‘Night of the Living Dead’ chapel takes a place on Miniature Railroad and Village landscape
The chapel in the Evans City Cemetery as seen in the opening moments of the classic 1968 movie “Night of the Living Dead.”
Brad Hundt/Observer-Reporter
ON THE COVER: The model of the Evans City Cemetery chapel as seen in the Carnegie Science Center’s Miniature Railroad and Village.
Brad Hundt/Observer-Reporter
A text panel that explains the history of the chapel at the Evans City Cemetery and its association with “Night of the Living Dead” at the Carnegie Science Center’s Miniature Railroad and Village.
PITTSBURGH — In the decades since the original “Night of the Living Dead” rattled moviegoers, fans have been flocking to Evans City Cemetery where the movie’s opening scenes were filmed, looking to find the tombstones and the chapel that appear in the movie’s anxious early minutes.
The chapel was, at one point, a serious candidate for demolition after falling into disrepair. But Gary Streiner, the movie’s sound engineer, spearheaded a campaign to save it more than a decade ago, and it remains in the cemetery, ready to be seen by the regular stream of visitors who make their way to what is almost certainly Butler County’s most photographed graveyard.
The chapel’s landmark status was recently cemented when a model of it was unveiled in the Miniature Railroad and Village at the Carnegie Science Center. It takes its place in the Village, with its scenes of old-time rural beauty, smokestack industry and urban bustle, alongside such essential regional historic sites as Forbes Field, Fallingwater, the Rachel Carson Homestead and Washington’s LeMoyne House.
At the unveiling of the miniature chapel in September, Carnegie Science Center director Jason Brown explained that new models are typically rolled out in November, just before the holiday season, but debuting the “Night of the Living Dead” chapel earlier was “perfect timing for Halloween.”
The addition of the Evans City Cemetery chapel is also unique in that it has become an important local fixture in the last 50 years – everything else in the Miniature Railroad and Village depicts life in the region before 1940. But Nikki Wilhelm, the manager of the Miniature Railroad and Village, said they had some wiggle room with the stone chapel because it was built in 1923, 17 years before the cutoff date.
“We figured we would do something spooky for Halloween,” Wilhelm said. She also pointed out that residents of the Evans City have wholly embraced their association with “Night of the Living Dead” and the chapel and cemetery are its most noteworthy landmarks.
The chapel was in such a precarious state before its successful restoration effort that “if there was a backhoe or a tractor on a free day, that chapel could very well have been gone,” Streiner said. When the Observer-Reporter visited the cemetery in 2008 for a story on the 40th anniversary of “Night of the Living Dead,” someone had spray painted “Monster A Go-Go” on a side wall of the crumbling building.
“It just sat there and the weather gobbled it up,” Streiner added. Now that the chapel has been restored and a tiny version of it is enshrined in the Miniature Railroad and Village, “It’s ingrained in Pittsburgh now forever,” he said.
Throughout October, spooky figures will be turning up in the Miniature Railroad and Village, such as a werewolf, witch, zombies, a headless horseman, the Mothman and Bigfoot. Text panels have also been put in place that tell hair-raising tales from the Pittsburgh region, such as the mysterious crash of a B-25 into the Monongahela River in 1956 and a peculiar banana explosion in the Strip District.
In addition, the Science Center’s Rangos Giant Cinema will be screening “Night of the Living Dead” on Friday, Oct. 28 and Saturday, Oct. 29 at 5:30 p.m. both days.
Meanwhile, voting is open on what the next addition should be to the Miniature Railroad and Village. Until December, visitors to carnegiesciencecenter.org/exhibits/miniature-railroad can vote on whether the next model unveiled in March should be the Frederick J. Osterling Office and Studio on the North Side, the Oliver Miller Homestead in South Park, or the Allegheny County Airport.