CHAPTER 40
I wish we had digital cameras 60 years ago. So many things have disappeared without proper recording. The Swamp House that I lived in 1947 to 1950 is gone. Ronald Tipton’s home on the corner of Chestnut Street and Boot Road is gone. Stuart Meisel’s grand stone house on East Lancaster Avenue in Downingtown is gone. The East Ward Elementary School we attended as boys is gone. History has a way of disappearing. The physical places fall or are torn down. The images of past times become only memories in the minds of old men and women. The old people die and everything is gone.
Even the ghosts are evicted eventually.
There were ghosts and devils on the country roads around Downingtown. Ronald and I rode our bikes to many haunts. Sometimes Stuart Meisel and Gary Kinzey came along. Sometimes invisible things joined us.
Ronald took the photo at the top of this chapter. The location is atop an area called Harmony Hill in the mid-1950s. Skelp Level is the name of the road. I am looking ahead, considering what may be over the rise. At the time of the photo not much was there except woods. Today that area is full of houses built around cul-de-sacs. They plowed beneath the earth what we found there as boys to make way for a development of cloned homes. Our haunted houses are gone.
Beyond that rise then was a rundown farm. The grounds were
overgrown with weeds and the outbuildings were crumbling from lack of care and paint. The main house had dead eyes, many windows broken out, the front door half off its hinges. When we walked inside we stepped carefully, which was wise. Part of the living room’s floor had caved in leaving a wide hole in the center of the space.
It was a deserted place with a history.
Louis Bergdoll was a German immigrant and a brewer. His lager was once one of the nation’s most popular beers. His main brewery was across Girard Avenue at 29th and Parrish Streets in Philadelphia. In 1893, Louis had a son. The son was Grover Cleveland Bergdoll and he was an early pioneer of aviation. He bought from the Wright Brothers a Wright Model B biplane in 1912. Keep in mind that the Wright brothers didn’t begin selling their invention until 1909. He flew 748 flights and then stored the plane away until 1936, when the Franklin Institute acquired it. He paid around $5,000 for it. This amount would be worth around $125,000 today.
That was not to be the source of his greatest fame., or should we
say infamay. Grover Cleveland Bergdoll became the most notorious draft dodger of World War I. After the war ended, he was arrested in 1920, but escaped to Germany. Police finally brought Bergdoll back to America for trial in 1939 after some disastrous attempts to kidnap him. He spent five years in prison. He died at age 72 in a Richmond, Virginia mental hospital. His death was in 1966.
What has any of this to do with my life?
The decrepit old farm Ronald and I stumbled across was a
Bergdoll estate. Grover Bergdoll came to the farm with his wife and six children after release from prison in 1944. In 1946 the government served tax leans against the property. Bergdoll abandoned the farm and moved to Maryland. The Pennsylvania farm was 260 acres. It was rumored he left a hidden fortune behind on the property. People came and searched, even ripped open the walls, but never found the $105,000 they believed he hid there. Maybe these fortune hunter created the hole in the livingroom floor. Ronald and I didn’t find it either. We didn’t even know whose place it was when we explored it several times during our childhood. We learned its secrets later.
We brought Stuart Meisel to the place. We brought Gary Kinzey to the place. We told Gary ghost stories about the house and while one of us took him inside, the other two made noises and banging sounds. Gary ran from the house in terror and would not go back.
On the other side of Skelp Level Road was only woods or so we thought. We hid our bikes in the brush one summer day and hiked into the forest. We found a log cabin far back in the trees. There were shoeless footprints pressed into the dirt around the cabin. Further along there was a dead Turkey Buzzard in our path. We had seen Turkey Buzzards circling in the sky many times, but never one this up close. It was very large. Oddly, no buzzards circled over this carcass.
These were curiosities, but the real shocker lay down at the
bottom of a gully. We came through some brush and saw a house down inside the gulch. The hillside was rather steep and thick with undergrowth. We started down. Gravity pulled upon me and I went too fast and fell. I tumbled down the hill and came to rest in a thicket of stinging thistle. Ronald stood above me laughing. Ronald does have a sadistic sense of humor. He sometimes finds humor in other’s discomfort.
He helped me to my feet and we continued down to where the house was. There was a rapid stream weaving through the low land. To the one side were the remaining two walls of a barn. We could see some blackened beams lying on the ground. We found out the story later.
The farmer who lived in the house had German sympathies. Whether he had any relationship to Bergdoll I couldn’t tell you. He apparently was none too quiet about his opinions. One night a group of men came dressed as Ku Klux Klansmen and set his barn afire. Whether they truly were the Klan nobody seems to know. There was talk that more than just a barn burning occurred, possibly even a lynching. What the truth was is hard to say. My grandfather and some of the men he knew told me this story. It was never clear to me if it happened during World War One or Two.
