PODCAST · history
Pennsylvania Oddities
by Marlin Bressi
Author and "historian of the macabre" Marlin Bressi explores true crime, unsolved mysteries, haunted places, and strange history from around the Keystone State. Based on the Pennsylvania Oddities blog and book series by Sunbury Press. New episodes on the 1st and 15th of every month (Note: There will be no new episodes in August; new episodes will return September 1).Be sure to visit the Pennsylvania Oddities blog for hundreds of astonishing true stories from every corner of the spookiest state in America!
Episodes
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The Haunting of the Sammet Farm
Over a century ago, a ghastly crime was committed on a Lancaster County farm situated along Lititz Run, about midway between Zook's Mill and Rothsville Mill, in the shadows of Owl Hill. The brutal deaths of Richard Sammet and Kate Nagle Hornberger so rippled the peaceful countryside that…
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The Missing Head of Ernest Gouker
On the morning of December 9, 1929, a fire devoured a log home four miles south of Gettysburg. The inferno raged with such ferocity that by the time neighbors noticed the smoke, all they could do was watch in helpless horror. When they finally sifted through the cinders and ash, what they…
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The Urdanivia Tragedy
Recently, the nation turned its attention to Massachusetts and the trial of Lindsay Clancy, leading to serious discussion about mental health and the consequences of a mother's heinous actions. However, in the spring of 1960, one mother from Pennsylvania left a nation asking the very same…
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From Coal Cracker to Caribbean King
The strange but true story of Faustin Wirkus, a coal region breaker boy who found fame thousands of miles away from the anthracite fields as ruler of a Caribbean island.
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Mamie Toogood and the Burning Boarder
Summer Break! Pennsylvania Oddities will return on September 1! Born on Christmas Day of 1856 to George and Mary Brown, Mary E. Brown spent her youth in the Chester County Quaker community of Ercildoun, an important stop on the Underground Railroad and an early center of the American abolitionist...
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Dead Air: The Tragic Demise of Lois Marshall
During the Great Depression, millions of Pennsylvanians found themselves facing an uncertain financial future, and many sought enterprising ways to keep the dark shadows of poverty at bay. Some risked jail time manufacturing moonshine, others traded labor for food and other necessities, and still...
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The Disappearance of Johanna Logue
A house on North Eleventh Street in Philadelphia was once the home of Jimmy Logue, who rose to notoriety as one of America's most infamous criminals, earning the nickname, "The King of Sneak-Thieves". In this house Jimmy lived with his wife, Johanna, and their young son, Percy. But, in February…
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Special Triple Episode
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...
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The Dissection of Anna Castner
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,...
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The Railroad Spike Murder
In April of 1936, authorities initially believed that three-year-old Sonny Karmendi's death had been caused by a hit-and-run driver. But the truth soon brought to light one of the most shocking murders in the history of Blair County.
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The Cursed Creek of Eden
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…
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The Fiendish Fumigator
On June 15, 1934, the body of a missing four-year-old girl, Leah Minerva Dilley, was found after nearly two weeks of searching, in a spot more than three miles from her home-- under extremely bizarre circumstances. Leah had died from cyanide poisoning resulting from a careless fumigator, before…
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The Unsolved Murder of the Schultz Children
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...
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The Disappearance of Marjorie West
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...
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The Bludgeoning of Biddy Quinn
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...
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Farmhouse Hospital of Horror
For most of its history, Mechanics Grove was a quiet, unassuming community amid the rolling farmlands of Lancaster County. But things changed in 1935, when authorities went searching for a missing Maryland woman and uncovered a "hospital of horror" inside a farmhouse owned by a disreputable,...
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The Mysterious Fate of Crazy Lindy
For most of his 63 years on earth, Hugh Smith was a respected resident of Liberty Valley. Hugh owned 380 acres of land in Perry County, and he earned a handsome living renting out his lands to sawmill operators. And for 28 of those years, the respectable Hugh Smith may have carried with him the...
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The Ballad of Iley Tate
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...
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The Shohola Mystery Skeleton
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…
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The Strange Murder of Louis Schulman
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...
