during its time of operation.” In other words, the “Haunted History Tour” includes no ghosts or ghost stories, but its advertisement is written to suggest that it might.

Joe does not know all of this, though. He reads the advertisement to me off his phone during his interview. “Ever since its construction in the 1840s, the area of 10th, 11th, and 12th

Avenues has been the site of murders, robberies, train wrecks, and mysterious deaths of every conceivable manner,” it runs. Joe stops here and releases a spooky sort of “Oooooo” sound, like the white-sheeted ghosts of children’s Halloween traditions are thought to make. He continues reading, “Walk in the footsteps of the city’s forbearers while learning about the darker side of the town’s colorful past.” The rest of the advertisement is about logistics (e.g. “Wear comfortable

101 shoes.”). Clearly, the advertisement does not say that the victims of those “murders, robberies, train wrecks, and mysterious deaths” have become ghosts. It’s equally clear that Joe expects to be told that they have, however. This is the only possible interpretation of his “Oooooo” sound.

The juxtaposition of those events against the title, “Haunted History,” obviously helps bring him to this expectation. But, for that juxtaposition to have its desired effect, Joe also already must be predisposed to expect that “murders, robberies, train wrecks, and mysterious deaths” are ghost- causing events. He would not have released the “Oooooo” sound if the advertisement had said that Altoona has been the site of inventions, business dealings, and major political decisions (for example), even under the same title. The difference is that most of the events the advertisement does list are sensational ones. Murders and train wrecks both are horrifyingly violent. Train wrecks in particular are notable for the extreme scale of violence they create, both against persons and against the physical landscape. By definition, mysterious deaths are mysterious.

The language of the advertisement promises accounts of sensational pasts. The “Haunted

History” will be “colorful,” it says. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “colorful” can mean both “Full of interest, excitement, character, etc.; lively, spirited” and “Disreputable; questionable; notorious.” The first definition directly connects to emotional responses, that is, to sensation. Tour participants will feel excited when they encounter Altoona’s past. The second definition indicates why; that past is “disreputable; notorious,” said otherwise, “unorthodox and countercultural” (Moran 2007:3).

Words like “colorful,” which describe emotional reactions to the events in their stories, appear in other ghost-storytellers’ accounts of ghost-causing events. In the HauntedPlaces.org write-up for Ridgewood Winery in Birdsboro, Tracy S writes that “some of the past residents, due to to [sic] unforeseen horrific accidents, are still here.” With the phrase “due to,” Tracy S

102 says that the accidents are direct causes of the ghosts at the winery. She uses only two adjectives to say what sort of accidents these might be. First, they are “unforeseen;” Bennett’s

(2001) mortes repentinae might be at work here. But second, and more importantly, they are

“horrific.” Whatever (unstated but presumed, fatal) mishaps created these ghosts elicit horror.

Frazier (2016:18) tells this story about a ghostly millhand at what’s now McConnell’s Mill State

Park:

Regardless of whether the equipment needed repair or whether the mill-hand just got careless, the end result was that he was caught up in and crushed to death by the belts and grinding stones of the mill. It was said to have been a horrible and excruciating way to die, and, typical in such cases, it was thought that because of his terrible death, the man’s spirit could not move on to the next world…

He makes two arguments about ghostly causes: that the specific way that this man died was reason for him to become a ghost, and that people in general who die like this man can be expected to become ghosts (“typical in such cases”). And what is this way of dying? Frazier uses three adjectives to describe it: horrible, excruciating, and terrible. All three of them denote ways of feeling. “Excruciating” describes the millhand’s own feelings as he died. He was in extreme pain. As such, it is the least useful for the argument I am making here. But the other two describe others’ emotional reactions to the event. It was “a horrible…way to die” and a

“terrible death,” i.e. it inspires horror and inspires terror.

In Chapter 2, I recounted a story about a ghostly bride at City Tavern, Philadelphia, which Julia left in the comments on its HauntedPlaces.org webpage. Recall that Julia learned the story from a ghost-tour guide, who she says “told us the story of why the tavern was haunted.”

She does not say that the guide “told us the story of who haunts the tavern.” This is a story to explain the presence of ghosts in the building at all. The story is about a group of women who were burned alive at a wedding party. Julia believes that she heard screams from one of them,

103 the bride, while Julia was eating at the tavern before the tour. Twice, Julia refers to the emotional responses that incident evokes. Most directly, the last sentence of her story is, “It is a very sad thing if you think about it.” It is an understatement, but an emphatic one. Earlier, in the ghostly part of the story, Julia describes the phantom screams she heard. She says, “[I] heard a scream. It sounded like a blood curdling scream from a woman. […] I heard the scream again but this time it was louder and more brutal sounding.” The later adjective, “brutal sounding” describes the scream based on its own attributes. It is animalistic. But Julia’s first-choice adjective describes the scream by explaining the sensations it called up in her. Blood-curdling, says the Oxford English Dictionary, means “causing terror or horror; very frightening; spine- chilling.”

