West Mount Vernon’s haunted history includes three murders that once gripped the borough in fear
West Mount Vernon Street may be Lansdale’s most popular trick-or-treating spot today, but its history holds darker tales that linger just beneath the surface. Decades ago, this seemingly festive street witnessed a string of violent tragedies that now sit in eerie contrast to its extravagant Halloween displays.
The first act of horror to strike this otherwise peaceful street happened on the morning of June 4, 1926. Robert Hill, age 50, made a visit to the post office at around 6:30am. The postal employees, surely not wise to Mr Hill’s plan, processed his special delivery letter quickly, and had it on Chief Woffindin’s desk at the police station by 8 o’clock that same morning.
Inside the envelope was a simple note that read, “Call at once, 21 Mount Vernon Street.”
Not knowing if the note was a hoax, Woffindin brought the borough supervisor, Willing U. Weidner, to accompany him to the Hill home. When they arrived nothing seemed out of sorts. Unable to get anyone to answer the door, the two men circled the house searching for another way in. They found a first floor window that was able to be pushed open.
Weidner was the first to climb his way into the house only to step into a nightmare. Lillian, Mr. Hill’s forty-five-year-old wife, lay sprawled out on the bed barely clinging to life. Upstairs lay Paul, Robert and Lillian’s nineteen-year-old son, already dead. Both of them had been attacked with a hammer and shot.
Robert was found in the basement having taken his own life, the .38-caliber revolver he used as part of his dastardly acts laid on the floor beside him. Lillian was rushed to Montgomery Hospital, but later succumbed to her injuries.
When neighbors were questioned, they all insisted that nothing seemed off about the family, nor did they hear any commotion that morning. Weidner said of the crime, “I cannot believe that someone who was not insane could do a thing like that.”
Chief Woffindin theorized that money woes unhinged Robert’s mind. The Reporter called the act “one of the most brutal that has ever taken place in the North Penn section”, but it wasn’t to be the last, not even on that street.
Fourteen years later another filicide rocked the avenue, and what is just as shocking is that it happened right across the road from the first. Daniel McCabe, who was less than two months old, was sadly found dead in his crib at 14 Mount Vernon Street on New Year's Day of 1940.
At first the sudden death was declared to be of natural causes. However, about two weeks later, Twenty-two year old Benjamin McCabe admitted to Chief Woffindin that he killed his seven-week-old son. Benjamin was tried and found guilty of first degree murder and sentenced to life in prison.
Unfortunately, the tragedies don’t end there. In 1967 the body of sixty eight-year-old widow, Elsie F. Reed was found lying in a pool of blood in the vestibule of her home at 432 Mount Vernon. Two blocks away Raymond Ludwig, the 20 year old boarder of Reed’s home, was found on York Avenue with a self-inflicted stomach wound and holding an eight inch bone handled hunting knife.
Ludwig admitted to stabbing his landlady to police at the scene, but would later enter a not guilty plea in court. A jury found him guilty of first degree murder and sentenced him to life imprisonment, although he may have lived out his days at Norristown State Hospital after multiple suicide attempts.
Is it a coincidence that what is now a Halloween hotspot for Lansdale was once the backdrop for some of the most horrendous crimes in the borough’s history? Or is there something more sinister haunting Mount Vernon Street? You can be the jury of that.
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