14 Pennsylvania Mysteries That Still Have People Talking

Pennsylvania has been around long enough to collect some seriously strange stories.

Some of them have answers nobody agrees on, and some have no answers at all.

Here are the homegrown mysteries that still get Pennsylvanians talking.

The Kecksburg UFO

On a December night in 1965, something streaked across the sky over western Pennsylvania and came down in the woods near Kecksburg, a small town in Westmoreland County.

Witnesses described an acorn-shaped object, the size of a small car, with strange markings on it.

Before anyone could get a good look, the military reportedly arrived, cordoned off the site, and hauled something away on a flatbed.

The official explanation was a meteor.

But the people who were there never bought it.

Locals call it Pennsylvania’s Roswell, and they hold a festival about it every year.

The Fire That Won’t Go Out

Beneath the borough of Centralia, in the coal country of Columbia County, a fire has been burning since 1962, and nobody can put it out.

A coal seam caught light, most likely from trash burning at the town dump, though the exact cause is still debated.

The blaze spread through the old mine tunnels and never stopped.

It hollowed out the ground, cracked the streets, and the state condemned the whole town.

Centralia once held around 1,500 people.

Today, it’s home to about five, and the fire could burn for another 250 years.

The Lost Gold of Dent’s Run

Somewhere in the woods of Elk County, the story goes, a fortune in Civil War gold lies buried.

The legend holds that a Union shipment vanished in 1863 while crossing the wilds of north-central Pennsylvania, lost or stolen along Dent’s Run.

Gold hunters chased it for over a century.

In 2018, the FBI showed up and dug at a site two local hunters had pinpointed.

The bureau said it found nothing.

The hunters didn’t believe that for a second, and a legal fight over what was or wasn’t pulled out of that hole is still going.

The Squonk

Deep in the hemlock forests of northern Pennsylvania lives one of the saddest creatures in American folklore.

The squonk, as the old lumberjacks told it, is so homely and covered in warts that it weeps constantly, leaving a trail of tears through the woods.

The legend has a cruel twist.

If a hunter ever corners a squonk, the creature dissolves itself entirely into a puddle of tears and bubbles, escaping the only way it can.

You won’t find the squonk anywhere but Pennsylvania, which is how Pennsylvania likes it.

The Albatwitch

Down along the Susquehanna River near Columbia, in Lancaster County, people tell of the albatwitch.

The name is short for “apple-snatcher,” and that’s the legend in a nutshell.

A small, hairy, ape-like creature, a sort of miniature Bigfoot, said to lurk in the trees by the river and snatch apples right out of people’s hands and baskets.

The story traces back to the Susquehannock people.

Columbia leans all the way into it now, throwing an Albatwitch Day festival every fall.

Few towns celebrate their local cryptid quite so proudly.

The Green Man

For decades, kids in western Pennsylvania dared each other to go find the Green Man.

The legend described a figure who walked the back roads at night, his skin glowing an eerie green, his face missing. Teenagers drove out to a dark tunnel near Pittsburgh, hoping to meet him.

The truth is gentler and sadder than the legend.

The Green Man was a real person, Raymond Robinson, horribly disfigured by an electrical accident as a boy.

He walked at night to avoid the stares, and folks who met him remember a kind, friendly man.

The legend made him a monster. He never was one.

The Ghosts of Gettysburg

No place in Pennsylvania carries a heavier reputation for the supernatural than Gettysburg.

Over three days in July 1863, the bloodiest battle of the Civil War left around fifty thousand men killed, wounded, or missing across these fields.

Many believe the dead never fully left.

Visitors and ghost-tour guides report soldiers appearing in the Devil’s Den rocks, cameras failing in the Triangular Field, and footsteps on Sachs Bridge with no one there.

Skeptics chalk it up to imagination. In a town this soaked in tragedy, the stories never run dry.

Eastern State Penitentiary

In the heart of Philadelphia sits a crumbling old prison that many call one of the most haunted places in America.

Eastern State Penitentiary opened in 1829 with a radical idea: total isolation and silence to inspire penitence.

It held prisoners until 1971, then sat abandoned and decaying for decades.

Among its famous inmates was Al Capone, who served time here in 1929 and reportedly complained that a ghost tormented him in his cell.

Today, it runs ghost tours and a well-known Halloween attraction, and the guards and visitors who report whispers down the cellblocks say it earned the reputation.

Hex Hollow and the Powwow Tradition

In the hills of York County, an old Pennsylvania Dutch tradition still stirs up questions. Powwow.

Powwow, or braucherei, is a centuries-old form of folk healing and protection brought over by German settlers, full of charms, blessings, and handwritten spell books.

Practitioners were called powwow doctors, and many communities swore by them.

The tradition turned dark in 1928, when a York County man was killed over a belief that a powwow curse had been placed on him.

The site became known as Hex Hollow.

Powwow itself never disappeared. To this day, some Pennsylvania Dutch families keep the old charms close.

The Lost Children of the Alleghenies

In the spring of 1856, two young brothers wandered off into the Allegheny Mountains near Pavia, in Bedford County, and vanished.

Hundreds of neighbors searched the rugged woods for days and found nothing.

Then a local farmer named Jacob Dibert had the same vivid dream three nights running, showing him a path to a fallen tree by a stream.

He and his brother-in-law followed the landmarks from the dream exactly, and there they found the boys.

The children didn’t survive their ordeal. How a dream led searchers straight to them is a question nobody has ever answered.

A stone monument marks the spot today.

Pennsylvania’s Bigfoot Country

Pennsylvania is one of the busiest places in the country for Bigfoot reports.

The Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization has logged 138 sightings across the state as of 2025, putting Pennsylvania near the top of the national list year after year.

Cambria and Allegheny counties lead the pack.

Witnesses describe a tall, hairy figure in the Laurel Highlands, the Allegheny National Forest, and the deep woods of the Pennsylvania Wilds, often paired with wood knocks and howls in the dark.

The accounts go back to the 1800s, when settlers spoke of a “Wildman” in the hills.

Whatever it is, it never left.

Joe Magarac, the Steel Man

Out in the mill towns around Pittsburgh, the old steelworkers told stories of Joe Magarac, a giant made of steel.

The legend said Magarac was born inside an ore mountain, could squeeze molten metal into rails with his bare hands, and worked the furnaces around the clock without rest, the Paul Bunyan of the steel mills.

Here’s the mystery: Nobody’s sure whether the immigrant steelworkers told these tales themselves, or whether a magazine writer in 1931 invented most of it.

The clue that keeps scholars arguing is that “magarac” means donkey in Croatian, as if the workers were having a laugh at his expense.

Lake Erie’s Bessie

Up in the state’s northwest corner, where Pennsylvania touches Lake Erie, there’s said to be something living in the water.

The creature goes by Bessie, a long, serpent-like lake monster reported by sailors and shoreline witnesses since the late 1700s.

Descriptions run to thirty feet or more, dark and snakelike.

Lake Erie is shared by four states and a Canadian province, but Erie’s waterfront has logged its share of sightings.

With a lake that big and old, nobody can promise there’s nothing down there.

The Gravity Hill at New Paris

Here’s a mystery you can go test for yourself, out near New Paris in Bedford County.

At a particular stretch of country road, you put your car in neutral, take your foot off the brake, and the car appears to roll uphill on its own.

Locals have marked the spot with the letters “GH” painted on the road so visitors can find it.