The Sensation of Scandal

Olive is a murdered actress that Angie says haunts a desk she owns. (I mentioned this ghost in

Chapter 2.) But when Angie talks about the ghostly activity in the desk, she is not much interested in telling me about Olive. Angie includes only four or five sentences about Olive in all. Instead, she insists that the haunting of the desk “all has to do with the Thaw-Nesbit conspiracy,” that is, Harry Thaw’s murder of Stanford White, because of White relationship with

Thaw’s wife, Evelyn Nesbit. Before Angie tells me anything about Olive, in fact, she runs through the whole Thaw-Nesbit-White affair:

Anyway, it's about a woman who goes up to New Hampshire and she goes missing. This is the time of the Evelyn Nesbit, Harry Thaw scandal with Stanford White. That’s a big Pittsburgh thing. Of course, Harry Thaw's family owns a lot of property. I think one of the summer homes was not too far from here, from what I hear. I've got to go check that out. But he was a real sick creep, and his mother was a really sicker creep in her own way.

But anyway, Nesbit-Thaw was the beautiful actress. She made her fortune—her fame, I should say, rather than fortune—having her photograph taken and [from] the pictures that were made of her. She was supposed to be the epitome of beauty of that day. They did

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many postcards of her and prints and posters and stuff like that. And she was just a chorus girl at the time. But Stanford White took a lot of interest in her and really built her up and whatever. She was the Girl on the Red Velvet Swing.

Harry Thaw, who was a sadistic sicko, as I said, he was absolutely obsessed. Today they would say it was stalking. He did everything and finally he got her to marry him even though she didn't really want to. Because actually she was in love with John Barrymore. The young John Barrymore. Not the one from, the old John Barrymore from the It's a Wonderful Life period. He was young once, too.

But, anyway, the story is about one of her friends and how she goes missing, and they think [that she] was killed and that she was probably pregnant. And the death piece goes up to auction and it just keeps on coming back to the original owner, which ends up to be me. Because doors keep opening, closing, slamming and stuff like that. There is a key that locks itself in and, just sometimes, it will just show up outside stuck in the lock.

I can't remember her name of the top of my head, Olive—Anyway, she was an Edwardian actress and was probably killed while she was up visiting Stanford White at the Garden Estate and that's what starts this all off.

Angie spends another few minutes discussing the desk’s ghostly antics, which she says become more frequent and bothersome when it is brought near Pittsburgh. She then briefly returns to

Olive’s story, only to tie it back to Stanford White once again:

But, when we [Angie and her husband] have not been able to trace down anything more. We do know that when we did go looking for the well [this is the first Angie mentions a well] and stuff like that, we were literally chased off the property. They actually closed the well down and closed it in. It's a real whodunit, but I don't think there's ever going to be a way of finding out who done it, unfortunately.

But we feel that she was probably killed because she was pregnant and whoever it was didn't want to marry her. It's got to be one of the Stanford White people because those were all—because everyone came up to visit Square Gardens up in New Hampshire. The place was very, very famous and everybody came there. You know, all the artists and the sculptors, the actors, the architects, all of those famous people came there.

This is the last she has to say about Olive. Later, I ask Angie how she was able to connect the desk back to Stanford White. She replies, “Well, it came right from the Saint-Gaudens estate.”

With that prompt, she begins to discuss Thaw-Nesbit-White scandal again:

It was the auction at his estate. I mean, we bought a lot of stuff there at the auction. It was a great, I mean, it's a wonderful place. But the auction was right there at the house; it was his stuff that was being sold. And we knew that Stanford White, we knew that Nesbitt had

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stayed there, had gone up quite often. And that with Stanford White, and of course. White and Gaudens were so close, and Gaudens was there the night that Stanford White was shot.

And you know that Harry K. Thaw came right up to the front of the theatre, ‘cause they had like tables, like, that they would sit at, you know, at the theatre, you know, to watch the theatre. And he walked right up in front of everybody, point blank, took the gun and shot Stanford White. There's an awful lot written about the Harry K. Thaw-Stanford White scandal, you know. But Stanford White and Saint-Gaudens were very close. And they worked together, they were very close friends, and so there obviously is some type of a connection, because obviously. I mean, I brought a book over one day that was on the trial, you know. And I put it on the desk and I thought "Oh my god, mayhem going on." You know, drawers opening and closing. So, there was that, and that was the end of that. So, it obviously has something to do with that, but what, I have no idea.

Olive might be the ghost in the desk, but her past isn’t the one that Angie uses to explain the haunting. She’s obviously much more interested in telling the story of Stanford White. This indicates that Angie sees the Thaw-Nesbit-White scandal as the sort of event that should be connected to a ghost story—so much so that it must be the cause of any ghostly happening that

Angie can tie to one of the players in that scandal, no matter how peripherally (like a haunted desk that once belonged to Augustus Saint-Gaudens, who was friends with Stanford White).

As Angie tells it, the story of the scandal is unorthodox in every way. It ends with a murder (already a shocking and countercultural action), which Thaw carried out in so stunningly dramatic fashion that he managed to defy expectations even about how murders ought to happen.

At its center is a love quadrangle: Evelyn Nesbit was married to Harry Thaw, in love with John

Barrymore, and somehow still tied to her previous relationship with Stanford White. And then there is an indication that sexual violence was part of the scandal. Angie says that Thaw was

“absolutely obsessed” with Nesbit. “Today, they would say it was stalking.” She also hints that

Thaw may have forced Nesbit into marriage. Thaw is “a real sick creep” and “a sadistic sicko,” she declares. She adds, “his mother was a really sicker creep in her own way.” Angie’s language is both evocative and extreme.

