Spirit in the Woods

by Michael Long

[Originally published in the Fall 2025 issue of Mount Gretna Magazine. View the full issue to see this story in its designed layout, complete with additional images.]

The woods, as American poet Robert Frost famously noted, are “lovely, dark, and deep.”

Mount Gretna, lovely beyond dispute, possesses deeper, darker features that emerge only as summer yields to autumn and the woodland retreat’s lengthening shadows begin to stir.

Hundreds of thousands of souls of varying temperaments have passed through these woods — pleasure-seekers, soldiers, Christians, and criminals — each carrying a distinct energy. Time pays no mind to the matter of these beings, erasing the physical traces of generations with a sweep of its indifferent hand, but the energy of people and creatures somehow slips through its fingers. The clergy who preach from the pulpit and the scientists who lecture from the lab know well the same truth: Energy persists. 

Photo by Shannon Fretz Photography. An eerie path through the Gretna woods.

Some call it spirit

Whence spirits come and whither they go is anyone’s guess, but they do seem to hang about the trees at twilight. At night, they move through the woods, sometimes padding along with a whisper over a carpet of leaves and loam, sometimes stomping with abandon, whipping up an unholy racket as they crash through the underbrush. The Gretna woods teem with spirits whose intentions, kindly or wicked, depend on the eyes that look upon them, the ears that hear them, and the skin that feels their heat.

One of those spirits belongs to Mary Boyd, whose brief walk upon the Earth began in 1910 and ended before she reached what today would be the legal drinking age. Her solitary grave lies hidden among a thicket of pawpaw trees and Japanese barberry in the woods just south of the environmental center at Clarence Schock Memorial Park at Governor Dick.

In paper records, Mary, who died of typhoid fever in 1930 at age 20, has the dubious distinction of being older when she married than when she died.

Around mid-January 1926, two months before her 16th birthday, Mary Corkle became pregnant with the child of 24-year-old Manheim dairyman Arthur Boyd. By May, the two had married, likely without the blessing of Mary’s parents, who would have needed to give written consent to their union due to Mary’s tender age. Instead, the couple lied on their marriage license application, listing Mary as 21, an age she would never reach.

Mary gave birth to her first child, Arthur Jr., in October 1926, and she bore Arthur Jr. a sister, Edith, on March 26, 1928, the day before her 18th birthday.

The neat, deliberate signature Mary penned to her marriage license application would seem better suited to a schoolwork assignment. Arthur’s steady, practiced hand appears to have filled out both his and her portions of the application, including her inflated age.

Whether Mary thought her circumstances favorable or ill is impossible to know, but on her deathbed, she or someone who loved her decided her eternal rest would come not in a cemetery where her husband might one day lie beside her, but on the land outside Mount Gretna where Elmer and Lottie Corkle raised her and her eight siblings.

The tree rooted at the head of Mary’s grave lived more than twice as long as she, yet time has reduced even that once-sturdy hardwood to a wizened stump and a couple of moss-covered logs tented over a metal grave marker stuck into the ground by a local funeral home that itself faded into history four decades ago.

Still, life blooms at Mary’s feet. Each spring, daffodils emerge to form a yellow skirt around her deathbed, and the woodland property’s owners, Brett and Janice Balmer, register Mary’s presence as benevolent, not menacing.

On the hunt — in life and death

To find a truly malevolent spirit, one would need to follow the Horse-Shoe Trail a couple of miles west to Colebrook, where late 18th-century ironmaster Samuel Jacobs once stoked the fires that fueled the burgeoning iron empire of the Coleman family, whose collective wealth would one day build Gretna.

Although Samuel Jacobs’ dusty remains today lie entombed in a crypt in Harrisburg Cemetery, some say his tortured spirit still stumbles through the woods between Colebrook and Gretna, chased by a pack of baying hunting hounds he abused throughout his life.

The legend, first recorded in 1867 in an epic poem “The Legend of the Hounds” by Philadelphia writer George Henry Boker, goes something like this:

Despite holding the title of Squire — short for Esquire, meant to convey high standing —wealth had corrupted the spirit of the Colebrook Furnace ironmaster and made him a mean, lecherous drunk.

An avid fox hunter, the Squire boasted to his city friends about the excellence of his hunting hounds and took the men into the countryside on horseback to show off their prowess.

The pack, uncharacteristically indifferent to the hunt that day, failed to flush out a fox, enraging the Squire, who drove his dogs to the top of Colebrook Furnace and ordered his workers to toss them into the fiery maelstrom. He threw in the pack’s leader, Flora, a devoted, sleek white beauty who had once saved his life and who licked his face even as he lifted her over the flames.

Haunted by what he had done, the Squire set out to drink himself to death.

Lying in bed, breathing his last in full view of the belching furnace outside, he claimed to see his hounds leaping from the flames, their noses ablaze with the scent of new prey: him.

As fantastic as the tale seems, the pearls of legend grow upon grains of truth. George Henry Boker first heard the story from a friend who lived in the Lebanon Valley, and newspaper records indicate the ironmaster was, in fact, a fox hunter of some repute. In 1812, the County of Lancaster paid him $2.67 for 10 “old red fox scalps.”

The Squire’s general irascibility is harder to verify. Notice of his death at age 57, printed in the April 17, 1819, edition of the Lancaster Intelligencer, refers to “Samuel Jacobs, Esq.” as “a worthy and respectable Citizen,” a characterization any newspaper editor might have inferred from his courtesy title.

His wife, Sarah, followed him in death not a week later. Could Samuel have been so attentive, and his love for his wife so strong, that she died of a broken heart? Not likely. While Samuel’s cause of death was never listed, given the times, he and his wife probably died of the same disease.

His status as a slave owner might be the most significant indicator of his nature. In 1790, when most members of polite society north of the Mason-Dixon Line were divesting their interests in the slave trade, records show Samuel owned two slaves. While slave ownership may not contribute to creating a tortured soul, it’s hard to imagine such a grisly tale issuing from the legacy of an otherwise well-adjusted, stand-up guy.

How did George Boker describe him?

“Stern and strong as the dark, pitiless vague form/ That reigns in Hades, when the storm/ Of wrath is wildest, and the lost/ On blazing waves are upward tossed/ Pale with their tortures; so the Squire/ Grim and unshaken in his ire.”

Samuel’s spirit would seem a fit quarry for the hounds of hell … in any woods where they might give chase.

Michael Long is the deputy editor of the Investigations and Enterprise team for LNP | LancasterOnline and WITF. He and his family hail from northern Lancaster County and still frequent Mount Gretna.