Spirits of Old Allegheny

Tales of hauntings in some of the houses in the Allegheny West section of the Pittsburgh North Side is the focus of a spooky walking/storytelling tour held by the Allegheny West Civic Council each October. Tour guides take groups of people to six sites and a storyteller at each one talk about the spirits which haunt the homes and the area. While the tour focuses on the supernatural aspects of the lovely Victorian neighborhood, it is also grounded in historical fact and serves as an educational introduction to this wonderfully preserved section of the city of Pittsburgh whose list of former residents reads like a "Who's Who" of Pittsburgh.

Common stops on the tour include the Byers-Lyon house,  the Allegheny Commons, the Rope Iron Works, the site where the most haunted house in America once stood and the former homes of Moses Liehman, Harry & Constance Darlington, Letitia Caldwell Holmes, Harry Kendall Thaw and Francis Torrance.

I have included here the ghostly stories surrounding a few of these homes. For the rest, you will need to take the tour!

The Ghosts of the Byer-Lyon Mansion

The former Most Haunted House in America

Alexander Byers made his fortune in iron and had a mansion designed with two separate wings. He, his wife and their children occupied one side, while his daughter Maude and her husband, John Lyon and their children lived on the other.  Tragedy struck when the Lyon nanny fell asleep one night while caring for Byers' youngest granddaughter and the little girl climbed through an access area to a skylight in the roof and fell four stories to her death when the glass shattered. The tragedy was compounded when the next morning the nanny was found to have hanged herself from the same skylight. For the past century there have been reports of people seeing a little girl or hearing the sounds of a child crying. The nanny has also been seen, sometimes running up the stairs and sometimes walking hand-in-hand with the little girl. The haunted 90-room Byers Lyon mansion is now part of the North Side CCAC campus and when the college renovated the building and tore out the skylight in 1990 the sightings changed - now only the nanny is seen.