Peter Hauntz: The Mysterious Puppetmaster of Pennsylvania

Peter Hauntz was the stage name of James H. Sharp, a Civil War veteran from Clinton County who rose to prominence during the latter half of the 19th century as a master puppeteer, ventriloquist, magician and local stage performer. Born in Richmond, Virginia, in 1830, he was the son of a Centre County businessman who owned iron mines in the South. According to W. Orlando Smith, an army buddy who served in Company C, 52nd Regiment, of the volunteer infantry, Sharp learned the art of carving puppets from a master woodcarver from the Black Forest region of Germany who served in the 7th Cavalry with Sharp. During lulls in the fighting, Sharp and his friend, whose name was de Rotschkoff, carved wooden puppets for their friends to send home to their families.

The carving of puppets, or poppespel, has been a German tradition for centuries, and Sharp's mentor, de Rotschkoff, had learned the craft from renowned Parisian puppetmaster, Professor Alexandre. Before his arrival in America, de Rotschkoff had directed the puppet theater at Eisenstadt Castle for Count Esterhazy of Hungary. The Eisenstadt puppet theater dates back to the 18th century, and one of its early directors was a young Joseph Haydn, who would later become of the of the world's greatest classical composers.

The puppet theater at Eisenstadt is remarkable not just for its history, but for the legends associated with it. According to folklore, the reason the theater's puppets were so lifelike and realistic was because the wood carvers imbued their creations with actual drops of human blood. History also tells many stories of carvers and castle guests becoming morbidly attached to the puppets, essentially "falling in love" in with them just as if they were living, breathing human beings rather than painted poppespel hewn from wood.



From Soldier to Showman

Battle of Chantilly

As a young soldier, Sharp listened to these tales told by his mentor with fascination, and on more than one occasion, Sharp and de Rotschoff's ventriloquism skills were put to use on the field of battle. During the Battle of Chantilly, the puppetmasters threw their voices below the window of a Confederate general's headquarters, announcing that Union troops would be arriving in five minutes. The general, fearing capture, ordered his men to retreat on horseback. By the time the general discovered that it had been a hoax it was too late to return to headquarters; it was now under Union control. The dynamic duo of Sharp and de Rotschoff pulled off a similar stunt during the Battle of Seven Pines, and while these incidents never made it into regimental reports, they were vouched for by Captain Barker of the Seventh Cavalry.

After his military career ended, Sharp purchased a black hearse-like wagon and traveled the countryside with his puppets. His act was an immediate hit. Sharp incorporated magic tricks into his act, and adopted the stage name of Peter Hauntz, which was a supernatural take on Peter Hans, a stock character in German puppet shows. Sharp made his debut as a professional performer in 1865 on the night of the Grand Peace Jubilee at Jacksonville in Centre County. Other early performances were at Garth Hall in Mill Hall and the Hubbard schoolhouse in Martin's Grove. As his fame grew, he took his act to opera houses and theaters. He performed frequently in Altoona, and was said to have traveled as far west as Indiana County. For a brief time he also traveled with Walter L. Main's Circus. Sharp's performances centered on three main characters: Peter Hauntz, Julianne, and Herodia. Peter was a tall, ornery, Abe Lincoln-like puppet, and Julianne was his long-suffering wife.  And then there's Herodia.

Herodia-- who soon became Sharp's star attraction-- was a ten-year-old orphan, who had run away from from her cruel stepmother in Clearfield County and hid herself in the puppetmaster's wagon one night in 1873, while Sharp was performing his act in Beech Creek. Sharp discovered the young girl hiding in his wagon the following morning, and she so impressed him with her singing and dancing that he made her a part of his act.

For the next four years Sharp, his puppets, and Herodia performed together in villages and towns all across Pennsylvania. Herodia, painted up as a marionette, impressed audiences with her ballet dancing and quickly became one of the best-known performers in north-central Pennsylvania. And then, in 1877, Herodia disappeared as mysteriously as she had arrived.



The Mystery of Herodia


According to some sources, Sharp and his wife adopted the girl as their own daughter and she retired from performing. Others claim that Herodia's step-parents managed to track her down and take her back to Clearfield County. Some claim that Herodia enrolled in school, fell in love with a young man, and married. And still others claim that Herodia was never really a living person at all, but a puppet who was so realistic that it fooled everybody. At any rate, Herodia had become so famous that she was immortalized in a book by Caldecott Medal-winning children's author Katherine Milhous. In Milhous' book (Herodia, the Lovely Puppet, Scribner, 1942), which is regarded as the first mystery story ever written for children, the title character is a runaway girl who plays the role of a puppet in a traveling theater.

Shortly after Herodia's disappearance from the show, the puppermaster's health began to fail, and his wife, Lavina, accompanied him on the road, handling everything from arranging hotel accommodations to tacking up handbills and selling tickets. Sharp's daughter, Nellie, assumed the role of Herodia in her father's act, and many newspaper articles declared that she bore such an uncanny resemblance to the mysteriously-vanished orphan that they were actually one and the same. Described in newspapers as "darkly beautiful as a gypsy princess," some have speculated that she may have possibly possessed Native American lineage.

Nellie Sharp remains something of an enigma to local historians. Famed newspaper editor and Pennsylvanian folklorist Henry W. Shoemaker wrote, in 1942, that:

The daughter of Peter Hauntz was never billed as Herodia, (and) in fact did all she could do to discount the resemblance, but the two girls were so much alike that the name stuck, just as J.H. Sharp became known as Peter Hauntz from his most celebrated poppet.

