THE CONGELIER MANSION
Location: Constructed in the 1880s, the house was located at 1129 Ridge Avenue in what was the then quiet residential Manchester neighborhood of Pittsburgh. Today, nothing of it remains except the underpass to Interstate 65 with a parking lot on Ridge Avenue and Pittsburgh Mercy Hospital on the other side of the underpass.
Description of Place: Not much is known about the house's structure. According to accounts, it was considered one of the finest brick and mortar houses in the area. From the expansive lawn, Charles Wright Congelier could look out and see where the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers met to form the Ohio, offering a breathtaking view. However, in reality, it was actually a three-story standard Manchester row house, commonly owned by working class people of the day with rooms converted into apartments alongside other row houses lining the block.
Ghostly Manifestations: On the north side of Pittsburgh across the Allegheny River where Interstate 65 turns east to merge with U.S. Highway 279, close to the Carnegie Science Center and Northshore Riverfront Park, cars speed by through the industrial area of Pittsburgh past businesses, manufacturing companies and several restaurants. It's not a safe or hospitable area for children to cross the street or for raising families so it might not be a surprise that the area was once lined with homes similar to the Brownstone apartments on New York City's West Side, and yet, that's what it was. And yet, within these houses was one of the notorious and controversial haunted houses in paranormal history.
For more than two decades after the sinister events there, the house on Ridge Avenue remained empty. Local folks considered the place "tainted" and avoided it at all costs. Few dared to even trespass on the grounds, although sometimes small children threw stones at the windows and sang about the "old battle-ax and her meat-ax."
The Italian workers who took up residence in the house in the Late Twenties to Early Thirties quickly realized that something was not right in the old mansion. Their complaints and reports were met with quick explanations from the supervisors at the gas company. They told the immigrants that the strange occurrences were the work of the American workers who had been replaced. The former employees were playing tricks on the new workers, hoping they would abandon their jobs. The men soon dismissed the strange sounds and ghostly footsteps as practical jokes until an incident occurred a few months after they moved in.
One evening, fourteen men were seated around the table in the common dining room. They had just finished consuming large quantities of pasta and were now laughing and talking over glasses of homemade wine. One of the men got up and carried a stack of dirty dishes into the kitchen. He joked to his brother as he left the room, calling out a humorous insult over his shoulder with a smile. The remark was answered with laughter and his brother tossed a crust of bread at his sibling's retreating back. The conversation continued for several minutes before the remaining man realized that his brother had not returned from the kitchen. He got up and walked into the other room to find the door to the basement standing open.
Suddenly, the festive mood in the dining room was shattered by a chilling scream! Rushing into the kitchen, the men saw the basement door as it yawned open. Taking a lantern from atop the icebox, several of the men descended the steps into the cellar. Before they reached the bottom of the steps, they froze, staring at the macabre scene that was illuminated by the glow of the lantern. In the dim light, they saw the man who had left the dining room just moments earlier, now hanging from a floor beam that crossed the ceiling above.
On the floor, directly beneath his feet, was the man's brother. He was lying face down in a spreading pool of blood. A splintered board had been driven through his chest and now exited out through his back.
The leader of the group on the steps crossed himself religiously, and a gasp escaped from his lips. His friends repeated the gesture before all of them found themselves slammed backward by a force that they could not see! The feeling of a cold wind pushed against them and then rushed past up the stairs. The men later said that they could hear the pounding of footsteps on the wooden treads, but they could see nothing at all. The door at the top of the stairs slammed shut, startling the men in the kitchen, who didn't hear anything rushing through the house. However, they did report other doors mysteriously slamming throughout the house.
When the police arrived, they attributed both deaths to a bizarre accident. The first man, the detectives stated, tripped on a loose step and fell down through the staircase, impaling himself on the propped-up board. The other brother's death was the result of the same loose stair step. When he fell, though, his head was somehow tangled on an electric wire that was hanging down above the staircase. Accident or not, the other men quickly moved out of the house, wanting nothing more to do with the place.
However, through the Thirties, Forties and Fifties, members of the Canciliere (Congelier) family took possession of the residence and lived there and often took in boarders, often travelers, salesmen and other migrants. Many of them stayed in the upstairs attic apartment, but very few of them stayed more than a few days. Robert and Teresa Canciliere were between four and eight years old when they lived in the house in the Forties and were open to sharing their memories of it with William Collins and Lizzie Spellman of the Collinsport Ghost Society. To them, the location wasn't nearly as sinister as its reputation created by the neighborhood.
"Did you ever see anything in there?"
"My sister and I, when we were children and misbehaved," Robert Cancilliere started. "Our mother would punish us by making us sit at the bottom of stairs leading to the attic. Well, almost every time we sat there in that dark hallway, we would see this woman we didn't know come walking down the stairs. She always wore long white dress with lace in a v-shaped neckline. She had brown eyes and long dark hair and sometimes carried something wrapped in a blanket close to her chest."
"Both you and your sister saw the ghost? Did anyone else see her?"
"It was a big house with three floors and quite a few rooms. My grandmother and my two uncles and their families... We all saw the ghost at one time or another. My sister, Teresa, probably saw her more often than anyone else. She called the ghost "Miss Lydia," but that was when she was quite young, about four or five. My mother kept asking her where she learned that name. She didn't know, but she always refer to the lady on the stairway as Miss Lydia. I started calling her that too, and so did my cousin Alphonso. In fact, one day my cousin was making jokes about Miss Lydia - short of making fun of her like that. Late that night, everyone looking heard him scream, and his mother ran to his bed. He was crying and said that Miss Lydia had appeared by his bed and slapped his face. When they turned the lights on, they saw the whole side of his face was red."
"Another time, my father was lying in bed and he saw who he thought was my mother. She also had long brown hair. He was about to say something to her when he felt something moving in bed behind him, and he turned around and saw that was my mother. He looked back at the sofa, but there was no one there."
The next morning, Robert and his sister Teresa drove past the site of their old house on Ridge Avenue. Today, there is nothing recognizable about the street that was once lined with rows of Manchester-style filled with Italian and German families living in close proximity. There are actually very few Manchester structures left in Pittsburgh, and after a few phone calls, William located one that was in a state of restoration. Despite being modernized with an open first floor, brightly painted walls replacing wood-paneling and a modern AC unit, much of the house was almost identical to the layout that Robert and Teresa had grown up in and was familiar.
"See that little room under the stairs there?" Teresa pointed out the similar feature. "An old lady once told us that slaves were kept in there at our house."
"On the second floor landing was an old grandfather clock from which the mechanism had been removed. As I was passing one day, the door and front side popped open striking into my leg." Robert added.
"In your house," Lizzie looked up the staircase. "These would have been the stairs the phantom lady would walk down when you were kids."
"Up there..." Teresa added. "...is a third floor level that no one except the kids would ever use... until my uncle boarded it up to keep us out of it. Afterward, we would heard voices coming from up there and hear the sound of the doorknob rattling. I think my grandmother was the first person to ever see the ghost. She used to sleep in the bedroom on the second balcony landing, and one night, when she was in there reading, my aunt's baby was in a crib crying and crying, and she came to the end of the stairway where she saw a lady with long dark hair bending over the crib. my grandmother thought it was my aunt because we all had long black hair. She shouted at her, "Maria, don't you hear the baby crying? Maria? Maria, can't you hear the baby?" Anyway, the figure next to the crib didn't move, and repeating the question had no response. My grandmother became angry, stomped her foot and shouted "Maria." When she did, my aunt got out of her bed and went to the doorway where my grandmother stood. My grandmother then saw this vision leave the crib side and go through the wall as it was trying to hide in the closet
"My aunt said, "What you want mother?" and my grandmother looked toward the closet and the vision was still there."
"The second sighting of a ghost was made by my mother. There was a phone located on a second stairway in the hall by the attic stairs. She was in the house alone. Everyone had gone outside except made my mother who was pregnant at the time with her second baby, and she went up the stairs to call my father and see how late he be getting home from work that night. Well, she was dialing when she heard what sounded like someone coming down the stairs from the attic. As the woman's form can close to her, it became obvious to her that the form was not human, and she became so frightened that she dropped the phone and ran down stairs clutching the religious necklace around her neck too frightened to look back."
At this moment, it became obvious that Robert and Teresa Canciliere had slipped back into children by habit and were repeatedly glancing up the darkened hallway of the house as they talked as though they were still expecting to see the phantom lady come floating down toward them.
"Were there any other happenings here with sinister connotations?" William asked.
"See up there near the very top of the stairs. Back at my house, I found my brother hanging by one hand on the outside of the railing. He was only a baby and how he got there we couldn't figure out.
"When my brother was only eight months, I screamed to my mother for help as he had slipped through his high chair and was strangling in it by the neck. After my mother freed him, I screamed that Miss Lydia had tried to hurt my brother. She was so frightened that she could only hold him close, but my grandmother was so angry when she entered into the house that she picked the high chair up and broke it into pieces. Later, she had the house blessed and enshrined, but, by then, my mother had moved. She was too frightened to stay."
