In Brief
At the Old Allegheny County Jail in Pittsburgh, staff long said the warden's own wife still lingered in the halls. In 1902 she smuggled saws to two condemned brothers, cut them loose, and ran with them into a snowstorm.
The Full Story
At the Old Allegheny County Jail in Pittsburgh, the ghost that staff talked about for decades was the warden's own wife. They said Kate Soffel never quite left. A deputy warden told of a cold hand on his arm and the sound of sand falling through the wall, near the rooms that had once been hers. Others described her shuffling papers, brushing past guards in the hallway.
She earned the haunting the hard way. In 1901, brothers Ed and Jack Biddle were convicted of murder and sentenced to hang. Kate, the warden's wife, took to visiting them, ostensibly to read them scripture, and grew infatuated with Ed — though whether that was love or something the brothers worked on her is debated to this day. On the night of January 29, 1902, she smuggled them saws and a pistol. The Biddles cut out of their cells, and Kate climbed the wall and fled with them into a Butler County snowstorm. Two days later, police ambushed the trio north of Pittsburgh. Both brothers were shot dead. Kate, wounded, was taken back into custody. She served roughly two years, was released in 1903, and died in 1909.
The jail itself was built to last. H.H. Richardson, the leading American architect of his century, designed it in heavy Romanesque granite, with an enclosed stone arch called the Bridge of Sighs that carried prisoners across Ross Street to their cells. It opened in 1886, was named a National Historic Landmark in 1976, and ran without a single break until July 27, 1995 — 109 years of continuous operation.
Kate is not the only one the staff named. The story goes that in 1907 an inmate named William Culp re-enacted a horrific murder every night, his own crime by some accounts, between midnight and 1 a.m. on death row. As one tour guide tells it, "all the prisoners on death row were saying that they were seeing the same thing happen every night." The warden moved the whole row to another part of the jail to get away from it. Whether that fixed anything was never recorded, and what became of Culp is not pinned down in any record at all.
A single cell block survives as a small museum now, the original brick carried over and rebuilt behind the family court that took the building's place. In 1984 the jail played itself in a film about the Soffel escape — Diane Keaton in the lead, shot inside the real walls, with actual inmates used as extras.
