Pennsylvania Oddities

100th Episode Special! If you're a regular listener of the Pennsylvania Oddities podcast, you've noticed that Western Pennsylvania has no shortage of mass murderers. There was Martha Grinder, the kind-hearted housewife who was hanged in 1865 for nursing her patients to an early grave. There was Charles Cawley, the teenage genius from Homestead who went berserk in 1902 and slaughtered his family with an axe... a tragedy replicated in 1939 by 17-year-old Beaver Falls High School student Paul Cook. But one of the most deranged killers in the history of Western Pennsylvania was neither a nurse nor an angry teenager, but a foppish 73-year-old policeman with a fondness for wearing wigs and makeup.

The shocking story of Tillie Irelan, who, in February of 1940, became only the third woman from Philadelphia sentenced to death, and the first Philadelphia woman sentenced to death in the electric chair. But, as fate would have it, she didn't live long enough to fulfill her sentence.

If ever there was a Pennsylvania household cruelly cursed by fate, it was the Beilstein family of Pittsburgh-- a once-prosperous family whose strange and legendary downfall was said by some to be the result of incest, mental illness, and dabbling with the supernatural.

Since the earliest days of Pennsylvania history, there have been congregations of fundamentalist Christians which refuse to permit the sick and dying among them to seek the services of a physician. They instead prefer to leave the healing in the hands of Jesus, and, if for some reason, the sick or injured fail to recover, they view it as a consequence of their own lack of faith, or their own shortcomings as believers. Although it's no one's business to say what religious beliefs one should hold, it is understandable how a community can become outraged when the unfortunate victim of a failed faith healing happens to be an innocent child. Such was the case of Mary Elizabeth Sheeler, who died in Lebanon County in 1920.

Immediately after the death of Ralph Josiah White, it became evident that cemetery officials in Sweet Valley did not want to have a convicted murderer buried in their graveyard. And so begins the strange adventures of Ralph's corpse.

Is it possible to have sympathy for a killer? Cursed with the mental development of a child and an IQ of 52, John Hogendobler was an impoverished farmer with a heart of gold. And after he shot his wife in 1941, there were many who believed Hogendobler had gotten a raw deal-- by the Department of Public Assistance, by Northumberland County officials, by his own attorneys, and by life in general.

On July 30, 1920, the steamboat Rival docked at Bird's Run Landing in Pittsburgh after making stops along the Monongahela River. It was the engineer who entered the ballast bunker and discovered a lifeless body of a stowaway partially buried beneath a pile of coal. Neither the engineer, captain, nor any of the crew members had any idea how, when, or why he had gotten aboard the vessel, and no identification was found of the body. But things got even stranger after the body of the unidentified man was taken to the city morgue. (Note: No new episodes in August. Pennsylvania Oddities will return on September 1.)

Emanuel Schaffner was a farmer who owned a small tract of land about ten miles from Harrisburg. Middle aged and short of stature, Schaffner was neither particularly bright in intellect, nor particularly handsome in appearance. In fact, some said he was a downright repulsive and repugnant little man-- and that was before Emanuel Schaffner, who was sent to prison in 1872, earned his reputation as one of the most despicable villains Dauphin County has ever seen.

It's not every day a chiropractor admits to dismembering the body of one of his patients, but, in January of 1926, that's exactly what occurred in Philadelphia.

There are many strange ways to die, but few are as rare as being sacrificed by a group of religious fanatics. Yet, this is exactly the tragic fate which befell one five-year-old girl from Northampton County in April of 1908.