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Luke tells me another story of scandal. This one occurred in Woodward in 1894. A man named Etlinger killed the local police constable, named Barner. Afterwards, Etlinger pulled

Barner’s corpse into his (Etlinger’s) house, and barricaded himself, his wife, and his children inside. Luke says,

Well, the news went out, so a sheriff came from Bellefonte on a train with, he said, a cargo of ammunition, and they surrounded the house. Well, Etlinger's wife and children were inside. And so, what happens is, it's like twenty-four-hour siege. And Etlinger let his wife and children out climbing, went into the cellar. And what he did was he lit the house on fire, and he dynamited it. And he came out. And according to accounts—and they cleaned it up—but according to accounts he said, "You sons of bitches aren't going to kill me." And put a revolver in his head and shot. So, the house caught on fire and blew up.

When Luke began teaching the Penns Valley history course in the 1970s, he required all of his students to interview elderly residents. Together, they used those interviews to create an unofficial history textbook. He says that two of his students interviewed a woman who had witnessed the Etlinger incident as a child.

And they came running in and said, “Do you know why he [Etlinger] killed him [Barner]?” […] I said, “No.” Well Etlinger was a hunter. And he would go away for a week at a time. Well, when he went away, Barner came to see his wife. And they had details. I said, “No, no, no. We're not going through details.” And then I said, “We can't put this in the book.”

Inasmuch as the sensational is that which has the ability to shock or thrill, the Etlinger standoff certainly fits the bill. There are two violent deaths involved: Barner’s murder, and Etlinger’s subsequent suicide. Between these are two extreme and dramatic (and extremely dramatic) incidents. The Centre County sheriff laid a heavily armed siege to Etlinger’s home, and Etlinger dynamited the building. Then, there are three violations of taboo. As Luke’s early students learned, Barner and Mrs. Etlinger violated sexual taboos against adultery. Luke feared this violation would be so shocking to the Penns Valley audience of the 1970s that he determined they could not include it in their class-made history book. Second, by pulling his family into the barricaded house with him, Etlinger violated norms against putting women and (stronger still)

107 children in harm’s way. Last, and most important, when Etlinger dragged Baner’s corpse into the barricaded house, he broke even stronger taboos against touching and abusing the dead.

Luke concludes the story of the Etlinger siege, “But there was never a ghost story about that, because the house blew up. I think where the house would have been, Etlinger would have haunted the house.” His repetition is emphatic. The only reason Etlinger has not been turned into a ghost is that he has nowhere to haunt, Luke says. (The necessary tie between ghosts and geography he posits is fascinating.) Luke’s use of the word “but” indicates that the absence of a ghost story otherwise runs counter to his expectations. The Etlinger standoff should be ghost- causing.

War and Sensationalism

As he explores the kinds of experiences that give rise to sensationalism, Jervis identifies “body- horror” as a central feature (2007:17). “This spectacle of the body is, all to clearly, a spectacle of the body in pain” (Jervis 2007:29). In addition to “the agonies of the murder victim” or the suicide—the bad deaths I explored above—the “battlefield dying” are therefore a proper subject of sensationalism (Jervis 2007:29).

Just so, for Pennsylvania’s ghost-storytellers, wartime deaths ought to create ghost stories. The converse statement holds true, too. Neil is skeptical of the ghost stories at Fort

Roberdeau. “There’s never been a documented battle or death at Fort Roberdeau from fighting and stuff,” he says. “I think they only fired rounds twice. […] Nobody ever died in combat here at Fort Roberdeau. That’s why the myths…” He trails off. If there are not combat deaths, then there cannot be ghosts. The same logic is illustrated in the quotes with which I began this chapter. The anonymous author of the Olympia’s HauntedPlaces.org write-up expects to find ghosts there because she was a warship. Warships engage in battles, and battles create battle

108 deaths. Paul knows that no such battle deaths occurred on the Olympia, and so he “[doesn’t] think she’s haunted.”

If one battlefield death inherently is shocking, thousands of battlefield deaths at the same time should shock even more. Ghost-storytellers suggest that ghosts ought to arise at sites of battles with remarkably high body counts. Luke says quite laconically of Gettysburg, “Well, ten thousand dead. You’ve got a lot of room for ghosts.” Frazier (2016) tells a story about a husband and wife who decided to look for ghosts at the Gettysburg battlefield. They began at

Devil’s Den and moved into the Wheatfield. There, the husband expressed frustration that their video equipment was not picking up any spectral evidence:

After all, he noted, if any place should have ghosts it should be the Wheatfield; one of the bloodiest battle sites in the United States where 6,000 men were killed, wounded, or captured during the July 2, 1863, clash that veterans would later describe as a whirlpool of death (Frazier 2016:175).

Here, Frazier combines the sheer number of the dead with lurid, if clichéd, word-choices

(bloodiest, “a whirlpool of death”). Mark D. Bowan, Sr. left this comment on the

HauntedPlaces.org page for the Eagle Hotel in Waterford.

