Hazelwood
Slag Pile Annie
Hazelwood mill legend
Along the Monongahela in Hazelwood, the Jones & Laughlin mill is gone. The ground is the redevelopment called Hazelwood Green. The story that came out of the mill is about a woman the men called Slag Pile Annie.
Thomas White set the lasting version down in Supernatural Lore of Pennsylvania. A University of Pittsburgh student had a summer job at the mill in the early 1950s, driving a buggy that pulled empty hopper cars through a tunnel under the blast furnaces. The light was poor. He came on a woman in her late forties, in work clothes, a red bandanna in her hair, standing by the tracks. He told her to be careful. She said, “I can’t get killed, I’m already dead.”
He told the foreman. The foreman said she had worked the mill during the war, when women took the jobs the enlisted men had left, and that she had stayed on afterward and died in an accident there about five years before the student saw her. White wrote that the men kept the story because it did two kinds of work. It reminded them that an ordinary job in the mill could still kill them, and it kept a memory of the women who had done those jobs. No accident report with her name has turned up to match what the foreman said.
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