Forgotten Tales of Pennsylvania Read Free

the nights that followed, the woman was seen again in a variety of locations around town and could apparently vanish at will. One evening, the specter was spotted near Lackawanna Iron and Coal Company’s mill, and some of the braver citizens decided to pursue her. The woman in black went into an abandoned mine and did not emerge.
    The strange occurrences received a brief mention in the New York Times , and soon many surrounding communities began to report encounters with the same specter. She was seen in Carbondale and on the Depot Bridge in Pittston. The man who saw her on the bridge described her eyes as brighter than electric lights. She was seen in other suburban areas and small towns, and eventually even in Wilkes-Barre. The specter was talked about everywhere, and rumors of her appearance caused both terror and excitement. One reporter, obviously making light of the situation, claimed to have interviewed the woman in black. It did not take long before a few criminals masqueraded as the woman to commit assaults and robberies. A woman returning from a funeral was mistaken for the woman in black by two young ladies. They ran in terror until the woman caught up with them and convinced them that she was not the specter. After several weeks and a second article in the Times about the panic, the scare finally subsided.
    A L EPRECHAUN IN P ITTSBURGH
    During the 1920s, a young girl living in the Uptown section of the city of Pittsburgh supposedly had an encounter with a strange little man. Her large Irish-American family lived in a small house on Watson Street. She had four sisters and a brother, and she shared a bedroom with three of those sisters in their crowded house. One afternoon, while cleaning her bedroom, the girl pushed her bed to a different spot to sweep beneath it. She claimed that when she went to push it back, a little man in a green suit appeared on the other side of the bed. He pushed the bed in the opposite direction, away from its original location. The girl tried to return the bed to its proper place several times, but the leprechaun always moved it away. Eventually, the girl gave up and left the bed in its new position. The little man disappeared.
    When the girl’s father came in later to check on her, he asked why the bed was in a different spot. She told him the story. He dismissed it as an imaginative excuse for moving the bed and allowed her to leave it where it was. Later that night, when all of the girls were sleeping, part of the ceiling collapsed. Luckily no one was hurt because the debris fell in the spot where the young girl’s bed had originally been, before it was moved by the leprechaun.

    A T RAIN R OBBERY
    On the morning of October 11, 1924, a Cambria and Indiana Railroad train slowed down outside of Belsano, Cambria County, to pick up a passenger. As the engineer applied the brakes, a car with four men pulled up near the train and pointed guns at him. Two other men, who were already onboard the train, made their way back to a rear compartment. The robbers’ target was a safe belonging to the Ebensburg Coal Company. It contained the $33,054 payroll of the Colver mine’s employees. The thieves shot and killed one of the guards and took the safe. They escaped with the help of their friends in the car. Only two of the men involved, Michelo Bassi and Anthony Pezzi, were ever caught. They were found in Indiana, each with $3,000 in cash. They were later convicted and executed. The safe, the rest of the money and the other men were never found.
    G IANTS V ISITED P HILADELPHIA
    On the afternoon of January 27, 1887, three giants took a walk down Chestnut Street in Philadelphia, attracting a considerable amount of attention. The three were brothers from Iowa who were stopping in the city for a day with their cousin before going on to an exhibition in Rhode Island. Samuel, William and Charles Robinson, ages twenty-five, twenty-two and nineteen, respectively, were all over seven feet