Shippensburg

Hey folks, welcome to Phantoms and Monsters Radio.

Tonight, we are traveling through Pennsylvania, from the rural roads of Shippensburg to the mountains above Williamsport, from our crowded department store outside of Pittsburgh to the window of a third-story apartment in Lebanon.

The people whose accounts you'll hear are we're doing ordinary things, returning from a shopping trip, taking a drive, hunting familiar ground, looking out a window at the end of the day.

Then something interrupted that familiar world.

And as you listen tonight, keep one question in mind.

What did each person actually observe and what remains unresolved? This is Unexplained Pennsylvania.

Our first account begins with three people returning from a shopping trip near Shippensburg in Cumberland County.

The narrator places the encounter in the 1950s.

Let's check other games in the East, as much time as we have before going back to the ballgame.

Boston University 33, Northeastern six, Boston College 37, Navy nothing, Coast Guard Academy 15, Norfolk 14, Connecticut 41, New Hampshire 24, Cornell 24, Bucknell nothing, Delaware 29, McNeese State 24, Holy Cross 14, Dartmouth three, Lafayette 14, Gettysburg three, Maine 29, Rhode Island 19, Maryland 31, Syracuse nothing, Pennsylvania 14, Brown nine, Princeton 40, Columbia 13, Rutgers 24, Harvard 21, Slippery Rock 34, Shippensburg nine, Trinity 34, Bates eight, Vermont 25, Massachusetts 14, and Yale 30, Colgate seven.

[cheering] Al Bando, the third baseball lead it on.

Holzman has the heart of the batting order this inning against McNally.

And I was looking at lists of kind of enlistments and recruits.

And one of these, it just had kind of 30 recruits in Shippensburg in Pennsylvania.

And this was for the Seven Years' War, so not even the Revolutionary War.

But of the 32 names, 16 were born in Ireland.

And I, I knew I couldn't yoke myself with someone who, who didn't believe the same way that I believed and was willing to embrace, uh, the lifestyle that I wanted to live.

But through the course of things, I found out that Abigail was part of Shippensburg Christian Fellowship, and I overheard someone make a derogatory comment about Shippensburg and their view of finances, which piqued my interest because I didn't really know that there were other people out there that, other churches, um, that believed this way.

And so I remember on one of my furloughs, I went to the library because we didn't have internet at home, and I went to the library and I googled Shippensburg Christian Fellowship.

And, um, I read their, some articles about covetousness and, and wealth, and I...

And really the rest is history.

We're going to talk about why grave robbing happens, how body snatchers actually went about it, and what the public thought about the practice, and eventually, how it came to an end.

Joining us to give us that history is historian Chrissy Sienickel from Shippensburg University.

Welcome back to The Spark, Chrissy.

It's so nice to have you with us today.

For example, there's a big deal one that happens, the first one in the United States is in 1765 in our very own Philadelphia.

The, um, person that eventually led, uh, th- what becomes U- UPenn, his name was William Shippen.

No relation to the Shippen that founded Shippensburg, I checked.

I was about to ask.

All right.

Like Shippensburg, stuff like that.

Yeah, just the entire state.

That's right.