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Overview
A creeping fog rises from Blue Mist Road, and stories of car crashes, lynchings and even strange beasts haunt this isolated stretch outside Pittsburgh. Shades of Death Road in Washington County may be host to phantom coal miners killed during a deadly labor dispute. With firsthand accounts and historical research, authors Thomas White and Tony Lavorgne travel the backcountry roads and byways of western Pennsylvania to discover their ghost tales and mysterious legends.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781467118163 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Arcadia Publishing SC |
| Publication date: | 09/28/2015 |
| Series: | Haunted America |
| Pages: | 128 |
| Sales rank: | 1,065,254 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.50(d) |
About the Author
Tony Lavorgne is an independent researcher of historical mysteries and the unexplained. He specializes in obscure paranormal and anthropological topics. A native of Pittsburgh, he was most recently a contributing writer for the book Supernatural Lore of Pennsylvania: Ghosts, Monsters and Miracles. Lavorgne resides in Southwestern Pennsylvania where he operates his own antique business.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Haunted Roads in Context
The legends that have developed around western Pennsylvania's allegedly haunted roads are usually more complex than they appear at a first glance or superficial reading. Before examining each individual road, we must first look at the larger context in which the legends and ghost stories develop. None of the roads exists in a vacuum, and the supernatural legends associated with them have changed over time as people have experienced the roads in different ways. These legends exist as a dark mirror to American culture, reflecting fears, concerns and some of our hidden history. At the same time, they are difficult to define, classify and explain in traditional academic terms. To learn anything about haunted roads, we must first examine how the legends about them are transmitted and how people experience them directly. Then we must also consider the subject of ghosts and supernatural beliefs and set all of this against the backdrop of history and society.
Hearing the Legend
Sometimes the way that legends are communicated is almost as important as the legends themselves. Changing methods of transmission have affected the development and our understanding of haunted road legends and supernatural folklore in general. Decades ago, stories about haunted roads were transmitted primarily by word of mouth, causing them to be more malleable but also limiting their lifespan. The legends could change relatively rapidly in response to outside factors. Many of the legends are still transmitted this way.
One of the preeminent experts on modern legends, Bill Ellis, identified five general stages in the life of such a legend (also referred to as the legend narrative by folklorists) in a community or group. It begins with the naming of the "marginal experience" (the haunted road and the supernatural experience there). In the second stage, the experience is translated into words and shared with others in a rough form. This is the time that a legend is first told to others who did not directly experience it. By the third stage, the rough version has been refined into a finished narrative by multiple retellings or performances, as Ellis describes them. It is at this point that the legends reach their peak. Eventually, "when the story becomes a familiar part of the group's knowledge," it becomes a kernel narrative that is shorter in length with a less dramatic retelling. It is a reminder of the story for the group without repeating the entire narrative. Finally, it becomes a brief summarized report of only a few written or spoken lines, which continues as a reminder of the legend's existence. (For a full explanation of this process and an academic analysis of legends see Ellis's book Aliens, Ghosts and Cults: Legends We Live.) If a researcher only discovered a legend at the end of this cycle, it could be difficult to capture its full meaning and context.
Legends of haunted roads are sometimes discovered in books if they are not heard by word of mouth. Most often these are popular collections of regional ghost stories that manage to capture at least one version of the finished narrative. While this may serve to fix the legend in its finished form and ensure its survival, it can also alter the way that people experience it by ending its natural evolution. Of course, this is not always the case, and some legends continue to change well after they enter a fixed medium. Published accounts may include only one version of the legend or multiple versions. They also increase the area in which a legend is distributed.
Today, a haunted road legend is just as likely to be encountered on the Internet as it is to be passed along by word of mouth. Websites, message boards, Facebook pages and YouTube videos carry supernatural tales to a wider audience than ever before. The interactive nature of the Internet allows users to add their own experiences to a larger community narrative of the legend while at the same time comparing them to the experiences of others. Such interaction can make it difficult to define when the finished narrative of the legend emerges. Instead, the Internet preserves many layers of the legend that are contributed by different peer groups and communities over time. This provides an opportunity to look at how all the individual layers relate to one another.
Of course, this explains only how legends are learned and communicated, but it does not answer the larger questions of how people experience haunted roads directly or the validity of the supernatural happenings that are reported there. Because of the way legends are transmitted and experienced, there is no one definitive version of any of the stories told about these haunted roads. This volume will explore as many of these versions as possible, but there will always be more because they are tied to personal experiences.
It is difficult to say anything definitive when dealing with haunted roads. Consequently, some folklorists would argue that it is a futile endeavor to try to trace the historical origins of any modern legend. This futility may be true for some legends more than others. In fact, some legends can at least be partially verified or debunked by historical research and placed firmly within a historical setting. In the case of supernatural experiences, we can only make observations based on our perceptions of events and try to add some kind of context to them. We should begin this process by examining the experience of going to a haunted road.
