The Melt Shop Ghost: Pittsburgh's Most Chilling Haunting

Now, before Pittsburgh became a city of hospitals, universities, and football, it was fire.

At night, the steel mills along the Monongahela lit the skies orange.

Former J&L workers said the Bessemer furnaces at Two Shop burned so brightly that people could read the newspaper from a block away.

Pittsburgh earned the nickname Hell with the Lid Off.

Two Shop was a maze of furnaces, platforms, pits, rail lines, and moving ladders.

Men worked above open vessels of steel that could reach nearly 3,000 degrees.

The light was so intense they needed special lenses to look into it.

The ghost story was almost less frightening than the job.

Every man who entered that mill knew the building could crush him, burn him, or make him disappear.

In one 12-month period in the early 1900s, Allegheny County recorded 195 casualties in its steel mills.

Hundreds more workers were hospitalized or permanently injured.

Some deaths left no body to take home.

In 1910, a worker named John Mitchell fell 18 feet into a soaking pit containing a white-hot ingot.

Reports said his body was consumed.

Only a faint outline remained.

He left a wife and five children.

The mills developed rituals for death like that.

Sometimes a block of steel equal to the missing worker's weight was placed in a coffin.

Sometimes a smaller piece from the fatal pour was given to the family.

If they could not bury the man, they buried the steel.