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Leanna Wilson Townsend, my grandmother, was
a teller of tales. Had any of us had the sense to commit the stories
to writing, what a splendid collection we would now have. As it
is, almost the only stories we have are two accounts of the activities
of a couple of ghosts who inhabited places where Leanna had lived
when a child.
One of these stories was the tale of the Park Gate ghost, which
Charles W. Townsend II recorded and I typed many years ago.
For some time the Wilsons lived near Ellwood City, Pennsylvania,
at Rock Point. There they took up residence in an old stone house
called Park Gate. Leanna's brothers, Birt and Robert Clyde Cooper,
were born there in 1874 and 1877; and I think Leanna, who was
already living there when seven years old, perhaps earlier, was
very fond of the place.
In the time of the Indians a beautiful young girl with lovely
long hair had lived at Park Gate with her mother, father, and
brothers.
One morning the Indians appeared suddenly, massacred the parents
and brothers, and took the girl prisoner. As she was being led
away by an Indian warrior, she suddenly twisted about, snatched
his knife, and tried to stab him. In the scuffle the Indian killed
her with his tomahawk and left her lying where she had fallen
between two young oak trees. When the neighbors came and found
her there, they buried her between the trees.
Throughout the years that followed, many a citizen traveling home
late at night was terrified to see that girl standing between
the trees where she had been killed, her beautiful long hair hanging
down . Though a wagon road had formerly passed between the trees,
horses shied from the spot, often refusing to go through. Finally
the road was abandoned.
When Leanna was a little girl, the two big oak trees stood in
her father's cow pasture, and never was a cow seen going between
them. One day as a big storm was coming up and little Leanna was
bringing in the cows, she wanted to take the short way home between
the oaks; but though she shouted to the cows and ran after them
with a switch, they stopped short before the trees and refused
to go a step further. Lighting slashed the sky in long white streaks,
thunder roared, but Leanna had to turn the cows and bring them
home by the long way around.
Although many of the neighbors had seen the girl, no one in the
Wilson family ever did. But one night their hired man, having
got home very late, went out to feed the pigs after dark. As he
dumped the pig feed over the fence into the their trough, he happened
to glance over his shoulder. There was the girl behind him just
reaching out to touch him. He was so scared that he dived over
the fence head first into the pig trough, then thought better
of it, and ran to the house faster than anyone would have thought
possible. If Leanna's father, Robert Vance Wilson, had not heard
an unusual commotion and opened the kitchen door at the right
moment, the hired man would probably have gone right through it.
As it was, he fell into the room yelling, "I seen her! I
seen her." The Wilsons never again saw that hired man, for
he left early the next morning before anyone else was out of bed.
The old stone house is no longer standing at Park Gate, but the
same girl may yet search through the grounds for her lost parents
and brothers.