Lou’s View

By Lou Bernard

We hear stories of headless ghosts all the time. I can easily name three within Clinton County alone. The headless ghost has become something of a trope, really, due to how many dead people are apparently running around without their heads.

But how about a footless ghost? Well, there’s at least one story about one of those. Leave it to local folklorist Henry Shoemaker to come up with something completely different.

Shoemaker, the writer from McElhattan, collected a lot of stories like this, unique paranormal adventures. Shoemaker heard this story from Civil War soldier George Mitcheltree, and told it in a speech in the spring of 1954. The story itself takes place sometime around 1840, based on the lifespan of one of the people mentioned in it. (Shoemaker’s legends involved a lot of real places and people.)

The story begins with Dr. Samuel Strohecker, who owned a lot of land down in Sugar Valley back in the early 1800s. Strohecker wanted a barn built, the biggest barn in Sugar Valley. (I’ll grant there’s some competition there.) All of his friends and neighbors came to help build it, including one young girl named Elizabeth.

During construction, there was an accident. One of the beams fell, bringing a wall collapsing down on Elizabeth’s feet. Dr. Strohecker ran to help, assisted by another local doctor named Peltz, but there was nothing they could do to save Elizabeth’s feet. The feet had to be amputated.

That night, two things happened. One was that Dr. Peltz took Elizabeth’s severed feet home with him, with the intent of having wooden feet made for her. The other was that Elizabeth, unable to adjust to life without her feet, drank a bottle of chloroform by her bedside and died.

She was buried in a cemetery nearby, and that’s when things began to get more interesting.
It snowed, and footprints began to appear. They would begin at the site of the barn—Which was abandoned and never did get finished—And walk along Fishing Creek until they reached Dr. Peltz’s office.

This happened every night, apparently, as evidenced by the footprints in the snow each morning. How was the ghost leaving footprints without feet? Quit questioning it. One of the lovely things about Shoemaker stories is that they’re not required to make logical sense.

This was disturbing to the people of Sugar Valley. Personally, I’d be delighted to have a ghost walking by and leaving evidence, but that’s just me. The story said,”The people living along Fishing Creek were frightened to see delicate feminine footprints along the creek after every snow flurry or soaking rain.”

A wise old woman named Martha Boone, who went under the name of “Mother Boone,” realized that the ghost was looking for her feet, trying to get into the office every night, but the door was locked. Doctor Peltz had never returned the feet—Exhausted and distracted, he’d forgotten about them entirely.

Mother Boone declared that the feet should be buried with the rest of the body, and it would solve the problem. You can make a pretty obvious observation sound profound if you’re a respected old woman whom everyone calls “Mother,” evidently. I also have no explanation as to why she didn’t just tell Peltz to unlock his door, which would also presumably have solved the problem. It’s not as if Sugar Valley is a high crime area, and things weren’t worse in 1840.

At any rate, the feet took a somewhat roundabout route to get into the grave, but it seemed to lay the ghost to rest. Elizabeth quit leaving tracks along Fishing Creek. And the people of Sugar Valley went on with their lives….Until the next ghost, of course. There’s always another.