Brady township, Mapleton borough

A Light on Rocky Ridge, 1889

According to the 1889 reprint of U. J. Jones's history of the early Juniata Valley, the Local News of Huntingdon published a strange account in February 1889 from a ridge a short distance west of Mapleton. For about twenty-five years, it is said, a peculiar light had been seen near the top of Rocky Ridge at Bridgeport. Those who saw it thought it a strange place for a light but never thought it worth looking into. Then three Mapleton men set out to find the cause.

They left Mapleton in the evening. Nearing the spot, they saw three lights that looked like rockets. Each popped up from the ground, stayed about three feet above the surface for a few minutes, and disappeared in turn, and the three seemed to point to a larger, brighter light, like a lantern's, swaying over a crevice in the rock. The place was easier to reach by day and without snow and ice on the rocks, so they came back by daylight with picks and shovels.

Six feet down they struck a pile of loose stones covering two large flat stones that formed a lid. Under it, in a hole about three feet long, was what seemed to be the remains of a human body. The men were of the opinion that someone had been murdered near the place many years before and the body hidden there. The account says the light had disappeared since the discovery and that its cause was as much a mystery as ever. It asks whether it could be explained "upon any scientific, psychological, or mythological theory."

The reprint then offers a name. "It is now conceded by many," it says, that these were the remains of Jack Armstrong, the Indian trader killed with his two companions in the Narrows about the middle of February 1744, "just one hundred and forty-five years ago." It names none of the many. The reason it gives is distance: John Harris's memorandum fixes the killing eight miles from Aughwick and ten from Standing Stone, "which is about the spot where the body was recently found."

On March 7, 1889, the Bellefonte Republican passed along the same theory and added that the "news scribe" called the light "sufficiently accounted for by certain well known natural laws, though he does not explain the laws to the astonished public." Twenty years later Charles Welch retold the story in his history of Mount Union, opening with the words, "Nobody knows just where Jack Armstrong is buried." Nothing we have read shows whose remains they were, or what the light was.

Checked against the record. We read the 1889 reprint of Jones's history on its page images, the Bellefonte Republican of March 7, 1889, and the Waterbury Evening Democrat of February 27, 1889. The printings differ. The Waterbury dispatch gives the men's names differently, says the search was made "yesterday," and says the bones were intact, so the story gives only what the printings share and names no one. The Waterbury dispatch also says the light was most brilliant in February, which the story does not repeat. We have not seen the Local News itself or any Huntingdon or Altoona paper of that month, so the first printing stays open. Whether the remains were Armstrong's is not established. Lytle's account says Armstrong was buried by the Indians who killed him, and the Delawares' 1744 reply says the same, and neither names a place. The reprint's own note puts him on the river shore, which does not fit a spot near the top of a ridge. The 1966 Mapleton centennial book places the spot one mile west of Mapleton, where Route 655 joins Route 22, and puts the Narrows between Mount Union and Mapleton Depot, so this ridge is not the gorge itself. No coroner's or inquest record turned up in the sources we hold, and we have not fixed the spot on a map.

Sources

Checked 2026-11-01 · Primary sources and the Pennsylvania Newspaper Archive

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