The Old Allegheny County Jail: A Jailbreak, a Shootout, and the Ghosts That Followed

A warden's wife, two condemned brothers, a jailbreak through the warden's own house, and prisoners reporting ghosts five years later.

By LocalOctober 4, 20263 min read

Photo: Mike Hindle on Unsplash

Downtown, attached to the courthouse by a stone bridge, sits a building that looks like a castle built by somebody in a bad mood. For 109 years it was the Allegheny County Jail. People were hanged in its yard. A warden's wife ran off with a condemned murderer out of its front door. And in 1907, prisoners told reporters they were seeing his ghost in the halls.

The building

The jail and the Allegheny County Courthouse were designed by Henry Hobson Richardson, one of the great American architects of the 19th century, and finished in the 1880s. It's heavy stone, deep arches, and small windows, the style people call Richardsonian Romanesque, and Richardson himself considered the complex his best work.

The piece everyone remembers is the covered bridge over Ross Street connecting the courthouse to the jail. Prisoners crossed it from a cell to a courtroom and back. Somebody started calling it the Bridge of Sighs, after the one in Venice, and the name stuck.

The jail held prisoners until 1995, when the county opened the new facility on Second Avenue. The old building now handles court functions.

The Biddle brothers

In 1901, Ed and Jack Biddle, two brothers from Amherstburg, Ontario, ran a burglary crew in Pittsburgh that used chloroform on its victims. A robbery in Mount Washington ended with grocer Thomas Kahney shot dead. The brothers were convicted and sentenced to hang, and they waited in the Allegheny County Jail.

Kate Soffel was 35, married to warden Peter Soffel, and the mother of four. She visited prisoners with Bible verses and fruit, which is how she ended up at the Biddles' cell. Ed was 24 and, by every newspaper account of the day, handsome enough that women around the county wrote letters insisting he was innocent.

She fell for him. Then she started smuggling in saw blades and revolvers.

The escape

In the small hours of January 30, 1902, the brothers sawed through their bars, squeezed out, and jumped the guards. They collected Soffel, who was waiting in the jail library, and walked out through the warden's own residence, wearing stolen street clothes.

Three people walked out of a maximum security jail through the warden's house while the warden slept. The city could not believe it.

They cut through the alleys downtown, took a trolley north toward Perrysville, stole a sleigh and a shotgun, and started for Canada. The story was front page news from Ontario to California, with a $5,000 reward offered for the brothers dead or alive.

The road in Butler County

Detective Charles "Buck" McGovern, who had arrested the Biddles the first time, worked out where they were headed. On January 31, a posse caught the sleigh on a road near Mount Chestnut, west of Butler.

The Biddles refused to stop, and the shooting started. Both brothers were hit repeatedly. When police reached the sleigh, Kate Soffel was lying beside them with a gunshot wound to the chest. She had shot herself.

Ed and Jack died on February 1, 1902. Soffel lived. She pleaded guilty to aiding an escape, served two years in Western Penitentiary, lost her marriage and her children, and died in 1909. A Post-Gazette piece on her later years noted a line from the end of her life: it's safe to say that hard work killed her.

Hollywood eventually made the movie, Mrs. Soffel, in 1984, with Diane Keaton and Mel Gibson, shot partly at the jail itself.

The hauntings

Here's the part that puts it on an October list.

In 1907, five years after the escape, a widely circulated newspaper story reported that prisoners in the Allegheny County Jail were complaining about seeing the Biddle brothers in the halls. Not a modern ghost hunter's claim. A contemporary account, from people locked in the building where it happened.

Guards and staff have added to it ever since: footsteps in empty corridors, cell doors, cold spots in the old blocks. The local ghost tour operators call it the most haunted building in Pittsburgh, and whatever you make of that, the history underneath is real. Men were executed in that yard. People died in those cells.

If you want to see it

The old jail still stands on Ross Street, and the Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation has run tours and a small museum in part of the building. Hours have changed over the years, so check before you go, and remember it's a working court building, not an attraction.

Stand under the Bridge of Sighs on a gray afternoon and the story doesn't need any help.