Remember When: Horrific steel mill accidents lead to special memorial events and reports of haunted events

In the early morning hours of June 23, 1910, John Mitchell died in unimaginable ways at the West Penn Steel plant in Brackenridge.

As a tongsman at the mill, his job was to oversee the handling of the hot steel ingots from the furnace.

In order for the steel to be processed successfully, it must reach a proper, uniform temperature throughout its entire mass. To achieve this, the newly cast ingot is placed in a soaking pit, a furnace that reheats the steel to a temperature of 2,200 to 2,300 degrees.

The pit in the bottom of a mill is covered with a sliding roof panel. While in the pit, the steel in the ingot has time to reach a uniform temperature and can be heated further if necessary for maximum workability.

Mitchell had just given the order to open the gates of a nearby pit. A boy, Robert Trees, who was in charge of the doors over the soaking pits, pulled the wrong lever. Mitchell was thrown 18 feet to the bottom of a pit he was standing over. It contained a white-hot steel ingot.

Work colleagues who rushed to the scene reported that Mitchell’s body had been completely consumed by the hot ingot. They said only the faint outline of his body was visible.

Trees, whose age is unknown at this time, was so distressed by the consequences of his mistake that he was placed under the care of a doctor for several hours. At that time, 13-year-old boys were already working in the mills.

In 1916, Congress passed the Keating-Owens Act, which banned children under 14 from working in industries.

Mitchell, 35, lived in Edgecliff, a community directly across from the mill on the Allegheny River, near the mouth of Chartiers Run. He was married and had five small children.

In such a mill accident, there is no body to be returned to the family for burial.

These accidents are also extremely traumatic for colleagues. Some mills have developed practices or rituals in the event of such occurrences.

In the 1970s, a Lower Burrell resident worked at the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation’s bridge unit in Green Tree.

At that time, workers were replacing the existing Brady Street Bridge that connected the Oakland area to the South Side. In order to build the new bridge, now known as Birmingham Bridge, it was necessary to acquire additional land for the bridge and its ramps.

The state sent right-of-way personnel to meet with the property owners to discuss the planned work and negotiate a sales price for the properties. The right-of-way personnel were accompanied by several members of the bridge unit, including two engineers, a senior engineer and a trainee.

In one of the houses, the senior engineer noticed a block of steel the size of half a stick of butter on the mantelpiece. A name and a date were engraved on it. He was about to ask about the object, but his younger assistant signaled him not to.

After he left the house, the younger engineer – whose family worked in the steel industry – told him that the block of steel had been given as a souvenir to a loved one whose body had perished in a mill accident.

On the Steel Mill Pictorial Facebook page, dedicated to the steel industry, there are many stories of factory accidents, including ones in which a worker’s body was completely consumed.

In some factories, a block of steel weighing the same as the missing worker was given to the family to bury in a closed coffin. Occasionally the worker’s body was consumed by contact with slag. In these cases, an equal weight of slag was given to the family for burial.

The rituals and practices varied from mill to mill. In some cases, a piece of steel from the casting was buried in the mill as a memorial. Some mills buried them underground, others buried them on the grounds outside the mill buildings. There are also stories that the ingots involved were sometimes brought outside as spoiled.

In Allegheny County there were 195 deaths in the steel mills between July 1906 and June 1907. Of these, 24 workers died from falling from a height or into a pit. During the same 12-month period, there were 509 accidents that resulted in hospitalization and 76 that resulted in serious permanent injuries.

Ghost stories arose due to the many deaths in the area’s mills. Today, some mills and former mill sites offer ghost tours in October.

One of the most famous stories in the Pittsburgh area occurred at Jones and Laughlin Steel Corp.’s Shop No. 2. at the South Side plant.

The ghost of a steelworker, James Grabowski, was said to haunt the mill from his death in 1922 until the mill’s destruction in 1960. He died when he fell into a pan of molten steel. Over the years, many workers claimed to have seen his apparition and heard his cries for help followed by laughter.

In the Alle Kiski Valley, Lower Burrell resident Gerie Rossi tells a story told by her father, John Schenk, who worked at Braeburn Alloy Steel. As the story goes, Schenk was sitting in the break room next to the rolling mill when a supervisor and friend named Jack Wilks walked past him.

Schenk said, “Hello.” Wilks didn’t respond, which prompted Schenk to ask, “Can’t you say hello?”

He watched as Wilks walked across the room and passed through a solid wall. It was then that Schenk realized that he had seen a ghost, as Wilks had died a few years earlier.