History & local legend
In 1738, nine-year-old Susanna Reimer began seeing a man near her family’s farm in what is now Obelisk, Montgomery County. Her seventeen-year-old sister, Elizabeth, could not see him. Their father, Frederick Reimer, believed the visitor might be a farmhand named Miller who had died several years earlier.
Elizabeth supplied questions for Susanna to ask. The man said he had died owing money to a woman named Steinman. When the sisters promised to pay, he announced that he could go home. Susanna asked where that was, and the girls followed him to a burial plot on the neighboring Zeiber farm, where he disappeared into the ground.
Frederick tried to find Steinman and settle the debt. Passengers who had traveled with Miller and the woman remembered a disagreement about money, but Miller’s widow disputed that any loan had been made. Despite the story’s publication, nobody came forward to collect the payment.
