The Ghostly Tales of Pittsburgh

By Diane Telgen

Ghost stories from America's Steel City have never been so creepy, fun, and full of mystery!

Pittsburgh's haunted history and local legends come to life--even when the main players are dead. Find out if the ghostly entities at the Monongahela Incline actors or specters. Learn about the restless ghost of Henry Clay Frick lurking in his beloved Clayton. Discover that multiple Carnegie libraries are visited by the undead. Dive into this spooky chapter book for suspenseful tales of spirits and phantoms, bumps in the night, paranormal investigations, and the unexplained; just be sure to keep the light on.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arcadia Children’s Books
• Release date: Sep 7, 2020
• ISBN: 9781439670927

Diane Telgen

Diane Telgen is a longtime author and editor of reference books, including Defining Moments: The Gilded Age , and holds an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Growing up in Michigan, she loved myths and legends about fantastical creatures but was equally fascinated by stories about life long ago. She loved combining both these interests--history and the supernatural--for the Spooky America series.

Book preview

Introduction

How well do you know the city of Pittsburgh?

You might know it’s in western Pennsylvania, or that it’s the second-largest city in the state. Or maybe you’ve heard about its successful sports teams, like the NHL’s Pittsburgh Penguins or the NFL’s Pittsburgh Steelers. Maybe you even know that the Steelers got their nickname from the city’s steel industry, at one point the biggest and best in the world.

But did you know that Pittsburgh is haunted?

Countless ghost sightings have been reported in and around the Steel City. There are haunted buildings from colonial times. Spirits that revisit the sites of terrible disasters. Phantoms that never left their everyday homes and workplaces. Pittsburgh has a long and colorful history, enough to collect all sorts of interesting ghost stories.

Before the mid-1700s, though, Pittsburgh didn’t even exist. Let’s say you could travel back in time. Let your time machine take you four hundred years into the past, to the area where the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers join to become the Ohio River. You would find the Five Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy—the Mohawk, Onondaga, Oneida, Cayuga, and Seneca—living there. So did members of the Lenape (Delaware) and Shawnee tribes, after they were displaced by colonial settlements. Many of their descendants still live in the area today.

Jump forward another 120 years, and you’d discover European colonists exploring the unsettled frontier of western Pennsylvania. They didn’t care that members of the First Peoples had been living along its rivers for years. To them, the area was prime land ripe for the taking.

A dispute between France and Great Britain over who should control the forks of the Ohio River led to the beginning of the French and Indian War. In fact, if you set your time machine for 1754, you’d see future president George Washington lead troops in the area nearby. (Fun trivia: the only time Washington ever surrendered to an enemy was then, at the Battle of Fort Necessity.) As the war raged on for nine more years, British forces built Fort Pitt, which they named after William Pitt, at the time Great Britain’s secretary of state.

After the American Revolution, the village around Fort Pitt grew until it became the city of Pittsburgh. With three major rivers providing easy transportation, it quickly expanded from a frontier village to a shipping hub. If your time machine dropped you off in 1810, you would see builders transforming local forests into fleets of boats, helping supply the new and expanding United States.

Set your time machine for one hundred years later, and you would see Pittsburgh transformed into an industrial power. In 1910, it was the eighth-largest city in the United States. The riverfront was dominated by factories—mainly steel—and more millionaires lived there than in New York City.

Of course we can’t actually travel back in time. But sometimes history visits us, in the form of ghosts and legends. These stories of haunted Pittsburgh include those of early pioneers, setting off to an unknown future on the frontier. Industrial workers lost in terrible accidents. A steel millionaire saved from an assassin’s bullet. Even ordinary people, lingering around their homes and workplaces long after they’ve died.

Are these urban legends or real accounts of the supernatural? Read on and decide for yourself.

CHAPTER

1

Ghosts of the Frontier

When you think of the American frontier, you probably imagine places west of the Mississippi River—Great Plains states like Montana, or California and its Gold Rush. But in the years before the American Revolution, western Pennsylvania was the frontier.

The growing fur trade and desire for land brought conflict to western Pennsylvania. This struggle for control sparked the French and Indian War. Between 1754 and 1763, French, British, and allied Native forces fought several bloody battles in the Pittsburgh area. And when you have violence and discord, you have the perfect conditions to create … you guessed it, GHOSTS!

THE BLOCKHOUSE AT THE POINT

It should be no surprise that the oldest building in Pittsburgh has seen more than its fair share of ghosts. During the French and Indian War, Britain and France clashed over the place where the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers joined to form the Ohio, known simply as the Point. The first fort on the site was built by