Allegheny Episodes / Folk Lore and Legends Collected in Northern and Western Pennsylvania

by Henry W. Shoemaker

“Perhaps you have laid her,” said Grandmother McClinton. “Anna may now pull through.”

But these words were barely out of her mouth, when Oscar Wellendorf, pale as a ghost, appeared in the kitchen to say that Anna had just passed away. Andrew felt her death keenly, but he was also satisfied that perhaps he had by an act of kindness, removed the Warning of the McClintons. He was more convinced when a year later Anna’s father joined the majority, then her mother, with no visits from the mournful-voiced Warning.

Five years more rolled around, and Andrew McMeans, still unmarried, and cherishing steadfastly the memory of his beloved Anna, embarked his fleet for Pittsburg. It was a morning in the early spring, the air was soft and warm, and the shad flies were flitting about. He arrived in safety, but was some time collecting his money, as he was dealing with a scamp, and meanwhile put up at a boarding house on the river front, near the Hotel Boyer. The afternoon after his arrival he was sitting on the porch of his lodgings, gazing out at the rushing, swirling river, which ran bank full, on a bench similar in all ways to the one on which he had laid the shawl to warm the freezing back of the Warning of the McClintons. Somehow he fell to thinking about that ghost, and its disappearance, and of Anna McNamor; how much he would give if only he could see her again.

He recalled how the old grandmother had told him that some families married out of the Warning, while others married into it, much as he had heard was the case with the Assembly Ball in Philadelphia. The McClinton Warning had evidently clung to the female line, as it had been very much in evidence when Anna McNamor’s time had come.

Something made him look up the street. Coming slowly towards him was a slender school girl, with a little green hat perched on her head, the living image of Anna, dead for five years! He almost fell off the bench in surprise, to note the same slim oval face, the aquiline features, and hazel eyes that he had known and loved so well. She paused for a moment in front of the house next door, holding her school books in her arms, while she looked out at the raging river. The spring breezes blowing her short skirts showed her slim legs encased in light brown worsted stockings. Then she went indoors.

It did not take him long to seek his landlady and learn that she was a flesh and blood, sure enough girl, Anna Harbord by name, whose mother, widow of Mike Harbord, an old time riverman, also ran a boarding house. It was not many days before some errand brought the girl to the house where McMeans was stopping, and matters fortuitously adjusted themselves so that he met her.

He was struck by her similarity to the dead girl, even the tones of her voice, and it seemed strange she should have such a counterpart. She appeared friendly disposed towards him from the start, and it was like a compensation sent after all his years of disappointment and loneliness. She was then sixteen years old, and must have been eleven when her “double” passed away.

As their acquaintance grew into love, and all seemed so serene, as if it was to be, Andrew McMeans gradually regaining his faith, human and divine, felt he owed his happiness to the Warning of the McClintons’, whose misery he had appeased by taking the cloak out to her, while engaged in her disagreeable duty of fortelling the coming dissolution of the unfortunate girl.

McMeans and Anna Harbord married. They decided to remain in Pittsburg, and he became in a few years a successful and respected business man.

If few persons had been kind to ghosts, certainly he had profited by his interest in the welfare of the “Warning of the McClintons”. The girl’s mother informed him that in the early spring, about five years before, her daughter had been seized with a cataleptic attack, had laid for days unconscious, and when she came out of it, her entire personality, even the color of her eyes, had changed. Could it have been, the young husband often thought, as he sat gazing at his bride with undisguised admiration, some act of the grateful “Warning,” in sending Anna McNamor’s soul to enter the body of this girl in Pittsburg, and reserving her for him, safe and sound from Wellendorf and all harm, until his travels brought her across his path! Human personality, he reasoned, is merely a means to an end. The unfinished life of Anna McNamor could not go on, like a flower unfolding, until her fragrance had been spent on the one who needed it most. Then he would shudder at the idea that if the school girl, who stopped to look at the flooded river, had started on again, passing him by, never to see her again. He would feel that he had been dreaming perhaps, until, touching his wife’s soft creamy cheeks, would realize that she was actually there, and his.