Forgotten Tales of Pennsylvania (9 page)

The radio dramatization of
War of the Worlds
that aired on October 30, 1938, is famous for the panic it caused around the country and especially on the East Coast. Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre group decided to set their version of the story in modern times as opposed to nineteenth-century England, as in the original novel. They selected the small town of Grover's Mill, New Jersey, to be the invading Martians' landing point. Part of the story was told as if it were a series of news reports, so when some listeners tuned in late, they believed that the invasion was real. The reports detailed the defeat of U.S. military forces by the Martians, as well as the arrival and movement of more of the alien invaders.

While the level of the panic was certainly exaggerated by the press, there were many cases of people, some in Pennsylvania, reacting to the broadcast as if it were real. Several students from New York and New Jersey who were studying at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia packed their bags and prepared to hurry home to be with their relatives. City hall and the police were bombarded with calls from anxious people trying to determine the truth.

In Pittsburgh, a man reportedly came home to find his wife ready to drink some type of poison. She had heard the broadcast and the reports of the heat rays that were incinerating anyone in their path. She screamed, “I would rather die like this than like that!” Her husband was able to calm her down. Not far away in Uniontown, a group of women playing cards dropped to their knees and began praying like many others would before they realized the broadcast was fiction.

The Scranton area also had incidents. In the nearby town of Jessup, a dozen families grabbed their most important possessions and prepared to flee. Several men working the evening shifts at various jobs received phone calls from their wives telling them to hurry home. One man stormed into a newspaper office and demanded to know if the Army Reserves had been called out.

One Pennsylvania man was driving back toward the state from the west with his two daughters when they heard the broadcast. Both girls fainted during the fake news reports. He stopped in Ann Arbor, Michigan, to determine if the Martians were really moving into Pennsylvania.

C
IRCUS
T
ENT
C
OLLAPSED AND
B
URNED

John Robinson's Circus was in Ridgeway, Elk County, on May 23, 1902. During the show, a powerful storm developed with heavy rains and strong winds. Partway into the performance, the wind collapsed the main tent and several others. As the crowd was pinned under the tent, it caught fire. A panic ensued as all the circus-goers fled from the burning tent out into the powerful storm. Luckily, the rain helped extinguish the fire. No one was killed, but almost everyone sustained minor injuries.

T
HE
H
ORNED
S
KULL

A human skull with a pair of two-inch horns was discovered during an excavation by archaeologists in Syre, Bradford County, during the 1880s. State historian Dr. G.P. Donehoo and A.B. Skinner of the American Investigating Museum in Philadelphia were in charge of the dig. The skull was found in a burial mound with the rest of its seven-foot-long skeleton. The burial was believed to date to approximately AD 1200. The skull and skeleton were shipped back to the museum in Philadelphia for study, but shortly after their arrival, they were stolen.

A P
AIR OF
P
ATENT
M
EDICINES

Before the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, patent medicines were sold almost everywhere. The questionable concoctions claimed to cure or prevent all kinds of ailments. Often, they actually included addictive substances (like opium or cocaine) and had little real medicinal value. A pair of interesting patent medicine advertisements appeared in the
Advance Argus
, published in Greenville, Mercer County.

In 1888, an ad appeared for a medicine known as the “Electric Bitters.” It stated that a purer medicine did not exist. For only one dollar a bottle, the bitters could cure all liver and kidney disease; eliminate headaches, constipation and indigestion; and remove pimples and boils. If that were not enough, it could also cure malaria. Sounds like a good deal!

Another advertisement in 1891 presented a solution to a common problem. Apparently, rich, pretty and educated girls kept eloping with tramps, coachmen and other scoundrels. Luckily for the reader, Dr. Franklin Miles diagnosed the real problem. According to him, the girls were impulsive, hysterical, nervous, unbalanced and subject to immoderate crying and laughing because of their weak nervous systems. But Dr. Miles had the solution. The only remedy that was necessary was a bottle of his Restorative Nervine medicine. He also sold his celebrated New Heart Cure, the finest of heart tonics, for those who suffered from fluttering or shortness of breath.

M
AN
P
ERFORMED
H
IS
O
WN
W
EDDING
C
EREMONY

On June 11, 1913, Dr. Askelon Mercer performed his own marriage ceremony in Beaver County. The doctor was seventy-five years old at the time. His bride, Sarah Calgrove, was sixty-five years old. It was the sixth time that Dr. Mercer had been married. He had been licensed decades before and had performed all of his weddings himself.

F
IREMAN
P
UT
O
UT
H
OUSE
F
IRE BY
H
IMSELF

Joe Baldauf was a fireman from New Castle who took his job very seriously. One morning in January 1925, he was taking a walk along County Line Road near an old cement works. As he passed a nearby house, he realized that there was smoke coming out of its roof. Baldauf immediately rushed into the house and alerted the people inside to the danger. Then he borrowed their axe and climbed to the roof to cut a hole to get a better look and release the smoke. He was able to determine that damage to the chimney had started the blaze.

In the meantime, the residents followed Baldauf's orders and started filling buckets of water. They managed to pass the buckets up to Baldauf so he could extinguish the fire. His quick thinking minimized the damage and prevented the fire from spreading. Everything was under control by the time more firemen arrived.

A F
OLDING
B
ED
A
CCIDENT

On March 3, 1909, a bizarre tragedy occurred in Pittsburgh. Charles Murray and his family had just moved into a house on Penn Avenue. They had moved in quickly, and the folding bed that the parents used was hastily assembled. It was temporarily placed on the first floor, until their bedroom was finished. Murray's daughter woke that night to muffled groans and strange noises. She was frightened and stayed in her room for almost an hour until she decided to go to her parents. When she went downstairs, she saw that the bed was up, and the bottom halves of her parents' bodies were pushed up to the ceiling. Their upper bodies were pinned between the wall and the bed. She went for help, but her father's injuries were too severe, and he died. Most of his bones were crushed. Mrs. Murray was badly hurt but eventually recovered. Her husband's larger body took the brunt of the force and allowed her to survive.