I know the lady in charge of the Hotel, and it is built directly in the middle of what once was Fort LeBeouf, a French and Indian war Era Fort that was eradicated by George Washington. (He also eradicated the Native American population immediately surrounding the fort that were French allies..) [sic]

This is the sum total of his comment. He does not mention ghosts. But, he obviously felt that this information would be relevant to visitors to the webpage. The write-up for the Eagle Hotel does not include an historical part. It is reasonable, then, to assume that Mark D. Bowan, Sr. is providing one for visitors to HauntedPlaces.org. He is saying that Washington’s “eradication” of the fort that used to stand there, and of the surrounding indigenous population, can explain the

109 haunting at the hotel. To eradicate, when applied to a place or a population, means to kill everyone present. The ghosts were caused by two mass slaughters.4

Even upon the battlefield, bodies in pain are not always dying bodies. John and Paul, who leave comments on HauntedPlaces.org, both tell stories about the spectacle of the soldier’s wounded body. John’s comments appear on the webpage for the Inn at St. Peter’s Village.

St. Peter’s was apparently a recuperation facility for recovering wounded during the Civil War because of it’s [sic] tranquil setting. [S]upposedly the men would leave Valley Forge military hospital and another facility at Chester Springs to make room for more wounded (particularly after Gettysburg) I am sure that a number would have certainly died at St. Peter’s. […] I hope this might help.

Paul writes the following on the webpage for Independence Hall:

you absolutely cannot investigate this place but being friendly with the rangers [Independence Hall is run by NPS] let me hear there are some parts of the building they really hate being in after dark. the 2nd floor gallery was used as a hospital in the winter of 1777-78 and if you know anything about medicine at that time you’ll know how horrific that can be. [sic]

Like Mark D. Bowan, Sr., neither John nor Paul explicitly mention ghosts. Yet each of them nevertheless indicates that he means his story to account for the ghosts in its respective location.

John ends his comment, “I hope this might help.” Help what? Since the statement appears on

HauntedPlaces.org, the only possible answer is, help explain the haunting. Paul begins by saying

“you absolutely cannot investigate” Independence Hall. He is referring to paranormal investigation. Then he uses a disjunctive; “but…there are some parts of the building [NPS rangers] really hate being in after dark.” The rangers’ experiences provide the ghostly evidence he himself cannot collect. He begins the next sentence by naming one of those places, “the 2nd

4 Mark D. Bowan, Sr. adds another twist: the perpetrator of those slaughters is George Washington, a hero figure. He thereby violates an extremely important distinction, between hero and villain. Jervis argues that violations like this one also frequently characterize sensational events (2007:28-34). 110 floor gallery.” The rest of that sentence justifies the rangers’ desire to avoid it. Paul is explaining the cause of the rangers’ ghostly experiences there.

I grant that John is insistent that some of the Civil War soldiers in his story died at the Inn at St. Peter’s Village. In just ten words, he says both that he is “sure” that it happened and that it

“certainly” happened. But the bulk of his comment is not about the fact that wounded soldiers died there; it is about the fact that wounded soldiers were there at all. He also invites the reader to imagine large numbers of wounded crowded—or, more accurately, overcrowded—into military hospitals. John says that wounded men were sent from Valley Forge and Chester to St.

Peter’s Village “to make room for more wounded (particularly after Gettysburg).” These facilities must have been filled beyond their capacity. Paul does not say anything about anyone dying at Independence Hall at all. For him, it is enough that “the 2nd floor gallery was used as a hospital” during the Revolutionary War. He elides the details; in fact, he directly relies on his readers’ presumed prior knowledge of eighteenth-century medicine. But he still explicitly uses the word “horrific” (i.e. inspiring horror). Note also how the logic of his comment makes a direct link between the “horrificness” of Revolutionary War medicine and the hauntedness of the place where it occurred. NPS rangers’ experiences in Independence Hall provide the evidence of ghosts that Paul cannot collect. One of the places where the rangers have haunting experiences is the “2nd floor gallery.” The “2nd floor gallery” was a Revolutionary War hospital and (Paul uses this precise conjunction) Revolutionary War medicine was “horrific.” This fact explains why the rangers have ghostly experiences on the second floor.

Its connection with body horror is not the only reason Pennsylvania’s ghost-storytellers think that war is a proper cause for ghosts. Paul leaves another comment on HauntedPlaces.org, this time on the webpage for the Brandywine River outside Philadelphia.

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A well to do suburb of Philadelphia today in 1777 it was a strip of pleasant farming land caught in the path of invasion. after Washington’s victory at Trenton the British pulled back to New York and launched an amphibious invasion south of Philadelpia, by passing all of Washington’s plans to fight in New Jersey,.

Washingtons new defensive line was along the Brandywine River but a failure of his scouts to identify all the proper crossings resulted in one crossing being left wide open. The British doing a better job of reconaissance, many american cavalry men stopped in taverns. Found the opening and while part of the army made a demonstration on the banks opposite the americans the bulk of the heavy infantry crossed the river and for all intents and purposes just ‘appeared’ in the heart of the American line rolling it up.

It was the single worst suffered by the Americans in the war. not only for loss of life but the pure chaos in the ranks as supposedly secure flanks collapsed, camps were over run and supplies lost, The american position collapsed and Philadelphia fell, causing congress to run for their lives.

