Brentwood
Brownsville Road
Brentwood house. Published account and a radar report
At the end of 1988 a family moved into a house on Brownsville Road in Brentwood. In August 2014 the owner published a book about the years after that. He wrote of black fog and a bad smell, of scratches, of furniture that moved, of red streaks on the walls, of crucifixes bent and rosaries wrecked. He said it was worst around 2004. Priests were in the house for about two years. He said a Mass in the basement, in February 2006, brought it to an end.
The Diocese of Pittsburgh’s spokesman, the Rev. Ronald Lengwin, told the Tribune-Review there had been an infestation and an oppression, that priests had been in the house, and that an exorcist had come from New York. Adam Blai, a psychologist, told Brian O’Neill of the Post-Gazette in February 2014 that he had been in the house with students and had felt something rake his forehead. The owner later ran the place as a bed and breakfast. In 2019 the Post-Gazette reported that the film rights had been optioned.
On 26 October 2014 the Post-Gazette talked with people from the families who had owned the house before him. They said the book’s claims about their relatives were not true, and that nothing of the kind had happened while they lived there. A good deal of what the book says about those families came from conversations with people who were already dead.
Nobody dug up a body. The owner dowsed the yard, then hired a radar company. The report described an 11-by-6-foot disturbance at the base of an old oak, “consistent with an excavated grave site,” with shapes four to five feet down. Roots, rocks, fill, a pet, and an old utility line read the same way on a radar plot. The ground was never opened.
The only thing he says he dug up was a small metal box, about six inches down, the first spring he was there: rosary beads and medals. He says the box was not old. The seller told him to put it back. A finished rosary is often buried with a Catholic. The box, the phone call, and the radar reading all come from him. The son of the sellers, quoted in that October story, said nothing like the haunting had happened there. He was not quoted on the box.
The book ties the ground to a killing in 1792. The killing is a real report, and it belongs to another place. On 31 March 1792 the commander at Fort Pitt wrote the secretary of war that raiders had killed a settler’s wife and three children. A newspaper the next month places that station on the west side of the Ohio, between two towns there. A local historical society looked for a raid that late in this part of Allegheny County, and did not find one in the usual Pennsylvania record.
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