Could it be possible that the original Herodia was Nellie Sharp all along, and that the orphan backstory was just a contrivance of the puppetmaster? Sadly, we will probably never know the true identity of the infamous Herodia, because Nellie passed away suddenly in 1902 at the age of 25. Her untimely death, which was caused by heart failure, occurred just a few years after after she had married Samuel William Stover of Hublersburg.

Of Sharp's other children, even less is known. An elderly resident of Blair County, who was close to the Sharp family, told the Altoona Tribune in 1943: "If I remember rightly, he had four or five girls and a fine boy, Charles. The girls were Alice (Mrs. Thomas Porter), whose children live in the neighborhood of Lock Haven and Jersey Shore, and then there was Emma, Sadie, Maggie, Lavina (Vina), and the lovely dark Nellie (Mrs. Sam Stover)."

It seems that every facet of James Sharp's life is shrouded in mystery, and this mysteriousness is what turned him into a folk hero in Clinton, Centre, Clearfield and surrounding counties in the mid 20th-century, when there was a sudden resurgence in the puppetmaster's popularity following the publication of Herodia, the Lovely Puppet. One of Sharp's granddaughters, Mrs. L. Isobel Rowles, told the Tribune in 1949 that Sharp happened upon woodcarving by chance, that his original ambition was to become a great surgeon, and that even she, the granddaughter of the great puppetmaster, couldn't be sure if Herodia was human or mannequin:

"When his father died in Virginia, while looking after his iron mines there, grandfather was a young man attending medical school in the north. The widow lost everything and young Sharp had to quit college... Sharp knew the human form and its balance so well that he could carve out poppets that were mistaken for living persons... with him, it was only a hair's breadth between the living and the dead. Possibly none of his performers, even the famed Herodia, were living creatures-- only examples of his superb sculpture and painting.

"To relieve his moodiness, he carved doll babies for his army buddies to send home to their children, and upset and mystified his tent-mates with his ventriloquism. This voice-throwing gift, and his lung music, he learned from the colored folks working in the iron mines of Virginia... they stood in fascinated awe of him because of his resemblance to the emancipator, Abraham Lincoln."



The Tragic Death of Pennsylvania's Puppetmaster


At around four o'clock on the afternoon of August 15, 1908, James Sharp was on his way to visit a relative in Lock Haven. While walking across the tracks on Vesper Street, the 78-year-old puppetmaster was struck by a westbound freight train drawn by Engine No. 1668, which was passing through town at a moderate rate of speed. One of his legs was severed completely, the other crushed, and he suffered a deep gash in the back of his head. The train stopped immediately, and Sharp, who was still alive, was carried across the street to the office of the Claster coal yard. The entertainer known to thousands of Pennsylvanians as Peter Hauntz died before the ambulance could arrive.

The Vesper Street crossing, where Sharp was killed in 1908.

Some newspapers erroneously reported that Sharp was in his buggy when it was struck by the train, and that his beloved puppets were destroyed by the collision, but this appears to be just one of many fanciful legends surrounding Peter Hauntz. By 1908, the showman had effectively retired due to his health, which had declined significantly following the untimely demise of his daughter, so it is unlikely that he would have been traveling with puppets and marionettes while paying a visit to a relative. One newspaper article from the August 16, 1902 edition of the Tyrone Daily Herald indicates that Sharp's physical and mental condition was a matter of concern to those who had purchased a ticket to see his performance in Ironsville, just five months after Nellie Sharp's unexpected death:

Professor Jim Sharp, famous as a ventriloquist and expert manipulator of the Peter Hauntz show, is still alive and doing as well as could be expected under the circumstances, as his presence in this town today fully proves. His aggregation is billed to exhibit at the school house in Ironsville this evening, rain or shine, so the professor informs us, and the show will go on if no serious accident happens to prevent.

The whereabouts of Sharp's puppets are also steeped in legend and mystery. It has been written that, after Sharp's death, all of his puppets were taken from a storage shed in Salona and burned on a trash heap. Sharp's granddaughter refuted this legend, pointing out that one of Sharp's puppets was known to be in the possession of a Mrs. Paul Auman of Milheim. "Those poppets are probably knocking around somewhere, and perhaps used by a showman at the present time, with no credit given to J.H. Sharp," stated Mrs. Rowles in 1949.

So what happened to Professor Jim Sharp's fabled puppets? Are they moldering away in some dark attic in Salona waiting to be rediscovered? Have they been destroyed and lost to history, burned on a rubbish heap by an ignorant landlord? Perhaps somebody reading this knows of a little antique shop somewhere in Pennsylvania where a wooden puppet is on display-- a puppet so lifelike that it makes you wonder if it's creator might have used a few drops of his own blood to breath life into it. And if a puppet of this description is out there waiting to be found, it was probably crafted by James H. Sharp.






Sources:
Tyrone Daily Herald, Aug. 16, 1902.
Altoona Tribune, Aug. 17, 1908.
Clinton County Republican, Aug. 19, 1908.
Altoona Tribune, Dec. 1, 1942.
Altoona Tribune, Feb. 13, 1943.
Altoona Tribune, June 28, 1949.
Altoona Tribune, Aug. 8, 1949.
Lock Haven Express, March 15, 1951.