The Mystery Grave at Holeman Cemetery

A gravemarker at Holeman Cemetery

In Forest County, where Route 62 crosses the Allegheny River between the village of President and the county seat of Tionesta, stands a few dozen homes. On maps, this location appears as Hunter's Station, and this is the site of historic Holeman Cemetery, a pioneer graveyard where many of the early settlers of Tionesta Township are buried.

The first interment was made at Holeman Cemetery in 1835, and the last burial took place in 1926. Fortunately, the good people of Tionesta Township have done a wonderful job preserving the grounds and its time-worn gravemarkers, but this was not always the case; by the mid-20th century, the abandoned graveyard had fallen into an unkempt state, overgrown with weeds. Lost somewhere along the way by neglect and ravages of time was the wooden gravemarker indicating the final resting place of an unknown murder victim.

As the story goes, several years before the outbreak of the Civil War and the construction of the railroad, a wagon road extended from Tionesta to Oil City. One day, two men came down the road into Hunter's Station begging for food. Armed with a frying pan and a tin coffeepot-- and nothing else-- it was obvious that they didn't have a penny to their name. Having nowhere to stay, they bedded down inside a small abandoned shack on the banks of Holeman Run.

A few days passed and the two strangers failed to appear in Hunter's Station, so one of the local villagers decided to pay a visit to the shack and check up on them. Inside the shack lay one of the men in a pool of blood, his throat cut. The cooking utensils were untouched, but the other man was gone and was never seen in the vicinity again.

The villagers of Hunter's Station buried the unknown beggar in a corner of Holeman Cemetery, marking the spot with a crude wooden plank. Although nobody knew the identity of the victim, or from where he had come, the grave was treated with the utmost respect. In 1955, a former resident named Celia Sager, who grew up in a house next to the cemetery, reminisced about the mystery grave to the Franklin News-Herald. She recalled that, as a young girl, children on their way to school would pick violets and dandelions and place them at the stranger's grave site. Unfortunately, by 1955, the grave had grown over with weeds and brush and all traces of the burial spot had vanished.