Washington County
Shades of Death Road
Washington County road and South Hills bridges
North of Avella, in the western part of Washington County, Shades of Death Road runs about two miles from Bethel Ridge Road to Cole School Road. Bethel Church and its cemetery stand at the ridge end. Trees close over the pavement. People who have lived along it say that is the shade in the name. Hemlocks, and before the timber was cut a cover thick enough that a wagon wanted a lamp at noon. Meadowcroft is about four miles off. The same name gets hung on other dark roads, some of them in the South Hills. The one with the name on the sign is this road.
What travels with the name is a scream, a car that dies, a figure in the road, a hanging, a body stumbled over in the dark, murders nobody can name. In June 2025 the Observer-Reporter asked around Avella. People who had grown up there knew the murders and the cars that quit. They had not seen them. A local history the paper quotes, written by a woman who lived on the road, says the people in the stories have no names, and that none of it can be checked. In October 2025 the City Paper drove the two miles and wrote down what legend-trippers tell each other to do: stop where the road dips across the creek, cut the lights, honk three times. No one death has been found that would account for the name.
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