BANGOR, Pa. (WLVT) - If you travel to Northampton County's Slate Belt, chances are you’ll come across history without even knowing it.
Some might even call it "haunted."
The Slate Belt Heritage Center will host its ninth annual Haunted Heritage event Thursday. Every year, historical figures from the area turn into ghostly storytellers.
"They are all real stories," said center president Melissa Hough, "and truth can be sometimes stranger than fiction."
"Sometimes, the characters just reach out and grab you," added ghost re-enactor Perry Morris. "Even if it's a little story, that adds to keep it interesting."
Typically, the ghosts would perform on stage in front of a crowd, but this year, the spooks and scares are on a screen.
"It's entertaining, it’s educational, and it will tell them a little bit about the slate belt and the history around us here that maybe they don't know about," Morris said
Five ghosts will share their stories from the Slate Belt -- and the legacies they’ve left behind.
"They're very haunting, because they are real," Hough said, "and this stuff did actually happen."
Morris plays the ghost of Joseph Keller, who was just six years old when Native Americans kidnapped him and his family during the French and Indian War. They were taken from the village of Delabore to Montreal.
"They were drugged and kicked and beaten -- literally hauled off to Canada," Morris said.
Keller came back to the Slate Belt as a late teenager, having learned several skills -- including using a rifle.
"He became proficient and learned those ways of a warrior because deep in his heart, he wanted to get revenge or retribution on the Native Americans that had raided their farm and killed his older brother Christian," Morris said.
Keller became a scout in one of George Washington’s armies and served several rounds of duty.
Mrs. J.M.R. Long, portrayed by Hough, is another ghost featured this year. Her rise to fame came during the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918.
"Women were not supposed to have their names in the paper, except when they were born, they were married and they died," she said.
The pandemic hit Philadelphia hard, and the impact reached the Slate Belt. When local doctors started getting sick, Long put an ad in the paper, asking women to step up and become caretakers.
"It helped, I think, to be unified, to feel that we're all in this together -- and that, if we don't do something, nobody else can," Hough said.
Mona Strunk, another local ghost, published Homefront Magazine during World War II as a way to connect with soldiers from the Slate Belt. The magazine started getting a lot of attention and became a social network of sorts.
"Letters from the guys overseas, pictures of local girls who were the ‘Fairest of the Month,'" Hough said, "and the information included way too much information!"
The two other ghosts are suffragist Catherine Eilenberger and Reverend Isaac Rose, a leader from East Bangor’s African-American community.
"These are real people with real stories, just like you or I," Hough said. "It's very compelling, really, because ordinary people, in every case, have stepped up to an emergency or a situation that was foreign to them -- not unlike what we're going through today -- and done something that was a little bit heroic."
The virtual Haunted Heritage event will be streamed on Thursday at 7 p.m. via Facebook and YouTube.
You can watch from Facebook HERE.
You can watch from YouTube HERE.