Forgotten Tales of Pennsylvania (10 page)

T
HE
D
ORLAN
D
EVIL

Chester County had its own version of the Jersey Devil appear in the 1930s. While working to the north of Dorlan, two men sighted a jumping creature that did not resemble any animal or human. Both men had experience with local wildlife and insisted that the thing they saw was nothing identifiable. A search party was sent out, but no trace of the creature was found.

In 1937, a millworker, his wife and a female friend had a close encounter with the creature one night in July. They were driving down a road just outside Dorlan when their headlights fell on the beast. They described it as being like a giant kangaroo, with long black hair and terrifying giant red eyes. The creature jumped across the road and into the swamp in one leap. They went home and called about a dozen friends to form a search party. Again, nothing was found.

C
HRISTMAS
T
REE
S
URVIVED
F
IRE

A fire tore through the home of George Burg in Philadelphia on New Year's Day 1952. Most of the first floor was destroyed, except for a small corner where the Christmas tree stood. Often live trees are the source of fires around the holiday season. In this case, it was the only thing to survive.

T
HE
“Q
UIETEST
F
IRE
”

The town of Bedford was having its annual Halloween Parade on the evening of October 31, 1955, when a call came into the fire station. Stanley Stroup smelled smoke in his home in Bedford Heights and was unable to locate the source. Because the parade had closed several main streets and there were people everywhere, the fire chief decided not to use the sirens. He feared that the sirens might cause panic or unnecessary traffic congestion, and there were already firemen at the station. The fire trucks quietly drove from the station to the home, located the small fire in the wall and extinguished it. No one knew about the incident until the
Daily Bedford Gazette
ran the story of the “quietest fire” the next day.

K
ILLED IN A
G
RAIN
E
LEVATOR

William M'Aninch had been working in the Red Bank flour mill in Bethlehem for about eight weeks by December 1906. One Friday, M'Aninch was recruited to help unload the grain elevator. When they finished, a belt slipped on the elevator pulley and another employee climbed a ladder to change it. M'Aninch grabbed a lantern and followed in an attempt to learn the process. When the new belt was attached and reactivated, the ladder shook. M'Aninch dropped his lantern and then lost his grip, falling thirty feet to the grain bin below. He broke his neck, and his body was badly bruised. He was dead by the time the other employee reached him. If the grain had still been inside the bin, it would have cushioned his fall.

M
AY
P
AUL
'
S
W
EREWOLF
A
DMIRER

During the 1850s, a young shepherdess named May Paul lived in Northumberland County. She passed many days on the hillsides and in the fields helping to watch over her family's flock. There was a much older man who lived nearby and was in love with May. He never expressed his feelings to her, but many in the community were aware of how he felt. The man watched her in the fields almost every day.

Many of May's neighbors also raised sheep. One year, the flocks of the surrounding shepherds began to lose sheep to a predator that appeared to be a wolf. May's flock remained unharmed. One shepherd finally managed to shoot and wound the wolf in the dark one night. The next morning, he followed the trail of blood that was left when the wolf ran off. The shepherd wanted to be sure that he had put an end to the predator. He was surprised when the trail led to the home of the old man who was in love with May.

When the shepherd entered the house, he found the old man lying on the floor with a gunshot wound in the same place he had shot the wolf. The old man was already dead. He was buried nearby, in the area that became known as
die Woolf-mann's Grob
, or “the Wolfman's Grave.”

G
YPSIES
V
ISIT
W
ARREN

On April 12, 1927, a band of gypsies passed through the town of Warren. They arrived about noon in a half dozen cars and trucks. Their stay was shorter than they had expected. They were promptly escorted through and out of town by the police department. Local papers commended the chief for keeping the “vagabonds” out of town.

H
ARBINGER OF
D
EATH

Governor William A. Stone briefly recalled a strange story in his autobiography,
The Tale of a Plain Man
. He heard the story as a child in Wellsboro in the 1850s from one of his neighbors, John Ainsley. There was a man named Duryea who lived nearby in a large white house on Dean Road. He had once been a sailor and supposedly a pirate. The entire community regarded him as a wicked and evil man. Duryea swore constantly and did not mingle with his neighbors. He even attempted to physically assault preachers who would try to visit him. Many believed him to be in league with the devil.

There was one old woman who went to Duryea's house frequently, but only to clean. One day, she came back and told Ainsley and Andrew Kriner that Duryea was very ill. The two men decided to go up to his house together to see if they could do anything. Though Duryea did not turn them away, he did not want help from a doctor. Later that evening, Ainsley and Kriner were sitting in the house with the porch door open when they saw a frightening animal walk into the house and straight into Duryea's room. It was a large black beast with four short legs and “sharp” eyes. As they watched in disbelief, they heard Duryea scream, and then the beast came back out and left the house. When the men entered Duryea's room, they found him dead. From that time on, the neighbors believed that the devil had come to take Duryea's soul.

B
LACK
L
ICK
D
ESTROYED BY
F
IRE

Much of the mining town of Black Lick was destroyed by a fire on September 29, 1909. An exploding lamp ignited the blaze that quickly spread from building to building. The entire town assembled to fight the fire, but it was difficult to contain. Eventually, dynamite was used to destroy some buildings in the path of the fire to stop it from spreading. The day after the fire, the loss was estimated at $35,000 by local newspapers, but it was most likely much higher.

