In an old Catskills tale, two casket bearers dug up an Olivebridge girl to steal her jewelry. As they tried to take it, she woke up.

The story appears in Neva Shultis’ 1957 booklet, “From Sunset to Cock’s Crow.”

For generations, Catskills folklore has also served local businesses. Some mountaintop legends were devised to give hotel guests a sense of the region’s romantic past, said Greene County Historian Jonathan Palmer.

“They were devised to give flavorful stories to the hotels,” Palmer said.

Halloween has roots in Samhain, a Celtic festival when the boundary between the living and the dead was believed to thin. In that spirit, The Overlook compiled some of the region’s spookiest tales.

Photo option: Woodstock Cemetery

Woodstock Witches and a Girl Buried Alive

Folktales from Woodstock’s hamlets of Shady and Willow tell of witches who cast spells and made mischief among early settlers in the 1700s.

Artist and historian Anita M. Smith recorded several of these accounts, as told by descendants of early settlers, in a July 1931 publication of the Historical Society of Woodstock.

Smith wrote about an old woman said to live in a cabin on Overlook Mountain. One day, as a hunter went up the mountain looking for deer, the woman charmed his bullets so they would have no effect on an animal. He finally shot a deer using a shilling from his waistcoat, but the animal disappeared.

“Later that day,” Smith wrote, “a woodsman brought news that the old woman was ill with a wound in her side.”

In Shady, another woman, who lived on Cooper’s Hill, played a trick on a suitor she didn’t want courting her granddaughter. One evening when he came calling, a white chicken wouldn’t stop crowing outside the front door. The suitor left, annoyed, and kicked the chicken on his way out.

The chicken was unharmed, but the suitor “went home with a sore foot that eventually caused his death,” Smith wrote.

Shultis was also Woodstock’s midwife in the early 20th century, said Janine Mower of the Historical Society of Woodstock.

Shultis and Smith gathered and recorded local folklore, including ghost stories, though those aren’t as plentiful as witch stories and superstitions, Mower said.

The girl in Shultis’ “The Girl Who Was Buried Alive” had fainting spells that could last for hours. Two days before her wedding, she had a spell that lasted so long her family thought she was dead. Not even the doctor could hear her heartbeat. They buried her at sunset in her wedding dress and jewelry.

The casket bearers brought her home after she woke, leaving the empty coffin behind. Her father rewarded them with money.

In Shultis’ account, she was buried twice more: once after her “real” death, and again when her grave was moved to make way for the Ashokan Reservoir. Her final resting place was Woodstock Cemetery.

Hauntings in Old Hurley

The Van Deusen House, a stone house on Hurley’s historic Main Street, figures in accounts of ghostly encounters in Lynda Lee Macken’s 2019 book, “Catskill Ghosts.”

Built around 1744 by Jan Roosa, the house later belonged to his grandson Jan Van Deusen and served as a temporary state capitol after the British burned Kingston in 1777, according to the Hurley Heritage Society.

Macken described the house as having a “long haunted history.”

“In fact, one prior resident installed a heavy duty latch to keep the ghosts out,” she wrote.

Residents have reported sensations of being watched, waking to find apparitions standing over their beds, hearing disembodied voices and footsteps on the stairs, and doors opening and closing on their own, according to Macken.

Macken also recounted stories of shadowy Revolutionary War soldiers haunting Main Street, including convicted British spy Lt. Daniel Taylor, who was sentenced to death by hanging by Gen. George Clinton in October 1777.

His body hung for at least two days from a sweet apple tree on Schoolhouse Lane as a warning to British sympathizers, according to the Hurley Heritage Society.

Tannersville’s One-Armed Brakeman

Ghost stories proved harder to find in Hunter and Windham. Hunter Town Historian Dede Terns-Thorpe said she couldn’t think of any off the top of her head.

One tale from Tannersville takes a darker turn.

Lisa LaMonica’s 2013 book, “Haunted Catskills,” recounts a story she heard from a village resident that also appeared in a 1995 article by Skip Hommel in The Hemlock, the Mountain Top Historical Society’s quarterly publication.

In the tale, set in the 1920s or 1930s, a brakeman lost his arm when a train passed as he was switching tracks on the Kaaterskill branch of the Ulster and Delaware Railroad.

