Clarion Content

From the "Can you make it up any stranger than that?" files, the Clarion Content ran across story that went beyond the boundaries of bemusing to a more profoundly weird place. It started innocently enough. Firefighters were called to the old George Washington Hotel in Washington, PA, this past weekend. There was a fire in the laundry room Sunday.

The fire crews set about evacuating the hotel, floor by floor. On the fourth floor, they ran into a room with what Washington, PA, Police Chief, J.R. Blyth, would later call the most grisly murder scene he had borne witness to in his thirty-five years in law enforcement. "[There was] blood on the floor, the mattress, the pillows, piece of a scalp with hair still attached in the center of the bed..."

But by Sunday evening the case had been solved. It was fake blood.

Two years ago, the room had been used to film a scene in a straight-to-DVD movie called "New Terminal Hotel" with the doomed Corey Haim.

The room had been left uncleaned after filming ended because the property owner wasn't sure if the movie crew would have to come back and do re-shoots.

The creepy George Washington Hotel, built in 1923, according to Pittsburgh's Channel 4 Action News, is a perfect setting for a horror movie. More than a dozen people have died in the hotel, four people since current owner Kyrk Pyros bought the hotel, only seven years ago.

The cops were initially mad that detectives put in eight hours of overtime investigating the scene before the mystery was cleared up. In the end, glad no ghastly crime had been perpetrated, they were left shaking their heads at the strange but true story, of a fictional movie starring a man who was dead before the old hotel got the room cleaned.

Labels: Pop Culture