Ghosts of the PA Wilds: The Glade Township Ghost near the ANF

The news broke in the Warren Ledger on Friday, August 5, 1881. In Glade Township, Warren County, in what would later become the Allegheny National Forest and Surrounds landscape of the Pennsylvania Wilds, there was a ghost. It had been sighted for the past month on a local farm.

“During the last month the little world around the farm of Fred Mack, in Glade Township, has been made most crazy with the belief that a real ghost visits the house nightly, or, rather the premises around the house,” the article read. “These stories at last reached the great city of Warren, and became the common talk.”

Fred Mack was a local farmer with a hundred and ten acres of land. The farm was in a remote area in Glade Township, outside of Warren, and it began attracting attention in the summer of 1881. The rumor was that there was a ghost there, and people began to go out to look for it.

The article explained, “Prominent men and daring boys had made the pilgrimage on foot, in the night time, more than three miles distant, uphill and over a wretched and lonely road, to
see the ghost, and many declared they had beheld the wanderer from the grave.”

One man claimed that he’d actually managed to briefly grab the ghost. He’d leaped out and tackled it, and was holding it in a choke hold, when the ghost disappeared, knocking him over.

A woman who claimed to be a medium came to the property, and said that she not only saw the ghost, but spoke to it, and it replied in a muttered language that she did not understand. Guests inside the house claimed to have heard unexplainable knocking.

Stories of ghost sightings spread throughout Warren, sending more and more adventurous people out to explore. The sightings happened so often that the Ledger finally sent a reporter out to check things out. He arrived on Tuesday, July 26, in the early evening. He didn’t want to just drop by and start searching in the dark.

The reporter had looked into it, and discovered that not long before, an older member of the family had passed away in the house. Soon after that, the ghost sightings began. The ghost was said to float around in the air, never leaving tracks.

“He’s here to see the ghost!” cried some of the gathered crowd when the reporter showed up.

The reporter sought out Fred Mack, who was described as a German immigrant who sat down and met with the reporter barefoot. The reporter pointed out that the constant flow of visitors was more troublesome than the actual ghost, but if they could perhaps capture it somehow, they could solve the entire problem.

“What is all this talk about?” asked the reporter. “Have you a ghost on your farm?”

At this point, Mack stated that he did not.

Earlier in the summer, he claimed, he’d had a crop of cherries. Overnight, some of the cherries had been stolen, and the branches broken. To prevent further theft, he’d hatched a Scooby-Doo-like plot, sticking a pitchfork in the ground and throwing a sheet over it. That, he said, had taken care of the cherry thefts, but created bigger problems he hadn’t expected.

The reporter accepted this, and on his way out, told an oncoming crowd that there was no ghost, but they refused to listen. They visited the farm, and on that same night, claimed to have seen a large, white, bat-like creature flying around.

The reporter ran a story that repeated what Mack had said, but also talked about the sightings, and included the fact that Mack and his family had claimed to see it. Was the ghost real? Did Mack fake the sightings, or did he only claim to in order to avoid attention? It’s just one more haunted mystery in the Pennsylvania Wilds.