Spooky York, part 1: Hex murder, creepy crematorium, steps to nowhere and a runaway train
With Halloween upon us, it’s time to bring forth the coldest of York County’s chilliest tales.
With a past growing from a strain of German medieval culture, many York County folks have it in their genes to see past events involving misfortune as particularly spooky.
You can probably classify these spooky tales into three categories:
Those that can be explained.
Those that cannot be explained.
Those based on events that never really happened.
And maybe all of the above. There’s plenty of weird, quirky and unexplained stuff out there to feed the imagination in this big-time moment in county culture - Halloween.
We’ll start off with the leading tale associated with Halloween, the Hex Murder of 1928.
Hex Murder and trials
This terrible moment that resulted in the trials of the 20th century in York County actually happened at Thanksgiving.
And while it centered on a certain type of white magic – the benevolent practice of the healing arts – we must remember that an innocent man died. Indeed, you could say it was a case of white magic that turned dark.
It involved witchcraft, as described in the trials of the trio of assailants who killed Nelson Rehmeyer, a white magic practitioner in a remote southern York County farmhouse.
Here’s a short version of a complex story, a story that erupted on a late November evening when two youths and one man sought to break spells they believed Rehmeyer had cast on two of them or their families.
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Just before Thanksgiving in 1928, the trio assailed Rehmeyer in a remote southeastern York County valley, Rehmeyer's Hollow.
Who were those tortured, down-and-out assailants?
John Blymyer, about 30 years in age, was the ringleader and the one most-aggrieved by the spell Rehmeyer purportedly cast on him. A witch in Marietta, Lancaster County, fingered Rehmeyer as the culprit who cast the spell on Blymyer.
Teenagers Wilbert Hess, 18, and John Curry, 14, accompanied him.
Now Rehmeyer was married but estranged from his wife and lived alone. He was reclusive, odd, maybe socialistic in his politics, and was believed to be a powwower, a practitioner of folk magic and healing rituals - white magic.
The trio sought to obtain Nelson Reymeyer’s copy of ‘Long Lost Friend,’ along with a lock of the suspected witch’s hair, which were to be buried 6 feet under behind the barn. That was the spell to break the spell.
But there was a struggle in Rehmeyer’s house, and the trio tied up the farmer, beat him to death and set fire to his body. After all that, they fled the crime scene. Rehmeyer's body was discovered about a day later.
Rehmeyer left behind his wife and two children. He was given a Christian burial and laid to rest at Sadler's Church Cemetery, near Shrewsbury.
Blymyer, Hess and Curry were arrested and ordered to trial two months hence in York County Court.
All three were convicted and given life sentences. In testimony, the role of witchcraft, spells and the like came out. Journalists from all over covered the trials, and these legal proceedings made international news.
All three were released after serving time, and each went on to live normal lives.
This quiet ending does not mean that the story is forgotten.
To this day, the house where the Hex Murder took place is a destination for visitors to Rehmeyer’s Hollow.
Those who go at night come back with stories. They experience a different type of quiet. Vehicles stall. Radios go blank … .
Stone steps to nowhere
The stone steps in Adamsville, on the back side of Dallastown and Red Lion, lead to nowhere. But their presence along a heavily traveled road has a commonsense explanation.
Still, the substantial steps, sans anything behind them, have a medieval feel, and at least once a year – at Christmas – decorations mysteriously appear.
Our story begins with the pre-Civil War birth of Henry A. Miller in the village of Springvale outside Red Lion.
Andy, as everyone called him, worked with his hands. He learned stone masonry when he was 12 and became a respected craftsman around York.
And he was known for something else: his walks. Actually, they were journeys.
In 1890, Miller walked the 800 miles from York to Jacksonville, Florida.
During a bus strike in 1945, the 95-year-old would walk the 9 miles to York from Adamsville and back, sometimes lugging a food basket on his return trip.
A couple of years before, he had started plying his craft on a stone house for his nephew, Adamsville resident Clarence Miller. The veteran stone mason was living there while working on it.