Experiencing the Haunted Road
Roads have had many symbolic meanings over the centuries in culture and in literature. It is only natural then that some of those meanings would involve the supernatural. In the most obvious sense, roads symbolize journeys, whether literal or metaphorical. Haunted roads then represent a literal and metaphorical journey to supernatural experience. For this reason, haunted roads have been one of the primary destinations for those who embark on modern legend trips.
The legend trip, a term coined by folklorists, is the process of acting out a legend. Folklorists sometimes use the more technical term ostension (or showing) to describe this process. In this case, it would be the act of traveling to a haunted road to test the legend, usually performing some type of rituallike activity to provoke a direct supernatural response. The ritual activity may be something simple like repeating a name, flashing headlights, putting a car in neutral, etc., or it might involve conducting the legend trip at a specific time, like during a full moon or on a stormy night. Often after such a test, something happens that is perceived as a strange occurrence. It might be an unusual noise, feeling or something visual. With the participants in a state of heightened dramatic tension, the occurrence is frequently perceived as being supernatural in nature. After it is over, the legend trippers interpret their experience in the context of the legend, adding their own encounter to the story (or legend narrative) when it is repeated. As previously noted, these legend trips provide a way to test fears, boundaries and the reality of the supernatural. Perhaps more importantly, they are a unique, suspenseful and entertaining experience for those involved.
Haunted roads, like many other legend trip destinations, exist in what are known as liminal spaces. Liminal space is a place of transition, both physical and psychological. Such spaces can be understood as boundaries between physical areas and/or social and cultural divisions. Liminal spaces are open to interpretation and do not always fit into a clear category because they are vaguely defined, much like supernatural experiences themselves. Haunted roads are in many ways the ideal liminal space for a legend to unfold. These roads are usually located at the fringe of suburbia or in nearby rural areas and are fairly isolated but still easily accessible by car. They are not places where one would normally go in his or her daily routine. For people who live on or near the roads, they hold little mystery. But for legend trippers who are unfamiliar with the area, the dark and lonely stretches seem like they are places where truly unusual things can happen. In some cases, the legends about specific haunted roads decline over time as areas develop and cease to be true liminal spaces. There will be a few examples of such transitions in this volume.
While it has traditionally been assumed that legend trips are primarily undertaken by adolescents, this is not the case, at least not anymore. In fact, in recent years, adults have made the trips to haunted roads as often as teenagers. Though their motivations may vary a little, both of these groups are seeking contact with ghosts and supernatural entities. Adults are often more serious than their teenage counterparts, and many are ghost hunters and paranormal investigators seeking some kind of serious proof of hauntings. They are frequently aware that a haunted road may be steeped in untrue urban legends but attempt to discover whether there are any real supernatural occurrences that inspired the legends. Paranormal investigators may attempt to use scientific or pseudo-scientific means to find proof of ghosts but in the process are adding another layer of ritual to the legend trip. By using devices like electromagnetic field (EMF) detectors, cameras and audio recorders, they try to elicit a supernatural reaction. Investigators ask ghosts and spirits questions, hoping they will speak into a recorder or make an EMF detector spike as a response. It is, at some level, the same as any of the other previously mentioned legend trip rituals. Such technology is often used in conjunction with the other, more mundane rituals. The primary difference is that the paranormal investigators believe that they document the existence of the supernatural in addition to experiencing it. The validity of such evidence is hotly debated, and we will not try to settle such arguments here. It is also important to remember that everyone who travels to a haunted road, regardless of age or purpose, is also going there for entertainment and excitement.
Ghosts, Urban Legends and the Supernatural
Now that we have discussed both the transmission of legends and the experience of the legend trip, we must turn to a more elusive subject that is at the very core of haunted roads — the ghosts themselves. The belief in ghosts is as old as recorded history and just as alive today as it has ever been. Ghosts have been the subject of much thought and speculation over the centuries, in spite of their intangible form. Many reasons have been suggested for their appearance. Some ghosts were once thought to guard treasure, while others stayed around to right a wrong, prevent an injustice or even identify their own killer. The ghost may even be seeking revenge on someone who wronged him or her. Some people believe that ghosts remain because of a tragic or untimely death that left a person's spirit tied to the material world, unable to move on. Other ghosts are thought to appear only once or a few times, just long enough to say goodbye to a loved one. There are some researchers who believe ghosts may not even be conscious entities at all but are rather like a recording in the Earth's electromagnetic field, replaying an action over and over again that was performed frequently in life.
