Perspective: Haunted Philadelphia

When you applied to Penn, you probably took into account Philadelphia's unique urban setting -- the history, the shopping, the cheesesteaks.

But did you consider its scarier side?

No, not the city's crime statistics, or the giant brown cockroaches in your kitchen.

We're talking about ghosts.

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Phantasmphiles and tourism bureaus alike call Philadelphia one of the most haunted cities in the United States.

And for centuries, many of its inhabitants claim to have been spooked -- and even groped -- by spirits from the city's rich historical past.

In 1881, a newspaper article reported that a young woman said Benjamin Franklin's ghost grabbed her rear end in Library Hall downtown after she saw him and that she fell down in terror.

While most people do not claim to have come into such close physical contact with the living dead, several have nonetheless been artistically inspired by the city's eerie ambiance.

Edgar Allen Poe lived in Philadelphia when he wrote his famous horror story "The Telltale Heart" and the chilling mystery "The Murders in the Rue Morgue." His tiny brick house, located at 520 North Seventh Street, is where he scrawled by candlelight some of his scariest works.

The architecture on Penn's own campus is rumored to have sparked the imagination of the celebrated cartoonist Charles Addams. While no one has proven that Addams modeled the mansion of Gomez and Morticia directly after College Hall, the creator of the Addams Family studied architecture at the University and was likely influenced by its Gothic-style towers, arches and windows, designed by architect Thomas Richards in the mid-19th century.

And just a few years ago, screenwriter and director M. Night Shyamalan, a Philadelphia native, set his critically-acclaimed supernatural thriller The Sixth Sense in his haunted hometown.

Take a walk by the Old Pine Street Presbyterian Church cemetery, where the film's characters pass by on the way to the funeral of a young girl poisoned by her own mother, and you'll see why Philadelphia is the perfect setting for a ghost story -- and if you continue strolling down the cobblestone streets of Old City, lit late at night only by dim street lamps, perhaps you'll see spirits of the departed for yourself.

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"People on my tours have said they saw an old housekeeper in colonial dress roaming around through the first floor window, when I thought it had been closed off," