DAMIAN DRIVE
— upper yoder township —
The history
A story can only frighten you if the ground under it is real. Here is exactly what is real about this hilltop, and exactly what we made up.
Real — and verifiable
- The Johnstown Inclined Plane. Built 1890–91, 896 feet of rise, the steepest vehicular inclined plane in the world. Its top station stands at 711 Edgehill Drive. Decommissioned in 1923, a tourist attraction since 1962, and still running.
- The 1889 flood. On May 31, 1889 the South Fork Dam failed and 2,209 people died. It did not reach the hilltop — the hilltop expanded afterwards, for the families who came up the hill to rebuild.
- The Westmont Hilltop Schoolhouse. A two-room red-brick school at Woodmont and Edgehill. The bell still rings every September.
- The Grand Midway Hotel, Windber. Hotel and brothel, with the world's largest Ouija board on its roof. Martha is reported on the third-floor balcony — killed by a stray firework on the balcony while watching the fireworks on July 4, 1911.
- Grandview Cemetery, Plot of the Unknown. Over 750 people from the flood have no name on a headstone. Of the 396 children who died, 98 have no cemetery record at all.
- Tony Ragusa. Convicted in 1914 in the Spangler-Barnesboro murder of Veto Cavello, and vanished between conviction and execution. The case is still technically open.
- The Hamilton House on Edgehill Drive, 1892–95 — the architectural anchor for the ranch houses on the hill.
- The rivers. The Stonycreek four hundred feet below to the south, and the Conemaugh, which forms at the confluence. Moxham, where the iron was made and where the watchman came from. The State Game Lands on the western boundary.
- The Medium and Daybreak, the London Spiritualist Alliance weekly, delivered by post every Wednesday — a real publication, and the reason a pattern-maker in Moxham would have had the idea at all.
Fiction — in service of the lore
- The Keller family — Frank and Mary.
- Mrs. Margaret Lewis, the Boston trance-medium, and the note she left on the kitchen table.
- Werner Knapp, the watchman, the reward notice, and the hat that is still at the property.
- The séances, and what happened in Garage Two on the night of October 31, 1904.
- The 1917 family, the 1921 dig, and the dolls recovered in a crawlspace.
- The 1904 Johnstown Tribune article — period newspaper copy written for this story. The paper itself is real; that article is not.
- Every name in the ledger. The ledger lists neighbours by initial, under period surnames that are not anybody's surname.
If you want to check it yourself
These are the public records behind the real half.
- The Johnstown Flood Museum — operated by Heritage Johnstown, in the former Cambria Library that Andrew Carnegie helped rebuild after the flood.
- Flood history and statistics — the 2,209, and the valley.
- The Cambria Memory Project — photographs, documents, and the Johnstown Flood of 1889 collection, maintained with Penn Highlands and the State Library of Pennsylvania.
On names
No real surname is published anywhere on this page or on the ledger. The names in the story are period stage names, and the people who live on this hill are only ever initials. If you took a ledger role and would rather not be there, your initials come out and the story still works.