Two ghost stories
Every old estate should have a ghost story, says the neighborhood's history, and it offers two: a headless settler on Spring Lane, and a face on a bedroom wall at Springdale.
The Neighborhood of Springdale begins with two nineteenth-century estates near York: Springdale, and Brockie, built in the 1860s on the south side of Country Club Road by Jeremiah Sullivan Black, Chief Justice of Pennsylvania and later Attorney General and Secretary of State under President Buchanan. It ends, as a proper history should, with a ghost for each.
Brockie took its name, the story goes, from an early settler called Brawkie who owned the land. Walk back Spring Lane, off Country Club Road, on a moonless night, and his headless ghost will chase you away from the spring just off the roadway.
Springdale’s is gentler, and sadder. In the 1860s a relative visiting the house was in love with a young man who was courting her. Sitting in her bedroom one evening, she glanced at the wall and saw his face there, and heard his voice: “Gaze upon my countenance fondly, my darling, for I fear this is the last time you will be privileged to do so.” The next morning she learned that he had died in an accident the evening before.
Halloween is still one of the neighborhood’s traditions. The ghosts, as far as we know, are optional.