History & local legend
A Bethlehem legend follows Moravian missionary John Heckewelder to the banks of the Lehigh River, where a woman’s apparition was frightening townspeople away. People had begun taking their livestock elsewhere rather than risk meeting her.
In the story retold by Jill Stefko from Richmond F. Meyers’s Sketches of Early Bethlehem, Heckewelder approached the woman and asked why she remained. She told him that she had drowned her child before coming to America, then ended her own life in the Lehigh. Her punishment was to stay beside the river until the date on which she would otherwise have died.
Heckewelder carried her explanation back to Bethlehem. Once people understood her presence, they resumed using the riverbank and gradually became accustomed to seeing her. The tale ends quietly: by the time her appointed years had passed, she was so familiar that no one noticed her disappearance.