Before we go any further, we must be clear that we are not attempting to prove or disprove the existence of ghosts and supernatural phenomena. The belief in ghosts is both personal and subjective. Science can neither confirm nor eliminate the possibility of ghosts because they are unmeasurable by scientific means. Many people, including the authors, have had authentic experiences that could be deemed supernatural, though there is no real way to quantify or confirm such happenings. Just as there are many alleged supernatural occurrences that have practical explanations, there are those that remain mysterious and unexplained.
Most ghost stories have more than one layer of meaning, however, and they are not always obvious to the observer or the person who experiences the haunting. On the surface is the direct encounter with the supernatural, whether real or imagined. As previously mentioned, this layer is the most difficult to assess, but it is obviously the one that holds the most interest for those who casually hear of the legend or of a firsthand encounter. But if we dig a little deeper, the legends of haunted roads can reveal much more.
Some ghost stories actually function as a form of nontraditional community history. These types of supernatural accounts are usually based on some historically verifiable facts. At least a few of the people, places and events that they describe can be proven to have existed or occurred. That is not to say that all of the elements of the ghost story are true, but the fact that they are grounded in reality makes them plausible. The people and events in the ghost stories may not have been recognized as historically significant at the time that they occurred, but they had an impact on the local community. Telling the ghost story recalls these people and events and keeps them in the popular memory.
This is one reason why ghost stories are frequently tied to marginalized groups of people. Until the second half of the twentieth century, history was written primarily from one perspective. Women, immigrants and minorities were often left out of professional historical accounts or were barely touched upon. Ghost stories were one way to keep the history and memories of their communities alive, even among outsiders. For example, if one surveys Pennsylvania's ghost stories from or about the 1800s, one would find that a very large number of the reported ghosts are female. Does this mean women make better ghosts? Of course not. Women's lives were documented far less extensively than men's in the histories of the day, even when they met tragic ends. However, when a ghost story is told about them, it keeps pieces of their personal histories alive in a nontraditional, almost hidden way.
These kinds of ghost stories can also be a record of some tragic event that impacted a community, like a ripple in the collective memory. Accidents, fires and murders all hold a level of morbid fascination for those who were not involved directly or heard about them later. The stories of victims can easily morph into reports of ghosts in such situations, and the memory of the tragedy is kept alive for years, and sometimes generations, to come. Of course a ghost story can keep a community memory alive in spite of attempts to let it fade. These ghosts may remind a community of racism, greed, incompetence or corruption. In such cases, the ghost is a moral reminder for the community involved.
Not all ghost stories carry a direct historical link, however. Such stories fall into the realm of what is commonly known as urban legend. While all the ghost stories are technically legends, for this book we will use the popular term to describe legends that can be proven to be historically false. These types of ghostly tales are not true in the sense that they represent actual people and occurrences, but they are true representations of societal fears. Urban legends carry warnings about perceived dangers and moral threats and are often initially indistinguishable from the historically based ghost stories. Upon closer examination though, it becomes clear that they resemble stories that are told in other areas of the state and country. Such legends carry weight and seem believable because they are passed along by trustworthy friends and acquaintances who heard the legend in the same way. Though many urban legends do not have a supernatural component, there are a sizeable number that do.
Urban legends remain popular, even though they lack verifiable proof, because they tap into the underlying fears of a community. Those fears sustain the legends and keep them alive for a while because they seem like they could happen. The urban legends of different decades reflect social and cultural fears of that time. They also frequently carry a moral warning, reminding listeners to remain vigilant against moral corruption. A non-supernatural example of this is the classic urban legend of the babysitter on acid. It emerged in the late 1960s and circulated well into the 1980s. The story has several variations, but basically a couple leaves their baby at home with a teenage babysitter (who was sometimes described as a hippie) while they go out for the evening. At some point in the evening, the babysitter takes acid. The parents called to check on everything after a few hours and the babysitter told them that she put the turkey in the oven. Not knowing what she was talking about, and being concerned by the strange conversation, they hurried back home. When they got there, to their horror, the babysitter had put the baby in a roasting pan and cooked it in the oven, being delusional because of the LSD. The purpose of the legend was twofold. First, it warned teenagers of the dangers of drug use. Second, it warned parents to be careful with whom they entrusted their children.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Haunted Roads of Western Pennsylvania"
by .
Copyright © 2015 Thomas White and Tony Lavorgne.
Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements 7
Introduction: Why Go to a Haunted Road? 9
Haunted Roads in Context 13
Blue Mist Road: Allegheny County 23
Shades of Death Road: Washington County 48
Axe Murder Hollow: Erie County 59
Mystery Mile and Mudlick Hollow Road: Beaver County 65
The Many 13 Bends Roads: Allegheny County 79
Hogback Road: Mercer County 90
Crybaby Bridge: Greene County 99
The Green Man's Wanderings: Various Counties 103
Conclusion 115
Selected Bibliography 117
Index 123
About the Authors 127