Springtime in Pandemonium

From Barclay to Yellow Springs, Rausch Gap to Laquin, and Masten to Centralia, Pennsylvania probably has more ghost towns than any other state. This is due, in large part, to the abundance of natural resources in our commonwealth. Most of these ghosts towns were originally settled by lumbermen, miners, ironworkers, and oilmen, all of whom ventured into the untamed Pennsylvania wilderness and carved out homes for themselves and their families amid the rugged hills and pristine mountain streams. In their heyday, some of these villages boasted hundreds of residents and dozens of buildings, including schools, taverns, churches and even brothels. Today, all that remains of these former boom towns are crumbling foundations and the occasional wilderness graveyard.

Pandemonium, nestled deep in the Tuscarora State Forest, has always been one of my favorite ghost towns to visit, and I recently took advantage of the pleasant spring weather to visit the old Pioneer Cemetery. Much to my surprise, not only has the graveyard not been vandalized and turned into a veritable trash pit like so many of our rapidly-vanishing historical sites, but it appears to have improved over the years, thanks to the efforts of local residents and dutiful forest rangers. Only a few of the headstones are legible; most grave markers are simple field stones or chunks of rock with the initials of the deceased carved upon them, and most of these humble markers appear very much today as they may have appeared more than two centuries ago.

The history of Pandemonium begins in the late 18th century, when German pioneers from Bucks County settled in the region currently known as Henry's Valley. The valley's namesake, John Henry, was the grandson of Johann Abraham Henrich, who arrived in America in 1738. While John eventually moved to Ohio, his son, Christian, stayed in Pandemonium and earned a living working at the steam tannery, which was located just south of Pioneer Cemetery.

After the Revolutionary War, several warrants were taken out for tracts of land in the wilderness, the first of which was granted to David Diehl, who had a warrant for 300 acres along Laurel Run. It was on this plot of land the village of Pandemonium was born. The name, which means "abode of demons", was already in use by the time L.J. McFarland built his large steam tannery on Laurel Run in 1840. Because chestnut trees are abundant in the valley, it seemed like a smart business decision, since the high levels of tannin in the tree bark makes it ideal for tanning leather. The tannery was what drew many of the pioneer families to the valley and these families, such as the Bitners and Neidighs and Clouses, are well-represented in the old graveyard. McFarland eventually sold the tannery to James Marshall who, in turn, sold it to Samuel Lupfer. The last operators were the Ahl brothers, from Newville, who ran the tannery until its closure around 1890.

Despite the hardiness of these early mountain pioneers, one can't help but notice the large number of children and young women who are buried at Pioneer Cemetery, and the reason for this is largely geographical; in order to reach a doctor, one would have to travel over Bower's Mountain to Blain, or over Kittatinny Mountain to Newville. Not surprisingly, this lack of medical access resulted in a high rate of "puerperal fever", or childbed fever, among women who had just given birth. Most of the graves marked with small mountain stones are those of children who died in infancy.

The Murder of James Hazel


One of the most interesting events in the history of Pandemonium is the mysterious death of a young man named James Hazel in December of 1882. Hazel, who was employed as an inspector at Ahls' Tannery, was found dead in the woods after failing to return home from a hunting trip with Daniel Neidigh. Upon examination of the body, it was discovered that Hazel had died after being shot from behind, the bullet piercing his heart and lungs.

According to Neidigh, the men had agreed to split up while hunting turkeys on Bower Mountain, and that was the last he had seen of Hazel. The plan was that the two men would meet up at the path on the mountain and go home together, but when Neidigh reached the spot and saw footprints, he assumed that Hazel had already left for home. Although a search party was formed the following morning, Hazel's body wasn't found until four days after his disappearance. It was Andrew Hardy, one of Ahl's employees, who found Hazel's gun standing against a sapling, still loaded. Hazel's body was located about fifteen feet away in the brush, with a smile on its lifeless face.

The inquest pointed strongly to murder, but the bullet was never found. Daniel Neidigh was never suspected, since James Hazel was engaged to Neidigh's sister. In fact, Hazel was murdered the very same week he was to be married. Suspicion did however, fall upon a fellow tannery worker named George Shambaugh, who was known to have been on less-than-friendly terms with Hazel.

