The Suscon Screamer (Unedited Version)

I can't help but feel that after suffering horrible fates, some restless spirits wish to make their presence known on Earth or make their way someplace else. Me? I never wanted to get in between those spirits and any of their wishes.

Around these parts, nothing exciting happened in the late 1970s during my early teenage years. There was the occasional keg party in some place where you’d hoped the cops would never find you. Something else might find you there. And when all was said and done, having the cops bust your party might have been the better alternative. 

I grew up midway between Wilkes-Barre and Scranton, Pennsylvania, about two hours north of Philadelphia with an aging population about 20 years behind the times. 

Like many other shiftless kids across the country, weekend nights for me meant throwing a couple bucks in a hat and finding some older guy to buy booze for you and your buddies. If one of those guys weren’t around, you sometimes plodded off in search of another party in another town where you might be able to mooch a few free beers. But there was always risk associated with this move. Mingling in a foreign party circle without a bunch of shit going down always involved having a connected friend who, at first, made assurances to the hosts and other attendees.

"Don't worry, man. He's cool," they'd say.

They'd guaranteed your safety. But it didn’t always work out that way. Because your buddy might disappear and a newcomer would inevitably point at you and ask, "Who's that guy?"

And then the fun began.

If you did show up with a hijacked bottle of Southern Comfort or something similar, however, all present and future walls between you and your new acquaintances would be torn down for all eternity. You’d leave the place with a key to the city— Party City. 

Forty-some years later, I don’t really recall making it to many parties in Suscon, a rural expanse of Pittston Township, which neighbored my hometown. It was an arduous four-mile walk uphill to those spots from my parents’ house, and I didn’t own a car or have any close friends up that way.

The prevailing mindset for me was don’t go where you don’t belong: Stick close to home and familiar faces. Besides, “Susconers" —as we small-city dwellers called them— were their own lot. I felt they represented part of the stereotypical divide between country folk and small-city slickers. Even in the summer, a fair share of them wore long-sleeved flannel and pumpkin boots, listening to Bob Seger and other pseudo-country music. 

I lived west of this rural community and opted for preppier clothes. As far as music goes, the stage for my future hearing loss was being set in Pat Mitchell’s green Datsun coupe, with thundering decibels of Pink Floyd and Jeff Beck and Spirit. Their tunes barreled from speakers powered by amps that a band could probably use for a gig.  

I’ve felt the people who grew up in Suscon (or gravitated toward it like Oliver Wendell Douglas from Green Acres) relished the country life—a life closer to nature where black bears and other wild critters raided your garbage more frequently than in the lower-lying municipalities of the Wyoming Valley. A few of the kids I knew from that more mountainous neck of the woods liked to hunt and fish and rip their lift-kitted pickup trucks along Suscon Road or Bear Creek Road, as it’s officially known. As for me, I hung out in a downtown billiards hall alongside bookies and aging mafiosos. Nothing enlightening ever happened there, despite what I may have thought at the time. 

There was another reason I didn’t venture to Suscon in the middle of the evening. I didn’t want to get lost in unfamiliar territory only to find trouble. There was a select set of dudes in many neighboring towns—and at least one ignoramus at every party— who would beat you up for fun or just because you weren’t from around there. I was no tough guy. At any party, my goals were to have a few Styrofoam cups of Genesee, find a clearing to study nighttime cloud formations, and flirt with a girl who didn’t have a boyfriend packing a deer rifle on a rack mounted to the rear window of his Chevy 4X4. And as far as I could tell, a guy from Suscon was likely to have a gun in his truck, and you never knew exactly who was dating whom. But in my time nobody ever shot nobody, as they might say in the nearby borough of Dupont, where the “trees” often come between the twos and the fours. 

That type of trouble—pissing off a beer-muscled hothead like Clint from Dazed and Confused—was real. Some Suscon residents also warn that within the vast Northeastern Pennsylvania forestland, you might encounter something even more frightening. And it would be up to you to figure out whether the experience was imagined or chalked up to something explainable. When I look back on it, maybe there was also a little bird in my subconscious telling me to stay out of those Suscon woods at night. 

That's because in the back of my mind sat this continually changing tale about the Suscon Screamer. It’s the kind of story that little kids fully accept, and most adults instantly dismiss. As a know-it-all teenager, I got caught somewhere in the middle of the believe-it-or-not spectrum. At that time of life, supernatural events intrigued me, but I didn’t need anything ruining my Friday nights. Avoiding spinning sensations on the walk home and going undetected by my parents at curfew were challenges enough. 

One of the more widely circulated myths behind the Screamer involves someone else’s day of ruin. Lore has it that a Suscon bride-to-be was left standing at the altar and bolted out of a nearby church. She hopped in a car and drove fast along Bear Creek Road: the quickest way to get to Suscon from that little borough of Dupont, where many residents claim Eastern European ancestry. Then and now, Bear Creek Road led to other remote places. These places had fewer people and police than Suscon did. So, along the rural route at night, isolated and illuminated only by the moon, there was no reason for carefree youngsters not to drive like maniacs.    

Suscon Road crosses over Interstate 81 heading away from Dupont— a town with about 2,500 pierogi-crazed residents—as you make your way southeast toward the Pocono Mountains. About 1.5 miles from the Interstate, the route immediately takes a sharp turn to the left. At that point, a low-hanging railroad overpass loomed for decades until it was torn down in the 1980s. If you unknowingly came upon that bridge at a high rate of speed from either direction, chances are you wouldn’t make it through without wrecking your car. Adding to the peril, the pavement beneath the bridge narrowed to one lane, and there was no way to know if another vehicle was headed toward you from the opposite direction. You had to honk your car horn to let other motorists know you were approaching. Legend told us that you just didn’t want to honk that sucker five times. 

