Posted on 11/25/2021 9:15:04 PM PST by nickcarraway
A grandpa’s haunting Thanksgiving ghost story appeared to help two brothers uncover a near 200-year-old “murder mystery.”
Bill and Frank Watson were told a chilling tale about 57 Irish immigrants who died at a railroad site in Pennsylvania during the cholera epidemic in 1832.
The area is now known as “Duffy’s Cut” as the rail workers’ boss was named Philip Duffy. It is a stretch of tracks located around 30 miles from Philadelphia. The brothers were told the chilling tale by their grandpa – a railroad worker – every Thanksgiving. They believe the rail workers died violently and not from cholera.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
What a potentially interesting but singularly uninformative article. Is it believed that there may be around 57 bodies? Any theories at all as to what may have happened to them? Any contemporaneous news reports, ethic violence in the area? Anything?
Could have been covid.
bookmark
The article was missing a decent conclusion.
Interesting.
As Peggy Lee said, “Is that all there is?”
Found more details at the link below.
https://www.irishcentral.com/roots/history/irish-immigrant-duffys-cut-57-deaths
Here’s the theory:
>>> “The railroad records indicate that when the laborers realized that cholera had broken out in their shanty, some tried to flee to neighboring farms but were turned away by people afraid of the disease. By the end of August, all fifty-seven Irish laborers were dead. The railroad reported that the laborers had died of cholera, and the newspapers downplayed the number of the dead throughout the nineteenth century. The archaeological dig and the anthropological examination of the remains revealed that the men and the woman recovered at the site were all murdered. Nativism along with a fear of cholera and fear of foreigners as supposed harbingers of the disease was likely responsible for vigilante violence that occurred at mile 59.” <<<
this case was the subject of an episode of Secrets of the Dead in 2013;
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/secrets/death-on-the-railroad-about-this-episode/944/
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