Lou’s View 10/7

By Lou Bernard

With each passing year, it gets a bit more challenging to find ghost stories that I haven’t written about before. Fortunately, people aren’t shy about reporting their own sightings, so I have a never-ending supply of haunted stories constantly coming in. But sometimes I still take one out, dust it off, and rewrite it.

This year, I was thinking about possibilities for ghost stories. It is October, after all. It’s been a while since I wrote about some of the buildings downtown, and those are always popular. When I thought about the John Brown House, at first I thought I’d pass on that one, because I’ve done it to death. Then I realized that “Done to death” is perfectly appropriate for a ghost story, so here we are.

The John Brown House is also known as the Gravestine Kintzing House, named after the man who built it in 1875. Kintzing was part of a prominent local business family, but it’s John Brown who really left his mark on the place.

The house stands at 220 West Main Street in Lock Haven. John Everett Brown was an undertaker who lived there with his wife. He was fairly popular in the community, which made his death at age forty-three all the more tragic.
It was March 20, 1938. It was getting late, past eleven. John Brown was awakened by someone ringing his doorbell in the dead of night. Assuming it was somebody who needed his services as an undertaker—I mean, that’s who you get when you find a dead relative, right?—He got out of bed and started downstairs.

Brown had tall, elaborate spiral stairs. Probably still half-asleep, he slipped and fell over the railing. Hitting the floor below, he cracked his skull and died. By the time his wife found him, it was too late. He was buried in Highland Cemetery.

Residents and workers have reported hearing voices inside, and sounds when nobody else is in the building. The house being right next to where I work, I’ve fielded a lot of these reports.

Nobody ever did figure out who rang the doorbell, though I may have a theory. And it involves another haunting, this one over in Lycoming County.

I checked all the obits and death records, but nobody died at the right time. There was no reason for anyone to be seeking Brown’s services as an undertaker at that moment. There was, however, the Last Raft.

The Last Raft was a sort of commemorative raft that was sent down the Susquehanna River, with seven men on board. It was meant to re-enact the classic lumber rafts that once were common on the Susquehanna. It was a huge deal, and there were messengers running around the various communities giving news of the raft.

The timing works out right—The Last Raft had docked in Williamsport on the last night John Brown would ever be alive. Given the time it would take for the news to travel to Lock Haven, and a messenger to be dispatched, it’s plausible that the mystery doorbell-ringer was bringing news of the Last Raft.

Ironically, John Brown’s death was not the only one caused by the Last Raft. It crashed into a bridge in Muncy, bringing the trip to a sudden and tragic end. It’s believed that the bridge is haunted to this day by the seven men killed in the river.

Two haunted places, in two different counties. A house and a river. Both haunted, possibly due to the same incident. If you happen to walk by the John Brown House, stop and take a look—You never know what you might discover.