Fallen Timbers Road

History & local legend

A New Geneva correspondent’s ghost story appeared in the New York Sun in January 1879 and was reprinted in the Troy Times. It described a tall, gaunt man haunting the woods known as Fallen Timbers, appearing in daylight to people traveling the road toward New Geneva.

Carpenter Osborne Hare told of seeing the stranger on his way to work about fifteen years earlier. At first he thought he recognized an acquaintance and hurried to catch him. Closer up, he saw a coatless man with sleeves rolled to his shoulders and unusually thin, pale arms. Stonemason Jim Dougherty encountered the same figure while approaching from the opposite direction.

Several years later, a farmer named Clemmer was bringing home a coffin on a sled when he and his companion saw the man beside the road, bare-armed and standing knee-deep in snow. A later encounter involved a physician from Brownsville: hearing an odd drumming noise, he turned in his saddle and found the figure immediately behind his horse. He rode away in fright.