by Thomas White
Published by Haunted America
A Division of The History Press
Charleston, SC 29403
www.historypress.net
Copyright © 2015 by Thomas White and Tony Lavorgne
All rights reserved
First published 2015
e-book edition 2015
ISBN 978.1.62585.598.5
Library of Congress Control Number: 2015943862
print edition ISBN 978.1.46711.816.3
Notice: The information in this book is true and complete to the best of our knowledge. It is offered without guarantee on the part of the author or The History Press. The author and The History Press disclaim all liability in connection with the use of this book.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form whatsoever without prior written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
For Justina and Maureen
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Why Go to a Haunted Road?
Haunted Roads in Context
Blue Mist Road: Allegheny County
Shades of Death Road: Washington County
Axe Murder Hollow: Erie County
Mystery Mile and Mudlick Hollow Road: Beaver County
The Many 13 Bends Roads: Allegheny County
Hogback Road: Mercer County
Crybaby Bridge: Greene County
The Green Man’s Wanderings: Various Counties
Conclusion
Selected Bibliography
About the Authors
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Many people assisted us in a variety of ways while we were working on this book, and their help was greatly appreciated. We would like to thank our wives, Justina and Maureen, and children, Tom and Marisa, for their continued support and patience. Also our extended families for their support and encouragement. Brian and Terrie Seech opened up their extensive archive to us, and we appreciate their help. We would also like to thank Victoria Trimble, Stephen Bosnyak, John Schalcosky of the Ross and West View Historical Societies, Amy Steele at Northland Library, Ed Falvo and the Elizabeth Township Historical Society, the Mercer County Historical Society, the Lawrence County Historical Society and Carly Lough at the Heinz History Center for their help accessing images and information. Many other people contributed by giving us stories, helping with editing or in other ways, including Haley Bristor, Colby Collins, Brian and Lori Mckee, Kurt Wilson, Andy Grejda, Ashley Kilbert, Anthony Kilbert, Emily Jack, Gerry O’Neil, Ariel Hammel, Kyle and Carrie Payne, Elisa Astorino, Allison Brungard, Debbie Brungard, Jennifer Germeyer, Katie Barbera, Jamie Thomas, Joshua Maley, Jim Matuga, Hannah Palmer, Megan DeFries, Albert DiAmicis, Michael Hassett, Will and Missy Goodboy, Vince Grubb, Brian and Jen Hallam, Ken Whiteleather, Rebecca Lostetter, Dan Simkins, Brett Cobbey, Chelsea Binnie, Angelle Pryor and Michael Witherel, Cassandra Speicher and Hailey Flowers of Coffee Buddha. Also, we would like to thank Hannah Cassilly and the rest of the staff of The History Press for giving us the opportunity to write this book.
Introduction
WHY GO TO A HAUNTED ROAD?
You probably heard the stories while you were growing up. Maybe it was a friend that told you or an older brother or sister. If you are of a younger generation, perhaps you stumbled across them on the Internet one fall day while you were looking for something exciting to do as Halloween approached. Regardless of how the tales came to you, they sparked something in your imagination—a sense of mystery, adventure and even a little fear. The stories that you heard surrounded a very real but ill-defined place on the periphery of your daily world—a place that, if located elsewhere, would not warrant a second thought. But out there, in the darkness beyond the streetlights and housing plans, that place could be home to both wonders and horrors. More importantly, it was a place where you could go and attempt to experience the supernatural.
That place is, of course, a haunted road.
Maybe the stories and legends that you heard told of the ghosts of children who lost their lives in a fire at their orphanage or a family killed in a tragic car accident. If you sought them out, they would leave tiny handprints on your car or push it back up the road. Or perhaps you heard that the Ku Klux Klan or satanic cults gathered along the dark road for rituals, sacrifices and murder. Their victims’ ghosts (and any dark spirits they summoned) lingered there in the darkness. Speaking of murder, you may have heard about a man who killed his wife or family in an old house along the road. Unable to move on, their spirits stay at the scene of the crime. Of course, the stories may have been a little vague, telling of an evil force that drives animals, and maybe even people, crazy if they stay too long. It’s possible you heard something else that was equally as creepy or sinister or a combination of all of these events.
The particular story itself may not have been as important as the possibility it presented. Out there was the opportunity to interact with something that was beyond the normal and rational. It was not a television show, documentary or a movie. Nor was it a distant ruin or some haunted mansion. It was an accessible place where you could go to test the reality of the supernatural. You needed to do nothing other than travel to the haunted road and perform any activity that the legend promised would provoke a supernatural response.
