Lou’s View – Jan. 22, 2014
Dead in the Water
by Lou Bernard
A few years ago, my sidekick Taylor Walizer and I went on a trip down around Harrisburg. As we passed through the borough of Liverpool—Not the Beatles one, the Pennsylvania community in Perry County, along Route 15—I told her the old legend of a man who was haunting the area, found hanging from one of the trees.
No idea if that legend is true or not. It has the distinct ring of one of those rumors that can’t be historically documented. There is an actual incident, however, that is similar and may be the source of the legend. It happened almost sixty years ago, and has a local connection.
It was December 28, 1945.
On the beach along the Susquehanna Rover at Liverpool (Borough Motto: “Please quit singing ‘Yellow Submarine’ already”) someone noticed a skeleton. This not being the season for them, the police were called. The Record reported the incident on the front page on January 3, 1946, with the headline screaming,”Skeleton of Man Found At Liverpool!”
The article said,”The skeleton of a man was discovered on the river beach at Liverpool, near Harrisburg on Friday, December 28. It was found handing on a clump of bushes.”
The police checked; nobody in Liverpool had been reported missing. The skeleton being found along the river, it seemed logical to check communities up river and find out if maybe it had floated downstream.
Which is what brought them to the farm of a family names Smith, up around Tamarack.
State and local police got teletype messages (“Teletype” was how you texted back in 1945) requesting information on any missing people anywhere along the river. Renovo Police Chief George Shilling got the message, and recalled a disappearance a couple of years prior.
Shilling informed the state police, who sent a man to the Smith farm to make some inquiries.
Barney Pluff of Hyner had been living at the Smith farm for a few months, some time ago. He had disappeared—The last time he’d been seen was November 28, 1943.
Nobody was sure exactly what had happened to Pluff, only that he was missing. On the same night, a girl from South Renovo told the local cops that she’d heard moaning and coughing underneath the bridge over the Susquehanna River. She flagged down a passing car, and the girl and the driver looked, but couldn’t see anything. Another driver stopped, went down, and searched the bank, but still nothing.
Then the fire department was called in. The Record reported,”Members of the West Branch and Clinton Hose Companies conducted a search. Flood lights, boats and grappling hooks were used but no body was discovered.”
It was assumed to be Pluff, who had disappeared the same night. I’d be neglectful if I failed to mention that several sources blamed his disappearance on Thunderbirds—The Thunderbird was an old Native American legend of a giant bird that ate people and created rainstorms. There are a few different books that suggest a Thunderbird may have carried him off.
As much as I love that theory, I think it’s possible that the Thunderbird got framed on this one. The skeleton in Liverpool, hanging from the bush, was thought to be Pluff. All the evidence pointed to that conclusion, and the case was closed. Nobody ever fully explained why it took him two years to get down the river, but the traveling was pretty impressive, considering he was dead at the time.
Another mystery remains: There is no record of what was done with Pluff’s body after it turned up. Most likely, he was placed in an unmarked grave in a potter’s field down in Perry County. Or, hey, maybe they fed what was left to a Thunderbird. You never know.