L
IVERMORE
—P
ENNSYLVANIA
'
S
S
UNKEN
T
OWN

The town of Livermore once stood along the Conemaugh River in Westmoreland County. Today, what is left of the town is submerged under the reservoir behind the Conemaugh River Dam. The dam was constructed as a result of the Flood Control Acts of 1936 and 1938. The acts were passed after the great St. Patrick's Day flood submerged parts of Pittsburgh and most of the other river towns in the southwestern part of the state. Livermore was already in decline because of the impact of previous floods, and the 1936 flood sealed the town's fate. The best location for the dam would necessitate that the town be abandoned. Most but not all of the buildings and remaining structures were torn down before the area was intentionally flooded in 1952.

T
HE
G
REAT
C
IRCLE
H
UNT AT
P
OMFRET
C
ASTLE

Circle hunts, also known as animal drives, were common in parts of Pennsylvania until the 1830s. The hunts involved gathering as many hunters as possible and spreading them out in a large circle in the woods. The hunters would drive any game in their path toward a central clearing, where they could fire on the animals and kill many more than would have been possible on their own.

One of the largest recorded circle hunts occurred at Pomfret Castle, a French and Indian War fort, in 1760. It was led by a hunter named “Black Jack” Swartz. He organized over two hundred hunters in a circle thirty miles in diameter. The hunters made a variety of noises and fired their guns to push the wildlife toward the central clearing. When the gunfire was over, the hunters had killed 109 wolves, 112 foxes, 17 black bears, 41 panthers, 198 deer, 2 elk, 111 buffaloes, 114 bobcats and over 500 smaller animals.

Even the two hundred hunters and their families could not use all the animals. The smell of their decomposition drove settlers from their cabins up to three miles away. Eventually, some of the remains were buried to control the stench.

S
OME
C
ASES OF
S
PONTANEOUS
H
UMAN
C
OMBUSTION

Spontaneous combustion in humans is a phenomenon that is not accepted by all scientists. When it occurs, a person is reduced to ashes by an incredibly intense fire that starts on or in him. Usually the surrounding area suffers little damage, but the victim is incinerated. It is not known how or why this happens. Pennsylvania has a few recorded cases of the unexplainable fire.

On January 28, 1907, a case was reported in Pittsburgh. Albert Houk's wife was reduced to ashes. The area of the house that she was sitting in had no fire damage. It was as if she was consumed from the inside out.

Helen Conway of Drexel Hill suffered a similar horrible fate on November 8, 1964. Conway was a smoker, and an occasionally careless one at that. Initially, it was believed that she accidentally caught herself on fire. All that remained of her were her legs from the knees down and part of the chair she had been sitting in. Investigators took a closer look when they assembled a timeline for the fire. They realized that the entire thing happened in as little as six minutes and could not have taken longer than twenty. There was too much damage done in such a small amount of time. The true cause remains a mystery.

Two years later in Coudersport, there was another incident. A ninety-two-year-old retired doctor named John Bentley was apparently consumed by flames. His charred walker and part of his leg were discovered in a bathroom on the first floor of his home. The fire had burned a small hole through the floor. Nothing remained of the rest of Bentley but ashes.

S
AM
M
OHAWK
M
URDERED THE
W
IGTONS

A gruesome murder occurred in Butler County in July 1843. The entire Wigton family, except for James, the husband and father, was massacred by an Indian known as Sam Mohawk in a drunken rage. Mohawk was a Seneca originally from New York. He had been traveling south through Pennsylvania, presumably looking for work, and drinking heavily in taverns along the way.

After Mohawk became heavily intoxicated at the Stone Tavern, several bar patrons pitched in to get him a stagecoach to take him back north. He slipped out of the coach and took off into the woods. Several men chased after him. After stopping to sleep for a brief time, he woke up and stumbled onto the Wigton farm. James Wigton was helping at his father's farm and was not home. Mohawk entered the kitchen and surprised Margaret Wigton. For some unknown reason, he stabbed her. Margaret ran out of the house and into the yard, but Mohawk followed and beat her to death with a rock. Instead of running, Mohawk reentered the house and went upstairs, where he proceeded to kill the five Wigton children, all of whom had been sleeping.

When the murder was discovered, search parties were deployed, and it wasn't long until Mohawk was in custody. He was in held in jail for six months while he awaited trial. During that time, he confessed to the crime and converted to Christianity. Mohawk himself had been married, and his son became ill and died while he was in jail.

The trial was held in December of the same year and lasted only a few days. The jury took less than an hour to deliver a guilty verdict. Mohawk was hanged in the Butler County jail yard on March 22, 1844.

T
HE
C
OLLAPSE OF THE
B
OYDSTOWN
D
AM

The Boydstown Dam was located along Connoquenessing Creek in Butler County. Large amounts of precipitation caused problems at the dam on August 28, 1903. Originally constructed in 1897, the structure was only six years old when the top of the dam was eroded by the rushing creek. Eventually, the water pushed open a 140-foot-long hole along the top. A 30-foot wave rushed down the creek, flooding parts of the city of Butler and other nearby towns. Luckily, word had been relayed by telephone and evacuations had already begun. Some people had to be rescued by firefighters, but there was only one fatality. It happened later that day when someone attempted to swim across the swollen creek.