A Revolutionary War Ghost Story for January 1st: Anthony Wayne died in 1796 while traveling back east from the scene of his recent military and diplomatic triumphs. He was buried near Erie, Pennsylvania, a long way from his home in the southeastern part of the state. Some years later his family decided to bring his remains back to Radnor, Pennsylvania, for reburial, a decision that was to have some dramatic and unforeseen consequences. Upon opening the General’s grave, the excavators did not discover the skeleton they expected. Although more than ten years had passed since his burial, Mad Anthony’s corpse turned out to be in remarkably good shape. Faced with the problem of transporting a decaying but still largely intact corpse, the excavators decided to scrape and boil away the flesh, and reduce the General to a bundle of relatively clean bones. What was left over supposedly got poured back into his original grave (with the exception of a few souvenirs taken by bystanders). The bones were then transported back to a church in Radnor for reburial. The story doesn’t end there, though. There is a strong oral tradition in Pennsylvania that all of Mad Anthony’s bones did not make it back home. As the story goes, the bones had not been properly packed, and many of them were lost on the long overland trek from Erie to Radnor. This circumstance gave rise to one of the best ghost stories about a Revolutionary War hero. Every year on January 1, the General’s birthday, Mad Anthony Wayne goes out searching for his lost bones. His ghost rides along U.S. Route 322 in Pennsylvania, a road that follows the path along which the bones were scattered, and seeks to recover them. Understandably, the General is mad that he is buried in Erie, in Radnor, and at several locations in-between. .
Posted on: Fri, 02 Jan 2015 01:00:00 +0000
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