The Burial Site of an Insurance Murder Victim and Its Folklore
Moonshine Rd, Jonestown, PA 17038
Age
All Ages
Cost
Free
Free. The church sits on Fort Indiantown Gap military installation land; confirm access at the base gate before visiting.
Access
Limited Access
Gravel road access, uneven cemetery grounds
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1800 · Blue-Eyed Six True Crime Case · 19th Century Pennsylvania Criminal Law · First Multiple Murder Conviction on Single Indictment
The story attached to this small church begins not with the building but with a murder on a creek in northern Lebanon County. Joseph Raber was a 65-year-old man living in poverty in a charcoal burner's hut in the Blue Mountain area when six acquaintances — later dubbed the Blue-Eyed Six by newspaper reporters who noted each conspirator shared the same eye color — took out life insurance policies on him totaling $8,000, representing themselves as his caretakers.
In 1878, two of the conspirators waited for Raber at a plank crossing over Indiantown Creek. When he reached the middle, one threw him into the water. Indiantown Creek runs only 17 inches deep at that crossing; the men held him down until he drowned. The coroner initially ruled the death accidental.
The scheme unraveled when one conspirator's son-in-law came forward. By April 1879, all six men faced trial — and in a moment that legal historians noted as unprecedented in American and English common law, all six were convicted of first-degree murder under a single indictment. Charles Drews and Frank Stichler were hanged on November 14, 1879. Israel Brandt, Josiah Hummel, and Henry F. Wise followed on May 13, 1880. George Zechman was granted a retrial and ultimately acquitted.
Raber himself was buried at Moonshine United Zion Church cemetery, near where he was killed. The church sits on what is now Fort Indiantown Gap military reservation land. The executions took place at the Lebanon County prison; despite persistent local legend, none of the Blue-Eyed Six were hanged or buried at Moonshine Church.
Sources
The legend that attached itself to Moonshine Church borrowed selectively from history. The Blue-Eyed Six were tried in Lebanon, hanged at the county prison, and buried in separate family plots across the county. None of them were executed at or buried at the church. Yet the cemetery became the location where their story took on a supernatural dimension.
The most repeated account involves six sets of blue floating lights observed moving through the cemetery at night — interpreted as the spirits of the six killers. Witnesses claim the lights appear when visitors walk around the church perimeter or cemetery boundary, with various rituals described for summoning the phenomenon: three circuits clockwise, or one circuit walked backwards.
Raber, who was buried at the church, is said to appear inside the building and along the cemetery's perimeter. Reports of his figure are less dramatically described — a man-shaped presence near the older markers.
A separate tradition concerns the woods behind the church: a spirit referred to in local accounts as a menacing red figure, described not as supernatural fire imagery but as a dark, malevolent force indigenous to the Indiantown Gap woodland. Accounts of this entity predate the Blue-Eyed Six case. Visitors also describe an inability to navigate out of the wooded area behind the church without difficulty, though this has not been systematically documented.
A 2005 correction to the original Shadowlands database entry specifically addresses the misattribution: the Blue-Eyed Six had no connection to the church or its cemetery and were not buried there. The victims, executioners, and conspirators all operated in the surrounding region but the church connection is, by available evidence, purely folkloric.
Notable Entities
Walk the grounds of Moonshine United Zion Church, where the murder victim Joseph Raber is buried. The cemetery holds the actual grave of Raber, whose 1878 drowning murder at the hands of a group known as the Blue-Eyed Six became one of the most sensational criminal trials in Pennsylvania history. The church sits within the Fort Indiantown Gap reservation boundary; check with base security regarding civilian access.
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