3/20/2024 0 Comments Delco dispatch ridley park pa![]() Since the Midgetville neighborhood really does looks so mainstream and normal, I became really curious how this street was tagged Midgetville in the first place and why it wasn’t my street or your street or any other street in Delaware County. Midgetville residents should capitalize and sell buttons, tee shirts or bumper stickers, imprinted with sentences like ‘I Found Midgetville’ or ‘We’ve Been to Midgetville’ and they could rake it in from the nosey, bothersome tourists! If you can’t beat ’em, you may as well use the whole thing to your advantage. No wonder, no one can find it when they are on a hunt, I concluded.Īnother thought occurred to me while wandering around the famous hood. And you know what? It looks like Any Street, U.S.A. Last week I took a little stroll through Midgetville, just to see for myself what it looked like these days. ‘I was shocked that the legend stretched all the way to the other coast!’ ‘You would have thought he met the most famous celebrity ever,’ she laughed. ![]() When she told him that she lives in Midgetville, he went ballistic. When she said ‘Ridley,’ he lit up like a Christmas tree and asked if she ever heard of the Midgetville there. talking with a man before boarding her plane home and he asked where she was from. I wondered silently if I should ask her if she ever saw him throwing rocks.Īnother resident told me she was in the airport in L.A. ‘People would point at him, asking if he was a midget when they knew darn right well that he was just a little boy outside playing.’ ‘My son would come in crying when he was younger and outside in the yard,’ one resident told me, still sounding slightly aggravated by the memory. The rock hurling sounds ridiculous to me now, but somehow the rumor was believable when I was in high school with a larger imagination. As a teen, the search was kind of scary in an adrenaline-thrilling way too, because there were always rumors circulating that the little people throw rocks at any outsiders who come on the street. Plus, there’s something just plain fun and thrilling to search for something as ‘Wizard of Ozish’ as a neighborhood of little people. Too many people know about it and talk about it for it not to be real, they figure. It couldn’t be an urban legend, generation after generation reason as they set out on the grand search. I felt like the ultimate trespasser, mostly because I was.įrom all the way back when I was in high school, cars full of kids would go searching for the elusive Midgetville. So after dinner, armed with flashlights, I took all those interested guests on a tour of Midgetville. He had heard about it from his friends numerous times. One Thanksgiving, I don’t remember how it came up in conversation, but my nephew who lives in West Chester, almost choked on his turkey when he heard I lived close to Midgetville. Living in Ridley, I wish I had a dime for every time I was asked the same question, ‘Where is Midgetville and how do you get there?’ They believe it exists, they wrote, because while searching for it, they heard first handed accounts from residents of Ridley Park who claimed to have been there, including a librarian. To make a long story short, the authors set off themselves to find Midgetville, even getting as close to it as Taylor Hospital, but they could never actually locate it. It got to the point that we’d finish the sentence for them. Usually, people would preface their comments with ‘I know this sounds dumb, but I’ve heard of this place,’ and then they’d trail off, as if they were too embarrassed to say more. Here is an excerpt from the book, which of course I had to buy: ‘While doing field research for this book in the Greater Philadelphia area, Weird Pennsylvania found that one subject kept cropping up. Written by Mark Sceurman and Mark Moran, the book claims to be ‘Your travel guide to Pennsylvania’s local legends and best kept secrets.’ One of the strange places to visit in Pennsylvania, according to the book, is Ridley Township’s politically incorrectly named ‘Midgetville.’ The authors devote two pages to the subject. ![]() While shopping at Five Below in Springfield recently, I came across a Weird Pennsylvania book, one in a series of books written about oddball places in each state. ![]()
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