Lou’s View – Aug. 20, 2015
The Twin Box Case
By Lou Bernard
Everyone loves a good mystery. A dead man with no identification is found carrying a book a secret codes, and he is never identified. Two men wearing metal masks are found dead on a mountain for no explainable reason. A strange radio broadcast coming out of a foreign country that nobody can make any sense out of. We all love to hear about the unexplained.
Clinton County has had them, too. Mysteries that, even after the fact, leave more questions than answers.
One of my favorites happened in Chapman Township back in November of 1939. It was known as the Twin Box Case.
A local man named Pat Deeder had a filling station up north of Hyner, along the Coudersport Pike. No idea why—I can’t imagine there was much traffic up in Chapman Township in 1939. It’s barely settled now. But there was a station there, and those things are regulated. Every year, inspectors come along and have to check things out, otherwise the government might run out of ways to spend tax money.
One of these inspectors was L.S. Artley, who was listed as a blister rust control agent for the state of Pennsylvania. I have no idea what being a blister rust control agent entails, and frankly I’m not curious enough to look it up. That’s not the point. The point is, while he was doing his inspection, he wandered up the pike a bit, near the Little Boyer Trail.
It was there that Artley made his discovery.
He found two cardboard boxes, sitting underneath a tree in the forest. Both boxes were in good condition, almost untouched. Inside the boxes were human ashes. Now, you may be wondering what kind of serial killer Artley was that he could identify human ashes by sight, but it was actually fairly easy. Each box had a card inserted with the ashes, identifying the people.
This was enough for Artley to contact the police. The cops came and looked at the boxes and the ID cards, which marked the ashes as Anna Waln, 82, and Emma Goodman, 80, of Philadelphia. What they were doing along the road in Clinton County was somewhat of a mystery.
The state police contacted the Philadelphia police, presumably with some effort at making an explanation. The Philadelphia cops checked into it, and informed them that the two women were twin sisters. Anna had died in 1938, and Emma in 1937. And, short of imagining the two women lighting themselves on fire and then jumping into cardboard boxes, the Philadelphia cops had no explanations, either.
Then the Williamsport police were contacted, because it wasn’t far from the Lycoming border, and how often do you get the chance to work on something like this? Upon asking around, they found some people who recalled that Emma Goodman—A doctor who had been known, at the time, as Emma Waln—Had lived up there for a while, around the turn of the century.
The Philadelphia police tracked down Emma’s widower, Horace Goodman, 67. They asked him about the incident, and he gave everyone explanations that left them feeling more confused than before.
The sisters were twins, he said, and had always been very close. They’d wanted to be buried together somewhere quiet and secluded. So he had another unidentified person bring them to Chapman Township and drop them off “until such time as he would find it convenient to find a burial place.”
This was what Horace Goodman considered an explanation, apparently.
The boxes were taken to the Hyner CCC camp and left for Goodman to pick up. The police called it good at that point, because the whole thing had gotten too strange for them. The Clinton County Times, never one to miss out on a weird story, ran it on the front page, saying that “A mysterious atmosphere still surrounds the affair.” They listed some of the questions that still remained.
How did cardboard boxes last in the wilderness, and still look perfect? If you’re still looking for a burial site, why leave them in the woods? Who was the extra person who dropped them off, and why have him do it? Horace was about fifteen years younger than his wife? Really? And what kind of twins are born two years apart, anyway?
None of this was ever answered. And, considering this all happened over seventy-five years ago, it likely never will be. Good thing everyone loves a mystery.
