Ghosts of the PA Wilds: The Governor and the Ghost in Pine Creek Valley
- by Lou Bernard
- October 24, 2024
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The Pennsylvania Wilds is home to its share of governors. Many of the governors of Pennsylvania were from the area, largely the I-80 Frontier landscape of the PA Wilds. But there was one from the Pine Creek Valley and the PA Grand Canyon landscape: William Alexis Stone. Stone grew up in Wellsboro, Tioga County. And he was a fan of ghost stories.
“I early became acquainted with ghost stories and have been thrilled at their recital by some calling neighbor, around the old fireplace at night,” he recounts in his autobiography, Tale Of A Plain Man. “Night is the only time that a ghost story should be told. A ghost story told in the daytime never has an appreciative audience.”
Stone recounts having an old graveyard on the hill behind his house. Many of his relatives and neighbors were buried there, and as a boy, he liked to go up and explore it. The place was overgrown with weeds and briars, and he would pull them enough to read the epitaphs on the stones.
Stone recounts the experience he had one night, in which he believed he’d encountered a ghost. He’d been visiting a neighbor and took a shortcut home through the graveyard. As he crossed over the hill, he saw in the moonlight a woman, standing in the graveyard and wearing what appeared to be a long white dress, flapping in the breeze.
“I had never seen it before, and I ran home, thinking it must be a ghost,” Stone wrote. “Next morning I did not mention it, for I knew my father would pooh-pooh the idea.”
Stone recalled that his father was not a big believer in the paranormal. His mother would have been except for the influence of his father. Stone himself was intelligent enough to approach the situation scientifically.
He went back later in the day, and discovered that the wind had blown the bark off a hemlock stump, showing the white wood underneath. That was what he’d seen, mistaking it for a ghostly woman in the dark.
“Ever since then I had no belief in ghosts, believing that a proper investigation would in all cases explain the mystery,” he said.
Image: The Stone House, courtesy of the Ross Library
He was still a fan of ghost stories, however. And he recounted one that happened to a neighbor, Richard Duryea. Duryea, he said, was an immoral man, profane and unreliable. Rumor had it that he’d once been a pirate. He lived alone along the Dean Road.
When Duryea became sick, two neighbors went to be with him. Duryea insisted on not having a doctor, and died later that night.
The two men with him heard Duryea cry out in terror at the stroke of midnight. They ran to assist him, and saw a large black animal “with sharp eyes and quite a large body and short
legs” walk in from the porch and into Duryea’s room. It exited, and when they arrived, Duryea was dead.
One of the men was a family friend, John Ainsley, and he retold the story for William Stone when he was a boy. Various sources claim the dark shape may have been a ghost, a
werewolf, or the devil, and Stone himself seems to have been undecided.
He did, however, always enjoy a good ghost story, and even recounted one of the epitaphs he remembered from the old graveyard: “Remember Friend, as you pass by, as you are now, so once was I. As I am now, so you shall be. Prepare to die and follow me.”
