The Ghost of Minersville

by Lou Bernard

You may or may not have heard of Minersville. It is—Or was—A small community in Colebrook Township. As the name suggests, it was a town founded around the local mines.

Colebrook Township was once a big, busy place. It was the center of industrial activity in the early 1800s, when mining and iron making were big. Farrandsville was the big community, but further up the mountain was Minersville. These days, Minersville is basically a small cemetery, an inclined plane, and part of a forest.

It was still well-known enough to be mentioned in the Clinton Democrat on March 3, 1893, however, which brings me to my spooky Halloween fun.

“Farrandsville, or rather Minersville, now sports a new ghost,” read a column in the “Farrandsville Items” section of the paper. “The uncanny critter is located in an old house which had been untenanted for some time, but is now occupied by two miners who report all sorts of queer noises during the ‘silent watches of the night.’”

The paper seemed fairly casual about ghost sightings, concluding,”Farrandsville is right up to the times, and when the ‘ghost’ business gets a little old we will negotiate for electric street cars.”

So, is it possible that there was a ghost in Colebrook Township? I’m not going to be the one to rule it out. I’ve already heard stories about another ghost, a witch, and indentured servants out in Colebrook Township. So I’m not going to suddenly dig in my heels at one more ghost story.

You’ll notice how nonchalant they were about it, as if it were just a quick mention among the other news items. The question I would ask, then, is: Who is this ghost?

It’s what I do for the Lock Haven Paranormal Seekers, the investigative team I belong to. I look into the history of an area, and I see who is most likely to be haunting the place.

In this case, that would mean looking at the records of Minersville Cemetery. The cemetery was established about two hundred years ago, and has been documented due to the excellent work of the Clinton County Genealogical Society. The book with the cemetery listings is maybe fifteen feet from my desk, so it’s not like I had to strain myself.

So, who would be likely to be haunting Minersville? Well, the answer is….Practically anyone buried in the Minersville Cemetery.

When you look for ghosts, you’re looking for dead people, obviously. But just any death isn’t necessarily a candidate—You never hear a credible report of a ghost who was a 93-year-old woman who outlived three husbands and died peacefully in her sleep. What you’re looking for is young death, violent death, traumatic death. Something like that is thought to be what causes a ghost.

Which applies to almost everyone documented up there in Minersville.

Elizabeth Shergood was four months old when she died in October of 1836. Her mother Rebecca died two weeks after. David Cree died at age seven, and his brother was an infant. A little girl named Eleanor was thirteen when she died in 1897, though her last name cannot be seen on the stone. And these are only the ones we know about—Many of the stones are illegible, or have been destroyed.

My personal favorite, though, is John Shade. His stone says he died in 18-something-9….That middle number is pretty hard to read. Maybe 1819 or 1829. It also says he died in a mine cave-in. That would make him a pretty good candidate for the average ghost story—Imagine a man, buried underground in a cave-in, unreachable, his ghost walking the ruined town looking for help.

Spooky, huh? An excellent Halloween story. And it’s about to get a little spookier—Let me leave you with a quote from one of the gravestones, the little baby brother of the Cree family.

“Here sleeps the dust of blooming youth, their spirits mount the sky; but whispers now this awful truth, that all are born to die.”