Haunted Pittsburgh

The late Pittsburgh Pirates’ rifle-armed right fielder Roberto Clemente repeatedly told his wife, Vera, that he was going to die young. He once told teammate Juan Pizzaro that he would meet his end in a plane crash. Another time, on a team flight, he awoke with a start because he was dreaming the plane crashed and that he was the only fatality.

Clemente’s premonitions turned out to be correct. On December 31, 1972, most people were getting ready to celebrate the new year, but a little boy in Puerto Rico was being put to bed by his grandmother, and he was very troubled. His father was at the airport preparing to go away on important business, and before he left, the little boy had pleaded with him not to go. As the little boy was being tucked in, he told his grandmother his father’s plane would crash. The grandmother assured him that everything would be fine, but then her heart inexplicably was filled with sadness. After she put the boy to bed, she walked into the kitchen and broke down into tears. That little boy was Roberto Clemente Jr.

That same night, on another part of the island, an old man was having a terrible dream that his son’s plane was crashing. That old man was Roberto Clemente’s father.

Vera Clemente recalls that just hours before Roberto’s plane took off on that ill-fated flight, she was making lunch in the kitchen when she heard a song playing on the radio over and over. It was called “Tragedia de Viernes Santo,” and it was about a famous plane crash, the crash of a DC-4 after departing from San Juan in 1952.

And, of course, that very night, Roberto Clemente was killed in a plane crash as he was taking much-needed supplies to earthquake victims in Nicaragua. The government in Nicaragua was stealing relief provisions, so Clemente decided to forego his New Year’s Eve plans to personally make sure food and other necessities got to the people who needed them.

Pittsburghers of a certain age remember exactly where they were when they heard the news. It was like a death in the family. Clemente was a humanitarian and one of the greatest players in the long history of baseball. In his last at-bat in a regular season game in 1972, Roberto got his 3,000^th hit, becoming just the eleventh player in major-league history to reach that milestone. His powerful throwing arm was legendary. For just the second time in history, the National Baseball Hall of Fame waived the five-year waiting period, and a few months after his death, Roberto Clemente became the first Latin American to be admitted to the Baseball Hall of Fame.

The premonitions were not the only strange thing about Roberto’s death. Just before Roberto joined the Pirates, his older brother Luis succumbed to an inoperable brain tumor in 1954. Luis died on New Year’s Eve, exactly eighteen years to the day Roberto would later die.

Clemente almost met his end a few years earlier than he did. One night in the summer of 1969, the Pirates were playing in San Diego when Clemente bumped into teammate Willie Stargell in the hotel lobby. Stargell was carrying a box of fried chicken, and Clemente asked where he got it. Stargell showed him the way. Clemente was walking back to the hotel from the restaurant, box of chicken in hand, when a car pulled up beside him. There were four men inside, and one of them pointed a gun at Clemente and told him to get in.

The men took Clemente to a deserted mountainous area and told him to undress. They took his shirt and tie, his wallet and his All-Star ring. They divvied up his money four ways while one of them held a gun inside his mouth. Roberto figured he was about to die, but somehow, he managed to blurt out that he was, in fact, Roberto Clemente, the ballplayer. The men did not believe him. Roberto told them to look at the cards in his wallet and his All-Star Game ring, which had his name on it.

When the bandits realized he was, in fact, the great Clemente, he went from being a hostage with moments to live to an honored guest. The bandits collected all the money they had divided up and put it back in his wallet, which they handed to him. They gave him back his clothes, and even made sure he put on his tie. Then they drove him back to the spot where they had taken him, not far from his hotel.

Clemente got out, and the car pulled away. He let loose the kind of sigh of relief only a man who had cheated death can muster. But his relief was short-lived. The car stopped, then it turned around and headed back toward him. Clemente figured they had changed their minds and decided to kill him, so he looked around for a rock. (Good luck to the desperadoes if the greatest arm in baseball history could find a rock!) Alas, there was no rock available.

Eben Byers was the son of iron piping magnate Alexander Byers and brother to Maude, who figures in the ghost story related elsewhere in this book about Byers Hall. Eben’s story, however, is proof that often the living are scarier than the dead. Eben became nationally famous in the early 1930s for a terrible reason. Time magazine and many others wrote all about it.

Eben was a ladies’ man at Yale, and he became the U.S. amateur golf champion in 1906. Eventually, he took over the family business as head of the A.M. Byers Pipe Company. In 1927, Eben fell from his berth on a train and hurt his arm. He was in persistent pain, so his doctor prescribed a medicine called “Radithor…CERTIFIED Radioactive Water.” In fact, Radithor was not a medicine at all—it was quackery. It was manufactured by a fraud named William Bailey, a college dropout who falsely claimed to be a doctor. Radithor was created by dissolving radium in water in high concentrations. Back then, radioactivity was all the rage, and it was thought to stimulate the endocrine system.

