The supernatural has always played a significant role in our shared cultural experiences. There are references to ghosts, for instance, in the religions of Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. Spirits likewise appeared in Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad, while the Roman magistrate Pliny the Younger gave a written account of a haunted house featuring a ghost shackled in chains. Even the followers of Jesus initially thought he was a spirit when he rose from the dead.
From India to China, Japan to Mexico – there is no continent on the planet or religion that is worshipped that doesn’t contain some reference to the supernatural. The same holds true for Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, as the city is ripe with ghost stories from both the past and the present.
In 2014, folklorist Thomas White collected many of the more widely-known ghost stories from the region in Supernatural Lore of Pennsylvania: Ghosts, Monsters and Miracles, each recited in essay form by a group of “historians, researchers, genealogists, ministers, skeptics, believers and practitioners.”
These tales go beyond mere ghost stories as they likewise offer a cultural understanding of each narrative. As White explains in the opening pages of Supernatural Lore of Pennsylvania, ghosts are not merely meant to scare us but often depict a remembrance of some particular tragedy or a warning of potential danger. They are history on the most basic and rudimentary of levels, reminding us of a forgotten past that otherwise would have been lost.
In the first Pittsburgh-centric essay in Supernatural Lore of Pennsylvania, Thomas White uses research by former school teacher Rich Oswald to explore the tale of “The Pig Lady of Cannelton.” Barbara Davidson was the teenage daughter of Samuel and Cora McCaskey who lived on her parent’s farm in Beaver County. During the summer of 1795, Barbara was alone on the property while the rest of her family made a trip into Pittsburgh to purchase livestock and poultry. When they returned, there was no sign of the young girl, and after a few days of frantic searching, her decapitated body was found within a crawlspace under the house. Neither her head nor assailant was ever found.
During the over 200 years since, Barbara Davidson has been seen wandering both the old family farm and nearby Cannelton Road by dozens of local residents. She is often headless, but other times she has a human body with the head of pig attached, thus her moniker of the “Pig Lady.”
In 1935, a local entrepreneur attempted to cash-in on the ghost story, offering trolley tours of locations where the headless Barbara Davidson had reportedly been seen. The resulting excursions were more than a financial success as the headless teenager not only appeared but was visible for a full fifteen minutes at times before fading into mist.
As a school teacher, Rich Oswald recognized the historical aspects of the narrative and constructed a theater play around them. The resulting annual production at a Beaver County middle school was thus more than a mere “ghost story” but the catalyst for recounting local history as well. The unsolved murder of Barbara Davidson would have been long forgotten if the teenage girl hadn’t re-emerged as a ghost, and while such a death may not be the most pleasant remembrance of the past, it is still part of the folklore of Beaver County nonetheless.
While Beaver County has the Pig Lady, Hazelwood has Slag Pile Annie. Or at least used to, as the haunting grounds of Annie were an old Jones and Laughlin steel mill that has since been demolished. The most vivid account of Slag Pile Annie was during the early 1950s when a student at the University of Pittsburgh worked at the mill over the summer.
Like Slag Pile Annie herself, the student’s job included driving a buggy that pulled empty hopper cars through a tunnel under the blast furnaces. It was dangerous work, especially since the lighting was poor within the tunnel. As he made his rounds on one occasion, the college student stumbled upon a woman in her late forties wearing work clothes and a red bandanna in her hair. When he told her to be careful in the tunnels, she replied, “I can’t get killed, I’m already dead.”
According to Thomas White, Slag Pile Annie worked at the mill during World War II, a time when women often had to fill jobs vacated by their male counterparts who enlisted in the armed forces. She continued working there after the war but died in an accident at the mill approximately five years before she appeared to the University of Pittsburgh student.
“The story of Slag Pile Annie, whether true or not, served other purposes in its retelling,” White explains. “Such stories were a warning and reminder of the constant dangers of the mills, even for those who performed rather mundane jobs. Slag Pile Annie’s story also carried part of the mill’s history. It was a memory, or commemoration of sorts, of the important role that women had played in industry during the war and the sacrifices that they made in the process.”
A third ghost story within the pages of Supernatural Lore of Pennsylvania that likewise pertains to the Pittsburgh region is “The Lady in White in Pennsylvania Lore.” According to Rachael Gerstein, the Lady in White is a ghost that has appeared in various European countries throughout the centuries, including Germany and the British Isles, with the spirit having lost her husband or lover through some sort of tragic accident.
Rachael Gerstein uncovered two examples of the Lady in White in Western Pennsylvania, both connected with the mountains of nearby Altoona – the first at Wopsononock Mountain and the second on Buckhorn Mountain. The White Lady of Wopsononock Mountain is the older story, going back to the late 1800s, and involves a young eloping couple whose horse and carriage were involved in an accident. Most versions of the story say that the woman survived but her male lover was killed.
The White Lady of Buckhorn Mountain, meanwhile, was also eloping but in an automobile instead of a horse and carriage. Regardless of the vehicle, her fate was the same. The young man’s body was apparently found, but the remains of his female counterpart were never located. The two stories are so closely identical that Rachael Gerstein believes they are essentially the same myth, the Pennsylvania version of a legend that has been handed down through centuries and across continents.
“Ghosts are history,” Thomas White explains in the opening pages of Supernatural Lore of Pennsylvania. “Whether you believe in them or not, every time a ghost story is told, someone is providing an interpretation of events of the past. The details of a ghost story, aside from the phantom itself, may be factually accurate, or they may only be loosely based on actual occurrences. Either way, ghost stories are a memory of something real that had an impact on people and on the community. Many of the events that are retold in ghost stories are not of national importance, but they are events that affected the lives of everyday people. Often, the people in such stories would remain obscure or forgotten if their supernatural tales were not told.”
So the next time you are sitting around the camp fire exchanging ghost stories with some friends, remember that the narratives are more than a mere myth designed to frighten but a forgotten part of local history, as well as a shared cultural heritage handed down since the dawn of humanity.
Anthony Letizia