Pennsylvania Oddities

One of the more peculiar crimes in the history of Pennsylvania occurred in 1931 with the slaying of an elderly spinster from Forty Fort named Minnie Dilley. While most murders in our state's history have been carried out by heartless outlaws and seasoned criminals, Miss Dilley's slayer was a young female college graduate and the daughter of a minister. Stranger still, the unfortunate elderly victim was said to have belonged...

Sixty-year-old Elirio "Eli" Mantoni adored his family-- especially his grandchildren, who lived in Northampton County city of Easton with their mother, Lillian Mantoni Gabert. But when the county threatened to remove four-year-old Elaine, three-year-old Raymond, and 21-month-old Paul from their home and place them in foster care, Grandpa Eli took matters into his own hands.

Those of us with our sanity intact simply don't know what ...

In the mid-19th century, an old farmhouse stood along a quaint country road in North Coventry Township. This was the home of an eccentric spinster named Hannah Shingle, whose brutal murder in 1855 remains one of Chester County's most perplexing unsolved mysteries.

Though no one was ever convicted of the crime, the evidence points to a killer who was closely known to the victim. And perhaps that is why Hannah's restless ghost was en...

When the Pennsylvania Railroad decided to expand the Conway Yard in the early 1950s, it brought an influx of new residents to Beaver County, many of whom were temporary workers who rented rooms from boarding houses. This newfound prosperity was a boon for local landlords, but not every landlord made out so well. Such was the case of 53-year-old Olive Mae Headland, whose strange death in the fall of 1956 has never been satisfactoril...

On a bitter cold day in January of 1947, a retired carpenter from Schuylkill County went berserk and slaughtered his wife with a hatchet. What makes the tragic tale of Samuel Aulenbach strange is that, according to some, Samuel was a member of a fanatical religious sect. The motive is the greatest mystery-- what drove a quiet, respectable man to a senseless act of slaughter? Only the killer knew for sure, and he didn't live long en...

To say that 1913 was a busy year for law enforcement in Luzerne County is an understatement. Records show that twenty murders occurred in the county that year, with an astounding 47 murders taking place in Luzerne County between January 1, 1903, and December 31, 1913.

To their credit, authorities made arrests in all 47 cases, but not every arrest resulted in a conviction. Among the unsolved crimes of 1913 was the mysterious death ...

100th Episode Special! If you're a regular listener of the Pennsylvania Oddities podcast, you've noticed that Western Pennsylvania has no shortage of mass murderers. There was Martha Grinder, the kind-hearted housewife who was hanged in 1865 for nursing her patients to an early grave. There was Charles Cawley, the teenage genius from Homestead who went berserk in 1902 and slaughtered his family with an axe... a tragedy replicated i...

Since the earliest days of Pennsylvania history, there have been congregations of fundamentalist Christians which refuse to permit the sick and dying among them to seek the services of a physician. They instead prefer to leave the healing in the hands of Jesus, and, if for some reason, the sick or injured fail to recover, they view it as a consequence of their own lack of faith, or their own shortcomings as believers. Although it's...

On July 30, 1920, the steamboat Rival docked at Bird's Run Landing in Pittsburgh after making stops along the Monongahela River. It was the engineer who entered the ballast bunker and discovered a lifeless body of a stowaway partially buried beneath a pile of coal. Neither the engineer, captain, nor any of the crew members had any idea how, when, or why he had gotten aboard the vessel, and no identification was found of the bod...

Emanuel Schaffner was a farmer who owned a small tract of land about ten miles from Harrisburg. Middle aged and short of stature, Schaffner was neither particularly bright in intellect, nor particularly handsome in appearance. In fact, some said he was a downright repulsive and repugnant little man-- and that was before Emanuel Schaffner, who was sent to prison in 1872, earned his reputation as one of the most despicable villains D...