Certainly battlefields have a reputation to be haunted and this one had all the ingredients needed for a ghost or two to linger on. [sic]

He makes only the briefest allusion to “loss of life.” The emphasis on the number of dead or on the suffering of the wounded is absent. But still, Paul says that the Battle of the Brandywine

“had all the ingredients needed for a ghost or two to linger on.” What could these ingredients be? They must be the things Paul does mention: the sudden, seemingly inexplicable appearance of the British infantry; “the pure chaos in the [American] ranks;” the fact that the Continental

Congress was forced “to run for their lives.” One thing pulls all these aspects of the battle together. We readers intuit that they must have caused fear—terror, even—among those who experienced them. Paul is drawing on a different sort of sensationalism here. It is not the sensationalism of history-as-spectacle, which evokes felt responses within second-hand observers. The Battle of the Brandywine is a sensational past because it drew up extreme emotional responses from the historical actors who participated in it.

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Ghosts as Lingering Sensations

Paul’s comment on the HauntedPlaces.org webpage for the Brandywine River is matched with a comment on the webpage for Gettysburg College. The user who wrote it goes by Graves. He says:

quit literally on the front lines of the first day of the battle., this was said to be where General Buford commanded his desperate bid to hold back AP Hill until Reynold’s infantry supported him.After Oliver’s corp collapsed it was where most of the fleeing federal and many chasing confederates passed by and there are many stories of the site. If anywhere in gettysburg was touched by a sense of mass fear and panic and determination, this was it. [sic]

Again, Graves does not say anything about ghosts in this comment. But its context resembles that of Mark D. Bowan, Sr.’s comment on the webpage for the Eagle Hotel. The write-up on

Gettysburg College’s HauntedPlaces.org webpage similarly does not include an historical part.

We can assume that Graves means his comment to provide that. He has information which will give a satisfactory reason for the ghosts at Gettysburg College. Pay particular attention to the last sentence. “If anywhere…” he begins; then, he ends “this was it.” In the context of

HauntedPlaces.org, the expected intermediary phrase is along the lines of Paul’s “had all the ingredients needed for a ghost or two.” But Graves instead says, “was touched by a sense of mass fear and panic and determination.” Where we readers expect ghosts, Graves highlights heightened emotions. We’re left with the understanding that these things are connected; “if anywhere” in Gettysburg should be haunted, the extreme emotions that Union soldiers experienced at Gettysburg College means that “this [is] it.”

Robert explains that Eastern State Penitentiary is a favorite spot for paranormal investigating teams (including his) to go for ghost hunts, because it is particularly paranormally

“active.” He says,

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But because of the, all the tragedies, all the energy that’s built up in those places, any of the prisons, you can get a lot of good activity because of that. Eastern State, you can get a lot of activity just because of all the fights, all the different arrays of people that you’ve had there.

So, the ghosts at Eastern State are a direct result of “all the energy that’s built up.” That energy, in turn, was created from “all the tragedies” and “all the fights” that happened there. Robert specifically is talking about emotional energy. Like Graves above, and to a lesser extent like

Paul, he is indicating that ghosts arise out of sensations in the past.

james dodge [sic] on HauntedPlaces.org takes the link between historical emotions and haunting a step further. He left the following comment on the webpage for Dixmont State

Hospital, a disused psychiatric internment camp in Pittsburgh:

I grew up a mile away from the dixmont state hospital.I remember very well when it was closed in 1984.from 84-90 I was in there numerous times.one things for sure.I’ve seen demons and ghosts.and the land.they won’t be able to build on it.ever.To much negative energy that will never go away. [sic]

Whereas Robert describes emotional energy as a cause, and ghosts as an effect, james dodge elides that distinction. Dixmont State Hospital is, and will remain, haunted by the “negative energy” that is trapped there. james dodge’s ghosts do not arise out of past sensations; they are sensations from the past that linger into the present.

Ghostly Sensationalism VS. “Real History” or Ghostly Sensationalism AND “Real History?”

I have argued that sensationalism is the theme that links together the events that Pennsylvania’s ghost-storytellers consider ghost-causing. Nevertheless, practically none of my interviewees discuss sensationalism outright. The word came up only a few times, and only in my interview with Joshua. He says that, before he took his current position in the Blair County Historical

Society and therefore Baker Mansion, docents at the mansion used to boost the story of Anna

Baker’s haunted wedding dress to tourists in order to “add sensationalist aspects, something

114 memorable so that people would remember their tour.” He also says that, for the mansion, the story has taken on a life of its own. A few years ago, the historical society was “redoing our exhibits” at Baker Mansion. They had taken down the wedding dress that originally formed the basis of the story, and that had stood in a display case for decades. (“It was horrible curatorial practice,” Joshua says.)

And we were putting other stuff into this display case. And people were leaving the mansion disappointed because they weren’t seeing the wedding dress, and it had become that much a fixture. So, our historical society—We have a ton of different wedding dresses from all sorts of historical periods. So, we actually are rotating out different wedding dresses, so that there’s always one on display. And we have, like, you know, the wedding photo if we have it or the original story behind it. People don’t care, they just want to see a wedding dress when they come there.

