There's a reason they call it a deadline.
Generally, I wind up digging through a lot of old files and newspapers. It gets harder every year as I try not to repeat myself. It was a Tuesday afternoon when, in desperate need of another story, I found myself digging through a file cabinet just off the Sloan Museum wing on the second floor of the library.
I found a thick file labelled "Ghosts," and pulled it out. I flipped through it. A couple of stories were ones I already knew, but then I found the stack of handwritten pages at the end of the file.
"Oh, wow."
"Pat Tyson was the closest thing I had to a mentor in paranormal research," I said. "She used to call me up and tell me when she liked one of my columns. She and I worked together on a few projects, speeches and all."
"She sounds nice," said my daughter. Biz had come to visit me at the library. She drops by sometimes to make sure I haven't forgotten to eat.
"She was wonderful. She died back in 2013," I said. I picked up a manila file and opened it. "Upstairs, today, I was going through an old file cabinet. You know how this place is bigger on the inside? I found an old file from Pat. Handwritten notes that she compiled about all sorts of paranormal legends."
"Oh, wow," said Biz. She looked over the file.
"The Giantess, the K-Mart ghosts....She made connections I'd never discovered," I said. "She found the Giantess years before I did, and never told anyone about it. And she connected it with the two petrified bodies in Great Island Cemetery. She saw the Indian ghost at K-Mart."
Biz was flipping pages. "I wouldn't mind a copy of this myself."
"I'll get you a copy. She wrote about some stuff I've never stumbled onto yet. The Witch of Sugar Run. There was a witch known as Sal Kervine who lived up just outside the city limits, and was known for casting spells on people. I'm going to be months checking out all of this."
"That's awesome," said Biz. "When are you going to start?"
I smiled at her. "You coming up for dinner tomorrow?"
Dinner was ham, browned Brussels sprouts, and garlic potatoes. With Paul watching, I cooked it so it was ready when Michelle brought Biz to the house. I am not a one-trick wonder.
"Got another offer to be on a TV show," I commented. "A producer e-mailed me, asking if I'd be interested in doing a show about investigating with teenagers."
"Oh, cool," said Biz. "That sounds fun."
"Well, until you factor in that the first thing I teach the kids is that everything on TV is wrong," I said. "I get a couple of these offers every year. But they do crap investigation on television; they're really unprofessional. I wouldn't want to sell out like that."
"It would be cool to see you on TV, though," said Biz.
"You mind if we make a stop before we drop you off tonight?" I asked. "I want to check out the Flemington Cemetery."
I walked through the cemetery, looking out across the gravestones. Flemington Cemetery had been around for over a century and a half. I noted the stones, and the empty spaces in between them, and then walked back to the car.
"You find what you were looking for?" Biz asked from the back seat.
"Yeah, I think so. I can tell where the bodies I need are....Great Island Cemetery was moved in 1918. Some of the bodies were brought up here, and I'm pretty sure they're in the old empty space to the south. Two of them were female, and listed as petrified---The bodies had turned to stone. These may correlate with reports of two female ghosts, one wearing black and one wearing white, in Great Island Cemetery."
"This have to do with the file you found yesterday?"
"Yeah. Pat ties the Great Island ghosts in with the Giantess. She seems to have been working on this Grand Unified Theory of paranormal investigation in Clinton County. All of her stuff seems to connect. I'm going to look into it, and see what I can figure out. I'm making a start on the Witch of Sugar Run."
"There was really a witch?"
"There seems to have been someone, and this seems to have been some sort of family story. The witch's name, in the legend, is Sal Kervine. Pat got this story from a friend of hers named Curvan. Those are similar enough that I had to wonder if it was some sort of family connection, and I checked the 1862 map. Along Sugar Run, way back when, a property was owned by someone listed on the map as P. Crevin, which is also pretty close. Nobody had standardized spelling back then; they just wrote down whatever they thought they heard. So if I can find out about P. Crevin, I can find my witch."
"Didn't you write a column about something like this in Farrandsville, a while back? A witch casting spells on people. Your headline was Spell Check."
"Yeah, and it's a similar story, though this makes more sense. The story involves her cursing people who were riding past her house, and Farrandsville isn't on the way to anywhere. You go to Farrandsville, you have to turn around and go back; it's the end of the road. Sugar Run makes more sense."
"It does, actually."
"Millie lives up near Sugar Run. LHPS has meetings right where a witch was casting spells in the 1800s. So maybe I can interest the team in checking into this. "
"Well, you have looked into witches before."
"County's full of 'em."
"And what do you plan to do when you find her?"
"See if she weighs the same as a duck."
"I be a witch for Halloween," added Paul.
"I know, little man. I promised to make you a wand. So I'm going to see if I can figure out who the witch really was, check some obits and property records. I looked through some of the obits today at work, and found Curvans, but no connection yet. Nothing that resembles the witch."
"So what's your next step?" asked Biz.
"There's never only one way," I said. "If you can't raise the bridge, lower the river."
