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Fifty-six years ago this month David Fellin and Henry Throne were rescued — pulled one at a time through a narrow borehole from the mine cave-in that had trapped them 300 feet underground for two weeks in the Schuylkill County town of Sheppton.
Lubricated with axle grease and wearing a combination harness/coverall that had been sent down the borehole, Throne ascended first. It was a 15-minute, 45-second endurance test that made him nauseous and dizzy, burned his nostrils with coal dust and made his feel as if his “limbs would be torn from their screaming sockets.”
For Fellin, a more experienced and less emotional miner, the early-morning ascent on Aug. 27 1963, took only eight minutes and 15 seconds. He emerged laughing and singing an old folk song about how “She’ll be comin’ ‘round the mountain.”
Fascinated by their story, local author and retired psychologist Maxim Furek, 72, of Mocanaqua, has detailed it in his book “Sheppton: The Myth, Miracle & Music,” which has led to numerous book-signings and recent speaking engagements at such venues as the Sophia Coxe House in Drifton and the Fort Fest in Linthicum, Md.
The Maryland event was a seminar on the paranormal, and people who attended were particularly interested in the “miracle” aspect of the story, in which Fellin and Thorne described seeing visions of Pope John XXIII, who had died a few months earlier, as well as images of a bright, celestial city.
“They credited the pope with saving their lives,” said Furek, who believes people should not be quick to dismiss the miners’ reports as hallucinations.
He tends to believe them, as did the Swiss psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross.
As Furek wrote in an article that appeared in the December 2018 edition of Fate magazine, Kubler-Ross, who authored the 1969 study “On Death and Dying,” interviewed the miners in Headwaters, Va., and declared “that Sheppton represented proof of ‘life after death.’ “
In what could be a telling incident, Furek said, Throne — who had not been religious before his rescue and had not known what Pope John XXIII looked like — noticed a portrait of the late pontiff at a Hazleton hospital after his rescue and said, “Hey, that’s the guy we saw.”
“The story really resonated with people at the (Fort Fest) seminar,” Furek said, noting that others who have been interested in Sheppton have included Vatican scholars, who saw the story as possible evidence of Pope John XXIII’s saintliness, and fans of the pop/rock group The Buoys.
In 1970 the band released “Timothy,” a song that tells of three miners trapped underground and implies the two survivors had resorted to cannibalism.
While there was a third miner trapped at Sheppton — Louis Bova, whose body was not recovered — the songwriter who penned “Timothy” told Furek there was no connection.
“I had a chance to interview Rupert Holmes at the Bloomsburg Fair and he said he didn’t know about Sheppton,” Furek said. “He said if he’d known about the tragedy, that someone had died, he wouldn’t have written the song because it would have been disrespectful.”
What the trapped men did try to eat for the first few days wasn’t much, Furek said. “They chewed on timber.”
Once the borehole was drilled, rescuers were able to send food down to the trapped miners.
“It’s a meaty story,” said Furek, who has written about such details as the tungsten carbide drill bits that billionaire Howard Hughes sent to aid in the rescue; the telegram of congratulations President John F. Kennedy sent; the visions of angels and children playing harps that Fellin and Throne reported seeing, and the way the borehole rescue that succeeded for the first time in Sheppton in 1963 is the same technique that rescued 33 miners in Chile in 2010.
In addition to his chance to talk about Sheppton at the Maryland seminar earlier this year, Furek’s work has been the subject of an Australian podcast called “Mysterious Universe.”
“It was almost surreal to hear those distinctive Australian voices reading over my book,” Furek said. “The podcast was extremely respectful of the Sheppton incident and, I believe, validated my research into the supernatural aspects of this tragedy.”
Furek’s ultimate goal with the Sheppton story is to create a documentary about it, perhaps with help from experienced documentary makers.
“There has to be a way to make this happen,” he said. “I believe it’s our duty to knock on doors and, if it’s our time, the door will open. I want to do for the supernatural aspects of Pennsylvania coal country what Stephen King did for Maine.”
