History & local legend
Alvira’s cemetery is one of the surviving traces of a Union County village displaced during the Second World War. In 1942, the federal government acquired local farms and homes for the Pennsylvania Ordnance Works, an explosives complex. Concrete storage bunkers replaced parts of the community, and the former village landscape later included woods and federal prison land.
A local ghost tradition imagines the dead from the displaced families walking those woods, still angry about the loss of their homes and land. The story gives the cemetery an enduring connection to a village no longer standing around it.
The Junior Investigating Paranormal Society and Soul Patrol visited Alvira’s cemeteries and bunkers together.
Sources
- Mandrake_1975, Ghosts of Central Pennsylvania, tradition of spirits of the displaced families in the Alvira woods
- Junior Investigating Paranormal Society, first episode and its investigation with Soul Patrol at the cemeteries and bunkers
- Union County Historical Society, A Village Dies in Union County, dispossession and the Pennsylvania Ordnance WorksUnavailable ·
- Uncovering PA, walking route to the original cemetery and the state game lands
- Alvira Cemetery’s mapped coordinates
