History & local legend
Sacred Heart Polish National Church Cemetery is one of the burial grounds clustered at the east end of Summit Hill. Its best-known apparition is a woman in white. In the version neighbors told columnist David Wargo, she appears on certain moonlit nights, passes through the cemetery gate and moves toward town, fading before she arrives.
Wargo began collecting these accounts around 2000 and described them in the Times News in 2014. Neighbors remembered hearing the story decades earlier, and a friend told him of an encounter in the 1980s. Older men recalled a related figure on the road above the field where they had played evening football, later incorporated into nearby St. Michael’s Cemetery. Whenever they tried to approach the woman, she disappeared.
Another story associated more generally with the east-end graveyards describes a headless man carrying a red lantern in fall or winter.
Sources
- David Wargo, Times News, August 9, 2014, interviews with neighbors and former football players, Fascinating Folklore
- StrangeUSA, archived Summit Hill burial ground story of the headless lantern bearer
- Tamaqua Public Library, individual cemeteries, exact coordinates and Sacred Heart Polish National Church Cemetery identification