Auto accidents near the Black Bridge and along Suscon Road were frequent, but not always serious. I never thought much about hauntings when passing under the bridge. On the contrary, some funny memories stick in my head. One summer Sunday evening, a jovial neighbor of mine was driving a rented  U-Haul party truck back from a weekend in the infield at the Pocono 500 car race. As he headed home toward the bridge with a cargo of young folks and a few empty kegs, his shotgun rider suggested they might want to turn the vehicle around and take an alternate route to Pittston. One only needed the eye test to know that the truck clearly wasn’t getting safely underneath the overpass. Yet, my friend T.C. pressed on, unfazed, as he often was. 

“Don’t worry," he said to his running mate. "We’ll squeeze through."

That statement came seconds before a collision with the overhang peeled off the top of the truck like a lid pull-tabbed from a sardine can. 

The entire 18-mile stretch via Suscon Road from Dupont to Thornhurst, situated along the Lehigh River, has seen its share of fatal car crashes. One of the stories behind ghosts in Suscon implies that the distraught bride’s last ride would count among them. An alternate recollection of the story says she may have hung herself from the bridge or a tree somewhere near it. It’s since been said that stopping at the railroad bridge, flashing your car’s headlights, and honking its horn five times would elicit the specter of a “woman in white”, screaming in ghastly tones. People who claim to have experienced the Screamer say the sound is unlike anything they’ve ever heard.

It may be the ghost of a murdered young woman whose screams are heard in response to car horns and flashing lights beneath the overpass. She may be hopelessly yearning for help that never came or wailing in agony before her soul can finally slip off into the mystic.

Some drivers have talked about a female hitchhiker in a white prom dress searching for a ride along the side of Mile Hill, a section of road that begins immediately after you ride eastward beneath the Black Bridge. The image appears undeniably real at first glance, only to fade from the driver’s sight as they pull closer to offer a ride. 

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There are theories about the Suscon Screamer that push the imagination to its limits, and there are versions that simply give the psyche a little nudge. The legend of the Screamer appears to have foundations dating back to 1946.

Standing near the James A. Musto Bypass in Pittston Township and gazing eastward, you see a line of mountains in the Allegheny Plateau within the range of the Appalachian Mountains, stretching from Wilkes-Barre to Scranton. A short hike from Suscon Road that borders State Game Lands 91, Big Shiny Mountain was once the site of a fire tower that offered a panoramic view of the remote forest in and around Suscon. As I’ve had some hunter friends of mine tell me, “Pal, anything could be living in those woods.”

If you knew Dupont’s Jim Reap back in the day, he’d likely tell you much the same. Employed as a watcher in a fire tower perched on the mountain exactly 666 meters above sea level, he also spotted something he may have wished to forget. The sighting is thought to be the basis from which all other Screamer stories spun off. 

Dupont historian and retired attorney, Jan Lokuta, relates a chat he had with Reap about the creature’s appearance. It was six feet in length with a snout, reddish-brown hair, and eyes that sparkled, according to Reap. The watchman would not happen upon the strange creature again, but he did twice hear unnerving screams, to which a pack of wild dogs would respond in kind. Lokuta believes that the being may have been a hyena escaped from an animal exhibit somewhere in the neighboring Pocono Mountains. 

Reap’s story would spawn some reports of a similar nature. Another version of his story has a bare-skinned creature, about the same size as Reap’s, approaching another guy perched in a fire tower. Guys like these spent much of their time in nature and never had this man seen or heard anything like it. Locking the hatch beneath the fire tower's hut, the watchman realized his rifle was not with him. He hunkered down and hoped for the best. After a few anxious minutes, he rose and watched the bizarre varmint scramble away from his post. Some people figured it was a black bear burned in a brush fire, screaming in in pain. This explanation as well as Lokuta’s make some sense. But it’s the subsequent sightings of tall upright hairy beasts that test the limits of one’s sanity. Unless, of course, you take stock in the existence of Bigfoot. 

If you ask a thousand people, you’d likely find many of those folks call it nonsense while another group might say that sasquatch lives among us. Rob Viars, a Wilkes-Barre resident, fits in the latter category. At nine years old he claims to have seen Bigfoot walk out of the woods near his home. Three other family members saw the same thing. “We all ran to the window and we looked, and the deer had come out of the woods with a creature walking on two legs, really tall, and hairy chasing it across the canal,” said Viars. He added, “I'm not crazy. I served in the military, I worked in law enforcement, so it's not that I'm crazy but I know what I saw.” 

Eric Altman concurs. A member of the Pennsylvania Cryptozoology Society, Altman references reports of sasquatch sightings that stretch back to the 1800s in lands not far from Suscon. In those days, Bigfoot was known as “Wildman.” Altman said, "The first documented newspaper report of a Wildman sighting came in 1838 up in Bridgewater Township in the northeastern part of the state near the Poconos.”

Who’s to say the big beast’s progeny haven’t traveled a bit westward, away from the bedroom communities of New York and New Jersey, in search of solitude and a few potato pancakes from the Sacred Heart church picnic in Dupont.

So, where does the legend leave us? Is the Screamer a team effort coordinated by ghosts and tortured souls in an area that is tailor-made for paranormal activity? Or is it the cries and calls of an actual creature whose existence has yet to be proven? There’s only one way to find out. Bring yourself— and an open mind. And let me know how you make out. Just don't say I didn't warn you.