Blog-o-ween 2023: "Blue Mist Road"

We are going to switch things up a little bit for today’s Blog-o-ween 2023 entry. I don’t have a particular author or short story in mind. In fact, the stories that I want to talk about today don’t really have a coherent form or a known provenance. Like the campfire tale of “The Hook” that we discussed at the beginning of this Blog-o-ween, these stories just seemed to pop into existence, then got passed around from person to person. As the tales were told and re-told, each “author” lent his/her/their own spin to them. The times in which they were told also had an influence on what was said to have happened. These tales may not have a specific author or subject, a particular form or content, but they all share one trait in common: they all take place on “Blue Mist Road.”

“Blue Mist Road” is not its correct name. Its actual name is Irwin Road. In total, it runs for two-and-a-quarter miles from Babcock Boulevard to Route 910 (otherwise known as Wexford Road) in the North Hills area of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. Much of this distance, however, is closed to vehicular traffic. It is one of scores of narrow roads that run through the woods of Western Pennsylvania. The trees growing alongside the road reach up and join their canopies to form a natural, leafy tunnel through which the road travels. Although it is only a half mile from the golfers and boaters in North Park, two-and-a-half miles from the suburban sprawl of Gibsonia, and three miles from the shopping plazas of Wexford, Irwin Road feels as though it exists in the middle of nowhere. There are no streetlights running along its length, and very few houses. Whatever drives there, drives there alone.

Irwin Road picked up its moniker of “Blue Mist” or “Blue Myst” because of an eerie mist that envelops the area from time to time. For such a small strip of land, Blue Mist Road has more than its fair share of urban legends and spooky stories. It seems that every fear, every bad feeling, every dark tale in the surrounding countryside found refuge in the woods that run along the road.

Blue Mist Road is home to many ghosts and goblins. Some of these are of the type to be found on any similar stretch of road. For instance, there is the story that a family was once driving on Blue Mist Road when either a drunk driver or a deer forced their car off the road and head-on into a tree. There were no survivors, but it is said that if you drive there and put your car into neutral, their ghosts will push your car back in the way that it came. Talk about AAA roadside service! It’s the Afterlife Automobile Association!

Other stories concern the ruins of several old houses in the area. With only its stone foundations intact, one house is said to be called “Midget Farm” because (so the story goes) it was owned by a little person hoping to escape the scrutiny of his neighbors. Anyone caught stopping nearby or coming close to investigate the ruins is attacked and chased away by a group of angry little people.

I don’t make the news, people. I just report it.

Other stories report that if you drive your car to the closed section of Blue Mist Road and honk your horn three times, then you will awaken and anger the spirits there. If you think about it, however, what you are probably awakening is some poor slob that has to get up at the butt-crack of dawn and go to work. I’d be angry, too, if a bunch of people kept blowing their horns outside my house.

No discussion of urban legends would be complete if we didn’t also take a look at the times in which certain stories became more prominent. In the 1960s and 1970s, for instance, the predominant tale was less ghostly and, unfortunately, much more real. It was said then that Blue Mist Road was a meeting place for the Ku Klux Klan. Gruesome stories of murders and lynchings were passed back and forth. None of these stories (like many urban legends) had any basis in fact, but the emergence of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, heightening racial tensions between whites and blacks, as well as the strains being felt throughout the country due to the Generation Gap surely contributed to the proliferation of these stories.

Jump forward a decade or so, and we find a nation caught up in another panic, this one of the Satanic variety. Beginning in the early 1980s and carrying on into the twenty-first century, more than 12,000 unsubstantiated cases of alleged Satanic cults abusing children and making human sacrifices have been made. In the early years of this panic, role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons and musical acts like Ozzy Osbourne and Judas Priest were said to be dissolving the morality of American youth and leading them down the path to Satanic worship.

With this fear gripping the nation, is it any wonder, then, that people began to speak of witch and Satanic cults operating in the woods beyond Blue Mist Road? There were tales of hikers finding ritually slaughtered animals, pentagrams drawn with chalk or blood, and, sometimes, the hoof prints of a goat-like creature walking on two legs. Other stories were told (most likely of the “my friend’s brother’s girlfriend said this actually happened...” variety) of kids walking out into the woods in order to party down only to stumble upon a cadre of men and women in black robes conducting some sort of dark ritual. Whoops! Truth be told, this kind of story just sounds more like it was told by someone who listened to too much Iron Maiden as a kid.

One last story about Blue Mist Road before you go. At the intersection where Irwin Road meets Route 910 there is a cemetery called, appropriately enough, Crossroads Cemetery. There, you will find a pair of headstones belonging to a husband and a wife. Due to erosion, the two headstones are sinking and slowly coming together. Aside from mundane explanations about land subsidence (boring!), there are two other stories about the headstones. One is romantic, the other...not so much. It is said that on nights when the moon is full, the stones come together and “kiss.” The other tale says that when the two headstones finally do come together and touch...the world will end.

Yikes!

Most of the above tales were taken from Thomas White’s book Legends & Lore of Western Pennsylvania. Other tales of Blue Mist Road, you can find several websites dedicated to urban legends and/or the history of the area, like Weird U.S., Positively Pittsburgh, and The Parting of Veils. I also found some good information thanks to The Uproar: The Student Voice of North Allegheny Senior High. Aris Paster wrote an excellent piece entitled “Petrifying Pittsburgh” back in October of 2021.

I’d also like to end today’s post with an invitation to all of you to share your own spooky stories and urban legends that are prevalent in your neck of the woods. Maybe in the future, I can collate these stories into a single post. And maybe then I will include my own tales of witches and Satanism that supposedly took place on a deserted road not far from where I grew up in Western Pennsylvania, Tevebaugh Hollow Road.

Until then...pleasant dreams? Hmmmm? Heh-heh-heh!