The House That the Devil Built
A story with more twists, turns and pure demonic depth than the
Amityville Horror has hidden for decades, lying away in what was the
peaceful Manchester neighborhood on Pittsburgh’s North Side. Even
from its earliest beginnings there was something “not right” about
the Congolier Mansion that would soon manifest itself – in blood.
During the late 1860’s Charles Wright Congelier made a fortune for
himself in Texas during the reconstruction period following the
American Civil War. In the Old South men such as Congolier were
referred to as “carpetbaggers” – someone who made a small fortune by
preying on the broken economy in the former Confederacy. Congolier,
a man turned profiteer by greed, amassed a considerable amount of
wealth and left Texas by way of a river steam boat, taking with him
his Mexican wife, Lyda, and Mexican servant girl, Essie. Their
riverboat docked in Pittsburgh to take on coal for the next leg of
the trip, but Congolier found that he liked the area and decided to
stay.
Soon, Congolier found a lot for the construction of his home and,
before long, building commenced on his brick and mortar mansion
which was considered to be one of the finest houses in the area. He
chose one of the most beautiful areas in the city – a place that
offered a breathtaking overlook of where the Allegheny and
Monongahela Rivers meet to form the Ohio. It didn’t take for
Congolier to become a respected member of the local business
community and his new home was the showcase for many social
gatherings. However, slightly more than two years after the
magnificent home was completed – in 1871 – the parties would come to
an end as shroud of darkness was beginning to take the mansion into
its dark caress.
During mid-winter of 1871, after the cold and snow had comfortably
settled upon the region, Charles found that living in a spacious
mansion could afford him some time here and there to engage in some
“extracurricular activity” outside of his marriage arrangement. It
took several months for Lyda to figure things out, but, when three
people reside in the same house for a lengthy period it would only
have been a matter of time anyway – sooner or later – the affair
would have been discovered, and besides, secrets do not like to be
kept.
One afternoon, sometime before the New Year Lyda rang the servant’s
bell, but Essie did not respond. After a second and, eventually, a
third ring Lyda went to find Essie. After looking in most of the
areas in the house where she may have been cleaning Lyda finally
decided to check Essie’s quarters. As Lyda made her way down the
hallway she heard lustful sounds emanating from behind the maid’s
door. She was painfully aware of what was happening – in that moment
she knew what she had to do. She went downstairs and calmly took the
first two convenient weapons she could find in the kitchen – a
butcher knife and a meat cleaver.
Lyda’s calm demeanor soon gave way to anger, then, as she was
ascending the steps to the upstairs, anger turned to a screaming,
uncontrolled rage. Charles and Essie knew that their affair had been
discovered in the midst of the act. Both scrambled to put on what
ever disheveled clothing they could manage to quickly scoop up off
of the floor. Charles, still half disrobed, continued to dress as he
hurriedly tried to exit Essie’s room and think of an excuse, but, as
he crossed the threshold he was met soundly with a cleaver to the
forehead. As he crumpled to the floor Lyda began stabbing him with
the butcher knife – 30 times in all – before she went to work on the
screaming Essie.
Several days after “the incident” took place a family friend stopped
by the house. He knocked on the door several times before trying the
latch. To his surprise it was unlocked, so, in the interest of the
well being of the family he peered inside. As he leaned into the
foyer he heard a creaking sound in the parlor. As he went further
into the darkened house to investigate he was relieved to find the
sound he heard was only Lyda sitting in her favorite rocking chair
in front of one of the large bay windows in the parlor. As he
approached he explained that he knocked and that when no one
responded he merely wanted to make sure everything was alright. If
it had not been for the creaking of the rocking chair the silence
would have been deafening. He approached, only slightly closer, and
again asked Lyda if she was ok, if he could do anything for her. He
was close enough to hear that Lyda was singing under her breath –
singing a lullaby – and holding a blanket swathed bundle, but, the
Congolier’s had no children.
Lyda held the bundle close, rocking it gently as she sang. It seemed
as if the family friend was not even in the room, no one else was in
the house and nothing else was going on in the world. He moved a bit
closer and again asked if everything was alright, but obviously
enough, by the glassy look in her eyes there was something that was
very, very wrong. He asked if he could see the child, and, as he
slowly unwrapped the pink blanket a chill of morbid horror rushed
through his body as Essie’s head tumbled to the floor. The man fled
from the house and alerted authorities who promptly went to the
Congolier residence and arrested Lyda upon finding that she and had
murdered both her husband and their maid in a most brutal manner.
Eventually Lyda was found to be “deranged” and was placed in the
care of Dixmont State Hospital, a mental health care facility that
was located in present day Kilbuck Township just outside of
Pittsburgh, for the rest of her life.
