The Pig Lady of Cannelton (Cannelton/Darlington Township) 🐷🐽

By now, some of you have heard of the infamous legend/ghost story of the ‘Pig Lady’ of Cannelton, an unincorporated community located inside of Darlington Township. This is a rather ancient place in our county; it was settled in 1795 and construction for a railroad to connect to New Galilee was built in 1852. My friend and fellow author, Michael Kishbucher, has a Facebook Page that has procured a lot more information on this mysterious topic; you can read more bout it here. It was also a source of coal mining for its early inhabitants; eventually, however, it was established as a farming community and that it where this story gets its setting.

This is one of the most mysterious and macabre tales of our region. It centers around a young lady named Barbara Davidson; she was the daughter of Samuel and Cora McCaskey. Sometime in her flower of youth, she married a young man whose name was Nathan Davidson; like Barbara’s father, he was a soldier in the American Revolution who we know about; it is also known that he disappeared quite suddenly for reasons not known. Some folks say he died in a tragic accident and Barbara was forced back onto her parent’s farm. That is all we really know. From there, a strange and bloody occurrence would take place.

In the summer of 1795, her father and mother left on a trip to Pittsburgh to purchase supplies for their farm. Barbara stayed behind and tended to the farming duties required. After a few days had passed, Barbara’s parents arrived back from their trip; when they arrived up the dirt road that was in front of the farmhouse, no one was there to greet them. This was strange to them. Everything seemed silent and strange. The only sounds they could hear were the animals that were kept in the barn. There seemed to be no sign of their daughter anywhere. When they got off their wagon, they began calling her name. She did not answer. They went inside the house. She was not there. After a few more hours had passed and a careful examination around the farm turned out nothing, her parents grew heavy with worry. Where was Barbara? It was not like her to do this. A search party by her parents and neighbors, for the next few days, still turned up nothing. There was no sign of her anywhere. As more days passed in the sweltering summer heat, a foul smell became aggressively notable from underneath the floorboards near the front of the house. As their curiosity got the best of both, they began digging out a crawl space from where the smell originated. To their horror, they found the remains of their daughter! However, one thing was even more astonishing, her head had been cut off and missing from the body! It was never found. An investigation by authorities at the time (which could have meant just local townspeople; there wasn’t anything even remotely close to forensics in those days) could not identify who her killer was. She was buried in the local cemetery and that was the end of it. Or was it?

Over the next hundred years and beyond, various accounts of Barbara’s ghost would surface. One night in the early 1800’s, a man going on a dirt road in his wagon was greeted by an apparition of what appeared to be the figure of a young lady missing her head; startled by this ghostly figure, the horses shook so violently, they threw him off of the wagon and ran from this figure, leaving the unknown man stranded for the rest of the night. As the sightings grew more with fame, another tale of interest comes from a group of boys playing near a bridge in the area where they claim that a ghostly female figure with the head of a pig began to chase them down the road; they never played on the bridge again or even walked on it. During the 1950’s, it was claimed by folks residing in the area that a female apparition wearing a head from a pig was seen walking along the cemetery in which she was entered and along some of the local county roads on certain nights. Long ago, on a warm summer’s evening, a man was said to be camping somewhere in the woods near Cannelton. One night he claimed something terrifying occurred that prevented him from talking about for many years.

While relaxing near his campfire, he saw something emerge from the fire itself. When it took its final form, it was that of a headless woman who began to speak to him! It only said one sentence: ‘tell them Raynoel!’ For some time afterwards, the mysterious man was unable to remember what the lady ghost had said to him. He was so swollen with fear for the rest of the night that he could not even move. When morning finally arrived, he packed up his things and was never seen again; however, after some time had passed, he related this gruesome tale to a stranger who wrote it down. After some lengthy research, it was claimed that there was a Indian/French fur trapper in the Beaver County area who went by the name of Raynoel. Accordingly, he possessed a bad reputation and was friendly to no one. Could it be that he was Barbara Davidson’s killer, and that she was trying to communicate from beyond the grave to tell the folks in Cannelton who her killer might be? It is not known who the man was that camping that night, or who he told his story to. As for the mysterious Indian called Raynoel, no one knows anything about him, or if he even existed. It is now preserved in the continuing legends of the ‘Pig Lady.’