In fact, Radithor was terribly dangerous. Why would any physician prescribe this junk? Well, William Bailey gave physicians a 17 percent rebate on each dosage. But Eben convinced himself it was helping the pain in his arm, so he took more and more and more of it—in massive doses. He consumed nearly fourteen hundred bottles of it, two or three every day, for a long time. He sent cases to his friends and even gave some to his horse. It turned out Byers consumed more than three and a half times the lethal radiation dosage. Finally, in 1930, he stopped taking it, but it was too late. The damage to his body is almost indescribable.

In 1931, a Federal Trade Commission lawyer investigating Radithor visited Eben at his Southampton summer home. Here is what he wrote:

A more gruesome experience in a more gorgeous setting would be hard to imagine. We went up to Southampton where Byers had a magnificent home. There we discovered him in a condition which beggars description.

Young in years and mentally alert, he could hardly speak. His head was swathed in bandages. He had undergone two successive operations in which his whole upper jaw, excepting two front teeth, and most of his lower jaw had been removed. All the remaining bone tissue of his body was slowly disintegrating, and holes were actually forming in his skull.

Eben died in 1932 from radium poisoning. What was left of him was buried at Allegheny Cemetery in a lead-lined coffin. At least one of Eben’s close friends also died of radium poisoning; his other friends were gravely worried about their own health. As for William Bailey? He denied any responsibility and declared that Eben died of gout. Eben’s death did not deter Bailey in the least. He went right on to a new racket: selling radioactive paperweights. Yes, the living can be scarier than the dead.

A well-known entertainer—a flamboyant pianist who became a star in early television and a Las Vegas headliner—had a well-known brush with the supernatural in Pittsburgh. The day after President Kennedy was assassinated, Liberace collapsed on stage at the Holiday House from kidney failure after accidentally inhaling cleaning fluid. He was rushed to St. Francis Hospital and was given a one-in-five chance of survival.

Late one night, near death, a beautiful young nun in a white habit came to his room and told him she was going to pray to St. Anthony who would make him better. The next day, Liberace miraculously turned the corner and started to recover. Before he left the hospital, Liberace wanted to personally thank the angelic nun who prayed for him, so he described her to the mother superior. The mother superior looked at him strangely and said, “My son, the Sisters of St. Francis only wear dark habits—the hospital has no nuns who wear white.”

The Thaws of Squirrel Hill were among Pittsburgh’s fabled Gilded Age families. Their patriarch, William Thaw, made his fortune in steamships and railroads, and their house, Lyndhurst, called “Pittsburgh’s last castle,” was a place of almost unimaginable opulence. From this cauldron of privilege came an unstable scion who would heap notoriety on the family. Harry K. Thaw, one of William Thaw’s ten children, would become internationally famous for murdering Stanford White, the most celebrated architect of his time, on June 25, 1906. The resulting trial was widely regarded as the “trial of the century” long before it was immortalized in the novel Ragtime and in the film and musical based on it.

Despite the fact that there were hundreds of witnesses who saw Harry K. Thaw pull the trigger and shoot White during a show on the roof of Madison Square Garden, to this day, the murder remains a mystery: did Harry murder Stanford White, or was White murdered by an evil spirit that took control of Harry’s body?

Harry K. Thaw was mentally unstable from an early age. He was expelled from Harvard after chasing a cabdriver with a shotgun, and that was the least of his transgressions. Harry did not find Pittsburgh sufficiently stimulating, so he took up partying in New York City, where his doting mother kept him on a strict allowance, $80,000 a year, which he quickly blew through. He developed a fondness for women, Broadway shows, cocaine and morphine, and not necessarily in that order.

Eventually, Harry set his sights on a nineteen-year-old showgirl named Evelyn Nesbit, who had been one of various women involved with Stanford White. Harry and Evelyn became an unlikely couple. She was talented, young and beautiful. He was paranoid, delusional and violent. On top of that, he was insanely jealous of Evelyn’s past with White, to the point that he would not allow her to refer to White by name. He forced her to call him “the beast” or “the bastard.” Nevertheless, they married, and to satisfy Harry’s voracious need for sensational details about White, she described the atrocities White did to her, which only heightened Harry’s unbalanced mental state. Harry was often heard talking to himself about White, and he soon came to believe that he had been chosen by Divine Providence to stop him.

