BLOG: Did you know the PA Wilds has a blog? This month, every Monday, they are featuring a ghost story from the wilds of Pennsylvania.

Historian Lou Bernard has written down some marvelous stories of haunted happenings in the wonderful woods of the Wilds.

There’s one from Halloween of 2022 featuring Inez Bull and the Vanishing Hitchhiker. In her book “Cross Fork Tales,” Inez told of having picked up a hitchhiker in God’s Country.

Lou recounted the story.

Inez was riding with her mother, driving over a mountain in Potter County on a foggy night when the women saw a man in white walking along the remote road. She couldn’t stop safely because of the fog.

“But a few miles later, they saw the same man, inexplicably now ahead of them. This time, they stopped and picked him up. He was an old man with white hair, dressed entirely in white.

“‘Where are you going?’ her mother asked.

“‘North,’ he said. ‘I walk across the world from north to south and east to west.’

“When they got to the nearest town – which I’m making a guess at being Cross Fork – the man had disappeared. There had been no stops, and he couldn’t have left the car … and yet, he was gone,” Lou wrote in the blog.

“There was, however, an old woman with a grocery bag walking along the road. Because this whole situation hadn’t gotten creepy enough yet, they stopped and picked her up, too.

They drove the old woman to an old, ramshackle house, and let her out. The woman invited them in, but then she disappeared, too, and the house was empty.”

Lou said the Bull ladies credited the mystery to a religious experience, suggesting that the hitchhiker was God.

“Personally I’m not convinced that God has the time to hitchhike the Pennsylvania Wilds, but I also know something that Inez Bull didn’t,” Lou said. “There have been other Vanishing Hitchhiker sightings in that general area.”