Dead Man's Hollow

In 1874 boys found an unidentified body hanging in the woods south of McKeesport. The hollow has kept killing people, and the ghosts stayed on.

In 1874, a group of boys cutting through the woods south of McKeesport found a decomposed body hanging by a rope from a tree. Nobody identified the man. Nobody was ever charged. The local paper reported it, the name of the hollow followed, and Dead Man's Hollow has been called that ever since.

The place earned the nickname by continuing to kill people. In 1880, a shop owner named George McClure was shot to death during a robbery in the hollow by a man named Ward McConkey. McConkey was caught, convicted, and hanged for the murder. Both men have been blamed, depending on who's telling it, for the shadow figure that people hiking the Dead Man's Hollow trails say follows them through the pine stands north of the old Bowman Brickyard ruins.

In 1883, four quarry workers built a warming fire too close to a cache of blasting powder. The explosion killed all four of them instantly. In 1905, a man named Mike Sacco died at the Union Sewer Pipe Company works that operated in the hollow, crushed when an elevator rose while he was climbing out of the shaft and wedged him between the ceiling of the second floor and the rising platform. A 74-year-old named Edward Woods drowned in the Youghiogheny River and his body washed ashore at the hollow; the drowning was ruled an accident, but foul play was suspected at the time and never cleared. In 1934, a man rowing on the Youghiogheny reported seeing what he described as a Native American figure rise out of the water, visible from the waist up, watching him.

That rowboat story is the one that changed the tone of the local folklore. Until 1934 the ghosts of Dead Man's Hollow were identifiable dead people: the quarry workers, the hanged John Doe, the murdered shop owner, the drowned Edward Woods. After 1934, the hollow picked up a second layer. Monongahela villages are documented in the Youghiogheny valley, and the modern telling of the legend is that the land was disturbed ground long before the industrial ruins started piling up on it.

The hollow today is 450 protected acres, the largest privately protected natural area in Allegheny County, owned since 1996 by the Allegheny Land Trust. Seven miles of hiking trails loop through the ruins of the Bowman Brickyard and the Union Sewer Pipe Company, both of which shut down after a catastrophic fire in 1920. Hikers still turn up brick kilns half-swallowed by brush, a brick chimney in a clearing, foundation stones covered in moss.

What hikers report is a fairly narrow menu. Shadows in the trees at dusk, walking alongside them at the edge of peripheral vision, vanishing when anyone turns. Odors without sources, usually described as something burning, which tracks with the 1883 explosion and the 1920 fire. Voices from the direction of the old works, low and male, not intelligible. And, occasionally, the tall snake. Local lore has included a large unusual snake, described as much too big to be any native species, since at least the 1970s; sightings are rare enough that cryptozoologists treat it as a minor legend, but hikers keep reporting it anyway.

Go during daylight. Park at the Greenock trailhead off Coursin Street. The hollow's not dangerous in the hiking sense, but it is long and it gets dark under the trees faster than most Allegheny County parks.