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

by Henry W. Shoemaker

There was a pause, as if no one wanted to take up such a very personal topic before strangers. It was in the days when the Fox sisters were electrifying all of Pennsylvania, including the celebrated Dr. Elisha Kane, with their mediumship, so that it was as popular a topic then as now, in the days of Sir Oliver Lodge and Mrs. Herbine.

At length one of the men, also a hunter, from Berks County, broke the silence by asking if any one present had heard the story of the Levan ghost of Oley Township, in Berks; if not, he would tell it. None had ever heard it, so he told of the young Levan girl who had lost her father, to whom she was particularly attached.

One evening, while milking, she was seized with a very strong feeling that her father was near, which feeling kept up for a week, growing stronger daily. At last one evening she went into her room–the house was built all on one floor–and she saw her father, as natural as life, seated on an old chest that had come from France, for the Levans were Huguenot refugees.

The girl did not seem to be afraid to see her father, about whom a light seemed to radiate, and they conversed some time together, mostly on religious topics. Her mother and sisters, who were in another room, heard her talking, and the voice which sounded like that of the departed, and came to the door, which was ajar.

“Who are you talking to?” the mother inquired.

“To father–he is here; come in and see him,” replied the girl, calmly.

The family was afraid to enter, remaining outside until the conversation had finished and the ghost vanished. When the girl rejoined them, the side of her face that had been turned to her father was slightly scorched or reddened, as if she had been close to a fire. And that tenderness of skin remained as long as she lived.

While other versions of the story have appeared, this is the way it was told that stormy night in the Washington Inn in the long ago.

The ice having been broken, one of the women spoke up, saying that the part of the story which told of the girl’s face being burned by the aura from the ghost interested her most, that over in the Nittany Valley there was a case in the old Carroll family of a woman who had an only child which she loved to distraction, but which unfortunately died. The mother took on terribly, and during the night when she was sitting up with the little corpse, besought it to prove to her that the dead lived, if only for just one minute.

In the midst of her weeping and wailing, and romping about the cold, dimly-lit room, the dead child rose up in its little pine box and motioned its sorrowing mother to come to it. The woman ran to the coffin and the little one touched her forehead with its finger, which burned her like a red-hot poker. Then it sank back with a gasp and a groan, and was dead again. Ever afterwards there was a sore, tender spot on the woman’s forehead where the corpse had touched it.