Green Man's Tunnel

The real Green Man was Raymond Robinson, a boy disfigured by 22,000 volts in 1919. South Park's tunnel just borrowed his story.

The real Green Man was a boy named Raymond Robinson, and he was not a ghost. In 1919, at age eight, he climbed a pole outside Beaver Falls to reach a bird's nest and grabbed a trolley line carrying 22,000 volts. He lost his eyes, his nose, and his right arm. He lived another sixty-six years.

Robinson spent his adult life in Koppel, Pennsylvania, about forty miles north of South Park. Neighbors knew him as Charlie No-Face. He walked State Route 351 after sunset, carrying a stick, because daytime attention was unbearable. Teenagers drove out to find him. Some brought beer and cigarettes in exchange for a photograph or a few minutes of conversation. He died in 1985 and is buried at Grandview Cemetery in Beaver Falls.

South Park's Green Man's Tunnel is the version of that story told by people who never met him. The actual tunnel, on South Park Road near the Piney Fork section of the park, is an old railroad underpass. Ask around in Pittsburgh and you'll get a dozen versions of what happened there. A utility worker electrocuted on the job. A boy struck by lightning. A man locked inside when the trains stopped running. In every version, he comes back glowing green, and he doesn't want you there.

The folklore borrowed Robinson's injury and stripped away his name. Urban legends do this routinely. A real person with a disfiguring accident becomes, a generation later, a monster in a tunnel outside the city where he never actually lived.

What visitors to the South Park tunnel report is the usual inventory of suggestion. Footsteps behind them. A faint green glow at the far end. Car engines stalling halfway through. Cellphones losing signal, which happens in most tunnels regardless of ghost activity. The more specific accounts tend to come from teenagers on dares, and the tunnel itself is short enough that you can see through to the other side on any clear afternoon.

The better story is the one that got erased in translation. Robinson was not malevolent. By the accounts of people who actually interacted with him, he was patient, polite, and had a decent sense of humor about the circus that the local kids made of his life. A 1985 obituary in the Beaver County Times described him as a man who spent his days making leather belts and doormats at the Beaver County Geriatric Center, where he lived his final years.

If you want the ghost story, park along South Park Road and walk in. It's mostly graffiti and damp concrete. If you want the real story, drive to Grandview Cemetery and find the grave of Raymond Robinson, born 1911, died June 11, 1985.