“The brakeman went running through the woods with his axe and lantern, screaming in pain,” LaMonica wrote, citing Hommel’s article. “He left his arm lying next to the side of the track. People searched for the brakeman for days but couldn’t find him.”

Legend has it the brakeman, named Hank, later returned to a camp above Tannersville Lake.

“One night, some maniac got into the camp amongst the kids and chopped off the left arm of eleven kids, killed them, gashed them across their heads with an axe and then took off,” LaMonica wrote. “It was the one-armed brakeman getting revenge for having his arm torn off by the train.”

Even after the trains from Lanesville stopped coming and the railroad fell into disrepair, Hank was said to patrol the old tracks, looking for children to attack.

A Haunted Room in East Windham

East Windham’s Perch Hotel, formerly known as the Point Lookout Mountain Inn, also figures in Macken’s “Catskill Ghosts.”

Her account centers on an alleged killing in Room 12.

“A couple checked into the now infamous room,” Macken wrote. “A quarrel ensued resulting in the male guest murdering his female companion. The woman’s body went undiscovered for days. No police record of this alleged slaying exists.”

Macken wrote that guests in Room 12 reported putrid smells, voices, and flickering lights. One guest even had to be forcibly removed from the inn after becoming agitated over the strong odor.

Ghostly Guests at Twin Gables

At Twin Gables, the inn at 73 Tinker St. in Woodstock, ghost stories are part of the invitation to visit. In a blog post, the inn described finding old guest-book entries that repeatedly mentioned two spirits: “Queenie” and “Uncle Redd.”

Queenie, described as an owner’s aunt who once lived in Room 1, was said to haunt the halls and Rooms 1 and 2. Room 5 was associated with Uncle Redd, an owner’s uncle. The inn also reported a mist appearing in photographs of that room.

The inn promoted the tales in TikTok videos and invited readers to “come see the house yourself,” perhaps to have an encounter of their own.

The Old Eagle-Nester of the Spruce Woods

Other mountaintop tales center on women whom settlers suspected of witchcraft.

Doris West Brooks’ 1992 book, “The Old Eagle-Nester,” collects stories passed down through generations from the Spruce Woods, an area in the East Kill Valley straddling the Hunter and Jewett town lines, near present-day Colgate Lake. The first settlements there were accessible only by a trail through Dutcher Notch from the Cairo hamlet of Round Top.

Many of Brooks’ stories mention a woman known as the Old Eagle-Nester. Brooks described the Eagle-Nesters as a community of Esopus people and Dutch settlers dating to the mid-1600s, later joined by people escaping slavery. They made baskets for barter and trade, she wrote.

In one account, a woman Brooks identified as an Eagle-Nester appeared one summer in the 1800s just outside the Spruce Woods, near a swamp. She remained isolated from the European settlers, though they traded with her for baskets and her blend of herbal tea.

Around the same time, a family in the region lost a child in the forest, and a mountain lion killed some of the animals they raised.

Decades later, according to Brooks’ account, a Spruce Woods resident named Bea encountered the woman again, working as a fortune teller in Catskill. She knew intimate details of Bea’s life in the remote region.

“For the summer she had lived in the shack by the swamp, the woman had never had any social contact with the settlers,” Brooks wrote. “How did she know about the little girl, the sheep and lambs, and the dog? Bea had always secretly thought that the old woman of the swamp was a witch. This incident proved it.”

Skulls Behind the Bar in Hunter

Palmer recalled one more tale, about a long-gone bar in the village of Hunter that displayed skulls from an accidentally unearthed cemetery.

The cemetery dated to the early years of the village’s tannery, he said. During a building expansion, “I guess they hit some neighbors who had been in the ground for a while and brought them to the bar.”

“Everybody’s got to have a hobby, I guess,” Palmer said.

Isabella Schoonover is a staff reporter for The Overlook covering Woodstock, Saugerties, Hurley, and surrounding Ulster County communities. Send correspondence to isabella@theoverlooknews.com.

Connor Greco is a staff reporter for The Overlook covering Windham, Hunter, and surrounding Greene County communities. Send correspondence to connor@theoverlooknews.com.