In the 1970s, spooky stories began circulating about a North Side house that had been located near where Three Rivers Stadium was completed in 1968. According to the stories, the house had been a grand mansion where decades of depraved murders and medical experimentation had taken place. It became dubbed “America’s most haunted house.”
No (known) murders and medical experiments ever happened inside the house at 1129 Ridge Ave. There was one grisly death caused by a massive gas explosion in 1927 that leveled a large chunk of the Chateau neighborhood, and the house was owned by an early Mafia figure. In fact, the real story behind what became known as the Congelier mansion is almost as wild as the haunted house stories — its longtime occupants were gangsters, not ghosts.
Severed heads and grisly experiments
The fanciful story begins in the 1860s after a man storytellers called Charles Congelier arrived in Pittsburgh and built a brick mansion at 1129 Ridge Ave. Allegedly, Congelier built his mansion atop one of Pittsburgh’s many abandoned burial grounds.
Congelier, married to a woman named Lyda, according to the tales, struck up a romantic relationship with a domestic servant named Essie. Lyda discovered the affair. She killed her husband and his lover. A few days later, a family friend discovered Lyda sitting in a rocking chair, softly singing a lullaby and clutching a blanket containing Essie’s severed head.
A story like that, told the right way, could scare the bejeezus out of almost anyone. But a simple double murder and decapitation isn’t enough to make someplace America’s most haunted house. That’s where the fictional Dr. Adolph C. Brunrichter comes in. According to the stories, he bought 1129 Ridge Ave. in 1900 after the house had been used as railroad workers’ housing. The unnamed railroad sold it after complaints of mysterious noises and events inside attributed to a poltergeist.
Brunrichter, it turns out, was a classic mad scientist. In the stories, he was reclusive and his neighbors knew very little about him. The police and firemen searched the house after neighbors reported hearing a woman screaming followed by a massive explosion. Upstairs they found a naked and decapitated woman’s body sprawled atop a bloodstained bed.
In the basement, they found Brunricher’s laboratory. “Dr. Brunrichter had been experimenting with severed heads,” wrote authors Richard Winer and Nancy Osborn. “Apparently, he had been able to keep some alive after decapitation.” There was no trace of Brunrichter.
Published in 1979 in a collection of haunted house stories, the Winer and Osborn telling appears to be the first published version of the 1129 Ridge Ave. story. Their version included a visit in 1922 by a psychic, who witnessed “objects hurled by unseen hands” and who described a “horrible presence.”
Later versions added an alleged visit by Thomas Edison in the 1920s to test an experimental “spirit phone” to help communicate with dead people.
The final chapter in most versions details the home’s destruction when storage tanks owned by Equitable Gas exploded Nov. 14, 1927, killing 28. The blast injured more than 400 people and was heard 20 miles away. The explosion was so strong that the National Weather Bureau reported that agency barometers recorded the rapid change in air pressure.
In Winer and Osborn’s telling of the 1129 Ridge Ave. story, New York City police caught up with Brunrichter in September of 1927 and held him for a month before releasing him. “Two weeks after Brunrichter’s release, a catastrophic occurrence took place on Pittsburgh’s North Side in the neighborhood of 1129 Ridge Avenue,” wrote Winer and Osborne.
None of the events from the stories — except for the 1927 gas explosion — was ever reported in newspapers. Between the 1970s and 1990s, the1129 Ridge Ave. story spread via local storytellers, in haunted house books, and on the Internet.
Kernels of truth
Folkorist Andrea Kitta grew up Southwestern Pennsylvania and, for a while, lived in Swissvale. She teaches folklore at East Carolina University and is an expert on legends and ghost stories.
“I’ve heard the story kind of on and off my entire life,” Kitta tells Pittsburgh City Paper. “I remember it very well because [of] the idea of her sitting there and rocking and singing, because it was also that she was like singing a lullaby to this head that she had in her lap.”
Kitta adds, “I had also heard, of course, about the doctor and the heads in jars and that he was keeping them alive. And I had heard, too, that when the police showed up, that one of the heads had opened their eyes at the police.”