Ronald and I knew nothing of such tales when we came upon the place. We followed the stream, which wended by the home and disappeared beneath the rear of a springhouse in the yard. The home itself had certainly seen better days. All the window glass was gone. The front porch roof sagged badly to one side.
We crossed the porch hoping the roof would hold. We found the front door locked. We went to a window and peered inside. The room looked empty through the half closed window. Even without the glass the cross stile of the lower sash barred our climbing through.
“Can you open it?” Ronald asked.
I put my hands beneath the stile and pushed upward. The old paint flaked off on my skin, but the sash didn’t budge. Time had frozen it in place.
Ron moved beside me and we both tried, but even our combined strength wasn’t enough to raise that window. We stepped back.
“We should close it,” Ron said.
That made sense. It should be easier to push down than up. Without any pane there would be a large enough opening for us two skinny guys to climb through. We put our hands above the stile and pushed down with all our might. The window did not budge.
We stepped aside, about to try the other window, which was in the same half-mast state. As we took a step back the window slowly raised itself completely up.
Looking down from the top of the gorge…
Yes we ran. I don’t remember running, but we must have run because we were back on top of the hill looking down.
Did a ghost raise the window?
Maybe we had read too many EC comic books.
We looked at the house. It was two stories high with a black-shingled roof and whitewashed walls long turned to gray. From a distance they still looked white, but close up were dirty gray full of cracks. The windows were glassless, giving the place the blank stare of something dead. The porch roof sagged at the center and hung like a bat’s wing against the house.
“Let’s go in,” said Roger, but he said it very quietly and he took no step toward the porch.
“Yeah, okay, if you want to,” I said.
“Sure I want to. Don’t you?”
“I said yeah.”
“If you’re scared, I’m not goin’ force you,” he said.
“I’m not scared. Come on.”
“I know you get nightmares…”
“So do you.”
“Not about haunted houses.”
“Neither do I.”
It was a strange argument for neither of us dared raise his voice. We spoke in hushed tones as if a loud word would bring the porch roof down atop us, and probably the house as well.
“You think the place is bobby trapped?” asked Roger.
“Booby trapped?”
“Yeah, you know, Nazis use to booby trap everything.”
“We better be careful, huh?”
“Yeah. Look, let’s just peek in first, you know, to see how it looks. If it looks okay we’ll go in.”
“Even if it ain’t booby trapped,” I said, “the floor could be rotten.”
“Yeah,” he nodded his head.
We went up the steps one foot placed carefully before the other. The boards squeaked and we froze. We looked at each other and then squeaked forward to a window.
It was our plan to stick our heads through the empty frame and peer about the room. Shadow hid the interior and we could not see in from where we stood. If we were to get a glimpse of the possible torture devices hanging on the walls, we would have to put our heads inside. Although the window lacked glass, it still blocked us. The lower frame was half down and the spaces above and below the crosspieces were too small for us. There was an easy solution, open the frame fully.
Except from “Mt Ghost Story”:1969
Collected in Tales of a Chester County Child. 1979
Mysterious lost graveyards, haunted houses, old quarries, what else lurked in our environs?
Well, there are the Gates of Hell on Sawmill Road and the Two Tunnels of Valley Creek.
There are a series of tunnels on Boot Road and then these two just
off of it on Valley Creek Road. My grandfather drove me through all these tunnels many times while blowing the car horn so it echoed off the walls. That was a blast (just punning). Riding through the Two Tunnels on bicycles, even in the daytime, was spooky, and I had done that as a boy, but no way would I ever walk through there at night.
The tunnels are long. There is a break in the middle where daylight streams in with eerie effect. Otherwise you are in darkness. There are all sorts of stories about the tunnels, none of them very nice. You can hear at night the death rattle of a man who hung himself in the center break, for instance.
There is graffiti on one wall depicting a suitcase with one human arm sticking out. This refers to an alleged murder of a woman by a biker gang. They cut her body into pieces, stuffed these parts into a suitcase and left it in the tunnel.
I don’t think some of these tales existed when Ron and I traveled through the tunnels, especially the one about the Biker gang. But one story did precede us.
An angry citizenry drove a young woman from Downingtown for
having an illegitimate baby. This occurred in the late 1800s or early 1900s. She carried her baby to the top of the hill above the tunnels where the split is and hung herself. She was holding her baby the whole time, but when the rope tightened about her neck the infant slipped from her hands and fell to her death in the tunnel. It is said when you walk through the tunnel at night you hear the baby cry and sometimes see its ghost.