So, you might have gathered some friends and set out on a nighttime trip, recounting the stories along the way. The level of seriousness depended on the people involved. Jokes were probably intermixed with personal accounts or speculation about paranormal phenomena. After arriving at the dark and desolate road, you proceeded cautiously by car or on foot, looking for a particular location or landmark mentioned in the accounts as the dramatic tension built. Finally, you found what you were looking for and performed the action that the stories insisted would cause the ghosts to appear. Maybe you put your car in neutral, or called a name three times, or flashed your headlights, or something else that would normally be innocuous. Then it happened. You heard a noise in the woods, or you saw a strange light, or your car started to move. Your friends may have wanted to leave immediately—or maybe you tried to wait and see what it was. But something else happened—maybe another noise—and everyone fled the scene quickly.
When you were finally off of the road and driving away, the speculation began. What had actually occurred? Did you encounter a ghost? Was someone playing a prank? Did you misinterpret normal noises? The answers were not clear. The only thing that you were sure of was that something happened.
In the weeks that followed, you probably recounted the stories of the haunted road numerous times to friends and acquaintances. But now it was your own personal experience at the center of the narrative. Your trip had made you part of the legend, at least for a while.
Many of us have had experiences like the one that was just described. Making the trip to a haunted place is a rite of passage for many adolescents. Teenagers are not the only ones who take these kinds of trips, however. In today’s culture, saturated with the paranormal, adults are just as likely to make the trip to a haunted place. This book will explore the supernatural legends, hauntings and personal encounters of those who have made the dark journey down western Pennsylvania’s haunted roads. We will try to examine the evolving legends associated with these roads and the historical context in which they formed. Besides being entertaining, supernatural legends and ghost stories can tell us a lot about society and the communities in which they emerge. As with most things, they are more complicated than they initially appear.
You may ask why we chose to focus on roads as opposed to graveyards, homes or som
e other type of location. Ghost stories and supernatural legends can appear almost anywhere after all, so what makes roads special? A main reason (aside from purely personal interest) that we chose to focus on roads was their accessibility. Most roads are public areas, unlike buildings, institutions or even cemeteries (which usually close at dusk.) You do not need to make an appointment to go to a haunted road, and generally, if you do not venture onto private property, you are allowed to be there. These conditions make roads the most democratic of haunted locations because they are potentially available to the largest number of people. Of course, along with accessibility comes a greater number of reports of supernatural encounters that create a greater depth to the legend.
But why do people make the journey to haunted roads year after year? Why do the legends about them continue to spread and evolve? In this era of high technology and science, interest in the paranormal and the supernatural is more widespread than ever. From a purely rational point of view, this would seem to not make sense. But as we all know, human beings are not cold, calculating machines, devoid of emotions. We are both rational and irrational at the same time. Science can explain why much of our world is the way it is, but it still cannot explain all of it. Scientific explanations also do not impart any deeper meaning to life and its purpose. Humans experience things that are unquantifiable and unmeasurable all the time and are innately drawn to the mysterious. The supernatural holds the promise that there is something more than the material world that we see every day.
Going to a haunted road is one way that people can test the reality of the unseen supernatural world. It is also a way to confront fears, both personal and societal. As we survey western Pennsylvania’s haunted roads, we will see that the legends associated with them are often localized manifestations of larger cultural scares and moral panics about perceived threats to society. Haunted roads can allow visitors to indirectly address these fears and issues or at least provide a context in which to broach the topics. And of course, haunted roads allow visitors to address the most common and widespread fear of all—that of death and dying. A supernatural encounter on a haunted road can be frightening, but if believed, it confirms for the participant that there is indeed life beyond the grave.
To tell the stories of these haunted roads, we have drawn on a variety of traditional and nontraditional historical sources. While much of our material and background research comes from books (both academic and popular), newspaper articles, magazines and other print sources, the majority of the legends come from direct interviews, web pages and Internet discussion groups. Legends are perhaps the only area of study where it is acceptable to cite Internet rumors as a source. Not for their truthfulness, of course, but because they are often a way to communicate the legend. Actual facts and historical details about the roads and events have been verified to the best of our ability using traditional sources. In some cases, we are only able to draw tentative conclusions due to the sparse evidence.
We could not tell the story of every haunted road in western Pennsylvania in this volume, so if we missed your favorite, we apologize. We chose to focus on some well-known roads along with some that are representative of different types of common haunted road legends. Some, like Blue Mist Road, can be surprisingly well documented, whereas some others leave us very little to examine. In any case, we have tried to uncover and analyze the core story and meaning of these popular tales in addition to recounting the supernatural element.
Before we begin our exploration of these dark and interesting legends, we would like to remind our readers to be respectful when visiting any of these roads. Though the roads themselves may be public property, most of the time the land around them is private. Please do not trespass or cause any disturbances. The people who live near these roads did not create the legends and may not have any interest in them.
HAUNTED ROADS IN CONTEXT
The legends that have developed around western Pennsylvania’s allegedly haunted roads are usually more complex than they appear at a first glance or superficial reading. Before examining each individual road, we must first look at the larger context in which the legends and ghost stories develop. None of the roads exists in a vacuum, and the supernatural legends associated with them have changed over time as people have experienced the roads in different ways. These legends exist as a dark mirror to American culture, reflecting fears, concerns and some of our hidden history. At the same time, they are difficult to define, classify and explain in traditional academic terms. To learn anything about haunted roads, we must first examine how the legends about them are transmitted and how people experience them directly. Then we must also consider the subject of ghosts and supernatural beliefs and set all of this against the backdrop of history and society.
