Dead Man's Hollow

OVERVIEW

A 450-acre wooded ravine above the Youghiogheny River between McKeesport and Elizabeth Township, held by the Allegheny Land Trust and crossed by trails from the Great Allegheny Passage. The ruins of the Union Sewer Pipe Company works stand in it. The name is old: a man was found hanging in the hollow in 1874, and a boiler explosion at the pipe works killed workers in 1905; the trust records other deaths and a 1880s shooting.

HISTORY

The hollow was quarried and industrialised through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and then abandoned to woodland; the trust acquired it in the 1990s.

REPORTED ACTIVITY

Walkers report sounds in the woods, movement in still foliage, and a figure near the pipe-works ruins. Pittsburgh guides and the trust's own history carry the stories; none is documented beyond the telling, and the deaths that gave the hollow its name are.

VISITING

Open daily as a conservation area; trails from the GAP trailhead at Boston, PA.