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There is this bound collection of papers by Henry Wharton Shoemaker. They are, evidently, scholarly papers and works for the most part, and at some point he had them bound up into a book. Shoemaker was a Wayne Township writer and folklorist, and the table of contents tells you everything I love about his work.
"Chapter One: Reasons For Collecting Pennsylvania Folklore. Chapter Two: Address on October 30, 1949." All of this up until "Chapter Twelve: The Werewolf in Pennsylvania."
That was Shoemaker, in a nutshell -- he would present a fourteen-page paper on werewolves with the same seriousness that he displayed everything else. The whole thing is about werewolves, and the folklore involved around them, with Shoemaker arguing that stories of werewolves definitely deserved a place in that folklore. You have to respect that.
The whole thing begins by noting that a Pennsylvania governor claimed to have encountered a werewolf. Governor William Alexis Stone, who served from 1899 to 1903, once wrote that he met a man who was a werewolf. No doubt, Shoemaker suggested, other prominent Pennsylvanians had experienced their own encounters, or heard stories of such.
The story, Shoemaker writes, probably occurred in the 1850s, in Tioga County. William Stone, not yet governor, knew a man named Richard Duryea. Duryea was "suspected of having dealings in the black art." As Duryea was dying, two of his neighbors sat up in n adjoining room, in case there was anything they could do. A black wolf entered the room, walked into Duryea's bedroom, and emerged a moment later. When they went to check on Duryea, he'd passed away, indicating that the wolf had been there to administer some werewolf form of last rites.
One of Shoemaker's sources was a man who had known Peter Pentz, from colonial days. The man had sat down with Shoemaker when he was a child, and told him these stories, which likely added to Shoemaker's interest in paranormal topics as an adult.
According to the paper, the Quigley family in Wayne Township had some encounters with werewolves. One night, Jacob Quigley saw a brown female wolf "skulking along the fence rows." His father George shot it in the right front leg, using a silver bullet -- Apparently this sort of thing was common enough to keep a supply of silver bullets handy, just in case. The wolf "uttered a human-like scream, vaulted the stone row, and disappeared among the trees."
The same afternoon, they spotted a woman whom Shoemaker refers to as "Granny XXX." He mentions several people in this essay in the same manner, Shoemaker apparently protecting the privacy of the werewolves. Granny XXX had her right arm injured, claiming to have accidentally shot herself in the arm trying to kill a fox. Shoemaker mentions that Granny XXX wasn't much of a threat. He says,"This was a benign werewolf, as the old lady had no designs, that were known, against any of her neighbors."
Another relative, Philip Quigley, had horses that were often upset, so distraught that they were unable to work. Quigley's wife took a rifle and staked out the stable, and at midnight, she saw a black wolf enter. As it came out, she shot at it, hitting it in the jaw.
The next day, there was a neighbor named Aunty XXX (Probably related to Granny XXX; all of those XXX people are related somehow) who was seen with a broken jaw. She said she'd had an accident, and it eventually got better.
Jacob Zimmerman of Sugar Valley told of a white werewolf that was seen down there, until his uncle shot it with a silver bullet. And Jacob Quigley spoke of a wolf that would escort him and his sister back and forth from school each day.
"That vampires, wolves, and witches were closely related would seem to be the case, at least in what is now Clinton County," Shoemaker writes. I love that, the local grouping of all those paranormal creatures. It's like I always say -- Clinton County has it all.