Ghosts of the PA Wilds: A Haunted House in Elk Country
- by Lou Bernard
- October 10, 2024
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The Pennsylvania Wilds is covered with ghost towns. Now, this doesn’t necessarily mean a haunted place. “Ghost town” is the term for an abandoned place with ruins to explore. We have plenty of those here. But, up in Elk Country landscape of the PA Wilds, there’s a ghost town that may have an actual ghost.
In northern Clinton County, Bitumen was once a busy mining community. These days, Bitumen is largely an abandoned area in Noyes Township, just a bit west of the Elk Scenic Drive, very near Milligan Run. But once upon a time, Bitumen had a population, it was home to the miners and their families.
Mining is an inherently dangerous occupation, especially back in those days. There were tragic accidents. This is the sort of thing that leads to ghost sightings—When you’re researching ghosts, you should be looking for accidents, suicides, tragic deaths.
And Bitumen had its share of those. A man was killed when he fell between shipping cars in 1913. In 1897, an immigrant miner named Stephen Kelzar committed suicide. In 1922,
the company closed down, and evicted the employees and their families. This was such an awful move that they had to hire guards to prevent the occupants from sneaking back in. And in 1938, they sealed the mines for safety reasons.
Chances are there were still some skeletons down there. Not every single body that died in a tragedy was recovered.
Image: Map of Milligan Run
There was at least one house in Bitumen that was rumored to be haunted. A mine supervisor named Miller had been the last occupant of the place. He’d died, and his old house had fallen into ruin — loose shutters, broken windows.
An old article details the attempt of two teenaged girls to explore the place. They’d heard that Miller was a reader, and there were magazines inside. Reading material wasn’t easily available in Bitumen back in those days, so they decided to see what they could find.
The girls were named Suzy and Mary. The article notes that their last names were kept anonymous. They’d heard stories of Miller’s ghost sitting on the porch, watching visitors, but they decided that the discovery of magazines was worth the risk. So they snuck in one day through a window.
Almost instantly, they came face-to-face with a spider web. This put them on edge and made them nervous. They started across the downstairs room.
Then, from upstairs, they heard noises. Both girls screamed, convinced it was the ghost of old Mr. Miller.
Mary, who’d come in last, turned and leaped back out the window immediately. Suzy turned to run and fell, sprawling across the floor and screaming. Later, when they got out of the house, they were said to have laughed about the experience. However, they never went back to the house, or even walked on that side of the street.
The story is unverifiable. However, there is still a cemetery near Bitumen, the old Saint Mary’s Cemetery from the mining days. There are mostly Hungarian immigrants buried there, who settled the area due to the mining. And there are a couple of Marys, and a couple of Susannahs.
So maybe the whole thing is real. Maybe Miller still haunts the house. And maybe the lost miners are still there, in the remote woods of Elk Country.
