Mt. Moriah - Fact or Fiction?

Written by John Ellingsworth

Wednesday, 07 July 2004

The fictional story below was sent to me by Jack Myers from his soon to be released (sometime in 2005) book Row House Days, which is about his childhood in Southwest Philadelphia during the 1960s. He's changed all the names in the story to protect the innocent - Mt. Moriah is Mt. Lebanon, Cobbs Creek is Dobbs Creek, Crazy George is Crazy Sam, etc. but if you are familiar with the area, you will probably recognize the names. I would suggest all who read it drop Mr. Myers a line and tell him you read the story; I am sure he would love to hear back from you! A big thanks to Jack for sharing his hard work! The Legend of Crazy Sam © Copyright 2004 by Jack Myers Nobody seems to know this Crazy Sam, don't even know his last name. But just about everyone in Kings Cross knows about him. Caretaker for the old Mt. Lebanon Cemetery that straddles the lower part of Dobbs Creek. That's the Protestant place when all Gram's people are buried - my mother's family and all the Catholics have their own separate deal out in the suburbs. This Crazy Sam lives by himself in the only house on Mt. Lebanon's grounds. Just Sam, his hound dogs, and a couple of thousand dead Protestant people . . . nice and quiet. Drinks rotgut whiskey they say - makes him meaner than hell. Talk is old Sam caught a piece of shrapnel in the head during the Battle of the Bulge. Never really been the same since . . . the nearby Hayden Police Department tried to bring Sam aboard years ago, him being a veteran and all. But the borough had to let him go. Wasn't working out, the man was too unpredictable. Nothing specific, just gossip. That's the way it's always been with Crazy Sam. Lots of rumors, nothing solid. One thing's for sure, Crazy Sam hates kids. Don't ever let him catch you on his turf, especially after sundown. The man takes things personally. He'll come after you in his beat-up pickup truck, sic the dogs on you. Has a gun rack in the truck, keeps a gun loaded. Shotgun, double-barreled. The scoop is he takes out the lead shot, pours rock salt in the shells in place of the lead pellets. Won't kill you at a distance, but it burns like a son-of-a-gun. Make you wish you were dead. The cemetery looms as a partial barrier between Kings Cross and hardscrabble Haskell, the next neighborhood over. Or, if you're Catholic, between Our Lady of Perpetual Peace and Holy Epiphany Parish. It's such a big piece of real estate that naturally Mt. Lebanon's going to serve as a boundary, whether official or not. Even the Lester Avenue trolley car takes a detour around Mt. Lebanon. Turns south to Kings Cross Avenue at 60th, then west past the cemetery, and finally back north to Lester Avenue along 63rd where Lester picks up again on the other side of the sprawling graveyard. The cemetery's also a natural spot for kids to explore. All those trees, hills, open fields, looping cemetery roads, mausoleums, row after row of tombstones. Problem is, some of the hardcore juvenile delinquents from Haskell like to throw the occasional beer blast in a few of the more remote areas. Go crazy, party hard, knock over some headstones, do more than a little damage. If I were in Sam's shoes I might get a little steamed myself. But shooting at kids? Like we were so many rats down at one of Haskell's many auto junkyards?? Seems a bit over the top to me. Maybe somebody oughtta pull this Sam fella off the track before he hits the wall. Not every kid in Kings Cross or even Haskell is a delinquent. And you shouldn't get shot at just for being a kid in the cemetery. But that's not the way ol' Crazy Sam sees it. If you took a poll in Kings Cross I'd say maybe half the kids would claim they'd gotten a dose of Crazy Sam's rock salt. Most of the remaining half would tell you they were shot at but missed. Myself, I'm too scared to get close enough for either. Once me, Howie, Jackie, Dave, Scotty, and some of the others sneak in to find the gravesite of Betsy Ross, the lady who designed the first Stars and Stripes. You know, the colonial one with the stars all in a circle. Davey Cutler has been to see the Ross tomb, but has trouble remembering the way. Just as we make a wrong turn, then try to double back, someone shouts, Here comes Crazy Sam! Look out!! In two seconds flat kids are scurrying left and right, ducking down behind the headstones. Sure enough I hear this engine coming fast, peek out from behind a slab of granite to see the infamous red pickup bouncing down the gravel road in our direction. Trailed by a moving cloud of dust and dirt, pebbles flying every which way. I duck back down, close my eyes. Start to pray. Please, God. I'll won't ever play in the cemetery again. I swear. Crazy Sam never sees us. The truck keeps going, up, up, and over the next hill until it drops out of sight. The dust settles, the cemetery grows quiet again. Forget Betsy Ross, she ain't goin' nowhere. We all hightail it outta there, through the woods towards the creek and Dobbs Creek Parkway, hearts beating a mile-a-minute. Take the long way home along the Parkway to Venice, nobody minds. No one has the stomach for daring the shortcut - a mad dash across open fields to the cemetery's eastern exit. What if Crazy Sam comes back around and spots us? Out in the open? All by ourselves? What then?? Ducks on the pond, rats in the junkyard. Besides the Betsy Ross grave site expedition there's the time Howie and friend Johnny Deemer come