Free Republic

A grandpa’s haunting Thanksgiving ghost story appeared to help two brothers uncover a near 200-year-old “murder mystery.” Bill and Frank Watson were told a chilling tale about 57 Irish immigrants who died at a railroad site in Pennsylvania during the cholera epidemic in 1832. The area is now known as “Duffy’s Cut” as the rail workers’ boss was named Philip Duffy. It is a stretch of tracks located around 30 miles from Philadelphia. The brothers were told the chilling tale by their grandpa – a railroad worker – every Thanksgiving. They believe the rail workers died violently and not from...

For long-buried Irish railroad workers, the story of DuffyÂ’s Cut is finally beng told. Missing molar gives clue. In late April 1832, a ship carrying laborer John Ruddy rounded the Irish headlands and plowed west across the Atlantic. Ruddy, 18 and poor, was sailing for Philadelphia with dreams of a better life. By August, his body lay buried near the new railroad he'd been building in Chester County. His skull, unearthed last year, had been crushed, as if someone had smashed it with a blunt instrument or projectile. That's the way Dr. Matthew Patterson sees it. Patterson is a Lancaster...

Malvern, Pennsylvania (CNN) -- "This is a mass grave," Bill Watson said as he led the way through the thick Pennsylvania woods in a suburb about 30 miles from Philadelphia. "Duffy's Cut," as it's now called, is a short walk from a suburban cul-de-sac in Malvern, an affluent town off the fabled Main Line. Twin brothers Bill and Frank Watson believe 57 Irish immigrants met violent deaths there after a cholera epidemic struck in 1832. They suspect foul play. "This is a murder mystery from 178 years ago, and it's finally coming to the light of day," Frank Watson said....

Online: http://www.duffyscutproject.com Malvern, PA -- Young and strapping, the 57 Irish immigrants began grueling work in the summer of 1832 on the Philadelphia and Columbia railroad. Within weeks, all were dead of cholera. Or were they murdered? Two skulls unearthed at a probable mass grave near Philadelphia this month showed signs of violence, including a possible bullet hole. Another pair of skulls found earlier at the woodsy site also displayed traumas, seeming to confirm the suspicions of two historians leading the archaeological dig. "This was much more than a cholera epidemic," William Watson said. Watson, chairman of the history department...

Irish railroad grave mystery solved Scientists in Pennsylvania believe they have found a mass grave containing the bodies of 57 Irish immigrants who died 175 years ago. The men from Donegal, Tyrone and Londonderry had made the journey across the Atlantic in the summer of 1832 to work on the railroads, but their time in the US was tragically short. Mystery still surrounds the question of how they met their deaths just six weeks after getting off the boat - a cholera epidemic was blamed, but foul play has never been ruled out. At the time, a cholera epidemic was...