Cursed Stone Couch in Mining Country Pennsylvania

Spooky season is almost upon us, and thus it feels appropriate to share this rural legend and roadside attraction near the border of Carbon and Luzerne Counties in the forested mountains of Pennsylvania’s mining communities. I am writing, of course, about the Cursed Stone Couch of Weatherly, PA.

Folktales — especially frightening ones — often have a social function. By having a tangible focus, they can relieve anxiety. And the stories behind the Cursed Couch reflect the troubled history of two vectors — coal mining and the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic.

The curse of the Stone Couch today runs something like this: sit on it the first time, and you will have bad luck. The second time you lie on the couch, someone in your family will die. The third time, death comes for you. Not a single one of the visitors that good-naturedly hiked out to the couch (I was the van driver scheduled for a trip to the Eckley Mining Village nearby and made a roadside attraction stop) elected to tempt fate, but the myths about the curse deal with those who did, and came to bad ends.

The first story is an origin myth, in which a Native American woman placed her baby on the stone formation, after which the infant died. The woman then inflicted a curse on the rocks.

In the second story, during the 1918 flu pandemic, a farmer was taking his wife and child to seek medical care. But as he traveled, his passengers’ influenza worsened. The man laid their bodies on the Stone Couch as they wasted and died.

This legend is particularly sad because so many people in the region succumbed to the flu due to the damage they had already sustained in the mines. Young boys and men working deep underground constantly breathed in coal dust and their weakened immune systems couldn’t fend off the illness. One statistic that drives this point home is that 25% of rural Schuylkill’s influenza casualties were in Minersvill