HGB Ep. 496 - Haunted Amish Country: Lancaster County

Moment in Oddity - Fat Albert the Blimp

Back in March of this year, Diane and I traveled down to the Florida Keys for our honeymoon. While cruising down the highway, what did we spy with our little eyes but a big stationary blimp that had the appearance of a white whale from a distance. Of course this was just after the Chinese spy balloon reports so I immediately began searching my phone for more information. Turns out this chonky balloon has a nickname by locals of Fat Albert. The blimp is one of eight Tethered Aerostat Radar Systems (or TARS for short), that hover along the U.S. southern border. This balloon is indeed a spy balloon of sorts, however the Customs and Border Patrol and the Department of Homeland Security prefers the term 'surveillance' balloon. They utilize Fat Albert to monitor boats and low-flying planes in the area. According to articles, the blimp was the first of its kind, going aloft in 1978. In 1981, Fat Albert decided to go on a pleasure cruise. The blimp broke free from its moorings and began a tour around the Gulf of Mexico. Some kindly fishermen who spied Fat Albert hooked the runaway blimp to their 23 foot fishing boat. They were thanked for their efforts by promptly being lifted, men, boat and all before dumping them into the water near the Mud Keys. That Fat Albert was finally shot out of the sky by a Air Force F-4 Phantom fighter jet using air-to-air missiles. Now, if you're ever driving down scenic U.S. Hwy 1, I don't recommend trying to get a closer look at Fat Albert due to the fact that he is tethered to a military base. The base is located in Cudjoe Key and although you won't encounter a giant killer canine there, you may be met with guns. Fat Albert was scheduled to end his 45 year flight on March 15, 2023, however when we drove by on the 16th he was still flying high and proud. So if any listeners live in the area and know of Fat Albert's current status, please let us know. A blimp named Fat Albert floating over the Florida Keys for decades as surveillance, certainly is odd!

This Month in History - Stephen Foster Born

In the month of July, on the 4th, in 1826, American composer Stephen Foster was born in Lawrenceville, Pennsylvania. He wrote over 200 songs, many of which we are familiar with such as "Oh! Susanna", "Camptown Races", "Swanee River", "Beautiful Dreamer" and so many more. There are many biographies covering Foster's life but the details vary greatly. Some historians believe that his brother destroyed any writings about the family that he thought were negative. Foster had three older sisters and six older brothers and while his initial education was academic in nature, Stephen taught himself to play the clarinet, guitar, flute and piano. When he was about eight years old, his brother William thought that Stephen would benefit from being under the guidance of Henry Kleber, a German-born music dealer in Pittsburgh. Foster learned music composition from him. Despite never living in the South and only visiting it once, most of his songs are set in the South. He became sick with a fever in 1864 that weakened him and this was what some think caused him to fall in a hotel room in the Bowery and cut his neck. But it also may have been a cut made at his own hand. Whatever the case, his writing partner found him still alive in a pool of blood and rushed him to the hospital where he died three days later. He was only 37 years old, but his music has lived on for over 150 years.

Haunted Amish Country: Lancaster County (Suggested by: Kay Eberhart)

The Amish are one of the oldest communities in America, predating the formation of the United States. Lancaster County in Pennsylvania is considered Amish Country as this is where they first settled and continue to live. The county seat of Lancaster is one of the oldest inland cities in the United States and it was the capital of the state for thirteen years. There are several locations here that are reputedly haunted. Join us as we share the history and hauntings of haunted Amish Country!

Lancaster County was established in 1729. They had no courthouse at the time, so court was held in a tavern. The jail was at the sheriff's house. The first courthouse was built in Penn Square. That one was destroyed by fire in 1784 and a new one was built in the footprint. That eventually would be known as the State House when the city of Lancaster served as the state capital. The county is 46 miles wide and 43 miles long with the Susquehanna River bordering it on the west and cities named New Holland, Mount Joy, Marietta, Bainbridge and, of course, Lancaster. Lancaster was originally called "Hickory Town" and was first settled by the Pennsylvania Dutch who actually came from Germany and took their name from "Deutsch" in German. An immigrant named James Hamilton platted out the land. Lancaster became a county seat in 1729 and remains that today. One of the citizen's championed the renaming of the city to Lancaster after the English city from where he came. For this reason, the city is also known as the “Red Rose City.” Lancaster reached borough status in 1742. As the Revolutionary War raged, Lancaster became a munitions center and was the National Capital of the American colonies for one day, September 27, 1777. The British had captured Philadelphia and the Continental Congress had to flee. Lancaster would become the capital of Pennsylvania from 1799 to 1812.

