Few horror film plots hit close to home as squarely as haunted house stories, especially ones with homes built on old cemetery sites. Though Pittsburgh has its share of cemeteries — those still in use and abandoned — and haunted house stories, there are no known reports of house hauntings here where graves have been paved over or relocated. Rest easy yinzers, there’s no local “Poltergeist” house. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t lots of places all around the city where dead people once were buried.
Considering that people have lived in Pittsburgh, starting with Indigenous Native Americans, for more than 10,000 years, in some respects the entire city is one big cemetery. “The Golden Triangle, somebody’s died on almost every square foot of that,” says historian and author Tom White. “They weren’t all buried there, but they certainly died there, and a lot of people were buried there.”
White is a Duquesne University archivist and history professor who has written several books about ghost stories and haunted places in Southwestern Pennsylvania…