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Massacre at Duffy's Cut Part 1

Massacre at Duffy's Cut Part 1

Astonishing Legends vor 3 Jahren

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1:07:06

In September of 2000, history professor Dr. William "Bill" Watson
of Immaculata University stopped by the campus for a break with
friend and fellow bagpipe musician Tom Connor during a long drive
back from a performance. While there, around 10:00 p.m.
near the typically deserted faculty center lawn, both men
witnessed a strange apparition that would later lead to a
remarkable and meaningful coincidence. Two years after this
experience, Bill's twin brother, Reverend Dr. Frank Watson, by
chance, came across a file once kept by their grandfather Joseph
Tripician, a former secretary to the president of the
Pennsylvania Railroad in the 1970s. One official record in
this file documented a tragedy connected to a ghost story their
grandfather told annually at Thanksgiving dinner. The
report outlined a mass death of workers on an arduous stretch of
the then Philadelphia and Columbia Railroad in the summer and
fall of 1832. Contractor Phillip Duffy had hired 57 Irish
immigrants to lay the tracks for roughly a mile through thickset
trees and over a deep ravine about 20 miles west of
Philadelphia. 39 newly arrived immigrants, one of them a
woman, and 18 others already working there would all be dead
within ninety days of their hire. Irish Catholic immigrants
were often viewed with prejudice as unseemly and unwelcome
intruders by established society and expendable workers by the
railroad and mining companies profiting from their cheap and
desperate labor. When the second global cholera pandemic
reached this work camp, the record suggested that all 57 had
succumbed to the deadly disease. Compelled by the discovery
of this document, in August 2004, Bill and Frank Watson, along
with two university associates, led an archaeological excavation
to find the accurate burial site for these victims. On
March 24, 2009, it was announced that the first human remains had
been found. However, a curious twist was discovered by
noted physical and forensic anthropologist Janet Monge, who
analyzed the bones. Her examination revealed that at least
two of the skulls found first likely received perimortem
blunt-force trauma and gunshot wounds. This conclusion
leads to the prominent theory that workers were either killed out
of fear they would spread the contagion, to quell a rebellion or
both. Please join us for part one of a story that yearns to
be told, the Massacre at Duffy's Cut.

Visit our website for a lot more information on this episode.