The Civil War was raging across America, pitting brother against brother in the bloodiest conflict in American history. The year was approximately 1864, and an unnamed man was looking out of his window in disdain at the heavy snow falling upon the densely-wooded mountains that surrounded the broad valley which played host to the small town of Benton in Pennsylvania's Columbia County. The weather may have been the world warning him not to do what he had been planning to, but he would not be dissuaded. You see, he had been having an affair with the wife of a man who had been enlisted to fight in the war. His love lived in a secluded mountaintop cabin, and he would brave blizzard and bloodshed to reach her. However, what he would encounter as he trekked up that infernal peak would leave anyone questioning their reality - and would ultimately cost him his life...
Ice Cold
The young man hitched his wagon and commenced the long journey up the winding mountain paths into his lover's sweet embrace. As he moved through the swirling white, he saw that he was slowly approaching an old lumber camp. Just to the side of the road was what he initially took to be a massive shard of ice rising up out of the ground. Riding up to it, he soon realised that this was no ordinary ice shard. Rather, it was a man - or at least something shaped like one. It was '
alabaster white' and appeared to be '
formed from snow' with a beard of icy spikes adorning its face, shining in the cold moonless night.
The witness continued to draw closer to the strange apparition, perhaps thinking that his eyes were deceiving him - but he didn't have the time to do any more thinking after that before the creature suddenly started moving, leaping from its frozen position and into the back of the man's wagon. It wrapped its freezing arms around his neck and started slashing at his neck with its icicle claws. After no small fight, the man managed to repel his preternatural attacker, but the damage had already been done.
Bleeding profusely, and obviously on his way to death, the terrified traveller managed to stumble his way to the door of his lover's cabin. She let him in, and he collapsed to the floor shortly after he entered the building. For the next three days, he was entirely bedridden - often going into fits in which he would desperately try to fight off attackers only he could see. When those terrible days had elapsed, he finally died - his features left contorted 'in paroxysms of fear'. An undertaker was called up from the town at the bottom of the mountain to carry his body down for burial - and as this undertaker progressed down through the snowy wilderness, he passed by a certain lumber camp. He didn't see the creature, but he did apparently catch sight of some extraordinarily large footprints...
That's Snow Ghost!
Or is it? This story is nearly unique among the annals of Fortean literature, which is why I just felt utterly compelled to cover it. However, I'm not sure just how true it is. It was first reported in the December 2015 issue of
The Curious Fortean magazine, in which it was attributed to Henry Wharton Shoemaker, an American folklorist from around the time. This actually puts us in a much better position to assume the potential veracity of such a tale. Shoemaker was actually the co-founder of the Pennsylvania Folklore Society, but has also apparently been accused of fabricating some of his tales. So it seems as if this story resides squarely in the grey area between fact and fiction, as with all good ghost stories...
