When Billy Cloyd prospered in the lumber and milling business, he determined to erect a mansion overlooking the arrowy waters of the Sinnemahoning that would reflect not only his success, but the social status of his family as well. Accordingly Williamsport architects who made a specialty of erecting houses for the wealthy lumbermen of that community were commissioned to prepare plans for what was to be the grandest private dwelling on the outposts of civilization, a structure which would outdo the already famous club house built for the use of the stockholders of the Philadelphia Land Company at Snow Shoe, or the offices of the agents of the Queen of Spain at Reveltown and Scootac.

The result was a large, square house, along Colonial lines, with a spacious doorway, above which was a transom of antique colored glass brought all the way from the home of one of his ancestors at Old Carlisle. Windows were numerous, commanding views up and down the beautiful, billowy stream, then teeming with fish and aquatic bird life.

The surrounding mountains were covered with virgin pine forests, while the great hemlocks, oaks and birches hung over the water’s edge. There was a clearing in which the mansion stood, the chief feature of which was an old-fashioned garden of carefully laid design, with plenty of columbine, called by the mountain folks “church bells,” and eglantine, with boxwoods from the “Quaker City,” purchased from the heirs of “Eaglesfield.”

The dark forest came to the back of the garden, and stood black in the gorge of Mill Creek near the projected flouring and fulling mills, to the east of the mansion; the ever-busy saw-mill, the chief symbol of the prosperity of Castlecloyd, as the domain was called, was situated near the mouth of the creek. There was barely a distance of two hundred yards from the sloping banks of the Sinnemahoning to where the forest and the steep mountains began, consequently the mansion, mills, workshops, stables and mill hands’ and woodsmen’s houses were all close together.

Along the water’s edge carpenters were steadily at work building arks and flats which carried the products of the mills to the terminus of the railroad at Lock Haven, or to Sunbury or Harrisburg.

Now all is changed. The view from the portico and the lawn of Castlecloyd is upon a stream flowing with a liquid the color and texture of ink, frowning with fine yellow bubbles; not, a living fish has been seen, according to the present occupant of the premises, the venerable Seth Nelson, Jr., since 1899, when the paper mill at Austin sent down its first installment of vile pollution. Then the fish leaped on the shore in frightful agony, dying out of water, but away from the insidious poisoning of the acids.

The water birds are gone; they cannot drink the polluted water, and give the region a wide berth. Instead of cooling zephyrs, when the wind blows off the creek towards the house, there comes a stench worse than a week-old battlefield in Flanders.

No forests of virgin timber are to be seen, if you strain your eyes looking up or down stream, nothing but charred, brown wastes, the aftermath of killing forest fires which followed the lumbering operations. Here and there on some inaccessible cliff a lone original white pine or hemlock has its eyrie, but even there the fires are finding them, and they are all scorched and shaky at the butts, and go down easily in sharp gales. Altar Rock, famed in song and story, still has one pine standing on its top, but it is dead, and will soon share the fate of its mate, which was blown down over twenty years ago.

The entire scene is one of loneliness and desolation, yet a quiet, peaceful home for the octogenarian hunter Nelson and his devoted and equally aged sister. How different all this from what it was in the hey-day of prosperous Billy Cloyd! The hum of the mills, the busy teams of horses and ox-spans bringing in the logs, the carpenters and boatmen, the large family of the successful woodsman, their guests, and the hunters and surveyors who often made the house their headquarters.

It was at the time that the line of the Sunbury and Erie Railroad was being surveyed from Rattlesnake, now Whetham, to Erie, and one surveying crew was quartered at Castlecloyd. A few weeks earlier Dr. J. T. Rothrock had stopped there, but was now further west, camping with Mike Long, the wolf hunter, in the midst of a great deer and pigeon country in Elk County.

Those were days of reckless waste of our natural resources, according to the good Doctor. One of the surveyors, so as not to have to curve his line, ordered that three giant original white pines be cut. All the stumps were measured by Dr. Rothrock and averaged considerably over six feet in diameter. They were, of course, left to rot in the woods, thousands of feet of lumber of priceless value today!