Ronald and I didn’t ride through at night. We didn’t see or hear any spooks.
Supposedly not far and in the vicinity of the Two Tunnels are the Gates of Hell. Allegedly there was a mansion back in the woods and these two gates to the estate were also portals to the underworld. These gates have disappeared, but there is a gravel path, which is pictured heret, and a fenced in area where mysterious lights have been reported. Some claim to have been chased away by large dogs.
If we looked for horrors around us, we were blissfully runaways
from the horrors of the world around us. We didn’t know any Asians in our boyhood and so didn’t take note No teachers at school told us of this history. We never heard of FDR signing Executive Order 9066. He did this in February 1942, not long after I had moved to Downingtown and two months after the surprise attack in Pearl Harbor. It was an order that seized the property of and caused the internment of a large group of American Citizens until World War II ended. Four years of forced imprisonment without trial, (photo) the kind of thing we had supposedly fought against in Germany and Hitler in the war. We knew nothing of this and really little about a movement called McCarthyism, something that actually threatened our own freedoms.
Not all the surprises or scares in my young life came while exploring with Ronald. One came in my own home and it probably frightened me more than anything else I encountered that year.
Up to this point I may be coming across as a fairly decent child. I performed a bit of petty theft one day, but instantly regretted it and to a degree immediately repented. I actually was an honest young boy, perhaps to a fault, always paying and always pointing out if clerks gave me too much change. I wasn't a troublemaker in school, despite not particularly liking to be there and often skimping on my homework. Teachers liked me, too much for my own good. I wasn't a problem child at home either. I didn’t give a lot of backtalk and I generally did my chores without too much fuss. It appears I was having a good time with my few friends as I went through my grade school years.
It is true there were some shadows over those early years. I was a child born at the beginning of a war and the tension, especially the blackout sirens terrorized me. Also like most children of my generation, my father was away at war for my formative years and my mother went out like Rosie the Riveter and worked at a factory. There was some feeling of desertion and abandonment resulting from this, but unlike some I had the advantage of fallback parents. My grandparents slipped easily into that roll and presented me with valued adult examples. They basically substituted for my mother and father for much of my youth.
In my earliest years I was fairly well adjusted. I was happy and
outgoing, or so was told, not particularly intimidated by the world around me (except for those blasted siren blasts). I was given birthday parties and I had friends on the street where I lived. I went to a private kindergarten for two years and flourished there.
But then in first grade things began to turn. I was suddenly taken out
of the school I started first grade in and moved from the town I had known since being six months old. The home to which I went was bleak and lonely, situated in the country alongside a swamp, surrounded by little in the way of companions, except occasional cows, birds and small water creatures such as snakes and frogs. I also saw the finality of death an unusual number of times as a young boy. Did this add to my future morbid bent?
My father returned from the war, but he took a job that kept him away
from home five days a week. On weekends, when he did come home, I was bundled off to my grandparents so mom and dad could have time alone. My dad might as well have sailed off into the South Pacific again for all the difference it made his coming home.
Sure, during the week I had my mother around. She was trapped with me out in the marsh. She didn't know how to drive so she had to give up her job and stay home. We were forced close for those two years, but I was already becoming a more independent lad, going out to explore my environs or holing up in my playroom. Mom and I ate simple meals together, but these were very informal, if not totally haphazard. I developed a habit of reading while I ate my meals; obviously mom and I weren't having long dinner conversations. Any elaborate, family dinners were held at my grandparents over those weekends, usually on Sunday.
Moving back to town after two years introduced other obstacles, mainly teasing and social anxiety. Even so, the grade school years had their moments and I cultivated a few friends, mostly outsiders, too. Still I made my peace with East Ward and Washington Avenue and grown comfortable with how my life was progressing, at least through fifth grade.
They say a little knowledge is a
dangerous thing. Having a real tiny bit of knowledge can be worse and having almost no knowledge of certain things can be real trouble. There were a number of things I had nearly no knowledge of because such things were not talked about openly in the 1950s, not to children anyway. Yet, this was knowledge I would have been better off knowing as I began my journey through sixth grade, junior high school and puberty.
If you read through the Bible there are two themes that become apparent, two strong failings of men that lead to most sins. One is the love of money. Avarice leads many people down a dark path to corruption, theft, deception and even murder.
The second is sexual immorality, which can lead down a dark path as well.
I was not greedy. Pursuit of gold was not my compass.