back to Littlefield Street all excited and out-of-breath. Ran all the way home from the infamous Mt. Lebanon. The back of Howie's dungarees look all torn and disheveled. Johnny has a nasty red mark on his forearm. I ask, What happened? It was Crazy Sam! says Howie. He caught us and let us have it with the rock salt. My legs feel like they're on fire! I look to Johnny, who nods earnestly, emphatically. His eyes are saying, It's true, Jimmy. We ain't lyin'. We swear. Whatever Howie and Johnny say, you gotta take with a grain of salt, ha ha. This is the same Howie who conned Bertie the Bunyip for birthday presents on local TV. The same Howie who painted food coloring on gumballs to cheat Mr. Nolan out of dozens of chocolate bars. The same Howie who tormented the poor kosher Fish Man into a homicidal rage. The same Howie whose big mouth is always getting me into scrapes, getting Big Brother Jimmy to fight his battles. The same Howie who climbed up on Grandmom's porch rocker as a toddler and plunged through the glass window, turning his thick little skull into a terrifying, glass-slivered, God-awful bloody mess. He's been adding to those scars ever since that day. Howie never does anything the easy way. So I have to wonder, is this another one of Howie's tall tales? The overactive imagination of two suggestion-prone preteens? Mass hysteria Kings Cross style?? Adults don't shoot at kids, right? Not even with rock salt, for God's sake. I hustle Howie up to our bedroom so Mom doesn't see. Get a washcloth and some water, make Howie strip off the jeans. Sure enough, ugly little red welts up the back of one leg and down the other. Then I look closer at the pants . . . see the faint white markings against the dark blue denim. Salt. These aren't mosquito bites on Howie's skin, or scratches from thorny bushes. This is the real deal, Howie and Johnny are on the level. Yep, Crazy Sam really is crazy. Which explains why the story going around this summer is so entirely believable. Kids swear by it, and now even some of the grownups are buying in too. It's the talk of the neighborhood, the talk all around Southwest. They say Crazy Sam killed a kid back in July. The kid's got a name, too - Russ Mahoney. He's a run-of-the-mill Haskell punk who's been missing for weeks. No clues, no nothing. Got grounded by his folks, slipped out of the house, was last seen in the vicinity of Mt. Lebanon Cemetery. Crazy Sam's cemetery. Now, voila - no more Russ Mahoney. Word is Crazy Sam caught Russ, chased the teenager behind one of those big mausoleums. Cornered him. Shot the kid point blank in the face with the rock salt. Even loaded with salt, that twelve gauge is a mighty powerful weapon. Must be deadly at close range. Very deadly. Hid the poor kid's body in the mausoleum. Waited for the next convenient, under-attended burial. Told the guys with the back hoe to take a break from the heat, go get some lemonade. When no one was around, dragged Russ Mahoney's body from the mausoleum over to the freshly dug gravesite. Now Russ is bunking with some old geezer in a lime-green polyester suit and a bad hairpiece. Six feet under. For all eternity. This all starts as rumor, grows into rampant speculation. Pretty soon it's become a done deal. Crazy Sam killed the boy, no doubt, case closed. After all, this is Crazy Sam we're talking about. Right? Great theory. The only problem is, two weeks before Labor Day, Russ Mahoney turns up alive and reasonably well down in sunny Florida. Seems he got tired of his parents' nagging requests to stop flunking school, quit getting into trouble with the cops, and cut out drinking beer with all the other lowlifes under the B&O railroad bridge. So he hitchhikes all the way down to Ft. Lauderdale. Bums around, hangs out at the beach, goes dumpster diving for half-eaten ham and cheese sandwiches. Now tired and hungry and bored, he calls Philadelphia, has his parents arrange for a seat on the next Greyhound bus going north. One way. So much for the speculation about our man Sam. The entire 'He Murdered Mahoney' story is full of baloney, so much hot air. Doesn't matter, say Sam's critics. It's just a question of time. He's gonna kill somebody someday with that shotgun. After all, he's Crazy Sam, isn't he? Whaddaya expect? The man's more than a few bricks short of a full load. A walking time bomb. But kids like Howie and Johnny keep going back for the thrills. For them hiding out from Crazy Sam in Mt. Lebanon is even more fun than running behind the mosquito truck when the city is spraying the streets of Southwest in thick, misty clouds of DDT. As for me, I'm still playing it cool, keeping my distance from the cemetery. Crazy Sam's not going any place. Neither is his shotgun. And rock salt is cheap, they haul it in by the truckload every winter for Mt. Lebanon's roads. Besides, even if Crazy Sam doesn't getcha, maybe Disappearing Diana will. Disappearing Diana doesn't need a gun. Unlike Russ Mahoney, Diana is not alive and reasonably well. Disappearing Diana is a ghost. Mt. Lebanon Cemetery, you see, is haunted. Or at least that's the word in old Kings Cross. Ever since that fatal, late-night, one-car wreck on winding Dobbs Creek Parkway back in the fabulous 50s. The mysterious tragedy that cut short Diana's brief, promising young life. The accident that gave Southwest our very own honest-to-goodness spirit-in-residence.

Last Updated ( Tuesday, 25 March 2008 )

 

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