Pittsburgh ghost stories come in three kinds, and Halloween is a good time to sort them. Some are true stories that grew legends around them. Some are legends with no record behind them at all. And some sit in the middle, where the paperwork exists but says less than the story does. Below are the tales we have covered on SteelCityHistory.com, each with a short version and a label: Fact where the record supports it, Legend where it does not, and Disputed where sources disagree. Follow the links for the full stories.
Charlie No-Face, the Green Man
Fact, with a legend attached. The Green Man was a real person, Raymond Robinson, who was badly injured as a boy in a 1919 electrical accident near Beaver Falls and later took long walks at night along Route 351 between Koppel and New Galilee, where local history writer Jeff Bales places him from perhaps the early 1940s into the 1970s. The glowing skin, the curse and the haunted “Green Man Tunnel” in South Park are Legend. According to the Montour Railroad Historical Society, that tunnel was not built until 1924, years after the accident, and there is no record that Robinson ever went there. Read the real story of Raymond Robinson, and our guide to how the Green Man legend grew.
The Kecksburg UFO
Disputed. Something bright did cross the sky on December 9, 1965. NASA’s catalog describes a fireball seen over Ontario and at least eight states, and people in Kecksburg, Westmoreland County, reported that something came down in the woods. The next day the Greensburg Tribune-Review ran two headlines in two editions, one saying an object had fallen and the Army had roped off the area, the other saying searchers had failed to find anything. An AP dispatch said the search turned up nothing. The acorn-shaped craft and the flatbed truck come from witness accounts, and the skeptic James Oberg says the acorn description first appeared some years later. Our Kecksburg UFO story sorts the record from the memories.
The Thunderbird
Legend. Thunder beings belong to real Native traditions. A Lenape story told by Nora Thompson Dean in 1977 tells of a man who visits them, and the Smithsonian describes a Haudenosaunee Thunder Festival held when the spring thunder is first heard. The giant-bird sightings are another matter. The documented Pennsylvania reports come mostly from the north-central Black Forest and trace back to Potter County writer Robert Lyman. The Pittsburgh version, a 1944 sighting over Braddock, Clairton and Monongahela, is a story we could not trace to any newspaper from 1944. See our Thunderbird legend page.
Blue Mist Road
Legend, on a real road. Blue Mist Road is Irwin Road in North Park, closed to traffic and partly unpaved. The Uproar, a student news site, says the county resolution to create the park passed in 1927. The legends are many: a father who killed his family, Klan gatherings, a witch, glowing eyes. The Pittsburgh Ghosts website, which retells the family-murder story, says no official record confirms it. The best-documented piece is the folklore itself. Duquesne University archivist Thomas White, author of Haunted Roads of Western Pennsylvania, told PennLive that since the 1970s people have said two tombstones in Crossroads Cemetery, marked John Fogal and Mary Fogal, lean together under a full moon, and that by the mid-1990s the story had turned into a warning that the world would end when they touched. Read our Blue Mist Road piece.
The witches of Harmony
Fact (the town), Disputed (the witch). The Harmony Museum says George Rapp’s German followers bought land there in 1804 and formally organized the Harmony Society on February 15, 1805. The witch story concerns Ann Girty, whose family lived near Whitestown in Connoquenessing Township and was said to be related to the frontier figure Simon Girty. Two old Butler County histories tell it differently. One says Ann was a daughter of John Girty, that the mother was thought to be a witch, and that Ann was shot in her cabin door by someone unknown. The other, a 20th-century county history, says Ann was the wife of Thomas Girty, that she was shot by a squatter named Kerr who wanted her land and died six weeks later, that he was never prosecuted, and that children long avoided her grave believing she had been a witch.
The Beacon Hotel
Legend, at a real family business. The Beacon Hotel in Renfrew, Butler County, has been in the Krelow family for generations. A 2006 Butler Eagle history says Thomas Krelow came from Russia in 1912, moved his family to a Butler County farm in 1929 and held the hotel’s grand opening in 1942. Ghost stories are part of the place’s identity. In 2021 Deb Krelow told the Butler Eagle that “the spirits of the Beacon are not all in bottles.”
The old Allegheny County Jail
Fact (the building and the 1907 report), Legend (the hauntings). The Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation says H. H. Richardson’s jail was completed in 1886 and closed on July 27, 1995, and that a preserved cell block opened as the Old Allegheny County Jail Museum in 2005. Its best-known ghost story actually ran in newspapers in 1907. A syndicated feature said condemned men claimed the ghost of W. A. Culp, who had killed himself in his cell while awaiting trial for his brother’s murder, acted out the killing every night, and that the warden moved murderers’ row. That is a real newspaper report, not proof of a ghost. Stories that Kate Soffel, the warden’s wife who helped the Biddle brothers escape in 1902, still haunts the jail come from modern ghost-tour guides. See what the record shows about the jail hangings.
Allegheny Cemetery and the Arsenal dead
Fact (the tragedy), Legend (the screams). On September 17, 1862, the explosion at the Allegheny Arsenal in Lawrenceville killed 78 people, most of them young women and girls, according to the American Battlefield Trust. Within hours, the cemetery’s president promised a lot for the victims, and a memorial in Allegheny Cemetery lists 78 names. Reports of phantom screams near the memorial are ghost lore. Read about the 1862 Allegheny Arsenal explosion and the history and legends of Allegheny Cemetery.
The body in the Brookville icehouse
Fact. No ghost here, just a documented horror. On November 8, 1857, a teenager in Brookville, Jefferson County, found a skinned human body in an icehouse. It was Henry Southerland, a local man who had died of fever days earlier. Dr. William J. McKnight, then a young Brookville physician, says in his 1917 county history that he was one of the men who dug up the body, and he later championed the state law that supplied medical schools with bodies. Read the Pennsylvania body snatching case of 1857.
The Carnegie Library of Homestead
Legend, with a real story underneath. The library’s executive director told WTAE that a balcony door alarm kept going off between 3:15 and 3:18 in the morning with no one in the building. “I am a skeptic,” she said, “but this is something that we couldn’t explain.” The usual explanation for the haunting, that Carnegie built it on the blood of the 1892 strike, partly checks out and partly does not. Our piece asks whether the Carnegie Library of Homestead is haunted.
How to tell them apart
The pattern is the same nearly every time. A real place, often a real death, and then decades of retelling that add details no one wrote down when they happened. Pittsburgh ghost stories are worth telling, and they are better when you know which parts are true. If you know of a contemporary record for any of the legends above, a newspaper clipping, a court file, a letter, we would like to see it.
