Pennsylvania Oddities

On the afternoon of April 1, 1965, state troopers visited the Duncannon home of 47-year-old Byron Halter and his family, consisting of his wife, Betty, their 17-year-daughter, Holly, and Betty's mother, Mrs. Elizabeth Swank, who lived in the adjoining side of the duplex. The reason for their visit was because someone had sent anonymous letters to local papers warning that four people were about to...

When Morris Foster died in 1889 at the Blockley Hospital in West Philadelphia, his friends suspected that he had been poisoned. Foster's corpse was exhumed and a graveside post-mortem examination was performed. But as the two physicians prepared to remove portions of Foster's internal organs and bone for a chemical analysis, they made a shocking discovery-- a line of deftly-placed stitches...

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 elder...

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 sa...

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...

This is the improbable, but true, tale of how Glinda the Good Witch helped save the life of a washed-up actor sentenced to death for murdering his estranged wife inside the Wilkes-Barre City Hall. This is the bizarre story of George L. Marion, a once-famous minstrel show performer with an addiction to pork and beans, and his wife, Frances Lee Brooks, who was raised in commune founded by a wacky fa...

One of the darkest chapters in the history of Nesquehoning occurred in 1939, with the killing of a 14-year-old girl named Joan Stevens. But what made this tragedy so sensational was the fact that Joan Stevens was gunned down not by thugs or bandits, but by a Pennsylvania state trooper in the backseat of a patrol car. To see over 20 photos from this case, be sure to visit the Pennsylvania Oddities...

On August 3, 1927, Bernard Lukehart of Altoona, and his sister Catherine, were picking huckleberries on Brush Mountain when they uncovered a skeleton beneath a pile of rocks and dirt. When the coroner found a bullet hole in the skull, it rekindled memories of a Frankstown man who vanished years earlier-- a man whom some believe had been murdered by his own son.

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 o...

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 f...

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...

On June 17, 1866, a family of three retired to their beds in a little one-story log cabin in a wild and secluded spot in York County. George Squibb and his wife, Mary, each around seventy years of age, and their twelve-year-old granddaughter, Sarah Emma Seifert, never saw the sun rise; they now rest in an old Quaker graveyard, where a weathered tombstone bears the inscription, "The Murdered Family...

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 wi...

The shocking story of Tillie Irelan, who, in February of 1940, became only the third woman from Philadelphia sentenced to death, and the first Philadelphia woman sentenced to death in the electric chair. But, as fate would have it, she didn't live long enough to fulfill her sentence.

If ever there was a Pennsylvania household cruelly cursed by fate, it was the Beilstein family of Pittsburgh-- a once-prosperous family whose strange and legendary downfall was said by some to be the result of incest, mental illness, and dabbling with the supernatural.

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 short...

Immediately after the death of Ralph Josiah White, it became evident that cemetery officials in Sweet Valley did not want to have a convicted murderer buried in their graveyard. And so begins the strange adventures of Ralph's corpse.

Is it possible to have sympathy for a killer? Cursed with the mental development of a child and an IQ of 52, John Hogendobler was an impoverished farmer with a heart of gold. And after he shot his wife in 1941, there were many who believed Hogendobler had gotten a raw deal-- by the Department of Public Assistance, by Northumberland County officials, by his own attorneys, and by life in general.

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...

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 on...

It's not every day a chiropractor admits to dismembering the body of one of his patients, but, in January of 1926, that's exactly what occurred in Philadelphia.

There are many strange ways to die, but few are as rare as being sacrificed by a group of religious fanatics. Yet, this is exactly the tragic fate which befell one five-year-old girl from Northampton County in April of 1908.

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...

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 Mi...

While Solomon Boscov is remembered for founding the chain of department stores bearing his name, he also played a role in a chilling and mysterious Berks County murder. In August of 1941, Boscov opened an icebox door-- and discovered the tragic fate of little Billy Krewson.