Ghost stories also serve up history lessons, author says
Courtesy of Thomas White
Thomas White, an archivist at Duquesne University, will talk about ghost stories and legends of Western Pennsylvania at Mt. Lebanon Public Library Monday.
MetroCreative
Ghost stories tend to be more enduring and more prevalent in Southwestern Pennsylvania, author Thomas White believes, because the region’s history dips back so far into the past and people who are from here “tend to retain their identity.”
Ghost stories and tales of the supernatural may give us shivers this time of year, but they also illuminate our history and offer a window into the concerns that we have in any given moment.
That’s the take of Thomas White, an archivist and curator of special collections at Duquesne University’s Gumberg Library and the author of several books on regional legends and lore, including “Ghosts of Western Pennsylvania,” “Haunted Roads of Western Pennsylvania” and “The Witch of the Monongahela: Folk Magic in Early Western Pennsylvania.” He points to the appropriately named Shades of Death Road near Avella in Washington County as an example – stories have long swirled that a runaway slave was caught and lynched there and that the ghosts of miners buried in a nearby mine wander in the woods.
White has “always been interested” in both history and ghost stories, he explained last week.
“They overlap. They’re ways of telling and rewriting history.”
White, of West View, will be stopping at the Mt. Lebanon Public Library Monday at 7 p.m. to illuminate the region’s ghost stories and legends. All spots are taken, but the library is maintaining a waiting list at eventkeeper.com.
His first book was published in 2009, after he researched some of the stories he had heard since his childhood. What he discovered is many ghost stories often contain a kernel of truth, even if they have otherwise been exaggerated. An example is the legend of the Green Man, a ghostly figure who was said to wander the roads near New Castle or Youngstown, Ohio. It turns out the Green Man was not an apparition but Raymond Robinson, a Beaver County resident who was born two days before Halloween in 1910 and severely disfigured in an electrical accident when he was a boy. Given the loss of his eyes and nose, and the attention he would attract when he ventured out, Robinson took walks at night along the roads near his home. He died in 1985, but the Green Man legend has endured.
“He was a real guy,” White said. “It was something that was partially true at the core that inspired the (ghost) story, or something that was misunderstood.”
Ghost stories tend to be more enduring and more prevalent in Southwestern Pennsylvania, White believes, because the region’s history dips back so far into the past and people who are from here “tend to retain their identity.” He also said that most of the United States’ folklore traditions began in Pennsylvania and filtered out to the rest of the country. And while ghost stories are often deeply rooted in long-running legends, they also reflect our own times, White explained, pointing to legends about satanic rituals that were abundant in the 1980s.
Scary tales are so engrossing because, more often than not, they make us participants, White said. When a particular place is said to be infested with wandering or malevolent spirits, there is “usually something you have to do for an interaction with the supernatural. … You’re part of the legend.”
And despite living in a world of science and technological advancements where few things can really qualify as being unexplained, White believes ghost stories will endure.
“I think it’s hard-wired in humanity, unless we’re taken over by AI robots,” he said. “It’s one of those things. The belief is always there.”