History & local legend
The Bagunk is a long-running ghost tradition around the cemeteries west of Glen Lyon in Newport Township. When the Times Leader investigated the story in 1997, Cheryl Evans recalled encountering it as a ninth grader on a double date at St. Michael’s Byzantine Catholic Cemetery.
The four teenagers had parked among the graves when Evans saw a white mist with red-orange eyes. Her grandmother had already told her stories about the Bagunk, so she had a name for the apparition she believed she was seeing.
Other residents described a woman in a white nightgown crossing the road between burial grounds. Police Chief Albert Vandermark remembered an officer who was afraid to go into the cemetery. These accounts appeared in Bob Nocek’s October 31, 1997, report, which collected the different forms of a story local families had passed down for generations.