“With its large pillars and arches, the house is a fine example of the art of masonry,” a Gazette and Daily story stated.
It was then that he built those stone steps, familiar to so many today, that led to the house’s front door.
In 1947, Miller was coming home from York – a friend from nearby Winterstown had given him a lift to the stone house in Adamsville.
As Miller got out of the car, he was struck by another vehicle.
The driver of that vehicle conveyed Miller to the hospital, where he died.
Today, the stone house that Andy Miller built is gone. Local lore has it that the house was damaged or torn down by people looking for money Miller had reportedly stashed.
But those solid steps remain.
Joe Stafford and Lance Minnich live on properties near those steps.
Stafford clears the brush, and Minnich decorates them for Christmas. So there’s the explanation for new decorations on old steps.
Stafford and Minnich own and take care of the nearby Tack Shop, a little place which had no known address until Stafford gave it one: 473 S. Duke St.
The two owners have been able to piece together some parts of the Tack Shop’s story – it was a cigar factory and likely a summer house for a long-gone larger place.
But mysteries remain.
One day, someone stopped at the place to say that a spirit appeared in a window.
“I never saw it,” Stafford said, “but I hope she treats me well for taking care of the place.”
Spooky old incinerator
OK, some spooky stories have a strain of truth, such as those surrounding the crematorium where bodies were believed to have been burned in the King’s Mill area of York city.
And it’s right along the rail trail, a mysterious place in plain view.
In 2000, the small brick building with a large smokestack on King’s Mill Road, indeed, became a crematorium.
For years, it had been rumored that the spooky building was originally used for burning bodies.
A 1955 newspaper article gives a glimpse at how that legend grew. As the story goes, a south-side neighborhood gang lurked around the building on Halloween night. Some gang members who peeked in a window reportedly saw a "job" under way.
Thus ended their sleep for a month.
As it turns out, historians are uncertain that the 1897-vintage building was ever used to cremate bodies – until 2000. Indeed, historians look at Prospect Hill Cemetery as an indication that cremation was not a common practice in this area through the decades.
The building might have been used to burn parts of bodies though.
The York Hospital, located nearby on West College Avenue, used the building to burn its medical waste. The city also used the old building to burn its garbage, perhaps up to 40 tons a day between the city and hospital's refuse.
With the new century, the John W. Keffer Funeral Home bought the building, moved in cremation equipment and got to work.
Other locations had become too busy, and Keffer was seeking an industrial area where residents did not fret about the smell of the business. Not that the crematory would emit an odor.
So, that's how the spooky old York incinerator finally became a crematorium.
Runaway Locomotive No. 1689
Sometimes stories are spooky because they bear an unsolved mystery.
So you wonder whose hand, if any, was behind a potentially disastrous York County railroad moment, an event that actually happened.
At about 9 p.m. on an August night in 1996, a runaway locomotive – No. 1689 - rolled from New Freedom, a high point on the old Northern Central Railway.
It was dark. No lights beamed as the locomotive picked up speed.
In Seven Valleys, Bill Elmer saw it coming:
"It was like a ghost train coming along," Elmer said. "I didn't see anyone on the train."
Elmer estimated the engine was traveling about 20 mph to 25 mph when it passed his store.
Fortunately, the rail trail paralleling – and sometimes intersecting with the tracks - was closed at that time of night, and the train drifted harmlessly to a stop.
Authorities could not see how the train would start rolling on its own.
No arrests were ever made of the reported culprits who released the locomotive for its 9.5-mile run. That's curious because you'd think someone with the gall to start a runaway train would brag about it in some bar.
Maybe that will still happen.
For county park officials – the rail trail is a park - it was a serious matter.
We just have to get the message out that this is criminal activity," a spokesman said, "not just childish pranks."
Stay tuned for part 2 of Spooky York.
Jim McClure is a historian and former editor of the York Daily Record. Source: YDR files; James McClure’s York Town Square blog.
This article originally appeared on York Daily Record: Spooky York County, Pa.: Hex murder, creepy crematorium, runaway train
