Due to the rich history of Pennsylvania and the surrounding area, folklore and legends have been passed down for generations. These legends are remembered and appreciated to this day by a community who enjoys investigating and learning about these myths.

According to paranormal investigator and Clinton County historian Lou Bernard, Pennsylvania has a wide variety of cryptids, ghosts and mythological creature sightings.

“I look into this stuff scientifically and try to see if there are any explanations for it,” Bernard said. “Sometimes I’ll check into the history of these things, and sometimes when I can, I will write articles about it.

Bernard likes to approach his interest in the paranormal through a scientific lens.

“There are people I won’t work with because they let their imagination run away with themselves. They aren’t interested in any kind of valid proof,” Bernard said. “They just want to walk around and go, ‘oh’, I’m getting a feeling’.”

Bernard also utilizes his background in history to explore even deeper during his investigations. Sometimes he will look into the “deeds of old houses,” “tragic deaths” and obituaries in order to find different places to investigate or look into.

According to Bernard, the most common paranormal occurrences he looks into are ghost and bigfoot-like cryptid sightings.

“There’s definitely a lot of forests around here, so I get a lot of reports of that,” Bernard said.

Bernard said that he has responded to many calls and reports over the past years, but one of his most interesting encounters happened while exploring a “haunted prison.”

“There was one time [we were recording] out in the courtyard where the guy was hung,” Bernard said, “and later, when we played it back, we got a little whispering voice on tape going, ‘You know that…’ Oh wow, that was exciting.”

While Bernard enjoys investigating and learning about paranormal activity, he claims that he has personally experienced very few paranormal occurrences. The one time that he did describe involved a hike out in the woods where he encountered a trail of crushed foliage leading off the trail, and was overcome by a foul odor.

Evidently this is a known sign of bigfoot activity, as senior Sean Mariano has experienced a similar situation.

“I was fishing with my brother in Delaware, and while we were packing up, we suddenly smelled a really bad smell, like rotten fish,” Mariano said. “We didn’t know what it could be because we hadn’t caught anything, and then we thought we saw some kind of movement on the other side of the stream so we took off.”

While many people find the idea of bigfoot evading everybody deep in the forest, environmental scientist teacher Ian Burley believes it could be possible.

“When it comes to Sasquatch or some organism like that, it has the ability to smell [and] see us and avoid us,” Burley said, “so I believe that it could happen. Is it true? I don’t know. But I do believe that there is enough land out there that if something does not want to be found, it probably could pull it off.”

Burley stresses the importance of looking at stories and sightings like this carefully.

“I just want to stress to keep an open mind because if we close our minds, people are not going to discover things. I think people should continue to keep an open mind with a healthy amount of skepticism,” Burley said.