Pennsylvania Oddities

This special episode features two new Pennsylvania Oddities stories, plus Episode 1 of my new short-form true crime podcast, 15 Minutes of Infamy.Part I: The Psychiatrist's Fatal FollyDuring the early history of Rockview State Penitentiary in Centre County, the homes of prison officials were tended by the most trusted and deserving inmates, who served as domestic servants. But things changed in 1932, after the daughter of a prison psychiatrist was stabbed by a "mentally deficient" convict named Fred Collins.Part II: The Deathbed Confession of Hetty GoodIn 1895, when a sweet old Mennonite woman found herself on death's doorstep, she made an astonishing claim with her dying breaths-- that she was one of the most ruthless killers Lancaster County had ever seen. Part III: A Black Hearse Comes at MidnightThe Archer Home for Elderly People was a highly-specialized business. That is, it specialized in the quick and speedy extermination of its residents.This is the shocking true story of Amy Archer Gilligan, the Connecticut nursing home owner who earned her fifteen minutes of infamy after a suspicious newspaper reporter noticed that a mysterious black hearse visited the home every midnight to spirit away the bodies of her victims.

During the early 20th century the portion of Avoca to the east of Interstate 81, near the Wilkes-Barre Scranton International Airport, was a mining community known as Brown's Patch. Like most mining patches among the anthracite fields of Pennsylvania, Brown's Patch was home to many struggling, impoverished families. In the 1920s, one such family who called Brown's Patch home was the Castners, who occupied a small, one-story house on Dawson Street. It was inside this house where one of the most gruesome murders in the history of Luzerne County occurred.

In April of 1936, authorities initially believed that three-year-old Sonny Karmendi's death had been caused by a hit-and-run driver. But the truth soon brought to light one of the most shocking murders in the history of Blair County.

In Manheim Township, just north of the city of Lancaster, there flows a tiny stream which has its source near Roseville. This little brook, an unnamed tributary of Landis Run, is little more than a trickle, and although it flows for a distance of less than two miles from Roseville to Eden, there is a long and astonishing list of curious deaths associated with it-- a list that, to my knowledge, has no parallel in the Keystone State.

On June 15, 1934, the body of a missing four-year-old girl, Leah Minerva Dilley, was found after nearly two weeks of searching, in a spot more than three miles from her home-- under extremely bizarre circumstances. Leah had died from cyanide poisoning resulting from a careless fumigator, before her body was transported to a field and burned in a bonfire, over which three unsuspecting children toasted marshmallows.