Thin Ice: Cold Comfort

Two degrees.

Overnight, the temperature had dropped to two degrees outside. Across town, car batteries were going dead. Ice was forming on the Constitution Bridge. The Susquehanna River was frozen solid.

"Put on a damn coat!" I shouted at Paul as he got ready for school.

"Oh. Yeah." He set down his backpack and put his white coat on. "Will you be home when I get home today?"

"I'll be at work, but your mother will be home. But before I get to work, I'm going to try to write an article."

"Oh yeah? About what?"

"Don't know yet I'll dig through my files and find something." I handed him his pack. "Shoes. You need shoes. Have a good day, kiddo. Love you."

"Love you, too," said Paul, pulling on his shoes as he walked out the door.

I poured a cup of coffee---Tim had given me a Swartz Paranormal coffee mug---And sat down at my laptop. I played around a while---Much freelance writing work can easily be mistaken for playing around---And then took my mug and walked upstairs to my office. I pulled out a random file on ghosts, and flipped through. 

And I rediscovered the frozen ghost of the Pine-Loganton Road.

When I got to work, there was a sign job waiting for me. This required me to spray adhesive on a piece of foamboard and stick a poster to it. Normally I'd just go out in the alley and do it, but it was too cold for any kind of spray adhesive. So I took it down to the basement.

The basement of the Hecht Building is a long, dark, stretchy thing that runs the length of the building. I'd been building a secret headquarters in one of the alcoves. I'd always done that sort of thing as a kid, and had never really outgrown the tendency. I changed a couple of light bulbs to give myself more illumination, then laid the foamboard down on a shelf and sprayed it.

When I brought it back upstairs, Emily was bringing back a printed job of fourteen hundred flyers to be cut and folded.

"Morning, Emily," I said.

Emily smiled. "Good morning. Got a huge stack of flyers for the Catholic school for you."

"You know that place is built on an old burial ground? I mention it on a lot of tours."

"How do you even remember all this stuff? I'd forget it immediately."

"I don't make much of an effort; I don't study it or anything. If it's something interesting to me, it just sinks in and sticks. But I can't balance my own checkbook, so don't get too impressed."

"Find out anything new lately?"

"I stumbled on one I've checked out before. There's a ghost down along the Pine-Loganton Road, which is Clinton County's most haunted road. He was a guy named Harry who froze to death in December of 1894 trying to walk down to visit his girlfriend. His body was found frozen under a tree. The story is that if you listen in a cold winter, you can still hear him calling for help."

Emily shivered. "That's another creepy one."

"I may get out there and check. This would be the perfect winter for it. I might take my rifle microphone and check if I can hear anything."
"How do you plan to get out there?"

"I don't know, maybe make a friend who can drive. I'll figure that out later. It's too cold to go out, so I think I need to do a little digging in the archives first."

The boss came through. "I'll be out for a while," he said. "I need to make a delivery down to Loganton."

"Drive careful," I said. "And keep your eyes open. There's supposed to be a ghost down there who froze to death in 1894."

He smiled, amused. Amusement seems to be his default position to my paranormal investigations. "I'll look for that."

He walked out the back door, and Emily said,"I can't believe I get to hear you say things like that."

Every now and again, Chris and I tried to get together for coffee, almost as if we were normal people. We sat at the same table in the local coffee shop and hung out, sometimes working on projects, sometimes just talking.

"I heard the Piper Museum is hiring for a general manager," I said. 

Chris looked at me, interested. "You going to apply?"

"Not gonna lie, I was thinking about it," I said. "I mean, nobody can say I'm not qualified. I was the curator over there for three years. I'm considering it. But I'm not sure how much I want to go back to working for a board of directors again."

"It would require working weekends," said Chris. "I know you've been enjoying spending time with your family on evenings and weekends."

"Yeah, that's another thing," I admitted. "I love the Piper Museum, I always have. But I do like working at the print shop, too. Everyone treats me good, and the place is haunted as hell."

Chris grinned. "Investigating it while it's too cold to go out?"

"Actually I'm currently working on the guy who froze to death on the Pine-Loganton Road while attempting to get to his girlfriend."

"This sounds like a Shoemaker."

