Lou’s View

By Lou Bernard

I know you’ve all been waiting for it. Every October, I write my columns about ghost stories. And, every October, I always manage to work in one Henry Shoemaker story. It’s a tradition by now.

In case you’ve never seen my column before, Henry Wharton Shoemaker was from Wayne Township. He was a writer and folklorist who wrote down a whole lot of haunted stories from the area. His work basically preserved a lot of our folklore, and left me with a lot to work with.

I don’t worry too much about running out of material. Shoemaker wrote a lot of stuff. And sometimes I find his stories in unexpected places. I have a copy of Keystone Folklore Quarterly from spring of 1957, where he was basically the whole issue.

With Shoemaker running around asking everyone about ghosts, it’s not a big surprise that he might end up with more material than he needed. You should see some of the unpublished stuff and scribbled papers he left behind. That’s probably what led to the chapter in the issue brilliantly titled, ”Ghosts At Random.”

For this chapter, Shoemaker basically threw together a few ghost stories he’d been told that didn’t stretch into books of their own. The first one was from July of 1926, a statement from the wife of Harry Surguy of Washington, DC.

She had a servant living in her home, sleeping in a room in the basement. To furnish her small room, Mrs. Surguy bought a used day bed and a pillow at an auction. The first morning she woke up in the basement, the servant reported that she’d seen a redheaded woman wandering about the basement, and she couldn’t sleep. Mrs. Surguy replied that she must have been dreaming.

But it happened every night, the action escalating, until finally the redheaded ghost tried to pull the pillow from underneath the servant’s head.

“At last I felt there must be something in the girl’s constant complaints,” Mrs. Surguy said,”So I told her to get a pair of my scissors and open the pillow.”

To their surprise, when they cut it open, they found it stuffed with red hair—Just like the ghost’s. They got a new pillow and burned the old one in the furnace, and the nightly visits stopped.

Or how about the story Shoemaker overheard on February 7 of the same year? A man said that he and another man were walking to catch a train from Lewisburg, and saw a young woman in black walking ahead of them.

“When she stepped across a puddle of water in the road, she would lift her skirt and I could see her white petticoat, white stockings, and black high-button shoes,” the man said.

The woman stayed ahead of them almost until the train station, and then she disappeared. Both men said immediately, ”Did you see that?”

The man concluded, ”We agreed that no one could ever tell us that there were no such things as ghosts.”

Shoemaker had written about the famous violinist Old Bull a few times. He once spoke to Emma Thursby, a famous singer, who was going to tour with Ole Bull, but never got the chance to, because Bull died in 1880. She did see him once after that, however.

In her apartment in New York, she entered the room and saw Ole Bull standing beside the grand piano, seven years after his death. He seemed to be trying to speak to her, but couldn’t make a sound. And then he faded into the shadows and disappeared.

There are other stories in the chapter, as well, not just these three. But I’ll save those for another year.