For more than two decades after the gruesome double murder the house
at 1129 Ridge Avenue remained vacant. In 1892 its rotting opulence
was remodeled to accommodate railway workers who labored in the
nearby train yards. It seemed that the men who lived in the house
were very transient, moving in and then moving right back out in a
very short period of time. After a while the housing supervisor
became curious and began to ask questions. Most of the men, not
wanting to be thought of as superstitious or cowards, didn’t say
much as to why their stay at the house was so short, but, a few did
talk. The tales that they recounted were filled with incidents of a
spectral woman sobbing or screaming on the stairway, cold drafts
moving about, sounds of a rocking chair creaking in the parlor,
shadowy figures moving about the rooms and hallways, voices mumbling
incoherently and loud “thuds” as if someone had fallen down
upstairs. By 1895 the house was abandon once again.
Five years later, around 1900, the property was purchased by Dr.
Adolph C. Brunrichter to be used as his private residence. Outside
of his practice the doctor kept to himself and was rarely seen by
his neighbors. Things were not to remain quiet for long. On August
12, 1901 the family who lived in the house beside the mansion heard
– and felt – an explosion that rocked the neighborhood. All of the
windows were blown out of the mansion, the sidewalks were cracked
and thick smoke was pouring out of several of the windows. Something
in the old Congolier mansion had exploded – perhaps a gas line.
Out of curiosity neighbors wanted to investigate but erring on the
side of caution they kept their distance out of fear of another
explosion.
By the time the police and fire department had arrived a small crowd
had gathered outside of the home. Many assumed that Dr. Brunrichter
was still inside and a contingent of fire fighters braved their way
in to find him. Brunrichter was nowhere to be found, but what the
fire fighters did find sent them scattering back into the street.
Several of the upstairs bedrooms had been turned into experimental
labs where the good doctor left several of his female victim’s naked
corpses rotting on the beds. For each of the bodies found, each was
missing its head. The heads were later found in another room that
was set up as a makeshift laboratory where the ol’ doc was
experimenting with the severed heads in an attempt to keep them
alive through the use of bizarre electrical equipment after
decapitation. During one of his experiments some ozone had built up
in one of the laboratories and a fault in the electrical equipment
created the arc that caused the blast. In all, the corpses of five
women, and their heads, were removed from the house – two from
upstairs “labs” and three from under the dirt floor in the basement.
Now, no one was willing to even go near the house – it had an “evil”
reputation, and it would again sit vacant for a period of years
before being purchased by the Equitable Gas Company. The Congolier
house, along with several others in the area, were remodeled, this
time for immigrant workers of primarily Italian descent who were
working as replacement laborers for the higher wage men that
Equitable had laid off as a cost cutting measure. These men, like
the railroad workers before them, experienced many strange events in
the house, but, to allay their fears the executives at Equitable
told the men that the American workers that they were replacing were
playing pranks on them to scare them off. This seemed to work…for a
little while.
On one particular evening 14 of the men were seated around the
dining room table eating pasta and drinking some homemade wine. They
were talking, laughing and making crude humor as working men do at
the end of a long day. One of the men got up, gathered the dishes to
clear the table and made his way to the kitchen. Several minutes
went by and the man’s brother, wondering where he had gotten off to,
went to find him. Looking around in the kitchen it seemed that
nothing was amiss, but the basement door was open. Upon descending
the rickety wooden stairs to the basement the light mood of the
evening turned tragic and the man found his brother and another of
the workers dead – his brother hanging from a rafter and the other
man impaled by a board that was driven through his chest and
sticking out of his back. The official police report stated that the
first man had tripped on the stairs and fallen onto the board and
the second man had accidentally become entangled in some electrical
wiring that was not properly fastened to the joists overhead. The
“official” report, however, was not enough to keep the men in the
house – especially with all of the other unexplainable events that
had already taken place.
From about 1915 the house again sat vacant waiting for its next
victim, but that time would never come. Although the house would be
unable to claim another victim, in late 1920 scientist and inventor
Thomas Edison came to study the house and, fueled by his experiences
at the house, Edison was now determined to build a device with which
he could communicate with the dead. Unfortunately, Edison died
before the invention could be completed. Years after Edison’s visit,
in September of 1927, a drunk was arrested in New York and somewhere
in the midst of his alcoholic daze the disheveled lunatic made
claims of once being a most eminent doctor - Dr. Adolph Brunrichter.
He began by explaining that he was a physician who worked diligently
to prolong life, but because of the nature of his experiments he
could only make progress by ending the lives of his test subjects.
