Ridge Avenue
The Congelier house
Ridge Avenue house legend
The version the tour companies still tell is a mansion at 1129 Ridge Avenue in Manchester, on the North Side. Charles Wright Congelier built it in the 1860s. In the winter of 1871 his wife, Lyda, found him with a servant, killed them both with an axe, and was found singing to the girl’s head. A later tenant, Dr. Adolph Brunrichter, killed girls in the basement and kept the heads. Thomas Edison came to study the house. On 14 November 1927 an explosion wiped it off the street.
An explosion did happen that day. An Equitable Gas holder let go and wrecked a stretch of the North Side. The rest of the story does not hold up. Stephanie Hoover and Troy Taylor looked for Charles and Lyda Congelier, for a double murder in 1871, for Brunrichter, and for a railroad man attached to the house, and did not find them. The building at 1129 Ridge Avenue was a row house from the late 1880s, not a mansion from the 1860s. The full legend first appeared in print in 1979, in Richard Winer and Nancy Osborn’s Haunted Houses.
David Rotenstein, writing for the Allegheny City Historic Gallery, followed the name Congelier back to a misspelling of Cancelliere in the coverage of the blast. Mary Congelier, 29, died of a cut artery from glass in that explosion. Relatives of the family did live at 1129 Ridge Avenue. The house was not destroyed. Thomas White, at Duquesne, came to the same conclusion. The murders did not happen. A highway runs over the block now.
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