Lou’s View – Feb. 20, 2014
Henry Shoemaker and the Disappearing Pigs
By Lou Bernard
It’s become something of a tradition for me to write a column around Henry Shoemaker’s birthday. Shoemaker was born on February 24, 1880, and was a writer from McElhattan. He was Pennsylvania’s first state archivist (Personally, I’m hoping to be nominated as the second one) and compiled a lot of the local legends from this area.
You may have noticed that I hold the man in fairly high regard; I have a tendency to trot out the Shoemaker stories at the slightest cause. I believe I wrote about him three or four times over the summer, several times for Halloween, twice for Christmas, to the point that even Shoemaker’s own ghost would tell me “Enough, already.” But I always need to say something for his birthday.
That’s the thing about Shoemaker—There’s always something more to say. I’ve been writing about the guy for years, and I’m still turning up his stories and facts that I never heard before. I just recently found out that he owned the field of the disappearing pigs.
Shoemaker is most closely associated with Wayne Township, where he lived. But he owned other properties, too—There was a place on Bellefonte Avenue that he inherited from his grandparents, and he owned a field along the Pine-Loganton Road.
That’s the one you want to hear about. That’s the site of the disappearing pigs.
I didn’t find the pig story in one of Shoemaker’s own books; I got it out of “Mountain Folks” by Homer Rosenberger. However, as Shoemaker and Rosenberger were friends, and Shoemaker owned the property, I’m sure Shoemaker often told the story himself. Rosenberger probably got it straight from Shoemaker.
So there was this field. It was known as the Hamilton Field. Once farmed and then later abandoned, people in the vicinity walked by it all the time. The story happens around 1894, when a fifteen-year-old boy was out walking, and was chased by a wildcat. He ran into the Hamilton Field, and lost the wildcat.
In the field, he saw some weird pigs.
They were described as white and hairy, with pig noses and eyes on top of their heads. Typically for a Shoemaker-related story, there is no explanation for these creatures—They could have been aliens for all anyone knows. And we’ll never figure it out, because they immediately disappeared. I don’t make them up; I just report them.
The boy went back with his brothers the next day. They took two of their dogs, a bloodhound and a bulldog. They wanted to try to catch the pigs, because apparently disappearing mutant bacon is the perfect breakfast food. At exactly two PM, the pigs walked in, and then disappeared immediately.
The boys attempted to catch them for the next three days, but the pigs wouldn’t come near. Finally on the fourth day, they tried a different plan—They kept the dogs back at the barn as two boys approached the field. When the pigs let them come close, pretty much oblivious to the fact that they were being hunted, the two boys whistled to their brother, back at the barn, and he let the dogs loose. The dogs gave chase, because they had one job.
At this point, they managed to tree the pigs in a tall pine. The dogs chased them up—Oh, yeah, that’s another thing, these weird pigs could also climb trees—But when the boys ran up, they had disappeared again, teleporting or flying to safety.
“I’ll be blamed if I ever could figure it out myself,” the boy said when he was grown.
Nobody ever did, at least not that I’ve ever read. Neither Shoemaker nor Rosenberger ever offered up any kind of explanation as to why there should be strange flying pigs in Clinton County, probably because they always dealt with so many other weird stories that the pigs were considered almost mundane. (“Disappearing pigs? Big deal. You should have heard about the screaming skull.”)
It’s one of those typical Clinton County legends that I like to relate. So, will I ever stop writing about Henry Shoemaker? When pigs fly. Oh, wait….They’ve probably already done that, and I’m still at it. Happy birthday, Henry.
