A 54-mile rail trail through western Pennsylvania is drawing a different kind of visitor this spooky season. The Ghost Town Trail, which runs from Nanty Glo to Ebensburg through Cambria and Indiana Counties, is a pleasant creek-side hike-and-bike route by daylight. After dark, locals tell another story.
The trail owes its name to the string of abandoned coal towns it passes through, and three in particular carry the heaviest reputations. Near Beulah Road, legend has it a White Lady in a wedding dress haunts the old train tracks at midnight, searching for a lover who never came home. The writer of the piece, a lifelong Cambria County resident, recalls testing that legend as a teenager — waiting at the overpass until her boyfriend's truck battery died and the pair had to walk the pitch-black trail for help. Give the White Lady attention, the local warning goes, and she follows.
Further along in Indiana County sits Wehrum, a genuine ghost town. Between 1901 and 1929 it was a busy company town with hundreds of houses, a jail, school and church. Explosions and a fire gutted it, the last resident left in 1934, and the 1977 Johnstown flood let nature take over. What remains is atmospheric: stony former streets, brick columns of collapsed homes, and just off-trail, the Sts. Peter and Paul Russian Orthodox cemetery, where Slavic-immigrant graves have shifted until the ground is visibly uneven. The writer, a paranormal investigator, recounts a night there with a spirit box that produced a guttural voice telling them to get out — followed by a car radio that misbehaved for miles.
The third hotspot is Vintondale, home to the Eliza Furnace, a nationally registered iron blast furnace steps from the trail. Hikers report seeing a figure in blackened work clothes — said to be David Ritter, the furnace's former operator — or feeling pushed along by unseen hands. Children, apparently, sometimes spot dirty miners through the fence bars.
For travellers, the appeal is the combination: a legitimately good outdoor route with real industrial history attached. The trail includes a 32-mile loop in its middle section, so you can tailor a ride or walk to your energy level, and the mining relics and cemeteries make it as much an open-air history lesson as a leg-stretcher. Visit in October if you want the full atmosphere — fall foliage plus maximum spook factor — but it works as a summer or spring cycling trip too. Just maybe save the Beulah Road overpass for daytime.