Lancaster County is known for being the oldest Amish settlement in America. The Amish here live a very plain lifestyle that they have carried on for centuries and their culture is very important to the area. Tours are offered of the farms and houses and Amish quilts and furniture can be purchased. The Amish church is a group of traditionalist Anabaptist Christians that developed after a group of Swiss and Alsatian Mennonite Anabaptists split in 1693. One group left with a man named Jakob Ammann and they called themselves Amish. This group also eventually divided into the Old Order Amish and Amish Mennonites. The Old Order are the ones that still use horse and buggy to travel. Amish and Mennonites came to Pennsylvania in the early 18th century. They all speak Pennsylvania Dutch and are pacifists who will not participate in any military service. Those of us outside the Amish world are called "English" by them. The practice of headcovering is part of traditional Anabaptism. The Amish value humility, they reject labor-saving technologies, electricity and photographs and baptism takes place between the ages of 16 and 23. You must be baptized to join and no one is allowed to marry outside of the Amish church.

The series Amish Haunting started in 2014. The television show proves that the Amish are no strangers to ghosts, possessed dolls, demons and all kinds of chilling experiences. The Lapp family deals with a faceless doll that is evil and an Amish witch comes back from the dead to terrorize the living. A witch's tree that wasn't burned down unleashes evil and the angry ghost of a man disgraced by the Amish church haunts parishioners. An Amish family is cursed after using the dark art of fortune telling. Now obviously, the Amish community would have had nothing to do with this program because they don't do photos or videos - they don't even use mirrors. But the places where they live DO have hauntings. And that is what we are going to share on this episode. 

The Eternal Hunter

There is this legend told about an eternal hunter. Lancaster County had many foundries in the 18th and 19th century and there were all these iron furnaces along this border ridge. Ironmasters ran these furnaces and this story was about the ironmaster from Colebrook Furnace. He was an alcoholic who treated his workers poorly and his hunting dogs even worse. Everyone called him The Squire. One day, some men from Philadelphia paid him a visit and The Squire bragged about how great his hunting hounds were. When the group went out to hunt, the hounds didn't match his expectations and he said, "I'll show these town-bred gentlemen, if my dogs can hunt so well on earth, another hunt in hell!” The Squire then took his hounds to the furnace and ordered the workers to throw them in the fire. The dogs came back and haunted him and drained him of life and so his spirit now roams the countryside for eternity. The legend is thought to have originated in Germany and probably came over with the Amish. The German version of this legend is more charitable with the hunter going out to find food for the community and dying. In the afterlife he continues hunting to ensure generation after generation doesn't starve.

Mondale Road Bridge

Lancaster County has more covered bridges than any other Pennsylvania county and one of those bridges is an infamous Cry Baby Bridge. The story claims that this is the Mondale Road Bridge, but nobody knows exactly which bridge that is because Mondale Road has two bridges. These are the Hunsickers Mill Covered Bridge and the Pinetown Covered Bridge. Both were built in the mid-1800s and were damaged during Hurricane Agnes. They have been rebuilt and the one that is haunted has the spirit of a young Amish girl hanging around. The story goes that she was playing near the water and fell in and drowned. People who drive onto the bridge at night and turn off their lights, claim that the spirit of a young girl will crawl into the car and if she can't get in, she leaves small handprints on the car. 