Leaning against a post of the bottom banister, Theresa went on with the stories from her childhood: "A lot of times after midnight, we would hear the crying sounds of a woman coming from the attic. My Uncle Sal was coming home from work late one night and saw the ghost lady coming down the stairway from the attic at the end of the balcony, but she vanished upon coming close to him.
"Another night, when he was climbing up the stairs, he commented he actually had to move aside and let an icy-cold figure pass him on the stairs. He was so frightened that he ran to the bedroom and locked the door to protect the children and his wife."
"To tell the truth..." Robert picked up a few memories. "There's been a number of unpleasant things associated with the ghost. My Uncle Robert saw her once and died in a car accident sometime after. He was quite young. Our Uncle Michael never had an emotional problems until he saw the lady, and it shook him up badly. He had never tried to commit suicide before, but he tried to take his life by cutting his wrist when my mother walked in to the bedroom at end of the balcony and got there just in time. He didn't seem to remember what he was trying to do. He just said he's been terribly depressed without any reason.
"There was always some unseen force trying to entice the children up the stairs and into the attic. That was when my Uncle Sal boarded up the entrance."
"My brother probably told you my mother used to make me sit in the hall." Teresa continued. "She didn't believe in spanking and that is when I could see the lady. One day my mother heard me talking when I was sitting in the hallway being punished, and she came to where I was and asked me who I was talking to. I told her "Miss Lydia." She asked me, "Who was Miss Lydia, and I said it was a lady on the stairs, but when she asked how I knew her name, I replied, "I didn't know."
"One day I was looking through some comic books belonging to my 16-year-old cousin when suddenly I took one and ran to where my mother was. I said, "Look, Miss Lydia" It was a picture of a skull."
History: Not much is known about the house, and much of it is debatable and contradictory. It is known it was built in the 1880s, and according to one story, it was first occupied by Charles Wright Congelier shortly after construction, remaining empty until the late 1890s when it was renovated to house railroad workers. However, the reliability of this claim is in doubt, as it cannot be confirmed by any indisputable resources.
By 1900, it was rented from the Congeliers as a doctor's office. Dr. Adolph C. Brunrichter was a German doctor from Michigan forced east by clandestine medical experiments in Detroit. He rented the house, and although a medical doctor, he lead a quiet remote life and very rarely socialized with his neighbors except as patients. He was also reported to be doing back alley abortions, recommending unnecessary operations and disposing of bodies for the criminal underground. On August 21, 1901, he was out of the house when a small explosion in the house revealed several young girls near death held captive in the cellar, one of them setting off the explosion trying to escape. The dead body of another was found eviscerated in an upstairs bedroom (some accounts claim she had been beheaded as well) and five more in graves behind the house. Brunrichter apparently was holding hostage some of the young girls coming in to get abortions for his shady experiments. He eluded the police until 1927 when he wandered into a police station as an inebriate claiming he was being haunted by a woman in white he knew as Madame Aenotta and confessing he had been holding experiments in life after death in "an old house in Pittsburgh." Disbelieving his crazy claims, the police believed he was harmless and held him briefly as a vagrant at Blackwell's Prison on Roosevelt Island until they let him go, but he was picked up again less than a year later as a vagrant once more and placed in St. Matthews Hospital.
By the turn of the century, the Congelier heirs had taken possession of the house and were renting the upstairs room to local laborers and railroad lodgers. It is from this period that the bulk of the location's haunting phenomenon comes. The family had a high turnover in lodgers and as word got out of the activity there, Spiritualists, the idle curious and would-be paranormal researchers showed up to experience the activity themselves. Local kids threw rocks at the house trying to see the ghosts. One medium who probed the house named Julia Murray said she felt a horrible spirit there, and the witnesses who accompanied her to the mansion claimed they experienced poltergeist activity. Murray further predicted that the entity would kill and would eventually extend out beyond the confines of the house. However, much of her claims would go on unproven, and her personal diaries disappeared into private collections. Among the lodgers during this period was supposedly Thomas Alva Edison, whose experiences there led him to try building a machine to contact the afterlife.
The Congelier family continued boarding tenants through the Early 1900s and through the Twenties and Thirties. Many of their tenants were Italian laborers, many of them laid-off railroad workers taking small kitchen jobs and gardening jobs to stay in the country. However, on November 14, 1927, the nearby Equitable Gas Company (now the Carnegie Science Center) had an explosion that devastated the majority of the city. Workmen sent to work on one of the huge gas tanks failed to realize one of the supposedly empty tanks still had some gas in it and accidentally set it off... which in succession blew up a second tank... and then a third. At 8:43 that morning, a great sheet of flame erupted from the tank and the huge container shot impossibly upwards into the air. Witnesses said the entire tank blew up in the air, barely hovered then crashed to earth exploding on impact. Steel, stone and human bodies were sent hurling into the sky and across several blocks. Two of the men who had been working on top of the tank were thrown against a brick building more than one hundred feet away, and their silhouettes were outlined there in blood. The third tank, this one only partially full, was wrenched apart and added to the inferno. Smoke and flames were visible for miles. The force was so awesome that it blew out windows and shook buildings for a twenty-mile radius. Locomotives were knocked over ,and homes and structures were damaged as far away as East Liberty.
