Pittsburgh, 1892: the Kecksburg farmhouse ghost that carried night-watchers out cold.

What the paper reported

At a stone farmhouse in Kecksburg, night watches of three to ten men took turns facing a “spook” in one bedroom, and several were carried out unconscious. The trouble began when the old house was remodeled. A long search inside and out failed to explain the hammering noises, and the paper dared skeptics to solve it.

Exhibit A · Transcription

Kecksburg’s Healthy Ghost

Is Old-Fashioned and Does Not Want the House Remodeled.

A Disappointed Farmer’s Curses

[Special Telegram to The Dispatch.] Greensburg, Pa., Dec. 11.—The wise materialists who insist that all so-called supernatural phenomena are traceable to purely natural causes can acquire a valuable farm property at a merely nominal figure and at the same time solve a mystery that is baffling scores of hard-headed investigators by laying out the ghost in a farm house in Kecksburg, near this city.

For some weeks past night watches numbering from three to ten men have tackled the “spook,” and several of them have been taken out of the bedroom, where the demonstrations are made, in an unconscious condition. In one instance there were grave fears that one of the investigators would not recover from his experience with some agency that is master of the situation. And, unlike the average ghost story, the actors in this one have the cheerful habit of living in the place where the ghost does business, and their names are given in connection with their statements.

Transcribed from the page image, spelling as printed (“Pittsburg”); line-end hyphens joined. The image starts at the article’s third deck and shows the opening two paragraphs. Checked word by word against the Library of Congress’s OCR text.

Newspaper

Pittsburg Dispatch

Published in

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Headline

Kecksburg’s Healthy Ghost.

Date

December 12, 1892

Page

7

Permalink

www.loc.gov/resource/sn84024546/1892-12-12/ed-1/?sp=7

Source

Library of Congress, Chronicling America. Public domain (published 1892).