The Erie Experience: Spooky Urban Legends, Folktales, and Lore

Erin Phillips

After learning all about Fairview High School's Erie Experience class, with a focus on their urban legends unit – Mr. Barbour, Erie Reader Managing Editor Erin Phillips, and a group of his students boarded a bus bound for Gudgeonville Bridge and Axe Murder Hollow to "experience" the generational legends those places hold.

Back in September of 2021, I was obsessed with Axe Murder Hollow. At the time, I was a freelance contributing writer for the Erie Reader, while also full-time momming through a pandemic – I spent every naptime, every evening, every free moment combing through Erie Daily Times digital newspaper archives searching for any mention of murders in southwest Millcreek. As my family tired of my excited daily updates full of researched details and true crime theories, my mind swirled with searchable archival terms: Billy the Butcher, beheaded "gypsies," axes, axe murders, Thomas Road, Weis Library. And then, as I honed in on a theory, my searches morphed into: William Gack, Brown Brothers Slaughterhouse, Daniel Biebighauser, Mary Lynn Crotty, John Florillo, and Roy Johns. By the time the Oct. 2021 Erie Reader went to press, I had figured out a working theory as to the origin of the Axe Murder Hollow urban legend and finally shared it with our audience.

Axe Murder Hollow is a legendary area "seven-tenths of a mile south of the Thomas/Sterrettania roads intersection in Southwest Millcreek," where, for generations, bored teenagers pilgrimaged on dark, foggy nights to scare themselves silly. The legend varies, but generally always goes something like: in this area, years ago, a man went berserk and killed his entire family with an axe. The ghosts of the man (and sometimes also his family) remain in the area and cause all kinds of commotion for people who dare to explore. Sometimes the legend involves a disembodied head found at the nearby Weis Library; sometimes it involves scapegoated Romani people.

What I found, in my extensive research, was a potential kernel of truth that may have started a massive game of telephone that eventually worked itself out to be the legend of Axe Murder Hollow as we know it. So, there was this guy back around the turn of the 20th century, William Gack, who lived in the Thomas Road area for a while with his mother. German immigrants, not a lot of education, potential alcoholism – you get the idea. Gack worked as a butcher in a slaughterhouse nearby. Two teenagers broke into his house one winter night and were detained by Gack until police arrived. These teenagers, likely being scared out of their wits, and seeing the tools of the trade for a butcher at a slaughterhouse, probably told a pretty wild story of their adventure once they got out of the reformatory. This is the very short version of the story I told in that Oct. 2021 issue of the Erie Reader (a link to the original story will appear in the online version of this article).

This "kernel of truth" is something that Fairview High School social studies teacher Benjamin "Hank" Barbour tells his students to look out for when thinking critically about any ghost story or urban legend they come across. Barbour is part of a class offered as an elective at Fairview High School called "The Erie Experience." It is a local history class led by Nicole Neis that focuses on all things Erie – our businesses and entrepreneurs, our maritime, military, and athletic history, our ecology and natural history, economics, transportation, our immigration and indigenous history, and for two class periods in a quarter – our urban legends. Barbour shares, "I was wracking my brain for something interesting that could be educational and compelling. I settled on urban legends, ghost stories, folk tales, and folklore – with the aim of having the students investigate them and discuss them in an academic way."

Barbour initially reached out to me after the Axe Murder Hollow story was published, telling me about the class, asking to use my story, and inquiring about some of my primary sources. As the class materialized and grew, Barbour reached out to me again and eventually I met up with him, as well as his colleague Nicole Neis, who runs the class overall, and their administrator, Dr. Luke Beall as we discussed the creation of the class, as well as Barbour's role with the urban legends unit.

Understanding how to locate and verify primary sources is one of the greater lessons taught through the Erie Experience elective. The unit covering Erie folklore and legends teaches students to pick through source materials to determine what, if any, truth lies within the spooky stories. (Photo: Erin Phillips)

The first part of Barbour's two-part class is a lecture, where he presents a few different local legends (usually Axe Murder Hollow, Gudgeonville Bridge, and the UFO sighting on Presque Isle), and displays some archival newspaper articles about the legends, then helps the students search for primary source evidence of an incident that may have been that elusive "kernel of truth" to these stories. They discuss the historic events surrounding the legend (like the Cold War aerial warfare panic that might have influenced the UFO sightings, for instance). The second day, the class goes on a field trip and experiences the locations of these folktales firsthand. It gets the students engaged, excited, maybe a little freaked out, but ultimately, thinking.