Shambaugh, who was the only man in Pandemonium who refused to join the search party, was known to be out hunting in the woods on the same day as Neidigh and Hazel. Interestingly enough, Daniel Neidigh eventually married the dead man's sister, Susanna Hazel, and moved to Harrisburg. So maybe there was more to the story than what has been reported.


The Henry's Valley School, Snake-Charming, and Life in Pandemonium

Not far from the cemetery stood the Henry's Valley schoolhouse, which was erected before the Civil War. The school closed after the 1912 session (which was taught by Leslie Shumaker) because only one family, the Sundays, remained in Pandemonium. Pierce Sunday was the last student to be taught at the school. His father, Frank, was the local forest ranger. In 1913 the Sundays relocated to Blain, thereby leaving Henry's Valley unpopulated for the first time since the colonial era.

After the Sundays moved away, the region became known as Deserted Valley- a name that stuck well into the 1950s. By that time, nature had reclaimed most of the old tannery town, and visitors would be quite surprised to learn that a thriving town had once stood between the birch-lined banks of Laurel Run and the oak-and-chestnut forested Bower's Mountain.

Wolves and wildcats were abundant during the heyday of Pandemonium, and some accounts by descendants of the pioneer settlers tell of the women keeping wooden poles burning in the fires while their husbands were away. Since wild carnivores are afraid of fire, the housewives would take a flaming pole and wave it in the direction of a wolf or panther who happened to stray too close to the homestead. As for the fire itself, this was provided daily by children of the valley, who traveled from home to home with a "fire basket", which was basically a torch that was carried throughout the village.

Children were a different breed back then, of course, with little fear of getting devoured by a bear or bitten by a rattlesnake. Proof of this can be seen in the life of Emma Louise Gerlach, who lived in Sheaffer's Valley, which, in essence, is merely a continuation of Henry's Valley. During the early 1900s, Emma made a quite a name for herself as a snake-charmer. Described as being exceedingly beautiful and unusually skilled at handling reptiles, Emma had many offers to join circuses and carnivals. "All kinds of snakes hung around her neck and stroked her cheeks with their tongues, but she was never once bitten," recalled her grandfather in a newspaper story from 1939. "When we sold our biggest blue racer to the Smithsonian, it was her especial pet, the poor kid cried as if her heart would break."


Myths and Legends


Any place that was once known as Deserted Valley and featured a ghost town with a name like Pandemonium certainly comes with its fair share of legends and myths. Famous Pennsylvania folklorist and historian Henry W. Shoemaker often told a tale about one of the ghosts of Bower's Mountain. "Old people in Henry's Valley crossing the mountain on moonlight nights say that they see a large man 'as tall as a door'... and if one follows him from the road he will lead to the scene of the tragedy and vanish," wrote Shoemaker in 1939. The scene of the tragedy in which Shoemaker was referring in his article was the site of the 1932 plane crash which killed two female pilots, Ruth Stewart and Debbie Stanford (I wrote an article about the plane crash in 2016).

However, since this also happens to be the same mountain road where James Hazel was last seen alive in 1882, it's quite possible that the ghost in question might be the spirit of the dead tannery inspector-- or the man who got away with his murder.

Perhaps the most famous legend of Pandemonium is that of the runaway slave who was reportedly the first person buried in Pioneer Cemetery. According to this legend, a female slave who had escaped from a Southern plantation by way of the Underground Railroad was making her way through the valley one night when she was chased up a tree by hunting dogs and shot down by locals, who, in the darkness of the night, believed that the woman hiding in the tree was a bear.

Luther Miles Bower, a former Perry County judge who passed away in 1981, provided a slightly different version of the legend in a 1973 Perry County Times newspaper article. According to Bower, who was a direct descendant of the mountain's namesake, the runaway slave was buried just outside the northeast corner of the cemetery, near the great white oak tree she had been shot out of. This, of course, suggests that the cemetery was already in use prior to the incident, thereby casting doubt on the myth that she was the first person laid to rest at Pioneer Cemetery.