"It is, in fact, a Shoemaker. It's from one of his articles in the 1950s."

"Shoemaker never lets you down."

It was morning, and Paul was off to school. I sat down at the table with my laptop. Coffee and a ghost; that classic way to start the day.

I began by checking the newspaper archives from December of 1894. I got on the website and checked every issue, one at a time. I learned that it had been a very bad winter that year, and people did in fact freeze to death while going out. I found a couple of cases of that actually happening, which was encouraging.

Then I took my coffee up to my office and pulled the cemetery records, Rosie and Butters trailing after me in case I had some available food up there. I began with Sugar Valley, because Harry had been from there and died on that end of the Pine-Loganton Road. I went through the records, one name at a time, and found it almost immediately.

There was a man named Harry who'd died "near Loganton" and been buried in very early 1895. He'd been about nineteen years old at the time. Bingo. That was my guy.

Okay, so I knew who he was now, and that it had actually happened. That was a good start. I'd backed it up historically; now I had to check into the paranormal side of things. That was a little harder.

"Right up here," I said as Michelle pulled the jeep up alongside the Pine-Loganton Road. 

"Should I pull in, or just anyplace?"

"We're in the right vicinity. Just anywhere along the road should be fine."

We'd gone around the long way, as opposed to starting in McElhattan and traveling the entire road. With the temperatures consistently below freezing, I hadn't wanted to chance any patches of ice, which were pretty likely. Michelle stopped the vehicle.

"You coming with me, or waiting here?" I asked Paul.

"It's twelve degrees," he said. "I'll wait here."

"Be right back."

I got out and walked along the road. It was cold as hell, and the wind was blowing. I got out my rifle microphone and slipped the headphones on, which actually helped warm my ears. I turned it on and raised it, moving at carefully around in an arc.

Howling. Oh my god, the entire forest was howling. I could hear it clearly through the headphones. The wind was drowning out everything else around for a mile. Probably happened every time winter hit.

Which would explain, to an extent, how the legend got started. Someone freezing to death along this road, which already had a reputation for being haunted, and the wind making noises that could be mistaken for human....Yeah, it made sense.

I walked back to the jeep and climbed in. Michelle said,"Anywhere else you need to go?"

"While we're in the neighborhood, one more stop."

I stood over the gravestone, looking down at the name "Harry." Paul roamed the cemetery somewhere behind me.

"Here he is, kiddo. The ghost who froze to death on the Pine-Loganton Road."

"Cool," said Paul. He was leaning over a couple of stones a few rows over. "This one just says 'Mother.'"

"Her name is on the big monument beside it. They did that sometimes, just labeled them like that."

Paul walked a little bit down the row. "These guys weren't very old. This one was only twelve."

"That happened, too. You see how these two died within a year? You see that sometimes, and it tells you something. In the future, people are going to be seeing a lot of graves from 2020 and 2021. What killed a lot of people in those years?"

Paul thought it over. "COVID?"
"Very good. Yes, COVID. When you see a lot of similar dates, it probably means there was an epidemic of some sort. Most cemeteries have them. Later on, if you like, we can check to see how these two died, and if there was some epidemic that year. I'll show you how to do that."

Paul nodded. "Did you get what you needed?"

"Yeah, I found the ghost grave," I said. "Let's get back where it's warm."

Monday morning, and sixteen degrees. When I got to work, as always, Emily was there.

"How was your weekend?" I asked.

"It was good. We took my sister back to college."

"Bloomsburg, right? Only town in Pennsylvania."
"That's right. How was your weekend?"

"It was good. Checked into that ghost who froze to death on the Pine-Loganton Road. Turns out, that actually happened to a guy. I found a guy with the right name who died about that time, and then when I checked the area, the wind was making a lot of noise through the trees."

"That would be hard to hear with the headphones."

"It kinda was. But I figure the noise, plus the death in a place already known for being haunted....That added up to the legend. I didn't get a whole lot of readings, but that's an investigation for another day. A warmer day."

'That makes a lot of sense." Emily grinned. "Don't know what I'd do without you here to tell me about this stuff."

I smiled.

"You won't have to find out," I said. "I'll be here."