HEARING THE LEGEND
Sometimes the way that legends are communicated is almost as important as the legends themselves. Changing methods of transmission have affected the development and our understanding of haunted road legends and supernatural folklore in general. Decades ago, stories about haunted roads were transmitted primarily by word of mouth, causing them to be more malleable but also limiting their lifespan. The legends could change relatively rapidly in response to outside factors. Many of the legends are still transmitted this way.
One of the preeminent experts on modern legends, Bill Ellis, identified five general stages in the life of such a legend (also referred to as the legend narrative by folklorists) in a community or group. It begins with the naming of the “marginal experience” (the haunted road and the supernatural experience there). In the second stage, the experience is translated into words and shared with others in a rough form. This is the time that a legend is first told to others who did not directly experience it. By the third stage, the rough version has been refined into a finished narrative by multiple retellings or performances, as Ellis describes them. It is at this point that the legends reach their peak. Eventually, “when the story becomes a familiar part of the group’s knowledge,” it becomes a kernel narrative that is shorter in length with a less dramatic retelling. It is a reminder of the story for the group without repeating the entire narrative. Finally, it becomes a brief summarized report of only a few written or spoken lines, which continues as a reminder of the legend’s existence. (For a full explanation of this process and an academic analysis of legends see Ellis’s book Aliens, Ghosts and Cults: Legends We Live.) If a researcher only discovered a legend at the end of this cycle, it could be difficult to capture its full meaning and context.
Legends of haunted roads are sometimes discovered in books if they are not heard by word of mouth. Most often these are popular collections of regional ghost stories that manage to capture at least one version of the finished narrative. While this may serve to fix the legend in its finished form and ensure its survival, it can also alter the way that people experience it by ending its natural evolution. Of course, this is not always the case, and some legends continue to change well after they enter a fixed medium. Published accounts may include only one version of the legend or multiple versions. They also increase the area in which a legend is distributed.
Today, a haunted road legend is just as likely to be encountered on the Internet as it is to be passed along by word of mouth. Websites, message boards, Facebook pages and YouTube videos carry supernatural tales to a wider audience than ever before. The interactive nature of the Internet allows users to add their own experiences to a larger community narrative of the legend while at the same time comparing them to the experiences of others. Such interaction can make it difficult to define when the finished narrative of the legend emerges. Instead, the Internet preserves many layers of the legend that are contributed by different peer groups and communities over time. This provides an opportunity to look at how all the individual layers relate to one another.
Of course, this explains only how legends are learned and communicated, but it does not answer the larger questions of how people experience haunted roads directly o
r the validity of the supernatural happenings that are reported there. Because of the way legends are transmitted and experienced, there is no one definitive version of any of the stories told about these haunted roads. This volume will explore as many of these versions as possible, but there will always be more because they are tied to personal experiences.
It is difficult to say anything definitive when dealing with haunted roads. Consequently, some folklorists would argue that it is a futile endeavor to try to trace the historical origins of any modern legend. This futility may be true for some legends more than others. In fact, some legends can at least be partially verified or debunked by historical research and placed firmly within a historical setting. In the case of supernatural experiences, we can only make observations based on our perceptions of events and try to add some kind of context to them. We should begin this process by examining the experience of going to a haunted road.
EXPERIENCING THE HAUNTED ROAD
Roads have had many symbolic meanings over the centuries in culture and in literature. It is only natural then that some of those meanings would involve the supernatural. In the most obvious sense, roads symbolize journeys, whether literal or metaphorical. Haunted roads then represent a literal and metaphorical journey to supernatural experience. For this reason, haunted roads have been one of the primary destinations for those who embark on modern legend trips.
The legend trip, a term coined by folklorists, is the process of acting out a legend. Folklorists sometimes use the more technical term ostension (or showing) to describe this process. In this case, it would be the act of traveling to a haunted road to test the legend, usually performing some type of rituallike activity to provoke a direct supernatural response. The ritual activity may be something simple like repeating a name, flashing headlights, putting a car in neutral, etc., or it might involve conducting the legend trip at a specific time, like during a full moon or on a stormy night. Often after such a test, something happens that is perceived as a strange occurrence. It might be an unusual noise, feeling or something visual. With the participants in a state of heightened dramatic tension, the occurrence is frequently perceived as being supernatural in nature. After it is over, the legend trippers interpret their experience in the context of the legend, adding their own encounter to the story (or legend narrative) when it is repeated. As previously noted, these legend trips provide a way to test fears, boundaries and the reality of the supernatural. Perhaps more importantly, they are a unique, suspenseful and entertaining experience for those involved.