He defends the decision:

So, you know, we’re not trying to promote or perpetuate that story, but we’re also a business that needs to keep our customers happy, and not only enlighten them, but at least to some extent give them what they want to see. And that’s the careful line that historical museums have to walk when they approach grisly tales and whatnot. What is that balancing act between what’s giving the public what they want to see and what’s going too far in regard to sensationalism. And that’s something that a lot of places are contending with.

Joshua returns to the theme of balancing later, when he discusses the Halloween tours that the historical society leads through Baker Mansion. He adamantly contrasts these with commercial ghost tours in places like Gettysburg:

A place like Baker Mansion, we sometimes incorporate real people into stories for Halloween events, but we never try to sensationalize it or capitalize off of misfortune quite in that regard. And I, to me, the important line in the sand here is that for a place like that, it goes to support real historical mission that goes on throughout the year. The ghost walks in Gettysburg, on the other hand, are purely for commercial gain. That’s the big line of separation in my mind.

So, Joshua agrees that ghost stories are sensational. But for him, sensationalism does not tie ghost stories to the past. It ruptures ghost stories from the past. Each time he mentions it, Joshua draws a clear distinction between sensationalism and “real history,” or conventional historical

115 practice done for the purpose of education. He thus also draws a distinction between “real history” and the past in ghost stories.

Notably, his distinction mirrors Miles’ (2015) ambivalent attitude toward the historical value of ghost tourism. She specifically fears that the incorporation of black slaves’ stories in ghost tours in Southern cities like Savannah and New Orleans is historical “Recuperation at a

Cost” (Miles 2015:123). Ghost tours do teach black slaves’ histories to tourists, she says. But, because they present those histories in a sensationalized manner (she uses the word several times in her critique), that teaching just commodifies and others black slaves yet again. This leads her to doubt whether any “real historical” work is accomplished on the tours. It also dittos the distinction scholars of dark tourism time and again make between sensationalism and “real history.” Strange and Kempa (2003) argue that tourists’ pop-culture-induced expectations about

Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary hamper educational initiatives at now-NPS-controlled Alcatraz

Island. “The challenge for the park service” upon taking over, they say, “was to drain the site

[Alcatraz] of its sensationalistic and shameful associations and to fill visitors’ (rangers’ preferred term) minds with its multilayered history” (emphasis added) (Strange and Kempa 2003:391).

Note the conflation between the two adjectives. Similarly, Mancuso (2018) argues that museums need to be careful about how they display potentially grotesque artefacts (in her case, three fingers that a nineteenth-century murderer cut from his victim, which initially were preserved as criminal evidence), so that museum visitors connect with them in a properly “sensitive” way, and not through shock. And, in an interview with Teoros, Philip Stone—the executive director of the

Institute for Dark Tourism Research at the University of Central Lancashire—explicitly dissociates dark tourism from “sensationalist” practices. He says that “for journalists to dismiss

116 dark tourism as merely sensationalist and immoral is far from accurate” (Baillargeon 2016:5).

He does not question whether sensationalism ought to be “dismissed.”

But, we should not take this disassociation without question. After all, it also mirrors common complaints about sensationalism in news media, which conceptually separate sensationalist stories from “real news.” Francke (1978) points out that that distinction is tenuous at best. News stories that are labelled “sensational” often address topics that are of indisputable political and/or social importance (war or political corruption, for example). Whether a story is

“real news” or sensationalism therefore seems to be a measure of whether the person who labels it so likes the way the story is presented—or, occasionally, likes the person or organization who is presenting it. Just so, a number of the ghost stories I have discussed here indubitably center on

“real history.” Their historical parts include events that are commemorated in conventional, sanctioned ways. Paul’s account of hauntings in Independence Hall depends on the history of the American Revolution, for example. And, it is set at a conventional, sanctioned historical site.

More, there is reason to suspect that the presentation of those stories—namely, their focus on emotion—is thoroughly in line with “real history,” too. Scholars of museums and heritage sites are beginning to assert the value of emotionality in visitor experience. To educate visitors effectively, museums and heritage sites must ensure visitors feel an emotional connection to the subjects of the history they present (e.g. Smith and Campbell 2016; Smith 2014; Modlin et al.

2011). What separates “real history” from sensationalism, too, might be a matter of taste, not conceptual consistency. “Sensationalized” stories, like ghost stories, evoke disfavored emotions—thrill, shock, and horror rather than sympathy or empathy. But there is no reason to say that these emotional responses are less legitimate. That thrill, shock, and horror prevent genuine emotional connection is much asserted, but less proven. Ghost-storytellers might well

117 be engaging with the past in the same way that historical educators would have them engage with it. If they present some parts of the past as proper fodder for ghost stories rather than for other means of thinking about the past, it might be because other means of thinking about the past do not give them room for the particular emotions these stories convey.

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Chapter 6: Conclusion

I opened this dissertation with a personal anecdote, about Kat and Wailing Mary. Permit me to close it with another one.

It was February 2016, and I was sitting in Dr. Gary Adler’s graduate seminar on the sociology of culture. There were seven of us in the class—five sociology students (including me), a student from the College of Communications, and an IST student named Sam who had grown up around State College. That day, we students were talking through our ideas for our final papers, and receiving advice both from Gary and from each other. The paper I was planning was a very early, and limited, pilot for this dissertation project. When it was my turn to talk, I described the basic idea of the project: I wanted to study ghost stories and the ways that persons think and talk about the past when they tell them. I recounted Kat’s story about

Weeping or Wailing Mary, and I said that I was looking for similar stories to study nearby. Sam immediately piped in. “You’ve got to look at Egg Hill Church! Everybody around here knows about it,” he said. He quickly told the story, that a long-ago pastor killed his whole congregation there and that the church now is haunted. Then, he pulled open his laptop. “Let me find it.”