I began my morning with a committee meeting at the Piper Museum, and then I had to deal with a fuel issue with the new Comanche. I fielded a couple of ghost questions from visitors. I was wearing my Kraken t-shirt. Mondays.
I made a stop at the courthouse halfway between Piper and the library. I dropped my pack off at the radio station rather than put it through security. I have no idea how to describe what I do for a living.
"Lou! Your son's not with you today?" asked the Register and Recorder when I walked into the office.
"I'm flying solo today," I agreed. "But I'll have to bring him in here soon. He likes it. You guys all give him candy."
I hadn't found anything under obits yet that I could use, so I tried Wills. There's never only one way. I had to try as many different spellings as I could, so I checked Curvan, Cervin, Crevin, Kervine. People weren't all hysterical over spelling back in those days. I finally found a Patrick Craven, died in 1891 with no Will. I copied off his estate documents, and then checked deeds.
Patrick had owned a lot of property, all over the county. That explained the Farrandsville discrepancy---He'd owned property there, too, so the family had likely told the same story in different locations. I checked to see if he'd owned the Sugar Run property in Bald Eagle Township---At the time, anyway; these days it's part of Allison Township. I found a barely readable deed from 1859 where Patrick Craven had bought the property in Bald Eagle.
I knew where. Now I had to find out who.
I biked over to the library. It was getting cooler out---I love autumn, but so far it had been about as chilly as the 1862 town fire. Now it was beginning to cool down, and the leaves were starting to fall.
Our IT guy was in when I got to the library.
"I think I have the server fixed," he told me. "It's been down all week. We're having a bad week for the computers; I can't figure out what's wrong."
"You want me to look into curses?" I asked. "Check to see if maybe we're built on an Indian burial ground?"
He grinned. "Well, that won't hurt. I don't have better ideas."
"I do what I can."
I went to my desk, where I pulled the index file for the obits. There's a certain luxury in being able to work in the library before it actually opens. Now that I had a name, I could find out more.
"How's it going, Lou?" asked my co-worker Sue as she walked past.
"Tracking down a witch," I said.
"Because of course you are."
I found Patrick Craven's card. He had an obit in November of 1891 and he was listed as "buried in the Catholic Cemetery." There were at least three of those, but when I checked the cemetery records, I found him in Saint Mary's, buried not far from where he'd lived.
Several family members were buried with him. Including a wife, who'd outlived him. Mary.
"Any luck?" Sue asked as she walked by.
"Where there's a Will," I said,"There's a way."
"Where do I turn?" Kara was driving. I was with her, Ashlin, and Charlie---Most of the members of LHPS.
"The cemetery is on Hill Street."
"Nobody but you and the pizza guy knows where the hell Hill Street is."
"Next right. Up ahead."
"Okay. Where's the cemetery?"
"On the left, just up ahead. Right there."
"I didn't even know there was a cemetery here," commented Charlie. "How did you know?"
"I'm Lou," I said. "I know these things."
Kara turned into Saint Mary's Cemetery and parked near the path. LHPS often held our meetings at Millie's house, right near Sugar Run, and just around the corner from Saint Mary's. So I'd suggested to the team that we take a little field trip before the meeting, and go find a witch's grave.
We climbed out of the car.
"She's in this section, Section Three. Between these two paths." I pointed toward the section, the two grass paths on each side. "Shouldn't be too hard a find; she's with the family, someplace near that mausoleum."
We spread out and began walking north, through the cemetery.
"What was the name?" Charlie asked.
"Mary Craven," I said. "She's with her husband."
Kara looked around. "Teah, Over there. Is that...."
"Yeah, Teah Hospital. We investigated it a couple of years ago. And up in that corner is Luther Shaffer, the guy haunting the old jail we investigated. He was the only guy hung for his crime in Clinton County."
"I don't see---" Ashlin began.
I knelt by a stone. "Here. Over here."
They all ran over to join me. I took a couple of photos of the stone. It was a big one, a monument, with a cross broken off and lying on the top. I was kneeling beside it, running my fingers across the lettering the way I was used to, feeling the letters.
"Mary Craven," I said. "This is her."
"We could read that whole thing if we had some paper and chalk," Kara said.
"Or a mirror," I said. "Or shaving cream."
"Seriously? Shaving cream?"
"You put shaving cream on the thing, and then squeegee it off, and it leaves white letters. Or the mirror, which is better for preservation---You can reflect light and leave the letters in shadow." I looked at Mary's dates, and then her husband's, and then I crawled sideways to look at the dates on the daughters' stones. "Check out the dates. You notice anything, Ashlin?"
Ashlin look at the stones. "They all died first?"
"They did. Her husband and both daughters died before Mary. And that will tell you a lot about where the witch story came from. We tended to be very suspicious of women living alone back then, and Mary was a widow. She lived alone on a huge farm, probably telling people to get off it. The rumor spread that she was a witch."
"I'd probably be cranky, too," admitted Kara.
I stood up. "Thanks for the help, you guys. Let's get back to the meeting."
"Yeah," Ashlin said. "We got snacks.
"Found the witch's grave," I said. "Happy Halloween, you guys."
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