It's forty years, and Thomas Glam is walking. If you've lived here long, then you just shivered. I did too, just writing the words.
You all know how I like a good, homegrown story, especially the funny ones. Today's news brings to mind what may be our oldest story - the granddaddy of them all - but I'm afraid it's not very funny.
The story begins in 1804 with a man named Thomas Glam. By all accounts he was a huge figure of a man; but you know the 'gentle giant' type, who can tear a phone book in half but cries at sad movies? Wrong guy. Glam had all of their mean and a twice his own on top. Being that sort of a man in that time, he found himself unwelcome on the coast and headed out West for the "frontier."
In the summer of 1804 he found the Frontier on a farm owned by a man named Halstead, near the western shore of what's now Lake Arthur.
Halstead had a problem. His farm was haunted by something called the Ritterg Gnost. This was an old Indian ghost, the one that would catch you in the night, rip you to pieces, and devour you - which was a very good reason to make it back home on time. Halstead had picked the spot on purpose, figuring there was nothing like a good local legend to keep the 'savages' out of his fields.
The problem was, it turned out to be more than just a story. For a week at a time each year, first in the heart of winter and again at summer's height, the Halsteads would hear footsteps on the roof each night and then find things dead in the morning. The winters were easier. They'd start with a rabbit or a squirrel and work on up to a dog or maybe even a sheep. The summers were worse. They'd start with a dog or a sheep and work their way up to a horse, or maybe even a cow.
In the summer of 1803 Halstead lost two horses, an ox, and his farmhand - all of them ripped to pieces. So you can imagine what his labor situation must have looked like in 1804, and what a godsend Thomas Glam must have seemed.
It worked out well at first. Glam could do any two men's work, and he was willing enough. He was just a surly sonofabitch. Mrs. Halstead invited him to church one Sunday and he all but ripped her head off. In the end they solved it by making up a room over the barn and leaving him pretty much alone.
Of course the best thing about Thomas Glam was that he had no fear of any Indian Ghost. "Let that thing come walkin' around on my roof, wake me up in the middle of the night, and it'll really be a ghost."
Sure enough, the dog days of summer rolled around, and the footsteps up on the roof. When the Halsteads came out the next morning they found a deer scattered all over Mrs. Halstead's garden.
Glam just laughed, picked up the pieces and said, "I want stew fer supper!"
The next day, though, they found a sheep; and that was different. The sheep were one of the animals that Glam was supposed to be protecting.
He stood over that beast and he swore a dreadful oath: "I will do to the Ritterg Gnost what it done to that sheep!"
That night the Halsteads barred their door. And then they waited. Sure enough, around midnight they heard the footsteps up on the roof, the bellow of a challenge, and then the noise of a great battle. It raged across the night, but their door stayed shut. Things crashed about for hours and then stopped; but still their door stayed shut until they could see the light of morning coming through the cracks.
Then they opened it and beheld a wreckage. The whole front of the barn had been torn away. Fences were shattered, posts snapped, boulders strewn about, and there, lying in the middle of it all, was the body of Thomas Glam - stone cold dead.
But he hadn't gone alone. Part of the horror of the Ritterg Gnost was that it never left a track, or trace or trail to follow. Next to the body of Thomas Glam, though, there was a footprint the size of a man's leg from the knee down. The trail led up a hill (where they say there's now a graveyard on top), dragging as if it were injured, and then vanished.
Thomas Glam was buried where he lay. The body was too heavy to lift and there wasn't a horse or an ox that would go anywhere near it. As for the Ritterg Gnost, it never came back. The killings stopped the whole thing was pretty well almost forgotten. Until the summer of 1846.
By that time the Halstead clan had grown, with four generations living in the original house. In August of 1846 something broke through the roof of the house and killed every living thing inside; except for old man Halstead. He lived another day and swore - swore on his deathbed - that it was not a beast and not a bear, but the ghost of Thomas Glam, big as life and twice as mean.
That, of course, made the story even better. It went down into local legend. Until 1884.
As I write this column, I'm looking at an old newspaper clipping from February 17th of that year. It warns of "a bear wakened untimely from its slumbers" (a wonderful phrase) that was slaughtering the local farm animals. "As yet there has been no sign to follow." Another article, dated August 12th, tells of three hunters found "horribly slain" by the old Erie Post Road (what's now Rt. 79). A week later (it was a weekly paper) somebody put the two together and recalled the legend of Thomas Glam.
By the 1920s people were waiting. Every year, from January to May, someone found something dead by the shores of what's now Lake Arthur. It might have been a rabbit, might have been a squirrel, but someone found something dead. That all changed in the summer of 1924.
By then the whole area was being strip-mined and no one really lived there. There were barns to hold the dray animals, however. On August 11th, 1924, something broke through the roof of one of the barns and killed every living thing inside. According to the newspaper reports, the "blood was higher than a man could reach and coated the walls like paint."
'64, of course, was the Hendrix murders. That's still the biggest unsolved crime in the history of Butler County. My parents knew the family.
Which brings us up to today.
Yesterday the police found what they're calling an "animal graveyard" in Moraine State Park off Rt. 79. There were two dead deer, a dog that was literally ripped in two, and a bear with its back shattered in three places. The police have concluded that the bear, "wakened untimely from its slumbers", killed the other animals, made its way out onto 79, got hit by a semi, made its way back to where it left the other animals, and then died. Case closed, end of story.
I have two main problems with that theory.
First, even a bear doesn't walk 800 yards with its back shattered in three places. And second, there were no insurance claims filed that night for any vehicle that struck any animal, let alone a truck that ran into a bear.
So. I don't know about you, but I may be heading heading south this year for my vacation. Because I don't want to be anywhere near the old Erie Post Road or the western shore of Lake Arthur come August of 2004.
