The Haunted Barn in Amish Country

My dad had many strange encounters in his job as an HVAC technician in rural Southwestern PA. He had this one job located down the highway from where we lived, in a rural corner called the Tri State Region where Pennsylvania, Western Maryland and West Virginia all touch. It was an old barn in an extremely remote area known as Sandpatch that was being renovated into a house. It was up a long gravel road with nothing else around. My dad said that one of the things he first noticed was that crows congregated on the site and wouldn't leave. Also, every morning as he had to drive his truck along the gravel road up the mountain, he would see barefoot Amish children walking to their one room school house. He didn't think anything of that at first, as rural PA has a huge Amish population and there are little one room schools still scattered everywhere in the back country. But then he noticed that the children, like the crows, also never seemed to leave the site. He could hear children giggling in the woods around the barn and if he looked through the trees he could catch sight of small children, barefoot, with homemade wool dresses and overalls. Just a note to listeners unfamiliar with Old Order Amish culture, it is typical that the kids and women don't wear shoes from April to October. It is not typical of the kids to lurk in the woods and spy on people, as Old Order Amish children are expected to work on their farms or around their houses with chores starting at the age of five or so. Also, yes, they still walk to one room school houses, which means that there has to be several around even in a small area. But yes, the giggling and brush of homemade clothes continued over the next few weeks. Then, the sound of gravel crunching under car tires, and the sound of an engine started to occur off and on. No car ever came up though. And there was no place to turn off, just a gravel lane surrounded by forest on a lonely mountain. Then, the light bulbs my dad and the other contractors were using started to explode. He said they weren't halogen lights, but multiple exploded one after the other. He soon eagerly finished installing the HVAC system though, and gladly moved on. That was twenty years ago and he still talks about "The Haunted Barn down in Sandpatch where the Amish live."