Allegheny County Jail

The warden's wife broke two killers out in 1902. A 1907 suicide re-enacted his murder for death row every midnight.

In 1902, Kate Soffel helped the Biddle brothers break out of the Old Allegheny County Jail. She was the warden's wife. Ed and Jack Biddle were celebrity convicts, in for robbery and murder, and Kate had spent long afternoons reading scripture to them through the bars. She smuggled in saws. When the brothers made it over the wall, she climbed out with them. Two days later, after a running gun battle through Butler County snow, both Biddles were shot dead and Kate was in custody. A jury sent her to prison. A 1984 Diane Keaton film, partly filmed at the jail with real inmates as extras, turned the story into a tragedy. Her ghost, staff said for decades afterward, shuffled papers on desks and brushed against guards in the hallway.

She is not the only one.

H.H. Richardson, the Boston architect considered the most important American designer of the nineteenth century, finished the jail in 1886. He thought the jail and its attached courthouse were his best work. The building is enormous, granite and Richardsonian Romanesque, with the Bridge of Sighs arcing over Ross Street to carry prisoners across from the courthouse. It held people continuously from 1886 until July 27, 1995, for 109 uninterrupted years.

In 1907, an inmate named William Culp killed himself inside. The men on death row then reported that he returned, every night between midnight and 1 a.m., to re-enact the murder he had committed before his capture. Every condemned prisoner on the row described the same scene at the same hour. The warden, reading the reports and presumably watching his men fall apart from lack of sleep, eventually moved death row to another part of the jail. Whether that fixed the problem is not recorded.

Today a single preserved cellblock operates as the Old Allegheny County Jail Museum at 440 Ross Street. Since 2005, Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation docents have led tours across the Bridge of Sighs. The Silence of the Lambs used the building as a location. So did Mrs. Soffel. The granite holds up. The stories about Kate and about William Culp have outlasted the institution they happened inside of.

Walking in expecting a horror attraction is the wrong frame. This is a museum in a single restored wing of a retired prison, and the docents want to talk about Richardson and about reform-era incarceration, not orbs. The haunting is old news in Pittsburgh, reported so often for so long that it reads less like folklore than like staff complaint. Something walked the halls. Someone re-enacted a murder. A woman let two killers out the window and ran with them. That is the building.