Lou’s View

By Lou Bernard

So how much do you know about Lock Haven’s Hill Section? The area around South Fairview Street, say? How much have you really explored that?

If you’re into ghost stories, and you’d like to learn a bit more, and you’d like to help out with a good cause, then September 9th and 10th is the time. Eight PM each night. I’ll be giving haunted tours of the Hill Section of Lock Haven, for five dollars each. The money is going to help with a really good cause.

My friend Ellie Croak was just about to start her first semester at Penn State when she found out she had a Malignant Peripheral Nerve Sheath Tumor, a very rare form of cancer. She’s getting surgery and has a lot of support, but of course her family needs some help with the medical bills, time off work, and that sort of thing.

So I’m helping out. I’ll be giving a ghost tour each night, Friday and Saturday. They’ll begin at eight PM at the corner of South Fairview and Bald Eagle Streets, and anyone who hands me five dollars is in.

I’ll be sharing some interesting stories, different ones from my usual tours downtown. I’ll have several ghosts, and a flying cryptid that appeared in the neighborhood, a lost cemetery and an abandoned grave, traces of a ghost town, and more. I’m going to try and make this exciting as possible, and all of these stories are researched and documented, which makes it even better.

You may have heard a couple of them already. I promise you don’t know all of them, but Great Island Cemetery, for instance, is a pretty popular story. I’ll be adding a few lesser-known details on the tour, to add to the fun, but most Lock Haven citizens know where Great Island Cemetery was.

Along the south side of Bellefonte Avenue, in the first block, there was once a cemetery. It was one of the earliest established in the area, way back in the late 1700s. Originally, the local church congregation met on the banks near Great Island, which is how Great Island Presbyterian came to be. But when they raised the money to buy property, it was up at the top of the hill, somewhat creepily overlooking all of the early settlements. Several prominent locals were buried up there in those early days, such as the Reed family, early settlers who built Fort Reed.

John Michael Conley was buried on the outskirts about 1920. He was the partner of notorious bad guy Robber Lewis, and both were known for committing a long series of crimes all over the area. At one point, they camped out just above Great Island Cemetery, and were chased away by some of the locals. Later, when Conley was shot down along the Sinnemahoning, he was brought back to the area for burial. (I’m withholding a few details here to save for the tour, such as, oh, little things like what later happened to his head.)

Great Island Cemetery was considered haunted, which may have been one of the reasons it fell into disrepair during the late 1800s. By 1918, it was pretty much overgrown and falling apart on its own, which led to it being moved. City council decided to close up the cemetery and move it to other cemeteries—Highland, Cedar Hill, Flemington, and Dunnstown all had some bodies replanted, while Great Island was emptied out.

Actually, it’s safer to say they moved the top half—A lot of the bodies went unfound, and homes were built on top of them. So, you know, if you’re wondering why that couple of blocks is so haunted, we have something of a “Poltergeist” situation going on up there.

So if this is even remotely interesting to you, grab five dollars and meet me on South Fairview Street at eight PM on Friday or Saturday. You get a fun, exciting ghost tour, and you get to contribute to a good cause, and help someone who deeply deserves it. And weekend activities don’t get a whole lot better than that.