"The class was not meant to be sensational or lurid, it was meant to treat these stories as cultural artifacts. As elements of our community's culture, the identity of our community, and trying to understand the sociological aspects and identify a purpose." Barbour continues, "I really try to challenge the students to make sense of them. What might these stories be satisfying in our community's psyche?" And in getting the students to think about these questions as they look critically at these legends, they serve to teach a larger lesson overall. "It's a way to teach information literacy, to teach archival research, library science, psychology, sociology, history, literature, and critical thinking in general. Reading these old documents lends itself to a multi-disciplinary approach," Barbour suggests.

Principal Beall comments, "They're giving students experiences that they're going to remember forever. Through that, they're going to remember the lessons that are woven in, which are: understanding primary sources, why it's important to learn about local history, and the underlying idea of what a credible source is." Beall continues, "Today, kids especially are getting crushed with information from social media, and the ability to discern what's truthful and what's not is such a valuable skill. A skill that wasn't maybe as valuable even 10 to 15 years ago. And those are the things that I think they'll remember. The teachers are using the vehicle of these sensational stories and places to teach them some good life skills along the way."

Dr. Beall and Barbour both credit Nies' creativity and the entire social studies department (including Jim Brinling, Susan Nelson, and Jessica Quiggle) for driving the success of the class, as they tour spots like Smith's Provisions and Splash Lagoon, alongside hyper-local trips to the Battles Family properties and the Fairview Alms House, in addition to the spooky spots of legend. The class racked up 19 total field trips last year. Dr. Beall comments, "We're all products of Erie, we all grew up here, and there's often that connotation of wanting to get out of Erie. Building connections with the local community and local history will maybe get some of our top people to stay, make a home here, realize all the great things that Erie has to offer, and put down roots."

After our group meeting, Barbour and I broke off and prepared to board a school bus with about a dozen students ready to learn some local lore. The bus took us on a roundabout trip through Millcreek and Fairview, often on dirt roads, as we sought out some spots that are the stuff of legends for my generation and those before, but places most of these students have never heard of. Our first stop is the spot of the old Gudgeonville Bridge.

Fairview High School social studies teacher Hank Barbour displays some primary sources at the site of Gudgeonville Bridge – in the 1950s a young girl fell from the cliffs to her death. This event may have been the "kernel of truth" that helped form the urban legends of ghostly children haunting the bridge. (Photo: Erin Phillips)

In its heyday, the Gudgeonville bridge was a local (and nationally registered) historic landmark – a covered bridge that was built in 1868 to cross Elk Creek. The covered part of the bridge sadly met its demise in 2008 when it was burned down by arsonists Jeffrey Gleason and Joshua Bell, but the structure itself has been rebuilt and is still in use. The legends surrounding the bridge vary – from the sounds of a haunted mule clopping out a dirge on the wooden slats, to visions of an ethereal young woman hurling her young child from the bridge. As we get out and explore the area, some students open their ghost-detecting apps, while others make clopping noises to scare their friends.

And Mr. Barbour gives us something to think about, a kernel of truth: "Researching the area, we find that there was a tragic accident here. A young girl fell off the cliff there," Barbour indicates to the high cliffs surrounding Elk Creek as he holds up a laminated newspaper article. "A 15-year-old girl, Ruby Shorts, perished in 1955 … So, some of the stories of visions involving a child could have emerged from this real-life tragedy. These stories can have a psychological purpose and aid in processing a community's grief."

We reboard the bus and head towards Axe Murder Hollow, but finding a spot to stop and walk around is difficult, as the area is much more developed than it was 30 years ago. On a patch of grass on the corner of Thomas Road and Echo Hill Lane, Barbour recounts the tale of Axe Murder Hollow and explains some of my theory. It becomes very clear that none of the kids have ever heard of this legend. In the concluding paragraph of my 2021 Axe Murder Hollow story, I state, "Since the physical location of Axe Murder Hollow is changing so rapidly, the place we all associate with this legend simply won't exist for the younger generations. So please, make sure you tell your children and grandchildren some version of this tale while you take them on a spooky drive on Thomas Road some foggy night, so that, hopefully, this long-lived Erie legend will never die."

Barbour shares, "I really love teaching local history, because I think so often it gets short-changed. Don't get me wrong, I definitely believe that students need to understand world history and different cultures, but it often comes at the expense of local knowledge. These are the stories that really give us a sense of place and hopefully inculcate some love for our community."

Barbour, in his efforts, while teaching these students archival research and critical thinking skills, is also doing the important work of passing along these local legends that have helped generations of Erieites define their own sense of place and create core memories that are associated with those places. One goal is for these students to pass along these stories – when they're driving around some day with their friends or family, to share the spooky stories of Axe Murder Hollow or Gudgeonville Bridge so that these legends continue to contribute to the overall story of Erie.

When not falling down digital newspaper archive true-crime rabbit holes, Erin Phillips can be found at erin@eriereader.com