One of the darkest chapters in the history of Nesquehoning occurred in 1939, with the killing of a 14-year-old girl named Joan Stevens. But what made this tragedy so sensational was the fact that Joan Stevens was gunned down not by thugs or bandits, but by a Pennsylvania state trooper in the backseat of a patrol car.

To see over 20 photos from this case, be sure to visit the Pennsylvania Oddities blog!

On August 3, 1927, Bernard Lukehart of Altoona, and his sister Catherine, were picking huckleberries on Brush Mountain when they uncovered a skeleton beneath a pile of rocks and dirt. When the coroner found a bullet hole in the skull, it rekindled memories of a Frankstown man who vanished years earlier-- a man whom some believe had been murdered by his own son.

When the Pennsylvania Railroad decided to expand the Conway Yard in the early 1950s, it brought an influx of new residents to Beaver County, many of whom were temporary workers who rented rooms from boarding houses. This newfound prosperity was a boon for local landlords, but not every landlord made out so well. Such was the case of 53-year-old Olive Mae Headland, whose strange death in the fall of 1956 has never been satisfactorily explained.

On a bitter cold day in January of 1947, a retired carpenter from Schuylkill County went berserk and slaughtered his wife with a hatchet. What makes the tragic tale of Samuel Aulenbach strange is that, according to some, Samuel was a member of a fanatical religious sect. The motive is the greatest mystery-- what drove a quiet, respectable man to a senseless act of slaughter? Only the killer knew for sure, and he didn't live long enough to tell anyone about it.

To say that 1913 was a busy year for law enforcement in Luzerne County is an understatement. Records show that twenty murders occurred in the county that year, with an astounding 47 murders taking place in Luzerne County between January 1, 1903, and December 31, 1913.

To their credit, authorities made arrests in all 47 cases, but not every arrest resulted in a conviction. Among the unsolved crimes of 1913 was the mysterious death of Alice Crispell, whose body was found in Harvey's Lake on the morning of July 7.

On June 17, 1866, a family of three retired to their beds in a little one-story log cabin in a wild and secluded spot in York County. George Squibb and his wife, Mary, each around seventy years of age, and their twelve-year-old granddaughter, Sarah Emma Seifert, never saw the sun rise; they now rest in an old Quaker graveyard, where a weathered tombstone bears the inscription, "The Murdered Family".

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.