The Appalachian mountain range is old and spooky, nowhere more so than in northern Pennsylvania, an area settled late and sparsely. After the coal and timber booms petered out in the early 20th century, they left a dwindling population, deadly pollution, and streams clogged with lumbering waste. And the ghosts of so many who died before their time in those mines and on those untamed streams.
Many tales were told over unnumbered years of tragic lives and deaths. One such occurred in some village whose name has been forgotten or has, like so many, disappeared back into the wilds. Far back in the hills there lived a clan they called the "witchy people." They looked different and all had red hair. Their crops and livestock were unusually good, and they also possessed the power to cure people and animals of all sorts of maladies by laying on their hands. But they could do much damage also, if that was their intention; this power increased during the darkness of the new moon and at that time they were carefully avoided.
An unknown and devastating illness passed through the village during a new moon one year, and as it worsened, claiming one life after another, the people set their minds on driving the witchy people out or killing them. Arriving at their homesteads they found no one there, not even an animal. Frightened and angry, they set all the houses and barns afire. On their return home they saw one leave a home and shot at him, killing instead a woman who had come out at the same time shouting "Don't shoot!" Another resident peered out and told the crowd, horrified, that the witchy had just finished curing every one of the family by his touch.
Shamed, they returned to the burnt-out homes of the witchy people to apologize and offer to rebuild. But everything had disappeared as if it had never been there.
Don't you wish they had TV?
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