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The ghost tales of Henry Shoemaker

Every February, I find an excuse to work in something by Henry Shoemaker. It’s his birthday — Shoemaker was born on Feb. 24, 1870. I think Shoemaker himself would have liked that — It’s a fitting tribute. In a way, I feel as if I’m somewhat following in the man’s footsteps. Shoemaker could more or less be considered Clinton County’s first paranormal investigator.

Clinton County is lucky to have been the home of Henry Wharton Shoemaker. He inherited the house in McElhattan that he’d visited his grandparents in as a child. He wrote down a lot of legends about ghosts and haunted houses, monsters, curses, and other paranormal incidents, publishing them in books. It basically became his career, telling ghost stories. (I know how that goes.)

He describes how he got into this in an essay he wrote in 1922. This appears in a book in the Ross Library, creatively entitled,”Collection Of Papers.”

Shoemaker makes the case that Clinton County has at least as many legends as any other area, and maybe even more. He wrote, “Clinton County is full of quaint legends and traditions, folklore, ballads, proverbs, songs, all of the long ago.”

As a child, Shoemaker visited his grandparents at their home in McElhattan. Before humans invented cell phones because real life wasn’t distracting enough, he ran around the community, talking to older people and listening to their stories.

In his essay, he points out that any road leaving McElhattan, in those days, was impassable if it so much as drizzled, so listening to stories was what he did for enjoyment. He claims the ghost stories were his favorites: “Ever since the speaker was a boy he was fond of listening to ghost stories, Indian stories, and hunting stories, in the order named.”

And he collected a LOT of ghost stories. The ghost of a Native American chief in Antes Fort, an old lumberman who was scared to death by his own ghost, and enough haunted spots to fill up the Pine-Loganton Road, the county’s most haunted road. As he got older, he began writing them down, and began publishing them in his school newspaper.

Later, he wrote them down into one of his first books, which did not get good reviews. Shoemaker received a letter, accusing him of making up some of the ghost stories, an accusation which was to repeatedly follow his career. The letter writer suggested that Clinton County would be better off if Shoemaker stopped writing.

I wish we knew who wrote that letter, because Shoemaker took it to heart… and did the opposite. He doubled down on his writing — Books, newspaper articles, and speeches, most of which contained some sort of spooky supernatural story. (My personal favorite is the cursed statue buried in McElhattan.) The anonymous writer of that critical letter spurred Shoemaker to become one of the most prominent writers of ghost stories that Central Pennsylvania has ever seen.

To my amusement, in his essay, Shoemaker mentions that he later deviated, gathering stories from the young as well as the old.

He offered prizes for ghost stories contributed by the students of a McElhattan school, which were later used in his 1922 book “Allegheny Episodes.” I’ve even written about some of these, stories of a man who saw a girl’s ghost from a train, a monster gorilla near Woolrich, a tree that could bring back the ghosts of dead Native Americans, and a chief who was killed by his misuse of a healing spring.

In his essay, Shoemaker laments the fact that there is no local folklore society, a group to gather and preserve these old legends. Maybe I’ll start one. I’ve mentioned before that I sometimes feel like I’m continuing his work, so maybe it’s time for me to begin a group to collect stories and legends. I think he would have liked that.

Henry Shoemaker collected as many area ghost stories as he could get his hands on; it’s what he did. It’s more or less what I do, too. And I’m grateful to the guy… Because of him, my home is documented as being one seriously haunted place.

——

Lou Bernard is a Lock Haven resident with a keen interest in the history of this area. He is adult services coordinator at Ross Library and may be reached at loulhpa@gmail.com or 570-660-4463.

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