Kitta’s recollection dovetails with the published versions. And she heard another variant growing up.
“I heard, at one point when the immigrants were living there, that they tried to do an exorcism,” Kitta says. “And that the priest that came to do the exorcism actually had a two-by-four shoved through his chest cavity by the poltergeist.”
That’s one gnarly story with lots of dates and peoples’ names. But in the age of online newspaper archives, the stories attached to 1129 Ridge Ave. crumble faster than a mad scientist’s tea biscuit.
The true story about 1129 Ridge Ave. is just as wild as the ghost stories. There was no Charles Congelier, but there was a Giacomo “Jack” Cancelliere. A Sicilian immigrant who came to Pennsylvania in the early 1900s to work in the coal mines, Cancelliere moved to Pittsburgh in the 1920s.
He became a bootlegger and early numbers gambling kingpin. Throughout his life, he had close relationships with some of the city’s biggest Mafia leaders, many of them using the Cancelliere family’s North Side Rosa-Villa restaurant as a meeting spot. In the 1950s and 1960s, the FBI unsuccessfully tried to untangle the Cancelliere (and his family) connections to key Mafia figures, including Pittsburgh Mafia family boss John LaRocca.
“La Rocca has been observed meeting with known criminal associates at an establishment known as the Rosa-Villa Café,” the FBI’s Pittsburgh office wrote in 1964. “La Rocca is a life-long friend of the owners of this café.”
Named for the Sicilian village (Villarosa) where Cancelliere and LaRocca were born, the Rosa-Villa closed in 2004, and, in 2019, the Andy Warhol Museum demolished the building.
Cancelliere, with his wife’s name on the deed, bought 1129 Ridge Ave. in 1923. Between the 1920s and 1960s, Jack and his family racked up a long list of arrests, mostly on liquor and gambling charges. They intentionally used aliases and because arresting officers frequently misspelled his last name. Sometimes the police, prosecutors, and the press spelled it “Cangelier” or “Congelier” — the same name attributed to the ill-fated Charles Congelier in the haunted house stories.
“The Cangeliers are known by name variations ranging from Cancelliere to Congolier, and it would take a scorecard to know their place in the lineup,” the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette wrote about the crime family in 1952.
Stranger than fiction
The one known grisly death linked to the house was Cancelliere’s wife Mary, who died at age 29 from wounds she received in the 1927 gas explosion. The blast shattered the window in the room where she was doing laundry. The story tugged at Pittsburgh’s heartstrings after photos of her five children appeared in local newspapers.
The real 1129 Ridge Ave. wasn’t a palatial Victorian mansion. It was an ordinary brick rowhouse built in 1886, not the 1860s.
“I don’t remember the outside,” recalls Ann*, the daughter of a numbers banker who was close friends and business associates of the Cancellieres. She asked to remain anonymous to discuss details of her family’s criminal activities. City Paper is using her middle name to protect her identity.
Ann did remember being inside the home. “I seem to remember a living room that was dark. I don’t know why it was so dark. But it just seemed to me like it was dark and gloomy, and then the kitchen was big and light, and we spent a lot of time there,” she says.
The Cancellieres and Ann’s family had decades of history. “He got them somehow out of trouble or he helped pay off a judge,” Ann recalled what her father had said. “I don’t know what he did. But the debt, as far as Jack Cancelliere was concerned, was never repaid and would last as long as he was alive. I mean, it was a big deal to him.”
The debt might have included murder, gangland justice administered to a pair of men who had robbed Ann’s father. “All I know is my brother told me that they found the guys in a field in Ohio with their knees shot out and a bullet in the back of their heads,” she said. “He assumed that it was somebody from that family [Cancellieres], but I don’t know that.”
There’s nothing left of 1129 Ridge Ave. today except for a surface parking lot and lots of tall tales, some of them true. Ann’s family had never heard the haunted house stories. She would have remembered objects flying through the air and the other haunting hallmarks described in the stories. There’s no doubt that gangsters are scary people. Crime, when coupled with a catastrophe like the 1927 gas explosion, can be a powerful fuel for concocting spooky stories.
This article appears in Oct. 22-28, 2025.