Philip L. Webster, who died a few years ago in Littletown, now Bradford, was also a member of one of these surveying parties on Elk Creek, a branch of the Clarion River; on one occasion he saw four elks together, in a swale.

As “Buffalo Bill” had been the professional hunter for the Northern Pacific engineering crews, Jim Jacobs, “The Seneca Bear Hunter,” was attached to Mr. Webster’s organization in the same capacity. Instead of bison roasts, Jacobs was to furnish fresh elk steaks, and he kept the surveyors, axmen and chain-carriers supplied with plenty of it all summer long.

The members of the party billeted at Castlecloyd were composed of young Philadelphia gentlemen, sons of prospective stockholders in the new railroad, finely educated, traveled youths, whose love of adventure had been fired by the deeds of their colleagues, the Brothers Kane. One of them stood out more brilliantly than the rest for his scholarly attainments and poetic nature. He was young Wayne Stewardson, scion of a distinguished Quaker house of that name, and probably connected with the family who owned the lands on Kettle Creek, once occupied by Ole Bull.

The young man had been educated at the university in his native city, and in Europe. His early upbringing had been in great cities, and his sentimental tastes came out in a peculiar admiration of spires, chimneys, towers, stacks, vanes, arched roofs, corbels and crockets. He would wander for hours just at evening watching the skyline in the changing light, peopling the growing shadows with all manner of grotesque shapes and chimeras. His love of shadowland was so great that he fell naturally to cutting charming silhouettes of his friends, his likeness of the lovelorn and ill-fated Dr. E. K. Kane being highly prized.

His visit to the Sinnemahoning Country was his first induction into the heart of nature, and his admiration of man’s handicraft as exemplified in minarets and high gables softened to a deep reverence for the spiral, columnar forms of the giant pines as they serrated the skyline of the Allegheny summits.

There was a bench between two red maple trees, on the bank of the Sinnemahoning, just in front of Castlecloyd, where he would sit after supper, watching the crimson sunset reflected in the stream, with the dusky shapes of the ancient trees athwart, and the sky gradually becoming less of rose and more of mother-of-pearl, behind the sentinel pines on the comb of the mountains beyond Birch Island. It was more beautiful than anything he had ever seen in cities, in its sheer ferocious wildness.

One evening, on hearing a woman’s voice humming an old tune, he looked around, beholding Cloyd’s pretty daughter sitting, watching the afterglow from the portal of the classic doorway. Her knees were crossed, revealing pretty, plump little legs, encased in blue cotton stockings. His first thought at seeing her was to recall Poe’s youthful lines, “Helen Thy Beauty is to Me.” Previously he had not noticed her much, except that she seemed more than ordinarily good-looking and refined, for the drudge’s life she was living. Now that, like himself, she was a person who took notice of her surroundings, she must be different, he thought, and have a soul more in keeping with her lovely appearance.

When she saw that he had observed her, instead of jumping up and running into the house and slamming the door, like some crude backwoods girl might have done, she came forward and stood leaning against one of the red maples, and chatted pleasantly about the wonderful scenery.

It was a blissful experience for Stewardson, and as he had hardly spoken to a girl for a month, was in a particularly susceptible mood. He studied her appearance minutely. She was probably a trifle under the middle height, very delicately made, with chestnut hair and eyes of wondrous golden amber. Her skin was transparently white, and the delicate peach-blow color in her cheeks was too hectic to betoken good health. But the outstanding feature was the nose, the most beautiful nose he had ever seen, the bridge slightly aquiline, yet a sudden shortness at the tip that transcended the retrousse. She was modest and simple, reticence being her chief trait, as she told about the deer which often took harbor in the stream, in front of where they were, when pursued by dogs.

She said that she had been christened Marie Asterie, but was generally called by her second name, though the first was shorter and easier to pronounce.