Twenty or thirty seconds later, Sam was staring at his computer screen with a puzzled expression. “Okay,” he said dubiously, “Google’s saying it never happened.” He continued his internet search for another few minutes. But website after website all said the same thing: there never was a mass murder at Egg Hill Church. “That can’t be right,” Sam insisted. “Everybody knows it.”

Everybody knows it. But, how? Certainly not because the mass murder has been memorialized—it hasn’t. Nor yet because everybody has seen reference to it in a museum— there’s no museum exhibit of the alleged massacre anywhere. And it can’t be that everybody has

119 learned about it from his history education—not in Penns Valley, at any rate, where Amos teaches that “there’s no shred of truth or evidence to any of that having taken place.” And everybody who performed independent historical research about the mass murder at Egg Hill

Church would end up just where Sam did, staring at a computer screen or a physical document that “is saying it never happened.” The only way everybody could know it is from the ghost story. In a nutshell, that is what this dissertation has been about. Ghost-storytelling is a social practice in which persons who do not and cannot build monuments or museums or control history curricula nevertheless imagine their communities’ pasts. The pasts they imagine might not be the same ones that public and academic historians include in memorials, museums, or history curricula. And they might not be the pasts that persons will find if they go out to “learn the history” (meaning, of course, the official history) of those communities. Indeed, they usually are not. When they do overlap, they are not the precise same pasts, either. Ghost-storytellers in

Altoona and the Blair County Historical Society both imagine Anna Baker’s history, but Joshua would be the first to say that what ghost-storytellers imagine about Anna has little to do with what he and his fellows say about her at Baker Mansion. But the pasts that persons imagine in ghost stories still matter very much. It was inconceivable to Sam that the Egg Hill Church massacre never happened. Even staring at evidence that the story was false, he insisted “That can’t be right.” Something had to have happened at Egg Hill Church because everybody knows that it did. Just like everybody knows that the White Lady of Wopsy met with a tragedy on her wedding night. Just like everybody knows that Anna Baker’s wedding never came to be. Just like everybody knows that the ghost at Swamp Church lost her fiancé and child’s father at the

Battle of Chancellorsville. Just like everybody knows that British-allied Iroquois massacred

American rangers near the Phillips Rangers Monument. Just like everybody knows… The pasts

120 persons imagine in ghost stories are part of their “common sense.” If they are not the same pasts as public and academic historians present in memorials and the like, this is partially why.

“[F]ormal commemoration often acknowledges not the power of living memory, but its fading”

(Schudson 1997:3).

In the chapters of this dissertation, I have analyzed what these common-sense pasts that persons imagine in ghost stories look like. In the first chapter, I have mapped out the kinds of persons that Pennsylvania’s ghost-storytellers say occupied their pasts. Overall, they are a diverse lot (in every way but race; Pennsylvania’s ghosts are overwhelmingly white). However, there are some social types that ghost-storytellers are particularly likely to imagine: soldiers, students and other academic figures, domestic workers (including servants and innkeepers), criminals and crime victims, industrial workers, and brides all frequently become ghosts. Ghost- storytellers also imagine personal and family pasts. In the second chapter, I have explored when the pasts that ghost-storytellers imagine occurred, and how they indicate that. For a ghost- storyteller to imagine it, a past should hit a temporal “sweet spot.” On the one hand, it must have happened long ago enough that a ghost-storyteller recognizes it as “the past”—in Pennsylvania, at least seventy years ago, or at least a human lifetime ago. But on the other hand, it must not have happened so long ago that it falls into “prehistory” (Zerubavel 2003). For Pennsylvania’s ghost-storytellers, that means that a past must have occurred in or after the seventeenth century, when Europeans first settled there. Also, in a plurality of the stories I collected, ghost- storytellers imagine the American Revolutionary War or the US Civil War (temporal “hot spots”). Ghost-storytellers do not rely on the calendar to set the pasts they imagine in time.

Instead, they use events and famous historical figures, or details that evoke the experience of life in the past, like clothing, sounds (e.g. Big Band music), or objects (e.g. horse-drawn carriages,

121 candles). And, in the last chapter, I traced the kinds of events ghost-storytellers are likely to imagine—or which they expect to imagine—by means of ghost stories. They are sensational pasts; the events that ghost-storytellers indicate ought to cause ghost stories excite strong, emotional responses.

