The White Hermit of Mount Joy

Beneath the streets of Mount Joy, where limestone veins cut deep into the earth, whispers tell of a man who traded the world of men for the shadows of caverns. Settlers called him the White Hermit—a strange, white-bearded figure said to wander naked through snowstorms and vanish into the hidden caves that once honeycombed under the town.

The legend begins far across the Atlantic. In mid-18th-century Scotland, a young man, trained as a schoolteacher, lived under the roof of a stern stepmother after his mother’s death. One bitter winter night, with his father away, an argument with the woman flared into rage. In a cruel moment, he forced his stepmother and her infant into the freezing night. By dawn, both were dead.

Wracked with guilt and terrified of discovery, the young man fled his homeland. He boarded a ship to Philadelphia, eventually finding his way to Lancaster. For a brief time, he lived as an ordinary citizen, teaching and attempting to rebuild a life. But one day, on a Lancaster street, he glimpsed a familiar face from Scotland. Fearing exposure, he panicked, bought a gun and supplies, and disappeared into the backcountry.

After three days’ wandering, he stumbled upon a network of caverns in the limestone hills of Mount Joy. These caves were already known to Native Americans, who called them the Osres, meaning Stone Wigwam. Within their mile-long passages, streams cut across the stone floor, and mineral drippings formed pale pillars like shrouded figures in the dark. Here, the fugitive built his refuge.

For years, he lived unseen. He hunted and trapped by night, dug roots by day, and drank from the streams that ran beneath the earth. Five years passed before he saw another white man. Six more before settlers stumbled upon him. By then, his beard had grown long and wild, and he was remembered not just as a hermit, but as something otherworldly.

Sometime in those lonely years, the Hermit claimed to have heard the voice of God. The command was simple: cast off clothing and live naked in penance for the blood on his hands. He obeyed, never dressing again.

Locals began to speak of sightings: a gaunt, pale figure with a mane of white hair striding across snowy fields, vanishing into a cave mouth. Even in the fiercest blizzard, he wore nothing but his beard and the weight of his guilt. Children were hushed with warnings of the Naked Man; some farmers muttered prayers and kept their distance, while others reached for the rifle leaning by the door.

Around 1765, the sightings ceased. Some believed a freshet in the nearby Little Chickies Creek collapsed the entrance and sealed him inside. Others thought he simply wasted away in solitude. His body was never found. For generations, Mount Joy residents wondered whether the Hermit’s skeleton still lay deep beneath their feet, entombed in the Stone Wigwam.

The caves of Mount Joy have long since been sealed, their entrances blasted shut by farmers wary of open caverns. Only fragments survive in the cellars of Bube’s Brewery, where the underground “Catacombs” still lure visitors. Here, the White Hermit’s legend lingers. Some say his ghost still roams the tunnels; others believe his story is no ghost tale at all, but the true account of a man driven by guilt into the earth itself.

The best-known entrance to these caves was at a place called the Cove, near today’s Cove Outlook Park on land owned by the Lancaster County Career & Technology Foundation along Little Chickies Creek. Before it was sealed by silt—most dramatically during the flooding that followed Tropical Storm Agnes in 1972—the opening lay beneath a pool where the creek curved under a shale outcropping. To slip inside, one had to dive below the water and vanish into the subterranean dark.

Approximate location of the Cove entrance shown above.

Take heed. To slip beneath the waters into the Cove is to risk the same fate as the White Hermit, whose bones are said to lie forever in the Stone Wigwam.

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Read more stories like this in Uncharted Lancaster’s Ghosts, Monsters, and Tales of Adventure book. This 283-page book is packed with 64 unforgettable stories, all set right here in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.

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For More Information, Visit:

• Lancaster Daily Intelligencer Tue, Nov 24, 1914 ·Page 6
• Lancaster Intelligencer Wed, Nov 25, 1914 ·Page 2
• Sunday News Sun, Jun 14, 1970 ·Page 48
• Lancaster New Era Tue, Apr 05, 1983 ·Page 14
• Lancaster New Era Fri, Dec 15, 1995 ·Page 8
• Legends of Lancaster – The White Hermit of Mt. Joy