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Rogue's Hollow

Mysterious things happen in the wooded hollow that used to be the mining village of Rogue's Hollow. Russell Frey's self-published history book describes many of them, and you can still hear about haunted mills and headless horsemen from the guides at the Rogue's Hollow Historical Society. Touring the hollow doesn't give you much of an idea of what this ghosttown used to be, since the handful of buildings that still remain are dilapidated and identifiable only by wooden signs posted along the path. The mines and caves are sealed up, and the old rutted road to Doylestown has been replaced by smooth two-lane blacktop.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, however, Rogue's Hollow was a wild place. Outlaws and gangsters hid out here, far from civilization and any kind of effective law enforcement.  The locals weren't much better; shoot-outs were a fairly regular occurrence, as was being robbed at gunpoint by bandits of all stripes. It's speculated that the more bizarre aspects of Rogue's Hollow lore were made up to keep people away from what was actually just a down-and-dirty, crooked town...but bizarre things continue to happen there, even a full century later.

As Frey's history says, "Ghosts are best seen in the Hollow on a moonlit night when there are large, fleecy clouds overhead. Then the Hollow fairly comes alive with the residents of the spirit-world, those who had a hand in making Rogue's Hollow a wild and dangerous place scores of years ago. It's said that you can see more as twilight turns to pitch blackness of the night.  Then you can see nooks and crannies with shadowy forms on the move."

Though long since burned to the ground under mysterious circumstances, the apparition that haunted Chidester's Mill was a popular spook tale in the Hollow for many years. Despite denials from the Chidester family, the decrepit, unpainted, slat-sided woollen mill was a favorite place for kids to dare each other to sneak into. When the untraceable fire turned it to ashes it was thought that the ghost had set it out of spite rather than allow the building to be sold to an outsider.

The abandoned mines around Rogue's Hollow are full of the apparitions of miners who died suddenly there in cave-ins and suffocation accidents. Tools are said to be picked up by unseen hands in the black shafts and chip away at veins of coal, though the entrance to the mine has been permanently blocked. And the walkways near the mineshafts are equally plagued by residents of the spirit world.

Rogue's Hollow's Crybaby Bridge is probably the most widespread legend of its kind in the entire state––and that's saying something in a state with dozens of variations on that theme.

The woman who threw her unwanted newborn over the edge (if she ever existed) is long dead. Today it's a nondescript footbridge over a small creek near the visitors' center, but odd things are still seen from time to time in the vicinity. The remorseful mother sometimes still weeps over the railing or wanders the roadways nearby.

The Gray Lady in the Hollow Road

As a teenager, my friends and I spent a lot of time in the Hollow. It was a great place to take girls when you were broke. Rogue's Hollow almost never had any cops patrolling it then. I had a couple of scary things happen there.

Once, me and my friend Scott were driving through, and I suddenly got this very strange feeling, aside from being high, that we had somehow driven into another time.  We were heading into the Hollow coming from Clinton. I swear I saw an old Model T Ford sitting by the road, no big deal, but then Scott says, "It seems like were in another time or something, doesn’t it?" and I thought maybe he was trying to make a joke at first, because of the old car, but I really did feel strange, so I agreed. "Yeah," I said, "it's like were back in the 20s or something." I actually had goosebumps. 

Then, at one point in the road there is a field beside it, and the foundation to an old building. I had been looking at Scott when I was speaking to him, and he had looked out the windshield and was looking at something with his mouth hanging wide open. I looked, and moving beside the old foundation, toward the road, was what looked like a woman in an old time dress.  She was moving very quickly, too fast for a human. And she seemed to be like light and shadow in one, very bizarre, like a very light grey color. She moved into the middle of the road in front of us, and then vanished.

I wasn’t going to be the first one of us to say what I had just seen, because I was still paranoid, so I didn't speak, but he asked me if I had seen that woman run into the road. We both saw the same thing at the same time––I think it was a ghost.
The thing is, the only woman ghost I've ever heard about is the one at Crybaby Bridge, which is by the historical society building. We were still about 4 miles from there, and people don't claim to see her as much as hear her and her baby crying. So there’s my Rogue's Hollow story, for whatever it's worth.  It might be just an overactive imagination, but I think it was a ghost.  –letter via email

Weird Happenings In Rogue’s Hollow

I just wanted to share with you what little information I could remember about an area called Rogues Hollow. It was a former coalmining town near what is known as Doylestown now. The area is full of some crazy stuff, and many tales. There is a "Crybaby Bridge”––it is a big steel framed bridge where a woman gave birth and drowned an illegitimate child under the bridge. Now if you go across the bridge at night and turn your car off, you can hear a baby cry.

There is a story of a headless horseman that roams the area at night. There are also train tracks that have been abandoned for decades, but you can still hear a train come through at midnight. There is a graveyard where the ground supposedly shakes at midnight on Halloween. This is just a little bit of info that I can remember, it's been a LONG time since I have been back there.  –Mindy

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