Thursday, November 11, 2021

On Christmas Eve, 1933 (the great depression was in full effect), a young woman in blue stepped in front of a train. It took 60 years to figure out who she was


in Willoughby, Ohio, a small city just off Lake Erie, a young woman in bright blue—her dress, coat, scarf, hat, and purse all blue—was out walking when she was struck by a New York Central passenger train. She had nothing in her purse but ninety cents and a ticket to Corry, Pennsylvania.

Just two days earlier, she had been kicked off a streetcar in Kirtland, after failing to pay her fare. As she wandered the streets of the unfamiliar city of Willoughby, a woman noticed her and took her to the boarding house.

Descending the stairs of the boarding house on the morning of Christmas Eve, she met the landlady and asked her for directions to the nearest church.

But after giving her directions, the landlady watched as the girl walked in the opposite direction.

She had been staying for a couple of days at a local boarding house but revealed almost nothing about herself. 

Reports at the time say that she spoke to a couple of people while out walking that December night, then she seemed to simply step in front of the speeding train.

A collection was taken up for a plain headstone, which was inscribed: In memory of the Girl in Blue / Killed by Train / December 24, 1933 / Unknown but not forgotten. 

An additional $15 was placed in a city fund to ensure that geraniums would be placed on the grave once a year.

In 1993, a chain of events changed that, and her true identity was puzzled out. The Girl in Blue was Josephine Klimczak.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/the-girl-in-blue-willoughby-ohio


In 1938, the late Hank Heaverly, who was a sexton at Willoughby Cemetery for more than 25 years, said a young man “driving a new Dodge car” pulled into the cemetery and approached him.

The man told Heaverly he wanted to see his sister’s grave.

“He looked just like her,” Heaverly told The News-Herald in 1966. “He fitted her to a T.”

The young man looked at a photograph taken of the girl in the morgue and said, “It’s her.”

As they walked to the grave, the man explained that he and his 22-year-old sister, Sophie, left their parents’ home in Corry, Pa., during the early years of the Depression to find work in Detroit.

Frustrated at not being able to find a job, the man said he scraped up enough money for train fare for Sophie to return home.

The man gave Heaverly $2 and asked him to buy some flowers to put on his sister’s grave. Then, he drove off.

The News-Herald ran an article in December 1993 marking the anniversary of the Girl in Blue’s death.
The article also ran in the Corry Evening Journal in Corry, Pa.

The article was read by Pennsylvania real estate agent Ed Sekerak, who was involved in selling the former Klimczak family farm in Spring Creek at the time.

He remembered the sale of a family farm and that one of the documents that finalized the sale of the farm was a signed affidavit filed by a son in 1985 that stated that his sister Josephine had died in Willoughby, Ohio on December 24, 1933.

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