N
ITRATE
F
ILM
E
XPLOSION IN
P
ITTSBURGH

Just before three o'clock in the afternoon on September 27, 1909, the offices of the Columbian Film Exchange exploded. They were located in the Ferguson Building between Smithfield and Wood Streets in downtown Pittsburgh. The explosion was triggered when a shipping clerk turned on the lights in a small film vault. A spark shot from the light switch and ignited the stacks of highly flammable nitrate film. The clerk slammed the door and ran away just in time. Part of the wall of the building facing Third Avenue was blown out, as were many windows. No one was killed, but the flying glass and debris injured almost seventy-five people inside the building and on the streets below. Police had to close the surrounding streets for hours to make sure that there was no chance of a second explosion.

N
O
G
OOD
D
EED
G
OES
U
NPUNISHED

Twenty-five-year-old Arnold Olds was not expecting to be a hero when he woke up on February 9, 1957. He wasn't expecting to lose his wallet either. Olds was a senior at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie-Mellon University) in Pittsburgh. That afternoon near campus, he saw four boys start to fall through the melting ice in Panther Hollow Lake.

Olds sprung into action. But first, he handed his watch and wallet to two other boys who were standing at the side of the lake. He took off his jacket and shoes and waded into the waist-deep freezing water. Olds managed to pull all four boys to safety. In the meantime, police arrived with blankets and prepared to take the boys and Olds back to the station. It was then that Olds realized that the two boys who had his wallet and watch had disappeared.

T
HE
B
LACK
C
ROSS OF
B
UTLER
C
OUNTY

The Spanish flu swept the world in 1918 and 1919, claiming many more victims than the First World War, which had immediately preceded it. Some areas were hit exceptionally hard by the killer virus. The small town of West Winfield, on the border of Butler and Armstrong Counties, suffered numerous deaths. In a short period of time, almost three hundred people died. The town did not have the resources to bury the dead individually, so a mass grave was excavated nearby. It was marked with a black cross.

In the years that followed, rumors of supernatural activity surrounded the site. According to legend, visitors who went to the grave at midnight during a full moon would hear the sound of babies crying. Also, the nearby trees would seem to take on strange and menacing shapes. Sometime in the recent past, the black cross collapsed due to the impact of the weather and vandalism.

F
UGITIVE
C
HICKEN
T
HIEF
C
APTURED

In late November 1908, detectives and police in Adams County finally captured the elusive chicken thief, Ambrose Dittenhafer. He was on the run for stealing chickens from the farm of Martin Harman near Hunterstown. The thief was known to be extremely fast and had eluded capture several times before. Detective Charles Wilson, Constable Morrison and a large posse of deputies tracked the witty thief to his hiding place—his own home. Dittenhafer was a crafty criminal, though, and his wife and sons managed to get in the way of the authorities long enough for him to escape again.

Wilson and his men chased him for three miles through the fog, occasionally firing shots. None hit its mark. Dittenhafer had started to circle back toward his home when Wilson and his men finally caught up. The thief dashed into “Dr. Goldsboro's Thicket” and prepared for hand-to-hand combat with his large stick and razor. By that point, the chase had lasted almost six hours. The police fired several warning shots into the thicket. Finally, Dittenhafer emerged. Wilson's pistol was pointed straight at his head. He surrendered and was taken to the county jail. The saga of the chicken thief was covered with great interest in the local papers.

M
AN
K
ILLS
T
WENTY
-
EIGHT
C
OPPERHEADS

Mr. Jacob Figley had an encounter with a nest of venomous copperhead snakes near his home in Hopewell Township, Beaver County. Figley's granddaughter spotted the first of the snakes in his backyard while visiting one summer day in 1912. When Figley realized what kind of snake it was, he killed it quickly and then sought out its nest. When he found it, he discovered eight adult snakes and over twenty that were half grown. He killed as many as he could, twenty-eight total, and only a few escaped.

L
ARGE
V
EGETABLES

There must have been something special in the soil in the early 1900s in Adams County. A newspaper article from 1909 featured George Hoover's giant tomatoes. He grew them on his Bendersville farm. He had apparently been growing his “beefsteak” tomatoes for several years. That year, he had produced the largest ones yet. He had many tomatoes measuring fifteen and sixteen inches in circumference.

Two years later, M.F. Williams was growing giant turnips on his farm. Some were as large as fourteen pounds.

T
HE
P
ERPETUAL
M
OTION
M
ACHINE

In January 1813, a man named Charles Redheffer invited the city leaders in Philadelphia to come to his home to see his amazing invention. What he claimed to have developed seemed impossible—a perpetual motion machine. Eight of the city commissioners attended Redheffer's presentation. Initially, they were amazed. The machine seemed to run without ever needing more power. It seemed like Redheffer had really created the long-sought-after machine. However, one of the commissioners became suspicious when the inventor would not let them get close enough to touch the machine. The curious commissioner managed to get a closer look anyway and realized that there was a hidden set of pulleys keeping the machine moving. He said nothing, and when the commissioners left, Redheffer was sure that he had fooled them.