Pennsylvania Oddities

On the afternoon of April 1, 1965, state troopers visited the Duncannon home of 47-year-old Byron Halter and his family, consisting of his wife, Betty, their 17-year-daughter, Holly, and Betty's mother, Mrs. Elizabeth Swank, who lived in the adjoining side of the duplex. The reason for their visit was because someone had sent anonymous letters to local papers warning that four people were about to die. But this was not a cruel April Fool's prank-- it was a senseless slaughter carried out by a disturbed Sunday School teacher.

When Morris Foster died in 1889 at the Blockley Hospital in West Philadelphia, his friends suspected that he had been poisoned. Foster's corpse was exhumed and a graveside post-mortem examination was performed. But as the two physicians prepared to remove portions of Foster's internal organs and bone for a chemical analysis, they made a shocking discovery-- a line of deftly-placed stitches over the abdomen of the deceased. Evidently, someone had already performed an autopsy. But who? And, more importantly, why?

One of the more peculiar crimes in the history of Pennsylvania occurred in 1931 with the slaying of an elderly spinster from Forty Fort named Minnie Dilley. While most murders in our state's history have been carried out by heartless outlaws and seasoned criminals, Miss Dilley's slayer was a young female college graduate and the daughter of a minister. Stranger still, the unfortunate elderly victim was said to have belonged to a bizarre sex cult.

Sixty-year-old Elirio "Eli" Mantoni adored his family-- especially his grandchildren, who lived in Northampton County city of Easton with their mother, Lillian Mantoni Gabert. But when the county threatened to remove four-year-old Elaine, three-year-old Raymond, and 21-month-old Paul from their home and place them in foster care, Grandpa Eli took matters into his own hands.

Those of us with our sanity intact simply don't know what it's like to have that last frayed thread holding our lives in the balance cut, sending us plummeting into an inescapable abyss. Few of us really know the depths of such despair; we can only imagine. But Elirio Mantoni lived that nightmare, though no one can really say if he knew, when he stumbled out of bed that morning, that it would be his last day on earth. In fact, no one can say for certain just what happened on the morning of November 23, 1959, since no one involved lived to tell about it.

In the mid-19th century, an old farmhouse stood along a quaint country road in North Coventry Township. This was the home of an eccentric spinster named Hannah Shingle, whose brutal murder in 1855 remains one of Chester County's most perplexing unsolved mysteries.

Though no one was ever convicted of the crime, the evidence points to a killer who was closely known to the victim. And perhaps that is why Hannah's restless ghost was encountered by numerous witnesses in the years following her death, haunting the countryside near her former home.

This is the improbable, but true, tale of how Glinda the Good Witch helped save the life of a washed-up actor sentenced to death for murdering his estranged wife inside the Wilkes-Barre City Hall. This is the bizarre story of George L. Marion, a once-famous minstrel show performer with an addiction to pork and beans, and his wife, Frances Lee Brooks, who was raised in commune founded by a wacky faith-healing cult leader.

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.