Pennsylvania Oddities

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...

On Monday, December 10, 1923, 38-year-old Harvey Willow left his home near Selinsgrove to go hunting. When Tuesday morning dawned crisp and cold without his return, his wife sent their eleven-year-old son, Glenn, to the home of a neighbor to learn if he knew of Harvey's whereabouts. It was this neighbor, Lewis Gemberling, who located the missing hunter in a clump of woodland on the property of Norman App, with the back of his s...

German immigrant Herman Schultz holds the distinction of being the only person hanged in Pike County; he went to his death in 1897 for the murder of his estranged wife. However, another German immigrant nearly beat Schultz to the gallows fourteen years earlier. In 1884, George Jacob Schmidlin confessed to a cowardly murder. Schmidlin cheated the executioner by hanging himself in his cell in the Milford jail. But, if folks around We...

On Friday, June 28, 1929, William Kennedy was building a new fence on his farm near York Springs when the circling of vultures led to shocking discovery on the banks of Bermudian Creek, about a hundred yards from the old Gettysburg-Harrisburg highway. It was the badly-decomposed body of a woman lying face-down in the mud. The victim, a 27-year-old deaf mute and mother of four from Harrisburg named Carrie Shellenberger Weiss, hadn&#...

Penn State Altoona, built on the site of a defunct amusement park, has a dark secret. At the center of the campus is a pond, the remnant of the warming dam which once fed Ivyside Park's massive swimming pool. There is one particularly sad tragedy associated with this pool-- a tragedy involving a distraught mother who drowned herself and her children one spring evening in 1930.

In February of 1900, a tiny, middle-aged German tramp found himself confined to a steel cell in the basement of the Lebanon city hall. He had been brought to Lebanon from the Berks County, where he had been picked up on a vagrancy charge. This was nothing out of the ordinary for 50-year-old Leopold Rowe, who had been drifting from town to town for the past ten years of his life. Rowe was no stranger to county jails and small-town l...

Over one thousand criminals have paid for their crimes in Pennsylvania with their lives. But one man, Lorenzo Savage, holds the distinction of being the only voodoo doctor executed by the Commonwealth.

The story seems like a tale ripped from the pages of a dime-store novel: A lovelorn nurse is brutally slain, her body found outside an abandoned mansion. In her hand detectives find an arrangement of playing cards, which they soon le...

In Lebanon County there exists a place known to locals as Ghost Hollow. For more than a century, strange things have happened near this rural stretch between Shaefferstown and Newmanstown. In 1876, a teenage girl lost her life in a horrific carriage accident just outside the tiny village of Millbach. According to those who witnessed the entire incident, something "otherworldly" was to blame. 

Every Halloween, children's thoughts turn to black cats, goblins and ghouls. For most, it is a joyful occasion, a chance to indulge in all things delightfully wicked. From magic potions to witches on broomsticks, the imagery is often lighthearted and playful because Halloween monsters are just make-believe. But tragically, in October of 1954, one little girl discovered that some monsters are real.

One of America's most successful serial killers was Martha Grinder, an Allegheny County woman who rose to notoriety in the years following the Civil War as "The Poisoner of Gray's Alley". What made Martha Grinder so successful in playing her deadly game, aside from the fact that she killed indiscriminately for years before getting caught, was that she appeared beyond reproach-- for Martha was adored by her neighbo...