10/27/2026
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No ghosts, no goblins, no door knockers changing into the face of Jacob Marley in this story--just a well-documented coincidence. A very strange coincidence.
The massacre of the Yablonski family ranks as the most shocking crime in our regionโs annals. It was also the biggest news story in America when it happenedโso big, and so gruesome, that they made a movie about it called โAct of Vengeance,โ starring Charles Bronson and Ellen Burstyn. But there's something so strange about it, we thought we'd share it the week leading up to Halloween.
Joseph โJockโ Yablonski was a crusading labor reformer. Three weeks before the murders, Mr. Yablonski had lost a bid to unseat the powerful head of the United Mine Workers of America, Tony Boyle, and Mr. Boyle ordered Mr. Yablonski to be killed. Mr. Yablonskiโs wife, Margaret, and their twenty-five-year-old daughter, Charlotte, were collateral damage. All three were massacred in an act of monstrous vengeance.
After the Yablonski murders, wild tales began circulating that their house was cursed--that screams and gunshots could be heard from inside and that blood oozed from the walls. Sinister folklore is not uncommon when a gruesome thing happens in a house, and in this case, the fantastic tales are easily debunked.
But there is something well-documented about the story that is much creepier--much more disturbing--than all the ghost stories and all the urban legends. What follows is the rest of the story. But you have to read to the end.
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Injustice and corruption were repugnant to the fiery Jock Yablonski, and his convictions might be traced back to an incident that happened in his youth. Back in 1927, when Jock Yablonski was just 17 years old, he was arrested for some offenseโand he claimed he was treated miserably by the arresting officer. We arenโt sure what happened, but Jock Yablonski never got over it--not long before he died, he was still talking about it. Yablonski recounted the story to historian Helen Vogt, who wrote about it in a book.
Mr. Yablonskiโs distaste for injustice led him to announce in June 1969 that he would run for the presidency of the mighty United Mine Workers of America, because the union was marred by corruption. A short time after that announcement, as if to prove Mr. Yablonskiโs point, the head of the union, William Anthony "Tough Tony" Boyle ordered his subordinates to kill Jock Yablonski. That the head of major union would order the hit on a rival made this story so surreal. Boyle had been handpicked by none other than the great union leader John L. Lewis himself (though Lewis came to regret it later when he saw what Boyle was). Several failed attempts were made on Mr. Yablonskiโs life, and when the union election was held in December 1969โan election marred by violence and fraudโBoyle defeated Yablonski.
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But winning the election wasnโt enough for Tony Boyle. Three weeks later, in the predawn blackness of the last day of 1969, three men skulked into the Yablonskisโ historic three-story farmhouse in Clarksville and brutally massacred the Yablonski family. The savagery was beyond description. Mr. Yablonski was shot five times, his wife and daughter twice. A fighter to the end, police said Jock Yablonski was reaching for a sh***un when he was killed.
A few years earlier, Margaret, a playwright, had told the Pittsburgh Press that she did her best thinking in the quiet of her bedโnever fathoming that her life would end in that quiet space in an unspeakable bloodbath.
The bodies were discovered fifty years ago todayโit was a story that rocked the Pittsburgh region as few others had done.
Ironically, in the end, Jock Yablonskiโs war on corruption was a success. A court threw out the union election that Mr. Yablonski had lost and ordered a new election, something that would not have happened if Jock Yablonski had not been murdered. Tony Boyle went on to lose the new election to a Yablonski protรฉgรฉ. Eventually, one of the triggermen tied Boyle to the Yablonski murders, and he was convicted. Boyle died in 1985 while serving three life sentences. Six others also served time for their roles in the murders.
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The Yablonski murders were not the houseโs first brush with the macabre. It harbors dark and strange secrets.
For starters, for a long time, the house had two cell-like wooden cages in the basement, supposedly to house slaves in the previous century.
During Prohibition, so the story goes, a previous owner had hanged himself in that basement.
How likely was it that a stately home in quiet little Clarksville would be the scene of four untimely deaths?
But wait, thereโs something else. Long before the Yablonski murders, in the late 1930s, the house was used as a boardinghouse, and one of the boarders was a man named Frank Palanzo who said he heard voices from the sky and that witches spoke to him.
Palanzo was known to string barbed wire around his house to keep people out, and one time he was spotted in a cornfield covered in corn to the point that he resembled a giant ear of the grain.
Then, on January 30, 1939, Frank Palanzo barricaded himself in a room upstairs, stuck a sh***un out the window and threatened to shoot people below. Someone called the police. A state trooper named George D. Naughton came to the house and climbed the stairs to Palanzoโs room. Palanzo opened the door, and apparently on orders of witches, shot state trooper Naughton to death with a 12-gauge sh***un. It is believed that the room where Naughton went berserk with his sh***un was the same room where Jock Yablonski and his wife would be killed more than 30 years later.
Like the Yablonski murders three decades later, this shocking crime was a major news story reported on the front pages of newspapers across America.
So what are the odds of five gruesome deaths in one house in sleepy little Clarksvilleโand two of the incidents being national news stories?
Just one of those things, you say?
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Alright, then let me tell you one more thing about the house. Remember earlier I related the incident where Jock Yablonski claimed he was treated miserably by a police officer back in 1927 and that Mr. Yablonski never got over it?
That police officer was none other than state trooper George D. Naughtonโthe man who was later killed on the order of witches in the same house where Jock Yablonski and his family also would be massacred some three decades later.
๐๐ฉ๐ข๐ต is one strange coincidence.
NOTE: The former Yablonski house is a private residence and is not open for tours.
