The Witch of Brockwayville

In 1822, Alonzo Brockway stood at the head of Pennsylvania’s Little Toby Valley and looked down. He had heard rumors of the place from the old mountain men. The Iroquois, they said, had avoided the valley for centuries. The Indians feared something that stalked the dark shadows and whispered across the waters; something, it was said, that had lingered too long in this world.

Alonzo was not afraid of stories and shadows, however; he was afraid of failing, of starving, of dying in the forsaken wilderness he now called home.

In 1884, the Ridgeway and Clearfield Railway was opened in Brockwayville, Pennsylvania. The R&C Railroad connected the tiny hamlet to the sprawling Pennsylvania Railroad, and thus to the world.

On June 21, 1885, a young woman disembarked from the afternoon train at the Brockwayville depot. She was unaccompanied. When she took a room at the nearby Kirkpatrick Hotel, she gave her name as Mary Brown.

In July of the same year, nine children were born to the families of Brockwayville. All nine survived and thrived.

Mary Brown soon took up residence in an abandoned property known locally as Allen’s Farm. She had produced papers to the local magistrate, Judge Shaffer, proving her claim to the land. She was a distant Allen relative. As September exhausted summer’s heat, Mary Brown planted a garden.

In 1886, Reynolds L. Buzard began felling the valley’s timber. He built a handsome mill along the banks of the Little Toby River. The timber was sent far to the south, to Pittsburgh, but some remained in Brockwayville. In the years to come, it would build grand homes for Buzard and his partners. 

Mary’s garden grew. The frost came and soon the snow. Poking through the white drifts, peas and turnips, onions and cabbage, along with clary sage, monkshood, foxglove, and yarrow. 

In 1887 a cube of coal weighing over a ton was brought out of the earth just west of Brockwayville. It was subsequently displayed at the Philadelphia Exposition and later housed at the Smithsonian. 

Mary Brown’s garden was laid out in a circular fashion. A lunar plot. Strips of planting beds radiated from a central pivot wherein a single vigorous rose bush bloomed in brilliant yellow.

In Brockwayville, an iron girder bridge was laid across the Little Toby Creek. The streets were paved and lighted, a new school was started, a fire brigade was formed, the telephone came.

In 1896 Norman Lane, a neighbor to Mary Brown, decided that the uncultivated land on Mary’s property would best serve the community if his dairy cows were allowed to graze there. He got Judge Shaffer to tacitly agree or at least to look the other way. After he released his cows onto Mary’s property, Lane found a single yellow rose on his doorstep. Two weeks later, half the herd was lost to sickness.

 In 1897 glass was first made in Brockwayville. For the next hundred years, glass would be made and the borough’s fortunes would be governed by its fragile economy.

In 1898 a notorious drunkard named Axel Johnson assaulted a young girl behind the hardware store along Main Street in Brockwayville. Johnson’s well-connected family coerced the woman into leaving town. Two weeks later, Axel’s mother Mrs. Johnson found a yellow rose on her doorstep. She placed it in a vase with flowers she had cut from her garden and promptly forgot it.

That same year, a coal mine was opened in Crenshaw, a short ride east of Brockwayville. The first miners underground reported being overcome by a strange sensation. One described the mine as animate, a living thing whose thoughts the miners could somehow feel. The sensation passed after a few weeks and the mine's operation was brought to full capacity. 

Later that year, Mrs. Johnson noticed the still-living yellow rose in a vase of dead flowers. She moved it to a glass vase next to the window in the kitchen.

Mary Brown was sometimes seen in town at the market or the hardware store. She bought little, but was always eager for news of the town and its people. Many townspeople would not talk to her. Her neighbors among the hill farms knew better. Some were happy to find a basket of beans or radishes out of season and unannounced on their doorstep, but others hung an iron horseshoe on their lintel.

In the summer of 1904, Mrs. Johnson relocated the glass vase with the yellow rose from the kitchen to the parlor. She forgot to refill the water for two weeks and, in the heat of August, the water dried up and the rose died. On September 5, 1904, Mrs. Johnson found her son Axel dead in his room.

In 1906 the Brockwayville Machine Bottle Company pressed its first bottle. It would go on to employ hundreds of local residents and become a Fortune 500 company.

Mary Brown said she was a widow but never spoke of her life before she came to Brockwayville. From time to time, men came to court Mary Brown. They were poor farmers or sons of poor farmers, and they came with more desire for her land than her affections. She amiably dispelled their illusions and sent them back down the sage-choked path.

In 1908 the Brockwayville Macaroni Company took over the old Kirkpatrick Hotel and turned it into a factory. They employed dozens of newly-arrived Italian immigrants, mostly women.

In 1909 Mary Brown took an orphan girl into her home. The girl’s name was Anne Hendrick. When the girl’s great-aunt Clara began bemoaning the child’s state around town, Judge Shaffer saw an opportunity. He intimated arresting Mary for kidnapping, corrupting public morals, indentured servitude.