Rachel’s Cafe & Creperie

Rachel's Cafe and Creperie is located at 201 W. Walnut Street in Lancaster's historic district. Rachel's is a popular, Parisian themed crepe place known for their savory varieties and Nutella drinks. The building is old, but there are no recorded deaths. Staff and clients claim that faucets turn on by themselves in the bathrooms. A former manager named Morgan Miller said, "It would randomly just turn on full blast! I used to think that maybe it was customers leaving it on, but it would happen early in the morning. Then I thought it was Ray [Rachel Adam’s father], but c’mon, he knows how to turn off a faucet." So perhaps this is the owner's father coming back to play pranks on his daughter's business.

Franklin & Marshall College

Franklin & Marshall College was established in 1787 and offers an undergraduate liberal education. It started off as a German school named German College and Charity School. The college became Franklin College and then merged with Marshall College in 1853. They each were named for their founders, Benjamin Franklin and John Marshall. Franklin College would be the first in the nation to allow female students, although later it would become an all-male school. Once the colleges merged in 1853, a new building and site was proposed. The site had been the former Gallows Hill and the building, now known as Old Main, was built in the Gothic Revival style and has a distinctive tall tower. Several class buildings and dormitories were added throughout the 1900s, with major expansions in the 50s and 60s.

The 200 acres of land upon which the college sits was not only Gallows Hill, it once had villages on the Susquehannock and then later a variety of indigenous people like the Shawnee, Seneca, Lenape and Nanticoke. The Lancaster Treaty of 1744 was made between English colonial officials and leaders of the Six Nations. The Conestoga Indian Town was still here and on December 14, 1763, a racist vigilante group known as the Paxton Boys, swept through and massacred several of the people. The survivors were taken prisoner and held in a Lancaster warehouse. They were subsequently murdered on December 27th. That leaves some bad energy here as does a story told about Dietz-Santee Hall. Workmen were digging on the side of the building in 1936 when they found several headless skeletons. The biology Department ended up having to come clean and admitted that their Anatomy Department dissected cadavers and these were bodies that they didn't dispose of correctly. The skulls more than likely ended up in some fraternity cellars.

There are many ghost stories connected to the campus. Hensel Hall houses the performing arts and was constructed in 1925. The building underwent a renovation in 2000 and was renamed Barshinger Center for the Performing Arts. The unexplained thing that happens here takes place when someone stands on the stage at night with all the lights turned off. If you look out over the empty auditorium, you might see two lights moving slowly back and forth across the back of the auditorium.

Another building on campus is Diagnothian Hall, which is a gorgeous building built in the Gothic Revival style in 1856. It was originally built to house a literary society. Members would read parts of classic books and then discuss what they read. They would also make speeches and debate. It then became the College Bookshop and then the Music Department. Today, it houses the Registrar's offices. During the Civil War, it served as a hospital for wounded soldiers. A part of the archives at the library documents a haunting experience a professor had one evening when he was working late and put on a Souza duet called “Red Cross Nurse,” a song about a nurse tending to soldiers during World War I. The archives says, “As this song played over his stereo, he began hearing sounds apart from the music — he heard moaning, rattling sounds, and overall, the sounds of a person in intense pain…He later realized the connection between his experience and Diagnothian Hall’s history as a Civil War hospital. About 3 or 4 years after his first experience, the same professor was in his office late at night and was playing the piece 'Haunted Landscape' by the University of Pennsylvania's George Crumb. Crumb wrote the piece specifically about the battlefield of Gettysburg as it is today and the sense of a 'lingering presence' there. The atmosphere of the piece is ambient and quiet. The professor, not realizing at that moment the implications of this piece, played it over his stereo and heard precisely the same sounds as before when he had played "Red Cross Nurse." Other people in the building have claimed to hear the slamming of doors when no one else is in the building.

Old Main sits next to Diagnothian Hall and sometimes at night, the bell that is in the tower will ring all on its own. Distler House was the Gym and is one of the oldest buildings on campus, being built in 1891. The upper floor had the gym equipment, while the lower floor had a bowling alley, dressing rooms, lockers and the boiler room. In the 1920s, the Old Gym was replaced by a new one and this building became a student center. It was remodeled in 1976 and renamed "Distler House" after former F&M president Theodore "Prexy" Distler. The building had administrative offices and academic departments until 2001 and then became the "Distler Student Union." Students report hearing strange noises late at night, especially on the upper floor. The sound is described as something similar to squirrels running in circles. There is also the sound of furniture moving and rough-housing, even though nobody is in the area of the sounds. This had been a gym with an indoor track and wrestling meets were held here, so perhaps these are residual sounds from the gym era.

