In May 1966 this county was the centre of a manhunt, and a federal agent died in it.
The FBI's own account is short and it is the one to read: “On May 17, 1966, Special Agent Terry R. Anderson was shot and killed while searching for a kidnap victim in rugged mountain terrain near Shade Gap, Pennsylvania. William Hollenbaugh, also known as ‘Mountain Man,’ had abducted a 17-year-old girl and held her captive for seven days. Special Agent Anderson was shot and killed while he and another agent were pursuing the fugitive. The victim was rescued, and Hollenbaugh was killed.”
The girl was Peggy Ann Bradnick, taken on her way home from school.
Terry Anderson was forty-two. He was born in Washington, Iowa in January 1924 and went to Drake University and Notre Dame. He is on the FBI's Wall of Honor. He was not from here, and he died on this county's mountain looking for a girl from Shade Gap.
Do you know anyone who remembers that May?
Nothing further from the county histories. The six histories held here end in 1913 and this story belongs to 1966, so there is no passage in them that bears on it. Rather than attach an unrelated page and let it look like corroboration, this story stands on the sources listed below.
Checked against the record. SOURCE UPGRADED from Wikipedia to the FBI's own Wall of Honor record for Special Agent Terry R. Anderson, which is a federal account of this case and names the place, the abductor, the seven days and the outcome.
CONFIRMED there: 17 May 1966 as the date Anderson was killed; near Shade Gap, Pennsylvania; William Hollenbaugh as the abductor; a 17-year-old girl held seven days; the victim rescued and Hollenbaugh killed; and Anderson's own details, born Washington, Iowa in January 1924, Drake University and Notre Dame.
ADDED: Hollenbaugh's nickname, “Mountain Man”, which is the FBI's own word for him and is how the region remembered him.
CUT: “the largest FBI manhunt in U.S. history at that time.” Two faults in one phrase. It is a superlative, and no source opened here supports it. And it was not an FBI manhunt: the search drew in state police, local officers, the National Guard and civilian volunteers, so describing it as the Bureau's operation takes the work off a great many local people. The page now says a manhunt, and lets the federal agent's death carry the scale.
STILL UNSOURCED, and left out rather than asserted: the abduction date of 11 May, the rescue on 18 May, and State Trooper Grant H. Mixell as the man who fired the fatal shot. These are almost certainly right and they are in every retelling, but the FBI page does not carry them and this county's own newspapers are not digitised for 1966 in either archive available here. The Pennsylvania State Police or the county historical society would settle all three, and that is the route rather than another search.
A NOTE ON NAMING. The FBI does not name the victim, and that is deliberate practice. Her name is kept here because she has spoken publicly about it for decades and is inseparable from the story in this county; the page carries nothing about her beyond what she has made public herself.
Checked 2026-09-09 · County history, independently fact checked
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