In 1909, the north side of Brockwayville’s Main Street was the site of an unusual spectacle. For two weeks in October a murder of crows perched upon the uppermost cornices from dawn until dusk. They cawed and angled their heads to peer at passers-by as passers-by peered back. The day that no crows appeared with the morning was the day that the entire block was destroyed by an accidental fire. 

Judge Shaffer failed to bring any charges against Mary. Anne Hendrick became Anne Brown. Mary and Anne could be seen along the backroads day or night, travelling between farms, delivering their garden’s bounty or tending to the sick and needy. Mary was widely known for her skill in healing the problems of people, animals, and crops.

In 1912 the Brockwayville Macaroni Company’s factory in the old Kirkpatrick Hotel burned to the ground. Two workers, Maria Pizzoni and Antonia Scarnati, died in the fire.

The autumn of 1912 saw a veritable plague sweep Brockwayville as the managers and owners of the Brockwayville Macaroni Company were felled by a mysterious ailment. Residents shut their doors for most of the winter. Some reported seeing strange shadows on their windows and eerie whisperings across the creek water. Dead leaves and yellow rose petals billowed silently down the empty streets.

In the spring of 1913, old Judge Shaffer and his sons went to Mary Brown’s farm. They had no warrant, they had brought no charges. What they brought with them was a lifetime of suspicion and mistrust. No witness has recorded what happened, but the Shaffers left the farmhouse and its occupants untouched. It was remarked upon by many Brockwayville residents that for the rest of his life, old Judge Shaffer kept a vase with a yellow rose on his bedside table. Some thought it marked the memory of a dalliance with Mary Brown or some sort of pact kept between them. Others wondered if it marked something like a debt or a transaction. Others simply said that something taken could never be given away.

In the decades to come, Mary Brown’s garden thrived. Brockwayville grew and prospered and her children were happy. In those days, yellow roses were sometimes spied in dimly-lit rooms, in front parlors, in locked closets, roses that never faded so long as their keepers minded their care, so long as they remembered the kind of effort it takes for something to bloom in the forsaken wilderness.

From the shadows!

Behold, mortals! The return of Scary True! The inexorable approach of All Hallows' Eve revivifies the dark spirits and what was dead now lives again! Look upon this blog and despair!

Next time on Scary True: A history too terrible to reveal...until now! "The Witch of Brockwayville" rides again!

The Midnighters: Troll Bridge

For over thirty years, Jerry worked as a police officer in Pittsburgh. In his time on the force, Jerry had seen some bad things, some worse things, and some downright evil things. Cleaning up when people got mad or got crazy was part of the job, but there were other things that Jerry saw, things that most people never see, things that prowl the night, things that refuse to die.

I interviewed Jerry several times in 2002. The following incident is just one of the many stories Jerry shared in hours of audio recordings. I have transcribed them just as they were told to me by Jerry.

“This happened back in the summer of ‘65. Frank and me – that’s my partner, Frank – we was doing night patrols around the Smithfield Street Bridge.

“See, that’s the oldest bridge we got here in Pittsburgh and they were doing some work on the trolleys they used to have on the bridge but every time the construction crew showed up for work in the morning, they found tools smashed and general vandalism-type stuff.

“We figure it’s a bunch of  these kids – hoodlums – running around all hours, so we did the stakeout thing to catch ‘em. Only it’s a big bridge so we had to walk up and down the thing and around and under, too.

“We’re out there on the first night and we don’t see nothing. We come up from under the bridge on our rounds and there’s some of the new tracks they were putting in torn off and ripped up. Now this is metal track, right? You don’t just take it apart like that, not unless you got time and some heavy equipment, but Frank and me, we were only off the bridge for ten minutes tops.

“The next night, same thing happens, right? Nobody can figure out what’s going on and the union is starting to make waves about it. Now the only way to stop the trouble is to put like fifty guys on the bridge all night long, but the captain, he don’t want to budget that kinda overtime so he tells us, you better get on this right away and figure it out, Okay?

“So, it’s a real mystery and Frank and me, we weren’t sure what we were dealing with. But Frank, you know, he’s sure the whole freakin’ bridge is haunted, so he wants to do a seance or dredge the river for bodies or something.

“I say, ‘Frank, take it easy, there’s a top and a bottom to the bridge, so let’s split up.’ Frank agrees to give it one more try so that third night he’s down below the bridge and I’m topside at first, then we’ll switch.

“After a few hours, it’s pretty quiet and I head down to trade places with Frank. There’s a street down there under the bridge and that’s where Frank is supposed to be but he ain’t there. Now, that’s not unlike Frank at all, right? But I’m not letting my partner go off on his own.