I came into the house at 417 Washington one afternoon. I wanted to speak to my mother about something (I don’t remember what), but the house seemed empty. I wandered to the kitchen and no sign of her. I went upstairs to look. She had closed the bedroom door, unusual during the day. She only closed it at night when she went to bed. This was a weekday. I expected dad to be on the road, but mom wasn’t working at this particular time so she should be home.
I walked down the hall and opened the bedroom door. I stepped inside and saw my mother and dad on the bed. They appeared to be naked. Dad was on top of my mother and I didn’t know what he was doing. I thought he was trying to kill her. Should I do something?
But my mother screamed when she saw me and yelled over and over for me to get out of there. So did dad. I got out of there, closing the door behind me and running to my own room. I didn’t know what to make of that. I still thought my dad was hurting her. Maybe she told me to get out so he wouldn’t harm me too.
I sat in my room shaking, not knowing what I should do. After a while my mother came out of the bedroom and down the hall to me.
This would have been a great opportunity for my mother to explained the other half of what she told me about the “Fat Lady” when she said babies were inside the mother. She could have calmly explained:
“Your father got home from the road early this week and we were putting a baby inside me.”
But she did not complete the story. She sternly told me to never enter their bedroom again without knocking first. I was left with no explanation of what had occurred behind that closed door or why everyone got so freaked out when I walked through that door. It was still not clear to me whether dad was hurting my mother and I certainly still had no idea what part the father played in how the baby ended up inside the mother. My ignorance of these facts of life continued for several more years during the silent ‘fifties. But I was nearing a time I needed to know things no one would tell me about. My little ink sketch illustration was not drawn in my teens. “Completeness”, as I called it, wasn’t done until I was in my twenties and married.
My childhood world was about to become more difficult and confusing. Not only would there to be a change of school from a one class, one teacher framework to one of multi-classroom and changing teachers, clanging bells and crowded hallways, but also I would be cast amidst a brand new crowd of classmates. I had been for several years surrounded by kids (friends or enemies) who didn’t change from semester to semester. Now there would be an ever shifting body of strangers and an uptick of the bullying and prejudice.
On top of the upheaval of social environment about to hit me, my
body was changing in ways I did not understand and was unprepared for. My emotions were growing chaotic as well. By the time I was into Junior High I was what might be called a “child at risk”, certainly at risk for a not so good life outcome.
Therefore, here is my disclaimer for what is coming.
When I began this autobiography or memoir or life rant, whatever
you wish to call it, I promised to be honest. I was and am a long way from perfect, but I hope I have developed in the right direction when my life turned to its second half. I think everyone has a kind of split personality. We have our public and private personas. No one on earth truly knows any one else completely. Even husbands and wives live parts of their lives completely separate from each other’s knowledge. We all have little closets in our minds where we keep our darkest secrets. It is just unusual for anyone to open those attic chambers to the world. I am going to open mine. Frankly, I don’t think my secrets are near as bad as those that many other people store. I think anyone who reads my life probably has shelves full of things as bad as I did and no one should be judging what I was by what I am today.
Although I show myself on the walk up the path to Downingtown Junior High, one pant leg rolled up, an innocent young man, my inner self was beginning to turn toward other things. One photo hints at what was coming. Ronald and I on one of our country jaunts came upon some trash. One item attracted my eye and Ronald snapped a picture of me with it. It was a magazine that I am perusing, looking at the semi dressed women it contained. I was very intense on my discovery and stooped down to study it. I had not seen such a magazine before in my young life, but I would soon see many and my second nature was coming to the fore.
It does give me pause when I think of my readership, small as that may be, because it contains friends, people I went to a variety of schools with or worked beside at some company. It includes family. It includes people I go to church with each week. Obviously if one writes their life it includes others that you rubbed shoulders with and thus you also expose some of their secrets perhaps. I am being very careful not to do that. You will find I sometimes will not give a name of someone engaged with me. I don’t want anyone embarrassed except me.
I do hope anyone reading my rambling opus will do so with an adult mind. I warn you that in some of the episodes ahead there will be frank discussions about sex and bodily function, some minor nudity in the illustrations and certain things “which some might find disturbing, so the reader should continue with discretion”.
What you will not find is profanity, blasphemy, pornography, explicit violence or offensive or denigrating remarks about others because of their looks, religion, ethnicity, lifestyle or personal beliefs. (This does not mean my opinions will never clash with your own, especially on faith or politics.) If along the way you find something offensive then the problem lies with your closed mind or too sensitive nature, not with my intensions or me.
And probably nothing that will follow will come close to being as horrible as what the last two paragraphs have probably put into your imagination. That said, shall we move further into the weeds into Chapter 41 and on with my life, such as it is.
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