By Mike Seate
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
Homestead police Chief Jeff DeSimone has been enforcing the law in this Mon Valley town for 19 years, and he isn't easily scared.
But the chief was rattled enough in recent months to call for backup. It started when he heard about some strange, unexplained noises in the department's 19th century headquarters.
"I asked officers to submit examples of whether they've heard anything unusual, and a lot of them had," he said. "They've heard locker doors slamming and footsteps when nobody's there. One officer pulled his gun because he was sure there was somebody behind him, but there wasn't.
"I'm not sure I believe in ghosts, but when that many people say they've experienced something, you start to wonder."
Vicci Kenna, the department's secretary, shares that wonder. She told me she has heard voices and noises coming from empty jail cells and other parts of the two-story building.
DeSimone decided to call the Greater Pittsburgh Paranormal Society.
The local version of Ghostbusters visited the headquarters a few weeks ago. Their findings, according to GPPS founder Tonya Boff of Green Tree: "There is something in there."
Boff said an electrical cord from one of the infrared video cameras used to monitor paranormal activity was caught on tape as it fell from the ceiling, verifying suspicions of a haunting.
"It didn't just fall, but it looked like it was violently ripped down," she said.
Although this would make a riveting episode of "Scooby Doo," one can't help but wonder what Homestead's officials are trying to flush out of their darkest spaces.
Homestead has more important things to worry about than ghosts. Things like a violent crime rate that, according to U.S. City Data Crime Index, is four times the national average. The U.S. average is 239.8 crimes per 100,000 residents, according to the index, and Homestead's rate in 2006, the last year for which stats were available, was 1,070.1 crimes per 100,000 residents.
Homestead would fare better focusing not on things that go bump in the night but on things that go "Yo, fool, come up off the car keys" after dark.
The reason behind the borough's booming crime rate is easier to see through than Casper's sheet. Homestead's median family income is around $18,000 -- less than half the state average -- and people will do what they must to survive.
All of which raises the question: Why would a ghost visit this place?
My suspicion is that somebody in Homestead hopes all this haunted hoosegow business might be the civic booster the depressed former mill town needs to turn itself around.
I can see it now: tourists lining up to visit the Mon Valley's best-known haunted house. Before long, MTV will film a reality series with scantily clad twentysomethings bumping and jiggling though a night inside Allegheny County's scariest neighborhood.
On second thought, that's kind of a silly idea. But no sillier than public safety officials who believe in ghosts.
http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsbu ... 63580.html
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