“There some scrub and grass down there and I see Frank crouched down. He sees something, I can tell by the way he’s sitting there, so I creep up real slow beside him. He’s got his gun drawn, but he’s not pointing it at anything.

“He points off to this big flat rock under the bridge. There’s nothing there, right? I don’t know what Frank is looking for, maybe he thinks that’s where the body is buried, right?

“Finally I say, what is it, Frank? And Frank says, ‘He’s in there, inside that door.’ And I’m like, ‘Frank, maybe you been working too hard ‘cause there ain’t no door there.’ 

“Frank gives me a look like I’m the crazy one and I look back and, you know what? There’s a door there right where there wasn’t a door a minute ago. And it’s just standing there ‘cause there ain’t no wall around it, and it’s this big wooden thing like you’d see in a castle or something.

“I’m just trying to figure out where in the heck this thing came from when all of a sudden it opens – guess I should’ve expected a door like that was gonna open right then – and standing in the doorway is the biggest guy you ever saw.

“Now, I can’t see him real good on account of it being so dark, but he’s a mountain all right, and he’s just standing there waiting and I think he’s watching us, but then I hear this funny sound like someone got the sniffles and I think, this guy isn’t looking at us, he’s smelling us!

“He takes a step forward and there’s more light so I can see him better, and, remember now, Frank and me, we haven’t moved yet and we’re not too far from this guy, but I don’t think he sees us but he’s moving his head around like he’s listening.

“He’s big, right, and he’s got this long black hair and big long nose and his skin looks green, in fact it looks like a rock with moss on it or something, and he’s wearing some sort of crazy get-up that looks like a sack to me. And his eyes, well, his eyes were the worst part. They were like little lights, like keyholes, right, only there’s a fire on the other side of the door.

“Now, I thought this guy is gonna see us and he’s gonna beat the living heck out of us, but he just sniffs and cocks his head and he says something like, ‘I can smell you sitting there in the dark’ and I realized this guy don’t see too good.

“Frank stands up and says, you know, ‘What do you want?’ and the guy says ‘Tell them to leave my bridge alone’ and Frank doesn’t say anything at first and like the jerk I am, I said ‘You can’t have that door here, it’s against code’ and Frank and the big guy just both look at me like I passed gas.

“I admit, I’m not the brightest knife in the drawer, and I say some dumb things, but this was a real doozy. I’ll never forget how the big guy looked right at me for the first time and he says, ‘The rocks and trees are my code’ in this real creepy-like voice.

“Frank gives me an elbow in the ribs and he says, ‘Okay, Mister, we’ll take care of it’ and this guy gives a little sneer and steps back inside that door and ‘poof’ goes the door again.

“Well, Frank gives me a look like he’s gonna take me up to the bridge and throw me off, right? But I say, ‘Frank, how are you gonna take care of it?’ And for once, I think that Frank has no idea.

“Well, a few weeks later, the trolley work is done without any more trouble and the captain is pretty pleased with Frank but nobody knows how he did it. Turns out, Frank got the foreman to get a crane down there and they put that big rock on the back of a truck and, according to Frank, he drove it 100 miles north and dumped it beside the road.

“Frank told me how these types of things – he didn’t wanna say troll but I don’t care – these trolls like to be under a bridge because something about how all the people coming and going over the water, passing through this kinda in-between place like a bridge causes something like friction, which gives off an energy or something, and these trolls, they can live off of that. I don’t know myself, sounds pretty nuts to me.

“But that spot where they dumped it – that rock – was down a big steep gorge ‘cause Frank was hoping that the troll wouldn’t find its way back. Now, a few years after that and that exact spot is where they put Interstate 80 that goes across the whole state – goes from New York City to San Francisco – and they built a new bridge there, a real big one, and thousands of people cross it everyday and I bet that rock and that troll are still down there under that bridge.”

Trip, trap, trip!

Next week on Scary True: Who's that tripping on my bridge? Find out in "The Midnighters: Troll Bridge!"
And check out this week's monster story, "Demon Wings."

Demon Wings

In the backwoods of western Pennsylvania, there’s a little-used highway that cuts through a deserted forest. Across the highway’s cracked pavement the thickly-wooded forest casts long, sinister shadows. The forest is known as Broome’s Quarter and the road is Route 666 and both are haunted. 

Jeff writes to tell me how he ended up driving Route 666 one dark September night in 1998. Jeff was a civil engineer in Altoona, Pennsylvania, and, after attending a conference up in Erie, Jeff got a little lost on the way home. 

“This was before we had all the GPS stuff,” Jeff tells me. “I had a map but I don’t think I even opened it.”

Jeff was making good time, or so he thought. He steered his car down the twilit and increasingly-deserted road. “It wasn’t that late, but I was the only car out there,” Jeff recalls, “and that made me think I must be going in the wrong direction.”