Just as they were becoming nicely acquainted, a young woodsman, whom she introduced as Oscar Garis, put in an appearance, and the two walked away together, leaving Stewardson still meditating on the bench. Evidently they were lovers, thought the young surveyor, and when he looked out on Sinnemahoning, the light was gone–the water ran dark and menacing.

Though he had noticed the girl’s unusual nose the first time he saw her, he had been too busy to become well acquainted, but he recalled that she occupied a small interior room, just off where he slept, in the second-floor lobby. He had seen her go upstairs to retire every night, but proximity had meant nothing to him, so deeply had he been imbued with ideas of class. Tonight it would be different.

He walked around a while longer, watching the bats flit hither and thither, and listening to the plaintive calling of the whippoorwills, then he went indoors and joined his fellow surveyors in the lobby. He kept watching the clock and watching the door for Asterie to return, amusing himself trying to cut her marvellous profile, the like of which King Henry VIII or King Arthur may have admired, for she was evidently a “throw back” to some archaic type. It was always the rule for the men to remain downstairs until the women had retired, and on this occasion they were all yawning but Stewardson, waiting for Asterie, who was the last to come in, close to ten o’clock.

Garis seemed indifferent to her, but it was the negligence of bad manners rather than lack of interest. This gave Stewardson a chance to light her fat lamp for her, and she closed the door and went upstairs. When the young surveyor and his companion ascended the stairs, he noted the rays of light from her room, streaming from the crack beneath her door. The night after the lights were out, and his friends asleep, he drew his mattress nearly to her door, repeating to himself the lines of Horace’s Ode X, in Book III:

The concluding lines of which were:

But it wasn’t a terrible night, only a fairly chilly one in early June, with all the stars out, and Asterie’s worst offense was that she was “keeping company” with another!

The young man could not sleep all night and wondered if the girl was similarly afflicted, as the light continued to burn; or maybe she was only like many mountain people, and slept with a night-light, for no sound came from her tiny apartment. After that night his pleasures at Castlecloyd were ended. He loved the fair and fragile girl, whom he hated to see working so hard, so patient and so misunderstood. He dreaded the thought of her inevitable marriage to Garis, a rough, common fellow of no refinement. He could not think of courting her himself as his family had never in ten generations been declasse. There was nothing to do but to sigh in vain, and watch that light coming from beneath her door. And on nights when the wind howled, and the rain beat about the roof, or some particularly hard gust sent a few cold drops pattering through a crack in the shingles, on his face, he found consolation by reciting to himself the lament of Horace in his Ode X. But he did present her with her silhouette, which she blushingly accepted, and on several occasions when she sang at the organ, complimented her on her sweet contralto voice.

In the autumn when the red maples had cast the last of their leaves, and the pines and hemlocks looked the blacker in contrast, Stewardson’s particular work was done, and he prepared to return to Philadelphia. John Smoke, aged Seneca, professional hunter of the outfit, agreed to take him and one of his chums to Rattlesnake in a birchbark canoe. Seth Iredell Nelson, another hunter, would take two more of the young men in another canoe. Asterie was on the leaf-strewn bank to see them depart, dressed in her best pink denham frock, and cherry colored peach-basket straw bonnet. It made him resentful to watch Garis put his arm on her shoulder as the canoes shoved away, to the tune of old Smoke’s Seneca chant.

Billy Cloyd himself was not present; he excused himself as not feeling well, and Went upstairs shortly after breakfast. On the journey old Smoke confided to his passengers the cause of the landlord’s backward conduct. A black calf had been born the night before; whenever one appeared in the family it brought bad luck; that had been a belief with Cloyd’s people even in the remote days when they lived in the “old country.”

Then the aged Indian told the legend of how the redmen came to the American continent. They had been driven eastward by famines until they came to a great sea, across which they found a narrow strip of land, which they crossed. They came to a country teeming with game, and made themselves at home, wandering great distances to enjoy the chase and visit the natural wonders.

Later they decided to revisit their old home, but the sea had washed over the strip of land, and their canoes were not stout enough to breast the angry waves.

