Troy Hill Firehouse

Firefighters at Pittsburgh's oldest station thought the ghost was a retired crewman. Footsteps on the empty bunk floor, bay doors swinging alone.

The firefighters at Engine 39 thought the ghost was on their side. Almost every fire-station ghost story in Pennsylvania comes with a warning about crossing it, but this one starts in the opposite place. The men on duty at the Troy Hill Firehouse in its last working years described footsteps on the second floor when no one was upstairs, creaks on the staircase, bay doors opening into empty stalls. They didn't feel threatened. They thought former firefighters were still clocking in, and that some of them rode along on calls.

Engine 39 was the last fire station in Pittsburgh to run horse-drawn carriages, which means the men who worked the early shifts here slid down a brass pole to reach animals, not engines. Architect Joseph Stillburg designed the building in 1901 in a Colonial Revival style with Beaux Arts accents, set on the North Side plateau that gives Troy Hill its name. The bell in the tower had a German nickname, Die Glocke Sarah, given to it by the predominantly German-immigrant firefighters who worked alongside it. By the time Engine 39 took its last call in 2005, it was the oldest working firehouse in the city.

The reports all point one direction. Nobody at the station ever described a hostile presence. Nobody reported cold spots or shadows or any of the standard vocabulary. What they reported was company. Footsteps pacing the upstairs bunk floor while the crew was eating downstairs. Doors swinging in a way the men recognized from working with partners who'd been gone for a decade. One firefighter told a local paper he'd started saying good morning to the upstairs when he came on shift.

The Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation designated the firehouse historic in 2001, four years before the doors closed for good. Preservation Pittsburgh is still pursuing a city-level landmark designation. Troy Hill is a neighborhood that holds onto things. Six buildings on the hill have landmark status, including Saint Anthony's Chapel, which houses around 5,000 religious relics and the largest collection of its kind outside the Vatican. Against that level of preservation, losing the firehouse would be out of character for the hill.

Most haunted firehouses come with a disaster story attached. A crew killed in a collapse, a rookie who missed the pole, an alarm that woke the wrong bunk. Engine 39 has none of that. No catastrophe explains the footsteps.

The simplest reading is the one the men on duty gave. A century of firefighters loved working in that building, and some of them haven't quite retired yet.