When guests at Shiloh Gastro ask about Mrs. Soffel, owner Gene Mangrum has his spiel down pat.
“I know as much as just about anybody, and I’ve told the story a thousand times,” Mangrum says.
The restaurant in Mt. Washington has a connection to the Biddle brothers' infamous escape from Allegheny County Jail, in which the pair of convicted murderers sprung themselves, aided by a love-struck Kate Soffel. Today, her ghost is rumored to haunt the building, once owned by the Soffel family, inviting a steady stream of curious visitors and ghost tour stops. A gold-framed portrait of Soffel hangs in the upstairs dining room — which has an adjoining space known as the hog’s head room for the wild boar mount on the wall — where her apparition has been said to appear wearing a white, flowing gown. Near the women’s bathroom — another hotspot — is a movie poster for the Pittsburgh-shot Mrs. Soffel, which turns 40 this year, starring Diane Keaton as Kate.
Mangrum suggested that I stop by on a day with bad weather so that the restaurant, which on sunny days packs out its porch on Shiloh St., would be less busy. But with the extended closure of the Monongahela Incline (which reopened after Pittsburgh City Paper’s visit and sits steps away from the building) and record-breaking rain, it was also perfect weather for a haunting, eerily quiet with a gray pall cast over Downtown. Noticing my audio recorder, Shiloh staff asked me if I was carrying ghost hunting equipment.
For those unfamiliar with one of Pittsburgh’s most lurid love-turned-ghost stories, Kate Soffel, born Anna Katharina Dietrich, was the wife of Allegheny County prison warden Peter Soffel at the turn of the 20th century. Mrs. Soffel would often minister to prisoners, and encountered Jack and Ed Biddle in Dec. 1901 while they were on death row. The Biddle brothers were part of the fearsome “Chloroform Gang,” bandits that committed a string of robberies by knocking their victims unconscious with chloroform.
“They were involved, allegedly involved, in a robbery on Mt. Washington in which the grocer was killed,” Mangrum tells City Paper. When police tracked them down to a boarding house in the Manchester neighborhood, a gunfight ensued, and Ed Biddle mortally wounded one detective.
“Back then, when they had enough people to have a hanging, they’d have a hanging,” Mangrum says. The Biddles became celebrities, attracting female fans who’d wait outside the jail pleading the brothers’ innocence.
“[Meanwhile,] Kate would take the incline down, because it was running back then,” Mangrum quips. In reading Bible passages to the brothers, she became infatuated with the youngest, Ed. Soffel was then a 35-year-old mother of four; Ed Biddle was 24. Over the course of a few days, she smuggled in a file to saw through jail bars, a gun, and oil to cover the filing marks. The trio broke out the night of Jan. 29, 1902.
“She may have chloroformed her husband in the residence down there,” Mangrum says, referring to the couple’s home on Ross St. near the jail.
They rode a streetcar to the end of the line, stopping at the White House Tavern in present-day Ross Township, spent the night in a barn — where Ed and Kate “may or may not have consummated their affair,” says Mangrum — stole a one-horse open sleigh, and made for Butler. They were caught by detectives, and another gunfight broke out in the snow. Both Biddles were mortally wounded and died hours later in jail, while Soffel tried to shoot herself but survived.
Ultimately, Soffel’s husband was granted a divorce (a rarity at the time), she served two years in the prison where she’d previously ministered, and “tried to parlay her notoriety into a theatrical career, which was widely panned,” Mangrum says. She died of typhus only seven years later at age 42.
“So the legend is that she's wandering around up there waiting for her dead, shot-up lover to come back,” Mangrum tells City Paper. (Details of this whole saga are fuzzy, especially where the Soffels lived at a given time. Most disappointing is that, according to both Kate Soffel’s death certificate and a New York Times obituary, she died at West Penn Hospital, not the house at 123 Shiloh St.)
Mrs. Soffel’s legacy seems to be as multifaceted as the building itself, which has gone through many phases since her time. According to Mangrum, it transitioned from a residence to a medical office then to a restaurant in 1974, when owners expanded it, giving it the “basic footprint” that it maintains today. Pittsburghers might remember it as Billye’s from the ‘70s, or the Shiloh Inn, an iteration that touted a baby grand piano, live music, and fine dining. Mangrum came aboard when the restaurant became the Shiloh Grill in 2010 — a sister restaurant of the Harris Grill and styled similarly — eventually saving it from closure in 2020 and “re-concepting” it as Shiloh Gastro. Still, the building maintains four original fireplaces (the Soffels had a fireplace in every room), looks like a Victorian house, and the haunting rumor persists.
“Do I believe it?” Mangrum reflects. “The only phenomenon I've been exposed to is that I have a visceral reaction to someone who smokes a lot of cigarettes. It's an unpleasant smell and my body reacts negatively to it. And I’ve had that [same sensation] a couple of times when I know I'm the only person in the building.”
Other staff have experienced the smell. “It’ll smell like cigarette smoke randomly,” says manager Brittany Bogard. “[When] there's nobody else here, it’s always weird.” One theory holds that the cigarette smoke comes from the Soffels’ former bedroom (now the second-floor dining room).
Bogard began working at Shiloh Gastro last November and almost immediately spotted floating orbs in a video taken in the hog’s head room, still decorated for Halloween.
“There’s something up there,” Manuel Banuelos, also a manager, tells CP, agreeing it’s a “different vibe” when working alone. “I was in the [hog’s head room] and [heard] the unmistakable sound of someone moving chairs in the other room four times. And it's carpet, so it’s not just creaks that the house is making. I quickly closed up and ran out, because it was freaky.”
Because of supposed sightings in the women’s bathroom, I had to go in by myself. After calling for Mrs. Soffel for a minute, the lights flickered and my phone froze up. This was during a torrential downpour, and my outdated phone freezes often, but, of course, I choose to believe.
For the Soffel skeptics, even if a ghost doesn’t come for you, Shiloh staff pranks might. During a walk-through of the basement, I recoiled at a clown puppet, dangling off a shelf.
“Oh, don't pay any attention to the clown,” Mangrum says casually. “Isn't that thing awful? It’s really good. We move it around so it keeps the staff on their toes.”
“There was one time when I opened when Gene [Mangrum] put the clown right in the front door,” Banuelos recalls. “So I punched it. And he's like, ‘You could have broken it!’ I was like … This is an actual reaction to someone getting scared.”
Bogard admits to planting the clown in the basement.
Scares aside, Shiloh Gastro is “a fun place,” Banuelos says. He enjoys serving the regulars from Mt. Washington, who have frequented the pub since it was the Shiloh Inn, and even advises them to borrow Mrs. Soffel from the library.
“It's cool to see the history keep up with the people in the neighboring houses,” Banuelos tells CP.
The alleged Soffel haunting, Biddle connection, and the historical arc of the building makes for “a good story,” Mangrum says. “In the early 1900s, this was pretty close to the frontier … It had all the rough and tumble characteristics of that time. It’s a reminder that there are real people that lived here … And humans are just as flawed then as they are now.”
