Nanty-Glo Ghosthunter Promotes Hiking Trail

By Linda Hudkins
(originally for Altoona Mirror)

NANTY GLO – When a former local resident-turned-ghostbuster got a call that Hollywood was interested in a book she wrote, she insisted they hold a casting call in her hometown.

C.L. Shore , author of “Ghost Tales from the Ghost Trail,” grew up in the village of Twin Rocks , Cambria County , smack in the middle of some prime ghost-hunting territory. The tales she heard during her youth range from the lovelorn White Woman of Beulah, who prowls the countryside in search of her dead beau, to the one about Maggie, a young girl who has appeared for generations in a cemetery in a ball of fire.

Not so many months ago, Shore got a call that the book is under consideration to become a pilot for a television show. It could become a regular series on a network or at least a one-time program on a cable channel. The name of the show will be “Ghost Hunters:PSI,” the initials being a term that describes the unknown.

“We put the book together to bring attention to the Ghost Town Trail,” she says. So it was only fitting that when Hollywood rang that she would direct them to the Nanty Glo Firehall to search for actors to fill the roles.

The Ghost Town Trail is a 16-mile path that spans Cambria and Indiana counties and is for non-motorized uses, including hiking, biking and horseback riding.

The trail didn’t get its name because of any particular ghost, says Delores Columbus, executive director of the Cambria County Conservation and Recreation Authority. Ed Patterson of Indiana County Parks chose the name back in 1994 because it’s interesting and it reflects the numerous ghost towns or coal patch towns that have disappeared from along the former rail bed, she says. Among them are Bracken and Wehrum, a boom town assembled by a coal company, complete with boarding houses, schools and a theater. But when the coal was gone, the company disassembled the town, lock, stock and barrel, Columbus says.

Dead-center on the trail sits the Eliza Furnace in the tiny borough of Vintondale, she says. The furnace is a nearly perfectly preserved specimen of an iron furnace that operated between 1846 and 1849. It’s also believed to be the site where a man hanged himself, she says.

“On a moonlit night, you can see a man hanging there,” Columbus says, repeating the local legend.

C.L. Shore is the name Cynthia Lee Shore-Sterling uses when she writes books. Before she left her hometown a few decades ago, she was known as Cindy Mehalko.

Shore-Sterling isn’t the kind of ghostbuster who finds errant spirits at every turn. Investigating ghost stories started out as a hobby for her and quickly turned into a field of study. What she does, she says, is investigate people’s claims that they’ve seen something out of the ordinary.

In her book, published a few years ago, she compiled many of the stories from her home region and other places and used her literary license to create a single setting for them along the Ghost Town Trail near the home of her youth.

“I am not a psychic or medium; I am a field scientist,” she says. “Ninety-five or more percent of the things we investigate are not ghosts.”

For example, she tells the story of the farmer she met who often found footprints on his kitchen floor. The prints would go away, then magically reappear.

After careful examination, Shore-Sterling and her team of ghostbusters with their detection equipment figured out that the farmer’s cows had been eating grain that contained phosphorus. The phosphorus passed through their digestive tracts and ended up on the ground where the farmer’s boots picked it up and carried it into the kitchen.

No ghost. Case closed on that one, Shore-Sterling reports.

But the “haunting” in a house in Pittsburgh wasn’t so easily solved and ended up in the “PSI” file.

A family reported strange apparitions, constantly seeing images, Shore-Sterling says. She and her ghost team checked the electricity, water pipes, underground water and loose wires to no avail. “All of our equipment was just off the board.”

“That house made television as one of the haunted places in America ,” she said. “All we know is that it is.” The casting call will give local people an opportunity to audition for roles of the ghost crew, the ghosts, the show’s host and extras.  

Filming, which will be done the week of June 7, will take place on the Ghost Town Trail and surrounding areas, around Pittsburgh and in Los Angeles, Shore-Sterling says.

Columbus says the book, one of nearly two dozen by Shore-Sterling, is a fun book, even if it’s only vaguely related to the real trail. She hopes the book and film lead people to say, “Let’s go see what that trail is like.”

Shore-Sterling built into the deal an opportunity for Columbus to film a trailer as an advertising pitch for the Ghost Town Trail, Columbus says.

The trail, which attracts a conservatively estimated 75,000 hikers, bikers and horsemen each year, runs between Nanty Glo, Cambria County , and Dilltown , Indiana County, with a spur trail known as the Rexis branch to White Mill Station in Blacklick Township , she says.

The long term goal is to connect the county seats of Cambria and Indiana counties, namely the boroughs of Ebensburg and Indiana. Within a couple weeks, contractors will be sought to complete an eight-mile extension to Ebensburg by late this year.

Ghost Town Trail hours are from dawn to dusk, not exactly the best time for ghost hunting. But Columbus says it’s awfully dark, even in the daytime, around the old abandoned mines.

“Ghosts could be in there,” she laughs. “Who knows?” Columbus says the only reminders of the towns, mines and railroads that remain are indentations from old foundations that can be seen when snow blankets the ground and the nostalgia that’s conjured up by Shore-Sterling’s books.

The author may have been content to let casting occur entirely in Pittsburgh or Los Angeles , but her first thought was of her hometown, Columbus says. “She has not forgotten her roots.”

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