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)…