Lou’s View

By Lou Bernard

Our county’s history contains several big promoters of ghosts and haunted stories. Two of them were Hiram Cranmer and the Clinton County Times.

Hiram Cranmer was the postmaster up in Leidy Township. He was known for collecting old legends and stories; he shared stories of ghosts, UFOs, King Arthur’s grave, and all sorts of good stuff. The Clinton County Times was a newspaper based in Lock Haven, and it was especially bizarre. When the two of them got together, you were in for an interesting time.

In the early 1950s, the Times was running a series of articles on our history’—“Old Times,” they called it. Mostly this was interviews with older people about their knowledge or memories. They did several of these with Cranmer, and almost invariably they turned into ghost stories.

One of them ran on July 31, 1952, and it was headlined “The Goodman Spook.” This was slightly inaccurate, as the ghost was actually named Frank Webster. But it all started with a man named Goodman.

Truxton Goodman was a business owner at Kettle Creek. He arrived from New York, bought up a lot of land, and started a lumbering operation. He had several supervisors and many employees. One of these was Frank Webster, who almost instantly became a problem.

“Webster was a young man who was always trying to advance himself,” said Cranmer,”Thought he could do anything that he saw another do, a headache to any boss he happened to work under.”

Webster, after a few trips on the lumber rafts, insisted that he could pilot one. This turned out to be more difficult than he’d planned. Rafting down Kettle Creek, near Whiskey Spring, he tried to cross the creek too early, stating,”We have to cross the creek here someplace.” He wound up crashing the raft into a rock, which Cranmer said was then known as “Webster’s Rock.”

The bosses were not going to allow him to pilot a raft again. So they sent him to the mill, under the supervision of a manager named Mike Campbell. There was a water wheel there, which ran on a constant stream of water that could be controlled with a gate. This required two men to raise and lower it, so naturally Webster assumed he could do it solo.

Campbell shouted for Webster to wait until he had help, but Webster’s famous last words were,”I can do it alone,” and almost instantly, the handle slipped from his hand, hit him on the head, and killed him.

And that is how the ghost began. Webster had been living in the room of a nearby boardinghouse, and a man named Henry Pelkey moved in. One night, early on, he was rolled out of his bed, and he moved to another room immediately—He refused to even enter the previous room after that.

The door often opened during the night, no matter how firmly it had been shut previously. Cranmer reported that when he was four, a woman named Nellie Proctor lived in the house. He was visiting one morning when he heard a thump, like a rock being thrown up against the side of the house. Nellie told him that it was just the local spook.

“This was the first time I ever heard the word spook,” he said.

Cranmer heard the sound repeatedly later in life, when he moved into the house himself. He lived there for ten years, and experienced some odd things.

The first week, Cranmer was headed upstairs to bed by lantern light. On the third step, his flame turned blue and flashed up to the top of the lantern.

“I thought the lantern was going to explode, so I jumped back downstairs,” Cranmer said.

Instead it went down to the wick, where it belonged, so Cranmer tried again. The same thing happened a second time. So the third time, since it didn’t seem to be doing any damage, Cranmer just continued up the stairs, and when he reached the top, the lantern went out.

After that, he learned to just walk upstairs in the dark, which saved fuel anyway.

“The first seven years in a haunted house are the hardest,” Cranmer said. “After that you don’t mind it anymore.”