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Murderous Madam: The Trial of Mary Ridey
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...
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The Martic Murder and the Haunted Sleigh of Barney Short
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...
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The Phantom Train of Cambria County
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…
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The Dalmatia Mystery
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…
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A Haunting in Shipoke
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…
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The Blooming Grove Pitchfork Murder
On August 3, 1907, a peaceful summer morning in Blooming Grove turned to horror with the accidental discovery of 75-year-old John Newman's body partially hidden behind a stone wall. Though no blood was found on his clothes, it was clear that he had not died of natural causes when a gaping wound…
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Death by Printing Press: The Mysterious Suicide of David Shilling
In June of 1908, the body of David Shilling, a 16-year-old office boy, was found hanging from a printing press at the newspaper offices of the Chambersburg People's Register. While evidence seemed to suggest suicide, there are many peculiar facts surrounding the incident which has led to...
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The Human Lightning Rods of Gettysburg
In July of 1863, a bloody battle fought near a small Pennsylvania town made the name Gettysburg famous throughout the world. But just forty-five years later, in July of 1908, tragedy would once again befall soldiers on the hallowed fields of Gettysburg. This time, the casualties would not fall by...
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The Murders at Sugar Valley Narrows
Located in Clinton County, Cherry Run, a tributary of Fishing Creek, is situated in a rugged, narrow valley between the small rural communities of Tylersville and Lamar. Today, a small clearing exists where Cherry Run intersects Narrow Road. On this spot once stood the two-room log home of a...
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Alice Marie Harris: Five Years a Prisoner in an Attic
In March of 1932, a girl named Alice was born in Fayette County to Martha Harris, the unwed 27-year-old daughter of a prosperous farmer from Perryopolis. Years passed, but very little was seen of Alice. Neither Martha nor her father spoke of her, not even her brother mentioned her. It was almost…
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The Duncannon Triple Murder
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…
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The Shocking Autopsy of Morris Foster
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...
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The Luzerne County Love Cult Murder
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…
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Grandpa Goes Insane: The Gabert Family Murders
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...
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The Ghost of Hannah Shingle
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...
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A Murder at City Hall: The Story of George Marion
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…
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A Nesquehoning Nightmare: The Joan Stevens Tragedy
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...
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The Brush Mountain Mystery Grave
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...
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The Corpse Under the Bed
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...
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The Aulenbach Axe Murder
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…
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The Harveys Lake Murder Mystery of 1913
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...
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The Squibb Family Murders
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...
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Revenge of the Perverted Patrolman
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...
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Murderous Mothers: Tillie Irelan
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.
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The Fall of the House of Beilstein
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.
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The Horrific Burning of Mary Sheeler
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…
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The Adventures of Ralph White's Corpse
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.
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The Hogendobler Tragedy
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...
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The Mystery of the Towboat Corpse
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,...
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The Schaffner Case: Ghoul at the Grave
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...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
Author and "historian of the macabre" Marlin Bressi explores true crime, unsolved mysteries, haunted places, and strange history from around the Keystone State. Based on the Pennsylvania Oddities blog and book series by Sunbury Press. New episodes on the 1st and 15th of every month (Note: There will be no new episodes in August; new episodes will return September 1).Be sure to visit the Pennsylvania Oddities blog for hundreds of astonishing true stories from every corner of the spookiest state in America!
HOSTED BY
Marlin Bressi
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Pennsylvania Oddities have?
Pennsylvania Oddities currently has 142 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Pennsylvania Oddities about?
Author and "historian of the macabre" Marlin Bressi explores true crime, unsolved mysteries, haunted places, and strange history from around the Keystone State. Based on the Pennsylvania Oddities blog and book series by Sunbury Press. New episodes on the 1st and 15th of every month (Note: There...
How often does Pennsylvania Oddities release new episodes?
Pennsylvania Oddities publishes regularly with 142 episodes available. Check the episode list for the typical release schedule.
Where can I listen to Pennsylvania Oddities?
You can listen to Pennsylvania Oddities on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Pennsylvania Oddities?
Pennsylvania Oddities is created and hosted by Marlin Bressi.
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