Across the street, the Union Paint Company was flattened and dozens of workers were buried under the rubble of the building. Bloody men, women and children ran frantically about in the streets.
The Battalion Chief of Engine Company No. 47, Dan Jones, was part of the first fire unit to arrive on the scene. He described the holocaust saying "great waves of black smoke swept through the streets and there was a whining noise in the air." According to a book compiled by the Writer's Project of America, the destruction stunned the city. "As houses collapsed and chimneys toppled," they wrote, "brick, broken glass, twisted pieces of steel and other debris rained on the heads of the dazed and shaken residents who had rushed into the streets from their wrecked homes, believing that an earthquake had visited the city."
Even the rescue workers and fire fighters who arrived on the scene were injured and killed when weakened structures collapsed on top of them. Entire neighborhoods were flooded by broken water mains while huge sections of the city lay in ruins. Sections of the giant gas storage tanks were later found more than a thousand feet away. Rough estimates from the following day listed at least twenty-eight killed and more than six hundred people injured from the explosion. Rescue crews had to dynamite ruins in a search for the bodies of the dozens of others who were still missing. Thousands were left homeless by the destruction.
At 1129 Ridge Avenue, the concussive wave of one of the blasts sent pieces of glass flying like a torpedoes through Marie Congelier and tenant Ethel Marty, killing them both. They were both Equitable Gas Company employees. Marie left five children, and her brother, John Cancilliere (Congelier), a barber, had to move into the house to take care of them. The family lived in the house until they departed in the Fifties, but by this point, they had established Cancilieres, a popular Italian restaurant. The structure, however, with the neighboring houses were demolished in 1961 to make room for the highway, and although several of the historic Manchester row houses from the area were saved, the Congelier House and other houses on Ridge Avenue were not among them.
Identity of Ghosts: According to legend, the spectral woman in white is Lyda Congelier, who was married to businessman and entrepreneur Charles Wright Congelier (Canceltiere) in the 1870s. Born in New York City in 1833, Congelier was the son of Italian immigrants from Tuscany and made a small fortune with a grocery store and apartment house on Manhattan's East Side. At the end of the Civil War, he traveled to Texas and Louisiana investing in cotton, real estate and building a bank in Houston. A widower by 1865, he married Lyda, a dressmaker of Mexican decent, in 1869 and soon started to return to New York City. However, when his steamship ended up in Pittsburgh through the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers, he tried to find his place in the Pennsylvania upper class through the local coal industry.
Unfortunately, Congelier also turned out to be something of a philanderer with several extra marital relationships. Some of his deals might have come through sleeping with the wives of business partners. It is known there was a high turnover of maids in the Congelier Mansion on the North Side of Pittsburgh with only one returning his advances. During a particularly harsh winter in 1881, Lyda came upon Charles and Essie, their Indian maid, in the throes of passion in an upstairs bedroom. In revenge, she took a butcher knife from the kitchen and attacked Charles with it, later turning on Essie with it. A few weeks later, Lyda's society friends came looking for her after not seeing her for so long and found her sitting in the front bay window, rocking with Essie's severed head in a blanket as if it were an infant. She was quietly instititutionalized in March 1882 and died at the age of seventy-one in 1922.
Some of the activity in the house might also be attributed to the occupation of Dr. Adolph C. Brunrichter, who reportedly was responsible for several deaths, but there is no documentation for this or even of his existence. The Pittsburgh police didn't keep a record of him, and the New York City police definitely didn't bother keeping a record on someone they only knew as a drunken homeless person. While languishing at St. Matthews, the addled doctor claimed he was being haunted by the countless ghosts of his victims and by a presence he knew as Madame Aenotta. One wonders, though... Could Madame Aenotta (AKA Miss Lily?) be Brunrichter's name for the ghost of Lyda Congelier?
Source/Comments: 1129 Ridge Avenue (1986) - Activity based on the Congelier House in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the Mineuercanal House in New Orleans, Louisiana, the Borden House in Fall River, Massachusetts, the Bergen House in Bergen, New York and the Old Brent House in Flint Michigan.