Lou’s View

By Lou Bernard

Haunted stories. Clinton County is filled with them, and every year in October I bring them out and write about them. I actually hate it that people mostly pay attention to them one month out of the year, but I’m enough of an attention sponge to do it anyway.

I find these stories from a variety of sources, with varying degrees of reliability. Not all of these legends are equally valid; some turn out to have no basis. A ghost in a house where I have found an obituary listing the occupant as having been murdered? Valid as far as it goes; I can prove that someone died traumatically there.

Your cousin’s psychic said that a little girl named Sarah is haunting the place? Better go do more research; that’s just word of mouth. I like documentation. Also, the little girl haunting the place, for some reason, is always named Sarah.

Nevertheless, there’s one story I’ve recently stumbled upon that I sort of like, in spite of the fact that I should dismiss it offhand. There’s no evidence, nothing but one mention in a booklet I discovered. It’s the kind of booklet assembled by kids in schools to teach them about local history, in this case Sugar Valley, and some kid submitted a entry entitled “The Dagger.”

“A young girl was stabbed to death one summer,” it reads. “Her murderer was never found. It has been told that once every year the dagger can be seen sticking in her headstone. This story has also been told in a different way. Some say that the dagger appears on the murderer’s headstone when it rains.”

There. That’s the whole entry. You now know everything that I know about the ghostly dagger. You’ll note there’s nothing there to research: No names, dates, not even a mention of which cemetery to look for. Sugar Valley has about twenty of them, and I tried going through the records looking for clues, and gave it up within minutes.

And yet, the description of another version of the story does suggest that the anonymous writer heard it somewhere, and didn’t just make it up. It has the feel of a local legend that’s been handed down a bit, instead of something fresh created just for this booklet.

I cannot one hundred percent verify that there wasn’t a girl stabbed in Sugar Valley somewhere. Sometimes, I can dismiss these things offhand—Years ago, a business owner made up a story of workers rioting and tearing apart their boss, and I was able to immediately debunk that one. That’s a big enough incident that I’d have heard of it by this point in my career. A single girl murdered? Could have happened, and I might not have learned about it yet.

When I mentioned this to my buddy Norman Houser, writer of the Pennsylvania Rambler blog, he pointed out that there was a very similar story in James Glimm’s book “Flatlanders and Ridgerunners.” As I have a copy of that one, and pretty much every other local book I can get my hands on, I checked.

Norman was right: There’s an entry in there that talks about a murderer in Sullivan County who was never arrested. Upon his death, a bleeding dagger appeared on his tombstone, implying his guilt. No matter how many times his family attempted to remove it, it kept reappearing.

This suggests a few possibilities about the Sugar Valley story. Could be it never happened at all. Maybe some kid heard this story from their grandparents in Sullivan County, and wrote it for the book without much awareness of county borders. Things like that have been known to happen.

But I’m intrigued by this story, so I plan to keep my eyes open, just in case.