What next? There is more to explore. The places where ghost-storytellers and public and academic historians do imagine overlapping pasts promises a fruitful place to start. How do official actors respond to those overlaps? The data I have collected here suggest two, diverging answers. Joshua flatly rejects the value of ghost-storytelling; he does not see any possibility of useful co-imagining between ghost-storytellers and academic and public historians. Amos,

Luke, and Neil all are receptive to ghost stories. Amos uses them to teach about the past in his

Penns Valley history course. A fuller analysis of official actors’ responses could uncover whether these are the only two ways in which they react to ghost-storytelling. It also could show which of these two responses is the more common one. And, it would let me explore the circumstances under which historians and other officials are likely to reject ghost-storytelling and under which they are likely to embrace it. Moreover, for all that Joshua is adamantly opposed to mixing official public history and ghost-storytelling, he has found it somewhat inescapable. In order to keep visitors at Baker Mansion, he has discovered that the Blair County

Historical Society must display someone’s wedding dress in the traditional space, which visitors can assume to be Anna’s (no matter how many pains Joshua and his coworkers take in the exhibit to say it is not). He also has found that ghost walks, both through the Baker Mansion museum and through downtown Altoona, are among the best ways to attract Blair County residents, especially in the month of October. There is a tension here, which Joshua acknowledges (and tries to wave away). It would be worthwhile to investigate this tension

122 further. Do public historians at other historical sites that offer ghost-themed events experience it, too? If so, how do they manage this tension? Is this another instance where some historians and other officials embrace ghost-storytelling? And again, what separates one case from the other?

It also would be promising to expand the geographic scope of this study. I limited that scope to Pennsylvania for reasons of practicality. But I am aware that Pennsylvania is a very specific location, and that it has had a very peculiar history. Some of the findings here might not translate to other places. Miles’ (2015) work alone indicates that ghosts in other places are not as uniformly white as they are in Pennsylvania. I have suspected that Pennsylvania’s ghost- storytellers are especially likely to imagine the American Revolutionary War and the US Civil

War (the temporal hot spots) because these events allow them to link Pennsylvania’s past to the past of the American nation. At the same time, they obviously are helped along in imagining those pasts by the fact that major Revolutionary War and Civil War battles and other events happened in Pennsylvania. It is unlikely that these would be the same temporal hot spots for ghost stories in, say, Arizona, or Wyoming, or Michigan. But what are the hot spots for ghost stories there? And—the bigger question—whatever they are, do they also allow ghost- storytellers in those places to imagine their communities’ pasts as part of the national past?

Adding additional locations could show which of my findings are Pennsylvania-specific, and which say something more general about the ways that persons who don’t control monumentation or history education imagine the past.

To that point, though, I should end with a word of caution. It comes to me from the

HauntedPlaces.org webpage for the General Warren Inne in Malvern. In the comments, a user going by LatteLover expresses doubt that the inn houses any ghosts. Instead, he scoffs that “All these haunted websites seem to like to pick any historic building and it must be haunted.”

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Graves (presumably, the same Graves who commented on the webpage for Gettysburg College) replies, “thank you for saying what needs to have been said that just because something is old doesn’t mean it HAS to be haunted” [sic]. As I hope I have shown, ghost-storytelling is a practice in which persons who cannot “do” public or academic history imagine the past. But

LatteLover and Graves remind us that it is not the only practice by which they imagine the past.

What is general about the ways that these persons imagine the past when they tell ghost stories might or might not be general about the ways that they imagine the past on the whole. In this project, I asked what kinds of past events persons expect to imagine by means of ghost stories. It is equally important to ask what kinds of events to persons do not imagine by means of ghost stories, and, once again, to ask what separates those categories of events.

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VITA: CHRISTINE BUCIOR

EDUCATION 2019 Ph.D. Sociology Pennsylvania State University (Social Thought minor) 2015 M.A. Sociology Pennsylvania State University 2012 B.A. Sociology/Russian University of Notre Dame

PUBLICATIONS

Bucior, Christine. 2018. “Lost Cause-ism in American Southerners’ News Writing about the First Russo-Chechen War (1994-1996).” Society 55(3):262-270.

Bucior, Christine and Alan Sica. 2018. “Sociology As a Female Preserve: Feminization and Redirection in Sociological Research and Education.” The American Sociologist 50(1):3-37.

Sica, Alan and Christine Bucior. 2019. “Luther Bernard.” Chapter 4 of Forgotten Founders and Other Neglected Social Theorists. Ed. Christopher T. Connor, Nicholas M. Baxter, and David R. Dickens. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield.

Bucior, Christine. Forthcoming. “History’s Priests, History’s Magicians: Ghost Tourism and the Imagined Past in Gettysburg, PA.” Journal of Heritage Tourism.

PRESENTATIONS

2018 Society of Catholic Social Scientists—Belmont, North Carolina Bucior, Christine. “History’s Priests, History’s Magicians: Ghost Tourism and the Imagined Past in Gettysburg, PA.”

2018 American Sociological Association—Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Bucior, Christine. “History’s Priests, History’s Magicians: Civil Religion and Ghost Tourism in Gettysburg, PA.”

2017 American Sociological Association—Montreal, Quebec, Canada Bucior, Christine. “The Haunting of the Captain Phillips Rangers Memorial and the Memory Work of Ghost Stories.”

2016 American Sociological Association—Seattle, Washington Bucior, Christine. “Concerning Toile Narratives; Or, the Lost Cause in Chechnya.”

AWARDS AND HONORS

2017 First Prize, Published Paper Category—Student Paper Competition, Penn State Department of Sociology Bucior, Christine. “Lost Cause-ism in American Southerners’ New Writing about the First Russo- Chechen War (1994-1996)”