Slavery in Perry County


The historical record also casts some doubt on whether or not this woman's death was truly accidental in nature. With the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, the hunting of runaway slaves became a thriving business, even in Perry County. On July 8, 1841, Coroner David Tressler held an inquest upon discovery of the body of a black man who was drowned in the Juniata River. The victim was one of three slaves who were being tracked by hunters, who followed the fugitives to a point just above the Millerstown Dam, where there was a ferry. Finding that the ferry was out of service, the three slaves sought refuge on North's Island, where two of the men were captured and the third was drowned.

While there were some residents of Henry's Valley who supported the abolitionist movement, history suggest that Perry County, for the most part, was strongly in favor of human bondage. Even the great James Blain, the man who gave name to the town that sprung up around the mill he built in 1778, owned a slave. William Anderson, after whom the village of Andersonburg was named, owned a slave whose name appears only as "Bob" in historical records.

Even preachers of the Gospel had no qualms about owning slaves; an advertisement appearing in the Perry Forester of 1826 offered for sale the slave of Reverend John Linn, a prominent minister of Sherman's Valley: For sale, a healthy, stout mulatto man, aged about 22 years. To be sold as the property of Rev. John Linn, deceased.

Rev. John Linn was definitely not a fan of abolition

The reverend's son, Andrew, not only owned slaves as well, but once placed an ad in the Forester offering a six-cent reward for the capture of one of his runaway slaves:

However, the most notorious slave owner in vicinity of Henry's Valley was Francis West, a prominent judge from Carlisle who moved to Sheaffer's Valley after his retirement. Judge West owned six slaves, which he bequeathed to his children after his death in 1781. Among these slaves were two females, "a Negro wench called Poll" who was given to his daughter, Ann (but later sold to her brother, Edward) and a young mulatto child listed only as "Nila", whom the judge gifted to his granddaughter, Mary Mitchell.

Is it possible that the mysterious runaway slave who was killed in Pandemonium was Poll or Nila?

As the value of a black man's life in pre-Emancipation Perry County was a mere six cents, it's probable that the life of a black woman-- unable to perform the same type of manual labor as a male slave-- was worth considerably less. This could mean that the unknown runaway slave buried in Pandemonium was killed in cold-blood, but it could just as well mean that the female fugitive wasn't being tracked by hunters for a reward at all because her life was literally worth pennies. If such is the case, then her death could have been an accident. Yet, this also begs the question-- if the poor woman up in the tree never said a word, how can we be sure that she escaped from the South, as the legend claims?

Unfortunately, the truth behind this mystery will probably never be known.

It's worth pointing out, however, that even the unspeakable crime of lynching was not unknown in this part of Pennsylvania. In 1837, a black man described in newspapers as "Doc Johnson" was lynched in Carlisle, while Henry H. Hain's History of Perry County (1922) describes the lynching of a ten-year-old colored girl "within six miles of the Perry County line".

While the exact location of the slave's grave has been lost to history, the Pioneer Cemetery continues to serve as a reminder of what life was like in the mountains of Perry County from 1787 to 1912: brutal, tough, dangerous, and all too often, short.

The first real clean-up of the cemetery took place in 1971, when a group of old-timers from Blain drove over Bower's Mountain to place flags on the graves of John Neidigh and David Shambaugh, both of whom fought in the Civil War. The June 3, 1971, edition of the Perry County Times describes how one member of the clean-up crew was so excited that he jumped the gun: The oldest member of the group, who is past 81, was so excited that he ate his breakfast in haste, drove over the mountain alone, and took all of the limbs and brush and some of the leaves off the graves. He then began to think that maybe he had gotten his dates mixed and so he came back to Blain by the Three Square Hollow Road. About 15 minutes after he left the cemetery, the others arrived by way of the Horse Head Road.

Nearly fifty years have passed since the restoration of the graveyard began, but-- with it's treasure chest of untold secrets-- one still can't help feeling that same sense of excitement when exploring the ghost town of Pandemonium.