Pennsylvania Oddities

This special episode features two new Pennsylvania Oddities stories, plus Episode 1 of my new short-form true crime podcast, 15 Minutes of Infamy.

Part I: The Psychiatrist's Fatal Folly

During the early history of Rockview State Penitentiary in Centre County, the homes of prison officials were tended by the most trusted and deserving inmates, who served as domestic servants. But things changed in 1932, after the daughter of a prison ...

During the early 20th century the portion of Avoca to the east of Interstate 81, near the Wilkes-Barre Scranton International Airport, was a mining community known as Brown's Patch. Like most mining patches among the anthracite fields of Pennsylvania, Brown's Patch was home to many struggling, impoverished families.

In the 1920s, one such family who called Brown's Patch home was the Castners, who occupied a small, one-story house o...

In Manheim Township, just north of the city of Lancaster, there flows a tiny stream which has its source near Roseville. This little brook, an unnamed tributary of Landis Run, is little more than a trickle, and although it flows for a distance of less than two miles from Roseville to Eden, there is a long and astonishing list of curious deaths associated with it-- a list that, to my knowledge, has no parallel in the Keystone State.

Around five o'clock on Saturday evening, March 7, 1953, a TV repairman was at work in his basement workshop, unaware that he was about to step into a nightmare more terrifying than any late-night horror flick that he or his customers had ever viewed on their television screen.

When Paul Schultz went upstairs in his home in Nazareth, his wife, Claire, asked him to go out and look for their two children, who hadn't been seen since tw...

Of all the missing persons cases in the history of the United States, few have made as indelible a mark as the 1938 disappearance of four-year-old Marjorie West. The mystery surrounding Marjorie's unexplained disappearance from a Mother's Day outing has been the subject of books, television shows and magazine articles. In fact, one British newspaper, The Guardian, has referred to the case one of the "great unsolved mysteries of the...

In 1826, the citizens of Lebanon were horrified to learn that a murder had taken place in their peaceful, idyllic community. In every household throughout the county the crime was discussed, while parents and preachers alike used the murder and the subsequent execution of the killer as a teaching device in order to illustrate the perils of intoxication and the evils of liquor. This is the story of the first execution in the history...

During the Great Depression, there lived in Fayette County a mountain man named Iley Tate who ruled the hill country between Haydentown to the West Virginia line like a feudal lord. Tate, a father of 20, had amassed considerable wealth as a livestock trader, and, because of his influence and steel-cold demeanor, he had a number of local lawmen and politicians in his hip pocket. Like many powerful men in similiar positions, Iley Tat...

On April 7, 1930, two men entered a shallow cave near Shohola to escape a sudden thunderstorm-- and discovered the skeletal remains of a murder victim.

The news of the mystery skeleton caught the attention of a probation officer from New York, who had been told a peculiar story a few years earlier about a mountain man who had lured a stranger to his death near Shohola. Though many pieces of the forgotten story fit together perfectl...

On a February evening in 1944, Dr. Louis Schulman, a prominent 42-year-old physician, was gunned down on the streets of Pittsburgh by a former patient. The killer was Martha Ashear, a Syrian immigrant who claimed that she had taken matters into her own hands after no one believed the shocking accusations she had made against Dr. Schulman.

Was Martha telling the truth? Or did Pittsburgh's medical community attempt to protect the repu...

Known as "Philadelphia's First Suburb", the neighborhood of Northern Liberties existed as a unique and independent city until 1854, when an Act of Consolidation passed by the state legislature made it a part of the City of Brotherly Love. By the time of its consolidation, Northern Liberties had earned a reputation as one of the most infamous red-light districts in the country, with streets were thronged with taverns, gambling parlo...

In February of 1884, the rural village of Rawlinsville in Martic Township, Lancaster County, experienced the most noteworthy event in its long history-- the mysterious murder of hotelkeeper Barney Short, whose body was found sprawled across the road with a gaping wound in the skull.

Evidence indicated that the killer, or killers, had crouched behind a roadside tree, waiting for Barney to pass by in his horse-drawn sleigh. But consid...

Were it not for the famous Lizzie Borden murder trial taking place five hundred miles away in Fall River, Massachusetts, the story of the phantom train of Cambria County might have become well-known outside of Carrolltown.

This tiny borough sits twenty miles west of Altoona, and, in 1892, became a stop on the newly-formed Cambria & Clearfied Railroad. The focal point of this rail line was a tunnel constructed through Strittmatt...

The village of Dalmatia in Northumberland County is situated along the Susquehanna River, on land once owned by William Dunbar, an early settler who purchased the property from Thomas McKee in 1773. One enduring mystery of Dalmatia is how this inland village came to be named after a coastal region of Croatia, as early records indicate that no one of Croatian descent has ever lived there.

Another mystery involves the strange deaths ...

First settled in the early 18th century, the quaint neighborhood of Shipoke is one of the most desirable in Harrisburg. However, for much of its history, Shipoke was regarded as a run-down, squalid place populated by Harrisburg's working poor.

One of the more run down locales was Indian Alley, and it was on this street where a house once stood that was rumored to be haunted. In fact, the home was so infested with spirits that the c...