On June 25, 1906, Harry and Evelyn attended the opening of a musical revue at Madison Square Garden, which White had designed. Everything was fine until the show’s big finale. Suddenly, Harry’s eyes bulged because he caught a glimpse of what he thought was a demon glowering at him. It was Stanford White. Harry got up, casually walked toward White, pulled out a pistol, aimed and fired three shots at White’s face, killing him instantly. Then he walked back to Evelyn and proudly told her that he had just saved her life. It was among the most shocking crimes in American history. Harry was taken to jail, where, because he was Harry K. Thaw, he was served alcohol, and his meals were catered by Delmonico’s. His broker was permitted to hang out with him all hours of the day and night.

Images

Evelyn Nesbit. New York Public Library Digital Collection.

But a prominent psychic medium of the day, Anna Wickland, revealed that it was not Harry who killed Stanford White. A spirit had used Harry as his deadly instrument. Ms. Wickland explained that she conducted a séance shortly after Thaw’s arrest, during which an excited, angry spirit came through that identified himself simply as “Johnson.” Johnson did not realize he was dead, but he triumphantly confessed to the murder: “I killed Stanford White. He deserved death. He had trifled too long with our daughters.” Johnson became embarrassed when he suddenly realized that he had inhabited the body of a woman and quickly departed.

Then another entity came through who identified himself as Harry Thaw’s deceased father, William Thaw. Mr. Thaw confirmed that Harry had been just a tool in the hands of vengeful spirits. And then he revealed that Harry would not go to the electric chair, but that the medium needed to contact Mr. Thaw’s widow and Mr. Thaw’s attorney, whom he identified as Mr. Olcott, to tell them what he had said. Ms. Wickland had no way of knowing who Mr. Thaw’s attorney was, but she followed his directions and soon learned that, indeed, one of Mr. Thaw’s attorneys was named Olcott.

Thaw’s first trial ended in a mistrial. After a second trial, Harry’s father was right—Harry not only was spared the death penalty, but the jury also came back with a verdict of “not guilty.” They said Harry was insane and sent him to an asylum.

In 1915, Harry was released, and he returned to Pittsburgh to a hero’s welcome, as thousands of well-wishers formed an impromptu parade and escorted him to Lyndhurst. Now, more than a hundred years later, despite all the eyewitnesses in Madison Square Garden who swear they saw Harry K. Thaw shoot Stanford White, the mystery of who really killed White remains unsolved.

For many years, WQED was home to the late Fred Rogers, the beloved namesake of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. Rogers died in 2003 and is buried in Latrobe, Pennsylvania. But there is a great story about Mr. Rogers that is almost otherworldly—the details vary depending on who tells it.

In 1990, Mr. Rogers’s Oldsmobile was stolen while he was babysitting his grandson. When the thieves rummaged through papers and props inside the car, they figured out that the owner was none other than the much-loved children’s show host, the personification of kindness.

The next day, Mr. Rogers stepped outside his house—and there was his car, as if nothing had happened. The thieves had returned it good as new, and they left a note on the windshield: “Sorry, we didn’t know it was yours.”

In South Oakland, internationally famous artist Andy Warhol grew up at 3252 Dawson Street. Among Warhol’s works was a series of disturbing paintings called Death and Disaster, depicting grisly scenes of carnage in the news—a harsh commentary on how the daily repetition in the news of scenes of death and destruction had numbed the public to the true horror of scenes of carnage.

Warhol might have been working out his own demons through his art. Warhol had an overwhelming fear of doctors and hospitals. Shortly before his untimely death in 1987 at the age of fifty-eight, he had a premonition that he would die in a hospital. Two days later, he was hospitalized for a routine gallbladder operation. He came through surgery, and there seemed to be no problem for his recovery. But then, a malfunctioning IV overhydrated him, and Andy Warhol’s fears, and his premonition, proved true: he died in the hospital of cardiac arrhythmia on February 22, 1987. He is buried in Castle Shannon, about six miles south of Pittsburgh, where his fans leave all kinds of mementos—from flowers to Campbell’s soup cans.

A few years ago, a British paranormal television series called Dead Famous sent ghost investigators to Pittsburgh in the hopes of finding Andy Warhol’s spirit. They retraced the hotspots of Andy’s life before he left Pittsburgh for New York, including the Carnegie Library and Museum. At the end of the show, a medium admitted that at first he was skeptical about coming to Pittsburgh to find Warhol’s spirit—but then, he channeled Andy, and he learned that even after Andy left for the bright lights of Manhattan, Pittsburgh was where Andy’s heart was and where his spirit dwells. The medium learned that Andy no longer cares about the artwork he created while he was here. He is in a spectacular place—an indescribable place—and Andy’s soup cans and all the rest do not really compare.