The Huegel Alumni House is said to be haunted by a former President of the college because this had once been used as a residence for Presidents. His name was John Ahlum Schaeffer and he served as president from 1935-1941. Schaeffer had actually attended the school and belonged to the Kappa Sigma fraternity and Goethean Literary Society. So he was very attached to the school. He was a tall man and enjoyed smoking cigars. To blow off stress, he would leave campus at lunch and speed through the Lancaster County countryside, probably scaring the Amish in their buggies. On the evening of Sunday, April 6th, 1941, Schaeffer went to bed early to read a book and his daughter found him deceased sometime around midnight, still holding the book. He apparently had a cerebral hemorrhage. Strange sounds are heard, strange sensations are felt and the scent of cigars is often detected.

The Shadek-Fackethal Library is said to be haunted by a historian who loved the library and was there often to do research. That man was Dr. Harvey Bassler, noted geologist and expert on the Amazon river basin, and he spent his time in the library during the late 1940s researching the Pennsylvania-Dutch culture. He was also a director for the Pennsylvania German Society and collected many artifacts and books and used the NE corner of the 3rd-floor of the library for cataloging and organizing his collection. People described him as being an older man with shaggy white hair who was usually seen bent over a table, deep in thought. Bassler had premonitions about his death and told people he knew he was going to die in a car accident. He did just that on March 14th, 1950 when his car hit the open door of a parked car and careened into oncoming traffic and hit an oil truck head-on. Up through the 1970s and early 1980s, students and staff would find books strewn about after they had been shelved properly, they would hear strange sounds and the elevators seemed to have minds of their own, traveling to wrong floors and opening when no one had called them. One student described hearing noises like "people moving furniture" in the southwest corner of the 3rd floor. People believe that this is Dr. Bassler just watching over his collections and favorite library.

Wohlsen House was built in 1929 and initially served as the Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity house. In 1982, it was renovated and became the Admissions Office. People claim that a young man died in the house when he fell down the stairs. They have claimed to see the apparition of a man appear and then walk through a wall. The lights will turn off all by themselves and people started yelling, "Knock it off, Bob" and the lights would come back on. People have heard doors slamming in the house in the middle of the night on their own. Late one evening, a woman was working in the basement alone when she heard a loud bang on the stairs. She was alone in the house and learned later about the young man who fell down the stairs.

The Fulton Theatre

The Fulton Theatre is referred to as the "Grand Old Lady on Prince Street" and is the oldest working theater in the United States. We mentioned earlier that Indians that survived the massacre by the Paxton Boys were taken to a warehouse and imprisoned before they were also killed. Where the Fulton Theater now stands had been where that pre-revolutionary jail had stood. Fourteen of the Conestoga Native Americans were killed on this spot on December 28, 1763. As a matter of fact, the rear wall of the the theater was an exterior wall of the jail courtyard. Fulton Hall was built here in 1852 and named for Robert Fulton who was Lancaster County's steam engine pioneer. A wooden statue of him was placed on the front facade. A replica takes its place today, but the original was restored and is displayed in the front lobby. The construction was paid for by Lancaster merchant Christopher Hager and the building was designed by Samuel Sloan in the Victorian style and became a community center hosting plays, lectures, concerts and meetings. The hall was sold to a harness worker named Blasius Yecker and a hotelier named Hilaire Zaepfel. After the Battle of Gettysburg, Fulton Hall served as a hospital for wounded soldiers and then a few years later was renovated by Yecker and a man named Edward Forrest Durang. This would now be a true performance venue and had a grand re-opening on October 2nd, 1873 under the name Fulton Opera House. The first play they hosted was Othello and the proceeds benefited widows and orphans of the Civil War. 

