Livermore, PA: Urban Legend of the Living Dead

This is a follow up of a previous post, wherein my Uncle Rick took me, as a child, on a short road trip to explore the place where "Night of the Living Dead" was filmed. An astute (and mysterious) reader pointed out that I was most likely writing about Livermore, PA.

There are many things of interest in this Wikipedia article about Livermore. One thing is that it is, indeed, close to Saltsburg, which explains why Rick and I so narrowly escaped ending up in Saltsburg*. To summarize a bit: The town of Livermore had some horrible floods, and in 1936,""The Great St. Patrick’s Day Flood" submerged the town under 18 feet of water, sweeping away the bridge spanning the Conemaugh and fourteen buildings, while others were ruined or severely damaged." After the flood, the town was razed, and a damn was built which flooded it, but saved other, more populated places from flooding more.

The thing that surprises me is that the town was actually demolished before they flooded it, because I have this memory (false memory?) of actually seeing some rooftops just under the water. (We stopped on a hill overlooking the area, and got out to look.) It was probably just my overactive imagination, perhaps encouraged by some suggestive hints from my dear uncle.

So, was "Night of the Living Dead" filmed there?

Wikipedia saves the best for last, "Several urban legends surround the former town... Another belief is that George Romero’s cult horror movie Night of the Living Dead was filmed at the Livermore Cemetery. While the cemetery scene takes place at Livermore, the movie itself was filmed in Evans City, Pennsylvania, more than 60 miles from Livermore.[12] The site is nonetheless considered haunted, and the stories primarily center around the moving of graves that occurred when the town's cemetery was required to be moved to higher ground."

The whole story about FDR seeing the floating bodies from his train must have been part of the whole "urban legend" about the cemetery being moved to higher ground. I feel so special for having been the victim of an urban legend! It's like I belong, somehow, to the greater community of gullibles**.

Thanks for finding this, beananimal!


* I have a tourist's knowledge of Saltsburg. Saltsburg celebrates Canal Day each year, and they of course put a banner up over the main street that says, "Canal Day". One year, the "C" fell off of the sign.

** Did you know that Webster took "gullible" out of the American English dictionary? Apparently, it was offensive, because a Miwok tribe leader was actually named, "Gullible," and he didn't want his name to mean that.