Lou’s View

By Lou Bernard

I love when this happens.

Sometimes I stumble upon something in the archives that has everything. This is one of those times. My favorite newspaper, one of my favorite historic figures, and a huge, weird mystery in my favorite county in the world.
This one was reported in the Clinton County Times on January 17, 1952. It was a story from Hiram Cranmer, postmaster of Leidy Township and a big fan of the paranormal. The Times loved interviewing Cranmer, because the Times was happy to run bizarre stuff on the front page. Neither the Clinton County Times nor Cranmer was ever going to shy away from some unnecessary weirdness, is what I’m saying here.

So the headline here was “Where Was John For A Year And A Day?” which is a pretty intriguing way to begin. Cranmer was telling the story of John McConaghay of Leidy Township, who came from Ireland to live with his brother, James. They lived in a house along the Boone Road, which runs through the northern part of the county. (The Boone Road would make its own fascinating article, and I’ll get to that sometime.)

Cranmer said, ”About sixty-five years ago” (Which would have put the incident about 1887) “One day in April John started over the Boone Road towards the Creighton farm and town.”

It was not unusual, in those days, to head out on foot towards the nearest community. In this case, it would have been Renovo, which was a fairly new and upcoming place at the time. So John headed out toward Renovo….But he never arrived, or returned.

“No one at the Creighton place saw him and he did not reach Renovo,” Cranmer said. James, his brother, organized a search involving two hundred men that lasted several days, but they never found John, or a clue as to what may have happened to him.

So far, this is not all that strange a story. It was pretty often that people set out on foot to get someplace in those days, and it wasn’t all that uncommon for them to vanish on the way. With wild animals and hazards in the remote areas back then, it had a tendency to happen. The weird part came next.

A year and a day later, a boy named Dan Tanner was out fishing with some of his friends near Drury’s Run. In a fairly traumatic moment, they found John McConaghay.

He was dead, and “doubled over a sunken log,” according to Cranmer. The oddest part was that he hadn’t been there two days previously—The boys often fished up there, and they’d have probably noticed a dead body if it had been there.

John was wearing the same clothes he’d had on the day he’d disappeared. Doctors were called in to examine the body, and they said he hadn’t drowned, and there were no signs of violence. His death was listed as an acute case of “damned if we know.” The doctors also said that the body appeared to have died not more than an hour previously, which left no explanation as to where he’d been for the past year.

“One day he vanished,” stated Cranmer. “A year and a day later he was found and ‘rigor mortis’ had not yet set in! He didn’t drown, he wasn’t murdered, what happened?”

This wasn’t, strangely enough, the only time something like this had happened. In another case reported in Robert Lyman’s books, a man in the area disappeared while walking on a bridge, and appeared years later in Africa with no memory of what had happened. For that matter, John Rohn disappeared one day in 1899, and never showed up again. And if you’re expecting some sort of explanation from me, don’t wait underwater, because I’m just as mystified as anyone else.