Yecker's son Charles took over operations in 1903 and he preferred the neo-classic style, so he hired local architect C. Emlen Urban to redesign the interior. By the 1950s, this was no longer a fancy playhouse, but a second-rate movie house. Lancaster residents began a campaign to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Fulton by returning it to an opera house, but everything about the place was now set for movies and the task was too daunting. They opted for a new movie screen, which was installed in 1957 and it was now called the Fulton Art Theater. The great grandson of the Fulton Hall founder, Nathaniel E. Hager, joined with Lancaster citizens to form the Fulton Opera House Foundation to save the building from the wrecking ball. In 1983, the Actor’s Equity Association recognized the Fulton as a professional regional theatre and in 1995 it was restored to its Victorian styling, reopening on October 14, 1995 with a Gala Reopening performance of the Stephen Sondheim musical, Company. And it is still going strong today and able to boast about the many stars that have graced its stage including Sarah Bernhardt, Mark Twain, Horace Greeley, Debbie Reynolds, Lily Tomlin, Lionel Barrymore, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, W.C. Fields, George M. Cohan, Treat Williams and Lancaster’s own Jonathan Groff. Theatrical performances included Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show.

And then there are the ghosts. One has been nicknamed "The Whistler" because he likes to whistle. His full-bodied apparition is usually seen wearing a three-piece white suit with a straw boater hat, brown shoes and brown belt. This spectre has been reported for decades and no one is sure where he came from. The Fulton's Director of Education, Mark Wise, said, "Some people say he whistles when someone is messing up their line or their lyrics, or perhaps he’s a bit of a trickster and likes to play jokes on people. No one’s ever really been too afraid of him; they feel like he is a positive presence to have around. But he’s appeared over and over for decades now."

Another of the spirits is male and he appeared in the audience one night during a closed rehearsal. When he was questioned as to who he was, he claimed that he was there to see his granddaughter. He told a spotlight operator, "Oh, well, I'm here to see my granddaughter perform. I've never gotten to hear her sing before on stage" and then he pointed her out. After the rehearsal was done, the spotlight operator went up to the woman and told her, "I just got to meet your grandfather -- he was so proud of you, so excited to come hear you sing and perform." The woman looked at him very confused and then informed him that both of her grandfathers were dead. Then she said that she did recall that one of her grandfathers had told her that he was sad that he never got to hear her sing on stage.  

Broadway star Marie Cahill performed at the Fulton many times in the late 1800s and early 1900s. She died in New York City on August 23, 1933 and apparently she liked the Fulton so much, she returned in the afterlife. Wise said, "She tends to appear to women, female actresses on our stage, she always appears downstage right. There used to be a spiral staircase from downstage right that would go down to the dressing rooms, and she always insisted on having a dressing room down at the bottom of downstage right, at the bottom of that staircase. Some women have even said she has screamed in their ears while they’re trying to sing or say their lines. So we think she has some major jealousy issues with fellow divas." This ghost usually appears in a white dress and once told a stagehand who asked her what her name was that her name was Marie.

Bube’s Brewery

Alois Bube was a German immigrant who arrived in Mount Joy, Pennsylvania in 1876 and bought a small brewery there. He had been a brewing apprentice in Germany and brought his knowledge of creating German-style lager beer to the area. Alois expanded the brewery several times and added a Victorian hotel and restaurant to it. He was very successful, but he died suddenly in 1908 at the age of 57. His family continued on with the brewery and managed to survive Prohibition. His family continued with the business until the 1960s. Restoration started in 1968 and continues today. There are several restaurants here now. The Bottling Works is set up like a tavern and is in the original bottling plant for the brewery. The water was drawn from the limestone taverns. There is a Biergarten just outside The Bottling Works. The Catacombs is several stories below street level. It's such a cool space. It really is like being down in a cave with stone-lined vaults and big barrels for aging the beer. In 2001, a small microbrewery was added and they produce small batches of 6 to 8 offerings a year. Sam Allen is the current owner.

