Newspaper Clipping of the Day

via Newspapers.com

If you want to write a screenplay for a horror movie centered around a Boy Scout camping trip, this would be an excellent way to start. The (Camden, New Jersey) "Courier-Post," July 11, 1932:

A mysterious hermit, with long- flowing beard and a chilling cackle, led two Boy Scout leaders Saturday midnight to the body of a murdered man in a Delaware County, Pa., woods.

Then, as he showed them the remains, the hermit disappeared.

An all-night and all-day search of the vicinity has failed to locate him. The murdered man has not been identified.

The Scout leaders were Wilmer Brown, 31, scoutmaster of the Colwyn Troop, and Walter Hawks, his assistant. They were on their way to the Scout camp on Darby Creek, Delaware township.

When the two were at the edge of the woods, the hermit appeared. Flashlights of the Scouts picked out his weird countenance from among the heavy brush and trees. "Do you want to see something?" the hermit asked in his strange, cackling way.

"Yes," the two replied, although later admitting they were frightened for the moment. Then the hermit led them through thicket and underbrush, over little used by-paths and through parts of the woods where no paths at all appeared.

He came to a little clearing. Bending over, he parted the underbrush and said one word" "Look."

Brown and Hawks complied. They saw, with startled eyes, the form of a man. A gun lay close at hand. They advanced into the thicket to get a closer view. Then turning to question the hermit, they discovered he had silently vanished.

The Scouts ran to the Springfield township police headquarters. Sergeant Chandler was on duty. He called Coroner J. Evan Scheehle of Delaware County and a searching party set out.

It took them nearly two hours to again reach the spot where the body of the man lay. At first it was believed he was a suicide. But no bullet holes were found In his tattered clothing nor his decomposed body.

The body was taken to the county morgue and an autopsy performed. Then it was disclosed that the man had been beaten to death. Two shots had been fired from the gun near at hand, but neither entered the body of the man.

His clothing, though worn and tattered by exposure, told police the man had been well-to-do. Expensive dental work furnished a clue.

Police are checking with all dentists of the Philadelphia area in hopes of identifying the man. Meanwhile the hunt for the mysterious hermit with the white, flowing whiskers continues.

A pair of eyeglasses found with the body enabled authorities to tentatively identify the victim as one Zephonia Hopper. Police assumed he was waylaid and killed by robbers, who then hid his body in the woods. However, his murder appears to have remained unsolved. As far as I can tell, they never found that hermit, either.

The moral is clear: if a cackling hermit asks if you would like to view something in the woods, politely decline. You probably won't like what you see.