Walnutport's Albino Ghost

1962 - Northumberland County

There were certain places that seemed different after darkness fell. An ordinary road became unfamiliar beneath the moonlight. A quiet stretch of water turned black and bottomless. Trees that appeared harmless during the day became twisted silhouettes against the night sky. And sometimes, all it took was a single frightened witness to transform a lonely place into something people avoided after sundown. In Walnutport, Pennsylvania, that place was the old canal and its towpath. For a brief but unforgettable period, residents became convinced that something pale and unnatural wandered beside the water after dark. Some believed it was a prank. Others called it a ghost. Newspaper reporters jokingly referred to it as an "albino woman." But whatever people believed, hundreds came looking for it. And stranger still, after the excitement finally disappeared, the mysterious woman in white apparently returned.

It began with whispers. People spoke of a white figure wandering beside the Walnutport canal after darkness had fallen. No one seemed to agree on exactly what they had seen. Some described a man. Others insisted it was a woman. A few were not even certain the figure was human. The stories moved quickly through Walnutport, repeated in stores, homes, and conversations on the street. Before long, the mysterious visitor had acquired a simple but unsettling name—the Thing.

As word spread, curiosity quickly overcame fear. Hundreds of people descended upon the canal hoping to catch a glimpse of the pale creature for themselves. On one Monday night alone, an estimated 200 people crowded along the towpath. The following night, another 150 vehicles traveled down Canal Street toward the location where the Thing had supposedly appeared. The procession became so large that traffic congestion actually interfered with Walnutport firemen responding to a call. For several nights, the normally quiet canal had become the center of an unlikely ghost hunt.

The people who arrived were searching for something that seemed to become stranger with every telling. Residents telephoned The Morning Call with descriptions that ranged from peculiar to nearly impossible. One witness claimed to have seen a towering woman, approximately six feet seven inches tall, dressed entirely in white. Another described a translucent figure that appeared to walk directly upon the surface of the canal. Still another told of a woman dressed in flowing robes who somehow managed to keep pace with a motorcycle traveling approximately seventy miles per hour. There were even reports of figures that disappeared when caught beneath the beam of a flashlight.

Walnutport Police Chief Alex Hussack attempted to bring some reason to the growing hysteria. His investigation suggested that at least some of the ghosts wandering along the towpath had been very much alive. Different people apparently dressed themselves in white sheets and wandered beside the canal as practical jokes. Hussack believed the entire affair might even have begun when a parent attempted to frighten his son away from fishing along the canal at night by covering himself with a sheet and walking along the towpath. Later, some youngsters reportedly repeated the trick, pulling sheets over their heads when canoeists approached.

The explanation should have ended the mystery.

Instead, the ghost seemed to spread.

Reports began coming from outside Walnutport. Newspaper offices received calls from frightened and curious residents in surrounding communities. One youngster admitted that fear of the mysterious figure had become so great that children were afraid to venture outside after dark. An Allentown woman even contacted police after children claimed that a ghostly woman had emerged from Mizpah Grove and headed toward the Lehigh River. According to their fantastic story, the woman had been lying across two limbs of a tree before climbing down, grabbing a young boy, scratching him, and wandering away. The tale quickly fell apart when the supposed victim returned home without a scratch and seemed completely unfamiliar with his mother's questions. Police searched the playground and found no mysterious woman hiding among the trees.

Back in Walnutport, the crowds eventually began to thin. The hundreds of curiosity seekers who had clogged Canal Street dwindled to only a few motorists. Perhaps people had accepted the police explanation. Perhaps they had simply grown tired of staring into the darkness and seeing nothing. Whatever the reason, the town slowly returned to normal.

Then came the story of the fisherman.

According to the unconfirmed account, a tall and sturdy fisherman had gone to the canal around dusk one Thursday evening. He had not been searching for ghosts. He had simply gone fishing. As daylight faded and darkness settled over the water, however, he reportedly looked across the canal and saw the figure of a woman.

She was walking across the water.

And she was coming toward him.

The fisherman apparently remained where he was and watched her approach. The distance between them steadily disappeared until the woman had come within approximately ten feet of where he stood.

Whatever courage had kept him there suddenly vanished.

The fisherman turned and ran.

Walnutport police later said they had never heard of the frightened fisherman or his encounter. There was no official report to confirm the story. Like so many of the tales surrounding the Thing, it existed only as something someone had supposedly seen and someone else had repeated. Nevertheless, the image was difficult to forget—a lone fisherman standing beside a dark canal while a pale woman silently crossed the water toward him.

Eventually, the excitement disappeared almost entirely. Traffic returned to normal. The curiosity seekers stopped coming. The towpath became quiet again, and the Albino Thing of Walnutport seemed destined to become nothing more than one of those peculiar local stories remembered by the people who had been there.

But apparently, the Thing was not finished.

Roughly a year later, residents began reporting something familiar along Catasauqua Avenue near the Lehigh Valley Thruway. At approximately 10:30 one night, several people reported seeing a ghostly figure dressed in white standing near the roadway. Even more disturbing, the figure was reportedly waving at passing traffic and frightening motorists.

Those who remembered the excitement in Walnutport immediately made the connection.

The ghost lady had returned.

Once again, descriptions differed. Some witnesses called the figure an albino woman dressed in white. Others claimed that whatever they had seen was extraordinarily fast. According to them, the mysterious figure suddenly headed toward the Lehigh River, moving with such speed that the newspaper jokingly remarked that it must have been "deer-fast."

No one caught her.

In fact, no one could even agree whether the thing fleeing toward the river had been a her or an it.

That later sighting added a particularly unsettling chapter to the Walnutport mystery. Practical jokes could explain people beneath white sheets. Excited children could invent stories. Rumors could transform shadows into ghosts, and fear could cause witnesses to see things that were never there. Yet approximately a year after the original excitement had faded, people were once again reporting a pale figure in white near the Lehigh Valley, frightening motorists before disappearing toward the river.

Perhaps there had never been anything supernatural wandering through Walnutport. Perhaps every encounter had been a prank, a misunderstanding, or a story that became more elaborate each time it was repeated. The towering woman, the figure walking across the canal, the apparition keeping pace with a motorcycle, the frightened fisherman, and the white figure racing toward the Lehigh River might all have had perfectly ordinary explanations.

But there was something wonderfully unsettling about what happened in Walnutport. For several nights, hundreds of ordinary people gathered beside a dark Pennsylvania canal because they believed there was at least a chance that something unexplained was waiting there. Police investigated it. Newspapers reported it. Children feared it. Fishermen supposedly fled from it. And even after everyone had convinced themselves that the ghost was nothing more than a man beneath a sheet, reports of the woman in white returned.

Years passed, and the crowds that once clogged Canal Street became only a memory. The canal grew quiet again, its dark water reflecting the trees and moon above it just as it had before the strange sightings began.

But legends rarely needed proof to survive.

They needed only a place, a story, and someone who swore that what they had seen was real.

So if you ever found yourself walking near the old canal or the Lehigh River after dark, and somewhere ahead of you a tall figure dressed entirely in white appeared beside the water, perhaps the safest thing would be to remember the fisherman.

He had waited until she was ten feet away.

And then he ran.