There are two spirits reported to be here. One is a woman in a long gown. The other goes by the nickname the White Hermit and is said to haunt the caves under the street level, which of course is lined with limestone. The story behind him is that he was a schoolteacher who immigrated to America from Scotland in the 1700s. His mother died when he was young and his father remarried to a woman the hermit didn't get along with. The father went away in the middle of winter and the hermit pushed his stepmother and and half-sibling out the door and they froze to death. He ran away to America after that and settled in Lancaster. He worked as a schoolteacher until one day someone from his hometown in Scotland came into town. The hermit decided he better hide so he ran into the caverns under the brewery and hid. He went unnoticed for years and when people finally spotted him, his hair had grown very long and gone white. So that is how he got his nickname. It was thought that he eventually died in the caves. He was last seen around 1765. And now people see his apparition down in the caves.

Railroad House Inn

The Railroad House Inn is located in Marietta, Pennsylvania. The borough was settled in 1727 and was named by combining the first names of the wives of the first two settlers, Mary Cook and Etta Anderson. The Railroad House Inn was built in 1823 directly across from the train tracks. The inn mostly housed canal workers and the occasional tourist. Today, it offers nine remodeled rooms and some ghosts. There is a Woman in White whom has been seen by several guests and people call her Annie. She likes to flirt with male guests. People see some male spirits who are thought to have been canal workers. There is also the spirit of a young girl with blonde hair. She is usually seen in Victorian garb and likes to play pranks. Room 6 is said to be the most haunted, but guests have reported feeling cold spots and seeing objects move throughout the inn.

Haldeman Mansion

The Haldeman Mansion in Bainbridge is named for Samuel Stehman Haldeman who was an internationally known scientist. He was born in the house that sits on what is known as the Locust Grove Estate in 1812. He is credited with advancing American science to a place of independence from that of Europe, but he was also a successful businessman in iron manufacturing. Professor Haldeman also was a leader in the development of phonetics as a science. (Mort: That's studying the difference between how different things are pronounced like the letter Z and the letter S. With Z our vocal cords vibrate.) The estate, which overlooks the Susquehanna River, is part of a historic and archaeological district. It is believed that there is evidence of four Indian cultures that were on the land for at least 900 years. The estate originally was made up of 440 acres and the earliest European settlers were Scot-Irish immigrants that included a fur trader, a Lieutenant Colonel from the French & Indian War, a brigade commander and wealthy tavern and land owner. That final one was Henry Haldeman. He bought the Locust Grove Estate in the late 1700s with the house already on the property. The Haldeman family lived on the property until the early 1800s and made many additions to it through the years that included a four-story grist & commercial mill, distillery, sawmill and livestock operations. They were close friends with President James Buchanan who more than likely visited the mansion.

The Haldeman Mansion is said to be one of the most haunted places in Lancaster County. There have been multiple spirits seen here. These ghosts include a teenage boy, a singing female servant, a grouchy man named Jacob who doesn't like the singing of religious music or furniture being moved and a little girl. There were several unmarked graves found during plumbing and electrical work that was done under the building. Fox 43 was out there for Halloween in 2018 and they reported hearing disembodied voices, seeing a chair move and lots of equipment going off. The reporter demonstrated the dousing rods and got them to point to where the spirit was standing and they crossed a couple of times to answer "yes" to questions. 

Christina Mark told Tyler Huber of Legends of Lancaster, "Apparitions, ghosts -- people say they can feel them, some hear them say things, some people have seen the spirits. I myself saw one here that was back in the early 1980s. I was coming through the house and actually walking out to the front porch. There was a wedding here, and I was putting food out on the tables. And as I came into this room, I could ... it was like I felt something, and I looked over at the window. There was a woman standing there, and she was looking out the window. She didn’t react to me whatsoever; she just looked out the window, dressed in a normal dress you’d see in the 1800s. … then all of a sudden she was gone."

A guest wrote of her experience, "One year, my husband and I were here for a family member’s birthday party. It was a teenager, and we had a mini haunted house for the kids, and we heard a door slam upstairs. We had made some areas off-limits. My husband thought, ‘OK, some kids went in the far room.’ The one staircase was closed off and no one could use it. When he went into the room, it was totally empty. When he came back downstairs, it happened again. He saw someone go past the stairwell, so he went back upstairs, opened up the door, and nobody was there -- no one he could see."

