Lou’s View

By Lou Bernard

One thing about Clinton County, there are all sorts of legends. If you’re looking for ghost stories, this is the place. Not just average ghost stories, either—There’s a variety of neat old legends and sightings, all different. And there’s always been someone to record them.

Hiram Cranmer did that. Back in the 1950s, Cranmer was in the Clinton County Times just about every week, talking about some of the ghosts he’d encountered. Cranmer was the postmaster up in Leidy Township, and he was very interested in the paranormal.

One of the stories was on August 2, 1951, headlined, ”Hammersley Fork Spook Diagnosed By Cranmer.”
The story begins in 1824, when David Summerson came and settled in Leidy Township. He settled in present-day Renovo at first, back when it was basically just forest. Then, later, he moved further north into Leidy Township, because apparently an unsettled Renovo wasn’t remote enough yet.

He brought with him a horse named Fanny, whom he’d purchased from David “Robber” Lewis, one of the area’s most notorious criminals.

Summerson and his horse were close. I’ve had pets; I get it. You get very attached. Which was what made it devastating on March 14, 1845, when Summerson went to feed Fanny and found that she’d died at age thirty-four.

He buried Fanny in the Ox Bow Cemetery, which was the family cemetery at the time. “Mr. Summerson did not want the wolves to feed on Fanny so he hauled her down in the field and had her deeply buried, at the foot of the hill,” Cranmer wrote.

Later that same day, Summerson took his rifle and went to hunt some deer. When he didn’t return, his grandson Simeon went looking for him, and found him sitting against a tree, dead at age eighty-eight.

Summerson was buried in the Ox Bow Cemetery, very near where he’d placed Fanny. And the story ended there, for a while.

Thirty-three years passed. A man named Hamilton Fish came along and built a road going through. A blacksmith named Thomas Creighton was walking along it one day when he heard the sound of a horse coming by.

He stepped off the road to let it pass, but the horse never passed. Curious, he walked back to see what had happened, but never spotted the horse. Later on, when he talked about it back in town, some of the men suggested it was the sound of the local shingle mill.

“I heard the shingle mill,” said Creighton, ”But it was over along the creek, not coming down the road!”

When others began to report the same sound, people figured out that it was the ghosts of Summerson and Fanny, riding along their usual route. Cranmer wrote,”Some said they saw a horse and rider coming down the road in the dusk and that the horse and rider vanished as they passed, right in the middle of the road only a few feet away!”

Cranmer reported on houseguests he had about 1941, who also saw Summerson and his horse, who passed and then disappeared.

The Ox Bow Cemetery no longer exists—It was moved to make room for the Kettle Creek Dam. Summerson’s grave was moved to North Bend. There is no record of Fanny ever being found, so maybe she’s still buried under Kettle Creek. Maybe she and Summerson are still trotting along up there in Leidy Township, together forever.