Lou’s View

By Lou Bernard

“My people didn’t believe in the supernatural, and I was eighteen years old before I heard a ghost story told except in ridicule of those who believed in ghosts.”

This was the opening statement of an article written by Hiram Cranmer. It was in the June 6, 1952 issue of the Clinton County Times. At the time, the newspaper was running articles on ghosts and local history every week, and Cranmer, the postmaster of Leidy Township, was a favorite guest writer. Cranmer was always happy to contribute a story about ghosts and old legends to just about anyone who asked.

This particular one seems to have been a favorite of his. I’ve encountered several different times when Cranmer recounted it, and it may have been his first actual experience with a ghost. It was August of 1909, and he was eighteen at the time.

Cranmer went fishing along Kettle Creek one morning, curious to see how the place looked during a drought. “As I walked down the road in the morning I noticed a two story log house across the creek from the road in the Wertz place,” he wrote. “Somebody had started tearing the house down, a part of the roof had been torn off. I didn’t know the history of the house, that it had been built more than ninety years before by Simeon Pfoutz, the first settler. To me that morning it was just another log house of which there were many at the time.”

Cranmer spent his day fishing, caught his limit, and then headed back. As he was approaching the house that evening, he heard something.

“I heard a sharp crack, as if someone on the opposite side of the creek had hit the house with a board,” he said. “I walked on a hundred feet when I heard three moaning sounds like a dog barking deep down a woodchuck hole.”

A moment later, he heard something fall to the floor—Something heavy that caused a loud thud. As Cranmer walked up the road further, he encountered two of the neighboring men—Walt Vallen, a seventy-two-year-old hunter, and a local farmer named Perry. Both of them acted odd and evasive about the sounds.

The next day, Cranmer walked over to the Summerson home, where several men were sitting on the porch. When he described the incident to them, George Hammersley told him,”You heard Jake Hall fall out of his chair after he was shot.”

They described the incident, which dated back to the first recorded murder within the borders of Clinton County. A man named Jake Hall had been stopping by to visit the wife of a local farmer. The farmer, suspecting this, secretly purchased a rifle and hid it behind his barn. When he saw Hall there, he took the rifle and shot Hall in the back.

Hall moaned three times, fell out of the chair, and died trying to drag himself to the door. These sounds were repeated every day at about the same time, according to local legend.

It was the first murder trial in Clinton County. The farmer had assumed he’d immediately be found not guilty, but he was sentenced to prison and died there five years later.

According to the legend, it still happens. The murder of Jake Hall can still be heard every day at about the right time. Cranmer wasn’t the first to hear it, or the last…. But he wrote it down to share with the whole county, even decades later.