Becky's Grave (Snavely Cemetery)

Snavely Cemetery is a small country burial ground on the outskirts of Elton, on Mount Airy Drive in Adams Township, Cambria County, Pennsylvania. For decades it has been better known by its folkloric name, 'Becky's Grave,' and is one of the Laurel Highlands / Johnstown area's most-told local legends, covered by the Johnstown Tribune-Democrat and investigated by regional paranormal researchers.

The popular legend claims that 'Becky' was a young woman hanged in Richland Township in the 18th or early 19th century, condemned for witchcraft. Researchers, including Walter Hutsky Jr., have traced the legend back to a real person and found that the story is fabricated. The historical Becky was Rebecca Wertz, later Kring, born March 18, 1807. She did not die by hanging: she and her husband Samuel died together in a house fire on January 22, 1892, a tragedy recorded in a contemporary newspaper account that described how the elderly couple could not be reached through the heat and smoke.

Notably, Rebecca Kring is not even buried in the cemetery that bears her nickname. Her actual grave is in Dunmyer Cemetery, several miles away near Route 160. The 'witch' identity and the hanging are inventions of local storytelling rather than historical fact.

The entry here treats Becky's Grave as a documented regional legend and a small historic cemetery, and corrects the record on the real Rebecca Kring out of respect for an actual person whose life and death were misrepresented by the folklore.