Lou’s View: HENRY SHOEMAKER AND THE SCREAMING PLANT

By Lou Bernard

So, it’s October. Every year at this time, I dedicate my columns to stories about ghosts, hauntings, and all sorts of weird stuff. And nobody mastered this like Henry Wharton Shoemaker, the Wayne Township folklorist. It just wouldn’t be October if I didn’t get around to writing about Shoemaker.

One of the interesting things about Shoemaker, in addition to the type of folklore he wrote down, is that he managed to write so much of it. (I do a similar thing; I pity anyone who tries to compile my columns in the future.) I’ve been studying Shoemaker’s work for years, and I still haven’t found it all—Frequently, I come up with stories I’ve never heard before.

This one comes from an article in 1954, and involves a plant. Not an average plant—This plant made noise.

Shoemaker learned of this in a letter that he’d received from Union County. I know how that goes; I get all kinds of input on my writing, some of which even manages to be accurate. The woman who wrote to him had lived in China as a girl.

Not the well-known China. Once upon a time, in Clinton County, there was a small community called China. That was where she’d encountered the legend of the Screaming Plant.

The woman wrote that, as a young girl, she’d been out gathering pine knots with some friends. Why you’d want to gather pine knots, I will never know, but it was a different time. She was somewhat ahead of her friends, deeper in the forest, and she heard a screaming that she assumed to be a woman needing help.

She ran back for her friends, and they advanced, getting closer. But they lost their nerve—The screaming continued, and they assumed it was a panther or an injured woman, and either way they didn’t want to get too close. So they ran back home, and asked one of the local old women for help.

It wasn’t either a panther or an injured woman, the old lady informed them. It was a local plant, comfortingly named “Dead Man’s Hand.”

She described the plant as “having large leaves growing out of the ground, with little specks on the back of them.” She said that the plant was known to scream, particularly when it was pulled from the ground. This resembled the May Apple or Mandrake plants. (And for you Harry Potter fans, you may notice this legend making an appearance in one of the movies.)

Shoemaker proposed a reason for the screaming sound, according to the article: “These plants, mountain devotees of folklore say, grow from the skeletons of dead Indians or dead panthers, and it is the voices of the skeletons that they hold together by their serpentine roots until Judgement Day that give out these unearthly shrieks when they are disturbed by human hands.”

Okay, so that makes my skin crawl just typing it, but we’re not done yet. The woman’s letter went on to explain that in between Lock Haven and Muncy, there were fifteen gaps in the mountains, and every other one held a Native American burial ground. (Shoemaker based an entire book on something like this premise.) She said that the Native American tribes could tell where their dead were buried by looking for the Dead Man’s Hand, the screaming plants.

Shoemaker suggested that the Green’s Gap Massacre happened because Captain Harry Green and his men were unknowingly camped out in one of these burial grounds. The Green’s Gap Massacre was said to have happened in Sugar Valley; there’s still a monument to it down there. It states that in 1801, the attack happened, but doesn’t mention the screaming plant. Which is probably just as well.