Lou’s View

By Lou Bernard

Over the years, I’ve accumulated a whole series of files—Clippings and photocopies about our local history, ghost stories, and interesting facts. You’d think I’d have some idea of what’s in there, me being the only person who ever puts anything in the files, but sometimes I am blindsided by the discovery of something I have no memory of ever seeing before.

This year, digging around for local hauntings, I discovered one called “The Baby’s Ghost.” I don’t remember this one, and it’s unsourced—No attribution, just the photocopy. But it’s an old article about a ghost story, and I thought it would be fun to write a column about it.

There was an old farmhouse in Pleasant Gap, owned by a couple in Florida. They had a caretaker, but rarely came to visit. They were trying to sell the place, but nobody would buy it—It was believed to be haunted. To me, that’s a pretty good selling point, but you never know about some people.

The ghost was said to be a baby. People would report hearing a baby cry all the time, while the house was empty. Word got around, as it generally does in these situations, and nobody would buy the house.

Until one day, when a wealthy couple from Philadelphia happened to be driving by. They saw the farmhouse, the creek, and the apple trees, and fell in love with the place. They arranged to buy it through a local attorney without ever wondering why the price was so low, and they moved in a month later.

One day in early October, the woman was outside doing chores, and she heard a baby crying. At first, she thought someone was coming up the road, but there was nobody there. Checking inside, she followed the sound up to a small room upstairs, but there was nobody there either.

A few days later, the husband heard the same crying, this time from the basement. It continued to happen, in the afternoon or at night, never with an actual baby around. They knew they were haunted, but didn’t feel threatened by it. They just wanted to help the baby’s ghost.

Finally, they went back to the lawyer who’d helped them buy the house. He dug into it, looked at the old deeds, and talked to a few people. And he came back to them, and reported that a baby had disappeared from the house about eighty years previously, and had never been found.

The couple asked the state police to come out, and hired some workers to tear out the walls underneath the cellar stairs. As they worked, they could all hear the crying. There was one wall that seemed to be more recent than the others, and when they pulled that one out, they found a pile of rags.
Inside the rags were the bones of a baby.

Nobody ever found out why the baby had died. They speculated about disease or injury, but no one ever knew for sure. The couple arranged for a burial in a nearby cemetery. “The grave is still there today,” the article states, and it could be; most of the local cemeteries have a lot of unidentified babies and children in them. Everyone in the neighborhood came out for the funeral of the baby.

And the crying stopped. The baby finally had an actual burial, and that seems to have been all he wanted. The couple lived in the house, and the baby’s ghost moved on….Except for my local file, which now has the story.