THE YABLONSKI HOUSE: WESTERN PENNSYLVANIA'S CREEPIEST STORY
The following isn't an urban legend, and it's not a campfire story. Every word can be verified, and you have to read this one to the end.
The story centers around the house in Clarksville, Pennsylvania (about an hour's drive south of downtown Pittsburgh) where Western Pennsylvania's most famous crime occurred -- the Yablonski family was slain there. This is a picture of the house.
In the late 1960s, “Jock” Yablonski was a crusading labor reformer who loathed and despised injustice. Until the day he died, Mr. Yablonski was still talking about the time way back in the 1920s when, as a very young man, he was arrested on some minor offense. He claimed he was treated miserably by the police officer who arrested him. We're not sure what happened, but he never, ever got over it.
Mr. Yablonski’s distaste for injustice led him to announce in June of 1969 that he would try to unseat the powerful president of the United Mine Workers union, Tony Boyle because the union was marred by corruption. Within a short time after that announcement, as if to prove Mr. Yablonski’s point, Tony Boyle ordered his subordinates to kill Jock Yablonski. Several failed attempts were made on Mr. Yablonski’s life, and when the union election was held in December of 1969 – an election marred by violence and corruption -- Boyle defeated Mr. Yablonski.
But winning the election wasn’t enough for Tony Boyle. Three weeks later, in the pre-dawn blackness of the last day of 1969, three men skulked into the Yablonskis’ historic three-story farmhouse in quiet Clarksville, Pennsylvania, 45 miles south of Pittsburgh, and brutally massacred Jock Yablonski, his wife, and their 25-year-old daughter. It was the biggest story in America when it happened, and it remains the most shocking crime Western Pennsylvania has ever witnessed. Ironically, in the end, Jock Yablonski’s war on injustice was a success: a court threw out the union election and ordered Tony Boyle to run again, something that would not have happened if Jock Yablonski had not been murdered. Boyle went on to lose that election to a Yablonski protégé, and it wasn’t long before Boyle was tied to the Yablonski murders and was convicted.
But there’s more to the story -- something so bizarre, it defies explanation. After the murders, all sorts of wild tales began circulating about the Yablonski house being cursed - - about screams and gunshots emanating from the house, and about blood running out of the walls. That is the typical sinister folklore associated with a house where such a terrible thing happened. But there is actually something well-documented about the house that is creepier than all those urban legends.
You see, the Yablonski murders were not the house’s first brush with horror. During Prohibition, so the story goes, a previous owner had hanged himself in the basement.
Wait. Four untimely deaths in one house in quiet little Clarksville? How much tragedy can one house bear?
Hang onto something because that's not all. Long before the Yablonski murders, in the late 1930s, the house was used as a boarding house, and one of the boarders was a man named Frank Palanzo who said he heard voices from the sky and that witches spoke to him. Palanzo was known to string barbed wire around his house to keep people out, and one time he was spotted in a cornfield covered in corn to the point that he resembled a giant ear of corn. Then, on January 30, 1939, Frank Palanzo barricaded himself in a room upstairs, stuck a shotgun out the window, and threatened to shoot people below. Someone called the police. A state trooper named George D. Naughton (pronounced “knock-ton”) came to the house and climbed the stairs to Palanzo's room. Palanzo opened the door, and supposedly on orders of witches, shot state trooper Naughton dead with a 12-gauge shotgun. Like the Yablonski murders three decades later, this shocking crime was a major news story reported on the front pages of newspapers across America.
Are we getting your attention yet? What are the odds of FIVE gruesome deaths – including two incidents involving grisly murders reported on front pages across America – in the same house in quiet little Clarksville?
“Just one of those things” you say? Alright, then let us tell you just one more thing about the house.
Remember at the outset of this story, we told you that Jock Yablonski claimed he was treated miserably by a police officer when he was a very young man back in the 1920s, and that Mr. Yablonski never, ever got over that mistreatment? So, what does that have to do with the house, you ask?
The police officer who treated Mr. Yablonski so miserably was none other than state trooper George D. Naughton -- the man who was killed on the order of witches in the same house where Jock Yablonski and his family also would be massacred some three decades later.
Ladies and gentlemen, some people believe that coincidence is God's way of remaining anonymous. Others might attribute something more dark and sinister to this particular set of facts. We, personally, don’t know what to make out of any of it -- but please, please, do not try to tell us that this was “just one of those things.”