Stewardson listened to this and other old tales in a half-abstracted way; his thoughts were back with Asterie Cloyd; she with that wonderful, impossible-to-silhouette nose, her sweet voice, and quiet, restful manner. He did not marry any of the stately Junoesque beauties whom he knew, upon returning to Philadelphia, but became critical of the fair sex, and shunned their company whenever possible. About two years later the Civil War broke out, and being intimately acquainted with the Kane family, he hurried to Harrisburg, and the genial “Colonel Tom” gave him a commission in his 1st Rifle Regiment, soon to win deathless fame under the name of “Bucktails.”

One evening in camp Colonel Kane and Captain Stewardson were sitting before their tents, stroking their long fair beards, for it was the aim of every young soldier to be the most shaggily hirsute. The Colonel was telling of his memorable trip on rafts from McKean County to Harrisburg with his recruits and how he spent a night with a man named Garis, who had acted like a copperhead, and though an expert rifleman, declined to enlist. “Yet he had ample cause to be out of sorts” continued the Colonel. “He had lately buried his wife, who, from all accounts, was an exceptionally pretty girl, one of Billy Cloyd’s daughters.”

If he had watched Stewardson’s face carefully, he would have seen it growing paler, even in the camp fire’s ruddy glow, beneath that mighty beard.

“Cloyd, who before the girl’s marriage, had lost his wife,” continued Colonel Kane, "went up Bennett’s Branch, to take out spars, and started to clear a farm on the mountain top, and build an even more ambitious mansion. Garis told me that the old man had recently sold the whole property, including the timber, to William E. Dodge of New York, who intends naming it after the President, the ‘Lincoln Farm’, and using it for a private summer resort."

Captain Stewardson did not care to hear more; as soon as he could consistently excuse himself from his commanding officer, he did so, and wandered off among the pines, inwardly moaning.

In the early part of 1864, as the result of wounds, he was given an indefinite sick leave, but instead of going home, he resolved to visit Asterie’s grave.

The railroad was completed to Renovo, and the ties were down, ready for the rails, almost to Erie. A mail carrier on horseback travelled from Renovo to the backwoods settlements of Sinnemahoning and Driftwood, and hiring an extra horse, the now Major Stewardson arranged to accompany him. They had not ridden far through the snowy road when the mail man, Wallis Gakle, began telling about the Haunted House, Billy Cloyd’s old place that they would pass. “Nobody’s lived there,” he said, “since Oscar Garis moved out in the summer of ’61, after burying that pretty wife of his. They say he worked her to death, making her do all the cooking for all the lumber and mill crews, and was always after her to do more; he literally hounded the poor little child to death.”

Then he went on to tell how towards nightfall people were afraid to go past the deserted house for the awful screaming and yelling, like a woman in torment, that came from the upper rooms. Travellers never went on that side of the creek, unless in parties of four or five together, preferring to follow the right-of-way of the railroad across the creek, but even there they could hear the shrieks and moaning. Some were even hinting that Garis, who had gone to live with his late father-in-law on the Clarion, had in a fit of temper murdered his wife. At the time it was said that she had died of lung trouble.

All this was interesting to the young soldier, and he next inquired where the poor girl was buried.

“She’s lying on the hillside, overlooking the meeting of the First Fork and the Driftwood Branch, a beautiful spot, but it’s cold and bleak under the pines when the country is covered with snow.”

Just beyond the present town of Westport, Gakle and Stewardson fell in with two hunters tramping along on snowshoes with their dogs, headed for the panther country. They were the veteran Nimrod Jake Hamersley and a young hunter named Art Vallon.

“Glad to meet you, gentlemen,” said old Jake, half joking; “we wanted a little bolstering up before passing the haunted house.” “said Gakle, “I am never afraid, but my horse rears like one of the deil’s own buckies when he hears those dreadful screams. I always try to get by before dark, for they say the racket is a lot worse after sundown.”

