In the second week of September 1919, the residents of Carbon, PA were worked up over the inexplicable presence of a young woman in a white gown who had been seen “flitting about late at night”.
The ghost, as the townsfolk called her, was spotted three times between midnight and one o’clock one night. One who saw her was a Norwegian miner named Peter Oleson. The miner heard a strange knocking at his door three nights in a row. Each time he answered, the girl in white would stand there silently.
Oleson bid her come in, assuring her that he meant no harm. But still she said nothing. However, when he tried to touch her, the entity screamed shrilly and vanished.
Oleson wasn’t alone in his sighting. An Italian man named Frank Piso who lived nearby also received the spectral knocking.
William Maisers, a local grocer and something of an authority on local ghosts said the woman is the ghost of a young lady who was captured by Indians when they fled from Eastern Pennsylvania in the middle of the 18th Century. Maisers related how in the woman’s third and final attempt to flee her captors, she had been killed near where the modern mining town of Carbon lay.