Jeff decided he needed to turn around. He pulled off onto a side road, made a turn, and headed back down the road. A quarter of an hour later, Jeff realized he had made a mistake.

“I was on Route 219 or something when I turned around,” Jeff remembers, “and here comes a sign saying Route 666 East.”

Jeff has no idea how he came to be on a completely different road, a road he had never seen before. And he wasn’t put off by the ominous sign. “It’s just a number,” Jeff tells me. “I’m an engineer, so I’m not afraid of numbers.”

Jeff considered his predicament. He was lost. He was headed east and he needed to go south. There wasn’t anyone around to ask for help. 

Suddenly a figure loomed up out of the dark trees and into the path of Jeff’s car. His headlights snared a young deer and it stood frozen in the road. As Jeff began to swerve his car, a shadow swept in front of his windshield and he lost sight of the road.

“I nearly stood on my brakes as this thing came in front of me,” Jeff tells me. “It all happened in a  split second or faster.”

When the shadow passed, the deer was gone. Jeff’s car sat still, his tires smoking. Jeff was breathing heavily and he was surprised to feel sweat dripping from his nose.

“I just sat there stunned for a minute,” Jeff recalls. “I thought I hit the deer and it must have flown over my car or something.”

Jeff got out to check the damage to his car. The night air made Jeff shiver. “I checked the front and the sides but there was nothing there,” Jeff remembers. “Not even blood.”

Jeff thought he must have missed the deer somehow and his thoughts turned to what exactly he had seen. It seemed that something had swept down and then the deer disappeared. “Now, did something pick it up?” Jeff asks. “Did I have a guardian angel? Or did the deer?”

Jeff got back in his car and swung it around so the headlights would illuminate the spot where he had last seen the deer. There was nothing there but one of the rare highway lamp posts flickering with a dim light.

Jeff walked toward the post and scanned the road for signs of the deer. He saw the grim, silent trees and the dark cracks that snaked across the highway, but nothing of the deer.

He paused under the buzzing, orange glow of the lamp post. He thought he heard a noise like running water or cracking very close by, but couldn’t make out the direction. He saw a patch of dark liquid at his feet but couldn’t make out the color. Was it blood or oil?

Then, the bottom half of a severed deer leg landed at Jeff’s feet with a heavy, wet splat, showering Jeff’s shoes with specks of blood.

“I was in shock,” Jeff says. “I didn’t figure out where it had come from at first.”

Jeff staggered back, his mouth open in silent fear as he quickly realized that the deer leg had fallen from the lamp post, that something else was up there in the dark, too, and whatever it was, it had swooped down in front of Jeff’s car, picked up the deer, and was now dismembering it, most likely eating it.

“I guess that deer didn’t have a guardian angel,” Jeff says. “And neither did I.”

Although the lamp’s light made it difficult to discern clearly, Jeff could see a shadowy figure perched at its peak. And the sound he had heard previously, like a wet crunch, was definitely coming from up there, too. 

Jeff walked backwards toward his car. The figure on the lamp post moved little, seemingly taking little notice of Jeff.

“I got to my car – fumbled with the door – not taking my eyes off that thing,” Jeff recalls. “But I finally got a good look before I left.”

As Jeff started to turn his car around, it seemed the thing on the lamp post became aware of his presence. Jeff saw the shadow sit upright. “I thought it heard the car or something,” Jeff says, “but I think it realized it had dropped that leg.”

The shadow leaned down and Jeff thought it looked like it was studying the ground with some sense possibly other than sight. Suddenly it fell to the ground right on top of the deer leg.

“It looked like a big black garbage bag at first,” Jeff remembers. “But those were just the wings.”

The body was smaller than Jeff expected: it was child-size, but wiry and muscular, with greyish mottled skin like an old tree. It was human-like, in that it had a head and two arms and two legs, but its arms ended in something more like scissors than fingers and its legs bent backward at an sickening angle and the head was a black stump divided by a teeth-filled maw.

And the great black wings that hovered above and enclosed the creature like a cocoon swayed and quivered in what Jeff could only surmise was a kind of pleasure.

“I couldn’t make sense of it,” Jeff says. “And I was strangely ashamed that I couldn’t make sense of it.”

The creature continued its meal and two pale grey disks watched as Jeff drove away. It wasn’t until years later that Jeff would come across the legend of Mother Meade and the monsters she left to wander in Broome’s Quarter. It was only then that Jeff contacted me. It was the first time he told anyone about his mysterious encounter with one of Mother Meade’s monstrous children, about the night he came under the shadow of demon wings.

“I don’t know what they are or where they came from,” Jeff tells me. “All I know is that I don’t want to run into one of them ever again.”

Read more about Mother Meade's monster children here.

In the sky!

Next week on Scary True: What's that in the sky? A giant bat? A Mothman? Whatever it is, it rides on "Demon Wings!"
And check out this week's story, "The History of a Bottomless Pit."