Jaytro wrote on TripAdvisor in 2018, "It helps to go in with an open mind and to actually participate in the experience. I distinctly heard children's voices at one point, even though no children were present in the group or on the property. I had just come downstairs from the upper floor when I heard the voices of children, laughing. It seemed to be coming from the front entrance. This room was two rooms back from the entrance. I was so sure that I heard them, that I actually walked out to the front entrance and looked outside for the children. Later in the session, I confided in Lora what I had heard. She had told me that while we were upstairs with Rob and she stayed on the first floor, she had heard the children's voices, but didn't say anything to anyone because she didn't want to influence our experience. It definitely gave me chills!!"

Rock Ford  

Historic Rock Ford was the home of Revolutionary War general Edward Hand. Hand was born in Ireland in 1744. He studied medicine in Dublin and enlisted as Surgeon's Mate with the 18th Royal Irish Regiment of Foot and was sent to Fort Pitt in America. In 1774, he resigned from the British service and moved to Lancaster to open a medical practice. He married Katherine Kitty Ewing in 1775 and joined the Continental Army as Lt. Colonel of the 1st Battalion of Pennsylvania Riflemen. Hand and Kitty had eight children: Sara, Dorothy, Katherine, John, Jasper, Mary, Margaret and Edward. After the war, Hand got involved with politics, joining the Federalist Party and serving in Congress. The Hands moved to Rock Ford in 1794 and did have at least two slaves in the time they lived there. The land upon which Rock Ford stands was purchased in two transactions: 160 acres in 1785 and an additional 17 acres in 1792. The name Rock Ford was inspired by the fact that the house sits along the banks of the Conestoga River and there were no bridges at the time, so the river had to be crossed at fords, which are shallow parts with hard rock bottoms. These are termed "ford at the rock" thus Rock Ford. This was a working farm with livestock and large orchards. Hand was an avid horticulturist and introduced a strain of plum named for him.

In total, four members of the Hand family died in the mansion. Hand died in 1802 and Kitty died in 1805, both at the mansion. The Hands' eldest son, John, took his own life with a bullet to the head. His blood is rumored to still stain the hardwood floor in an upstairs guest bedroom. The property was sold in 1810 and run as a tenant farm for 150 years with little being changed to the house. In the 1950s, the Lancaster Area Refuse Authority bought the property with the intention of demolishing the house and building a trash incineration plant and landfill. The Junior League of Lancaster put a stop to that in 1957 when they bought Rock Ford and the Rock Ford Foundation was established the following year. They restored the house and opened it as a museum in 1960. The mansion is four stories with each floor having a central hall and four corner rooms. The inside painting was restored to original and furnishings are from the Hands' time at the house. The only original thing is a dress that was worn by Kitty. There is a barn on the property that is not original, but is located where the original barn had been. Tours are offered as well as hosting of special events and weddings.

Guests and staff have experienced strange things at Rock Ford. Family members died in the house, but also it has been reported that in the 1970s, some Native American skeletons were found buried under the house. The phantom smell of snuffed candles has been detected, especially in the morning. Disembodied footsteps have been heard on the stairs. The Hands' daughter Margaret died in the house at the age of eleven and a young girl ghost that has been seen in the house is thought to be her. EVP have been caught including the voice of a young girl and a threatening voice that said “Kill her” toward a paranormal investigator. Human shaped mists have been captured in photos as well.

Director Sam Slaymaker told Legends of Lancaster, "In the 1970s, a couple had a son living in an apartment on top, where caretakers would live. The son was told he shouldn’t be playing in the museum rooms, but kids being kids, he did. He one day came back to his mom shaken up and he told her that he was in the boys’ bedroom on the second floor -- the Hand boys’ bedroom -- and there was another boy there. He said he could tell it was his room and he didn’t want him there."

Amish Country reminds us all of a simpler time and many of us probably long for that simpler life. One thing is for certain though, it doesn't matter what level of technology one embraces from the wagon wheel to artificial intelligence, ghosts are involved with it all and can be detected with gadgets or nothing at all. Are these location in Amish Country haunted? That is for you to decide!