He also told police that many years earlier he purchased a large
house in Pittsburgh which he used to entice young women who
anticipated an evening of romance. Instead of romance though, they
were beheaded and then used in various experiments in an attempt to
keep the severed heads alive. The man rambled on to the police at
length about the gruesome, blood filled orgies, demonic possession,
torture and murder that had occurred in the house – as well as the
previously unknown location of several graves of other women who
were not discovered in the basement of the house. The police,
however, were not able to establish a positive ID on the man and
thusly were forced to relegate his “confession” to the ramblings of
a deranged but harmless drunk with delusions of grandeur.
Less than 2 months later, on Monday, November 14, 1927, a 5,000,000
cubic foot natural gas containment tank and several smaller
containment tanks, owned by the Equitable Gas Company, erupted into
a ball of fire in an explosion that was felt throughout Allegheny
County. The force of the blast damaged many of the brick and steel
buildings nearby, shattered windows throughout the downtown area and
caused massive damage to the Equitable Gas operations, refinement
and storage facility. Estimates of this disaster were tallied at 28
killed, six hundred injured, nearly one hundred missing and one
structure destroyed. The irony of the situation is that the only
building that was damaged beyond repair, the only one that was
completely destroyed, sat blocks away at 1129 Ridge Avenue – the
Congolier Mansion. With its reign of horror over and only a
smoldering crater left as a reminder, no other structure has ever
been built on that site – a site that I can see from the Route 65 /
I-279 interchange every day when I drive by while on my way to work.
Every day I wonder…if the land could talk what other macabre stories
would it tell? But, perhaps, like everyone else, I am better off not
knowing. Some things are better left alone.
But Wait…There’s More!
As many of you who are familiar with my work know, I often say that
truth is stranger than fiction. That is not the case here. The story
you just read is almost entirely a complete fabrication made of up
several decades worth of urban legends. Everyone loves a good ghost
story and this tale is a prime example. This story is a perfect
example of why research prior to a paranormal investigation is so
crucial. Had I simply listened to the legends surrounding the
Congolier Mansion I would have been sorely disappointed should I
have attempted to perform an investigation at the vacant site. Like
most urban legends this story is a clever blending of fact and
fiction. The names, dates and locations seem to provide a concrete
foundation for the story and tend to add an air of authenticity but,
when I researched these events, they simply didn’t check out.
Problems with this story exist from the outset. The house was built
in the 1880’s not the 1860’s as the story traditionally claims, so
from the beginning we have a two decade differential in the basic
timeline. Census records, land and real estate transfers and so
forth do not even exist for anyone named Charles Wright Congolier,
Lyda Congolier or the maid, Essie. They never existed; they were
pure fabrications of someone’s creative mind. Additionally, there
are no police records indicating that there was ever anything so
much as a domestic dispute much less a double murder that occurred
at 1129 Ridge Avenue. Records from the Dixmont State Hospital, who
throughout its operation required rigorous documentation of all
patients, also provided negative evidence against the Congolier
Mansion story as no one by the name of Congolier was ever admitted
to the hospital.
As for Dr. Adolph Brunrichter, well, he never existed either. This
is reinforced by a check of both the Pittsburgh Police crime files
and the national crime database archive files which yielded no
information on anyone of that name or even close to that name. No
explosions ever took place at the house, there were no bodies,
secret graves or laboratories that ever existed at the house either
and with that, the stories of murder and torture to this point in
the timeline are completely discredited.
As for Edison’s 1920 visit, well, we all know that he had a lab in
Menlo Park, New Jersey and that he was interested in communication
with the dead but there is no evidence that he ever visited
Pittsburgh in the timeframe suggested by the story and, even if he
had, he certainly did not visit the Congolier Mansion during that
period. If he had, he would not have found an abandon stone mansion
possessed of evil, what he would have found was the home of Marie
Congolier and her family. Surely, the descendents of the Congolier
family would have some recollection of the visit, even if it was
merely passed on by word of mouth from one generation to the next,
but according to the family no such visit ever took place. Also, the
“Congolier Mansion” only became such after the Congolier family
moved in – during the1920s, not in the 1860’s as the story leads you
to believe.
The only death even remotely associated with events at the house was
on the morning of November 14, 1927 when the Equitable Gas Company
containment tank exploded. The percussion from he blast shattered
windows throughout the downtown Pittsburgh area and the Congolier
home was no exception. In an unfortunate turn of events Mrs. Marie
Congolier was hit by a shard of glass from a nearby window and,
although she was rushed to the hospital she died en route from a
laceration to her neck that severed her carotid artery. The house
survived the blast and, with only minor damage, was repaired. It was
not pulled down into the 9th circle of Hell like the story
insinuates, it stood on that site for years to come only being
demolished when the area was being redeveloped for Heinz Field and
the new Route 65 / I-279 interchange.
The moral of the story: as paranormal investigators we must research
our cases thoroughly, if we do not we cease to be investigators and
become mere storytellers, but than again, everyone loves a good
ghost story!