As the party wended its way along the narrow trail by the river’s edge, all manner of hunting and ghost stories were recounted. All were in an eerie frame of mind, as with the rays of the setting sun shining in their faces, they neared the deserted Castlecloyd. The deep woods screened the clearings and gardens, but long before they came in view a melancholy wailing, like a woman tortured by fiends, echoed through the aisles of the primeval forest.

“I guess we’ll have to face it,” said the mail carrier, "but four man sized men, and a like number of varmint hounds ought to be able to ‘rassle’ any spook."

As they neared the house, the setting sun tinted to the brilliancy of the stained glass of some mediaeval cathedral the vari-coloured lights above the classic portal. They noticed that the door stood open. From an upper room came the doleful groans and lamentations.

“What’s those tracks?” said the keen-eyed young Vallon, who had run on ahead with the dogs.

Coming up the bank from the ice-bound Sinnemahoning, crossing the trail, and entering the mansion by the front door, were huge round footmarks like those of some mammoth cat. “Painter, painter” they all cried, as they looked at them, while the dogs, knowing well the ferocity of the Pennsylvania Lion, slunk about their master’s feet.

All wanted to go indoors, and no one cared to mind the horses. They tied the jaded beasts to the red maple trees, on either side of Major Stewardson’s one-time favorite resting place. Gakle had an old-time, flint-lock horse pistol that had been carried by David Lewis, the Robber, when he was wounded on the First Fork; Stewardson had his army pistol, while the two hunters had their flint-lock Lancaster rifles.

They followed the tracks into the lobby, and by the snow and mud left on the floor, to the staircase, which they ascended. Stewardson’s eyes fell on the green-painted door of the little room once occupied by his beloved, which was ajar. He rushed forward, pistol in hand, and pushed it wide open.

On the bed, a small affair of the four poster type which he had never viewed before, the scene of the fair Asterie’s vigils, stood a great lithe, lean pantheress, clawing the counterpane and mattress with all four feet, and beating her fluffy tail with a regular rhythm against the headboard. In her mouth was a huge rat, bleeding, which she had lately captured.

Before he could recover from his amazement and shoot, the greycoated monster sprang over the foot-board, and through the window, carrying the sash with her. The other men appeared just in time to see the brute’s long tail disappearing through the casement.

Quickly turning, they seized the dogs by their collars and pushed them down the narrow winding stairs. Outside, in the fading light, the spoor could be seen at the side of the house where the lioness bounded over the lawn, and down the bank, and crossed the stream on the ice.

The dogs took up the scent, and were away, the hunters following gamely. The baying of the hounds echoed and re-echoed through the narrow valley; by their volume the quarry was not far ahead. The snow was deep and very soft in the woods, and it was getting very dark. Perhaps the chase would have to be abandoned, and the panther or spook, whichever it was, got away after all.

Soon the barking of the dogs indicated that the beast had been run to cover. It was just at dark when the hunters saw the pantheress crouched in a rock oak at the forks, on the steep, stony face of the Keating Mountain, with the dogs leaping up frantically, the monster feline hissing and growling savagely.

Jake Hamersley was selected to give the death shot, “taking” the brute between the eyes. She fell with a thud, and with a few convulsive kicks, expired on the snow. Major Stewardson built a military campfire while Hamersley and Vallon carefully skinned the carcass, and fed the flesh to the dogs. The Nimrods offered the hide to the young Major as a trophy, but he declined with thanks. He could not bear to have such a remembrance of a creature that had disported itself so recently on his loved one’s little four poster bed. Perhaps it had partaken of her spirit, from absorbing the environment where she had pined away to death.

He only wanted to visit her grave, above the meeting of the waters, to drop there a few tears, a part of the boundless water of life. His heart would always be a Haunted House.

It was verging on the “witching hour,” and an ugly winter drizzle had begun to fall, as the triumphant hunters ascended the soggy bank, and stood before the portals of Castlecloyd, undecided as to whether they should bivouac there until morning. Major Stewardson was muttering to himself the concluding lines of that Ode of Horace,