CENTRE HALL — Jeffrey Frazier grew up in Centre Hall, spending much of his childhood exploring the mountains of Centre County and learning about the local legends connected to them. Now, he is sharing the old-time tales he’s collected for the last 50 years in his most recent book, “Pennsylvania Mountain Landmarks Vol. 3.”
“I was born and raised in Centre Hall, where I like to say I grew up in a ‘Tom Sawyer’ sort of way,” shared Frazier. “Some of my fondest memories of that boyhood include explorations of the out of the way spots in the mountains and accounts of the legends that seem to cling to those spots.”
Frazier graduated from Penn State in 1967 and moved out of state to start his career. However, it wasn’t long before the absence of the mountains of Pennsylvania started to leave Frazier homesick.
“It was 1970 and I was living in New Jersey, which was all concrete. I realized how much I loved the Pennsylvania mountains and their stories. It was the homesickness that inspired me to collect and write those stories.”
Having read all the books he could get his hands on about the legends of Pennsylvania, cross referencing the materials with the stories he had heard as a boy, he started to track down and record the legends of important sites, landmarks, buildings and more, some of which had ties dating back to the Civil War.
As he collected stories, he categorized each story into one of four types of stories, Frazier explained. These categories included stories from early indigenous tribes; hunting histories connected to local wolves and mountain lions; supernatural stories connected to ghosts, witches and other supernatural events; and stories of lost treasures and exaggerated animals or people.
“Many of the stories often sound ‘far-fetched’ to us today,” said Frazier. “But I’ve tried to find the kernel of truth that might be buried in them by acting as an investigative reporter and treating each tale as a little mystery.”
Uncovering the truth of many of the Pennsylvania tales involved tracking down community members whose ancestors heard the initial story accounts firsthand, then verifying the stories with recorded histories and data. However, all the time and research were worth it for Frazier to be able to use his book to make an impact on the community.
“It has been a blessing to preserve many of these old-time tales that would have been lost forever had I not recorded them on the printed page,” said Frazier. “I of course hope people are inspired to go visit the spots that I wrote about, but on the other hand, I hope too that it inspires people to want to preserve our mountains and our wild areas. There’s too much development happening. I would like to see us keep our area in its natural state.”
For Frazier, the past is essential for the community’s future.
“The more links to the past we have, the more knowledge we have about how we should or should not do certain things. There are lessons to be learned, important lessons, from these stories.”
“Pennsylvania Mountain Landmarks Vol. 3,” along with “Pennsylvania Fireside Tales Vol. 8,” can be found on Frazier’s website, pafolktales.com .
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