Pennsylvania Ghosts 24/7

For those of you with a keen interest in ghost stories--I must say, this includes me--I have discovered a blog you must follow. It is Haunts and History, and its url is http://hauntsandhistory.blogspot.com. While you are there, click back to its main website, Pennsylvania Haunts and History.
I went there to check on the continuing saga of Duffy's Cut, and I must say the story has gathered new aspects, like a giant snowball rolling downhill. This sounds like a criticism. It isn't. I have no doubt that the story is true, and as Dr. Watson--who I have talked to--presented it. But a story as awesome as this one will inevitably pick up additions and new interpretations with each new teller.
I think that is good, for the most part.
What's the Duffy's Cut story to me? It's about justice--the justice of memory, which is the only kind that can be done to the 57 victims. Dr. Watson said to me that the people who had become involved in the project had changed, were not the same as they had been before. He included himself.
Having undertaken such a task myself--in my case, a biography of the Holocaust heroine and martyr Gisi Fleischmann--I know what he means. A friend of mine has had a similar experience: You stumble into a fragment of a story, and suddenly it becomes your mission, your obligation, to tell it.

Mollie Maguires Ghosts

While both my sisters have had direct paranormal experiences, I myself have not. The closest I have come to such an experience has been my writing of a history of Carbon County, "Smokestacks And Black Diamonds," which was published in 1997--several years later than originally scheduled.
At the time I wrote the book, the famous old Carbon County Jail in which a number of convicted Mollie Maguires were executed late in the 19th century, was still the county jail. I of course knew about its connection with the fate of the "Mollies," and I tried to visit, but without success. I was told it had the potential for being dangerous, which I suppose was true.
I was especially interested in the so-called "Hand On The Jailhouse Wall," said to have been impressed there by either Alexander Campbell or Tom Fisher just before his execution. Whoever made the hand print is said to have declared, "There it will remain forever, to shame the county that is hanging an innocent man."
I didn't get into the jail until it became private property and was opened to the public as a museum, some years after my book was published. I am not sure what year that was.
When I did get in, I must admit that I didn't see much of it; I couldn't stand the oppressive sense, or smell, for that matter.
But I did see the hand mark; Cell 17, where it is imprinted on the wall, is in the main cell block and near the main entrance. It is a strange bruise of a mark, and much has been said and written about it. "Bogus" is, of course, one of those things. But I don't think so.
It's been said that the former sheriff's department used to keep repainting the mark, just to keep the interest going. But I cannot see why County officials would want to do that--presumably calling attention to a great injustice they themselves had perpetrated.
Former Carbon County President Judge John Lavelle, in his book about the history of law and justice in the county, suggests a different story. According to his book, the sheriff's department went to very serious efforts to get rid of the hand mark--painting it over, chipping it out, even replacing the whole wall. Always the mark reappeared.
In 2001 Laurie Hull and a fellow investigator from Tri-County Paranormal were able to visit the jail--including some grim cells in the basement that I had not had the nerve to go down and see. Their report is satisfyingly detailed, at least to me. For me it represents something like "Everything the county historian wanted to know but never got to ask." (Actually, also some things I didn't realize were there to know.)
You too can visit Tri-County Paranormal's website to learn much more about the Mollies and the Carbon County Jail. The site also has some rather depressing photos, as might be expected from a site where grim things have happened.
Go to: http://www.delcoghosts.com/paranormal/Carbon_co_jail.html
By the way, I had not heard of Tri-County Paranormal before. But they seem to be conscientious researchers, and if you are interested in their subjects you might want to follow them. Or whatever the term for this is.

A Pennsylvania Ghost Story

This, I am sure, will be the first of many stories--and don't forget to share your own tales of Pennsylvania ghosts.
Let me confess that I have always believed in ghosts and the paranormal. These things have touched my life personally, but other members of my family--notably my sisters and my father--have experienced them in much greater depth.
I have heard or read somewhere that any house in which someone has died is by definition a haunted house. That's a lot of potential ghosts. Also, it seems to me that an old place with a rich historical past must be prime ghost country.
That certainly would define Pennsylvania. Old and with a rich past, and with some spirits who haven't yet worked things out.
My sister Carole seems to have encountered such a spirit when she and her then-husband rented a house in Hazleton. She became more aware of it than other members of the family because she spent more time at home than anyone else.
Evidently this ghost was a woman, and a dedicated housewife. Carole could tell that because, while she never saw her, the house's former tenant made her existence known through cooking smells, the clatter of dishes from the the kitchen, the aroma of perfume, and much walking back and forth, as of someone checking to see what needed to be cleaned or straightened.
Carole recalled that her daughter was unnerved by these ghostly manifestations, but she herself was not. Her coexistence with the ghost of the former tenant was peaceful and--if this is the right way to define living with a ghost--uneventful.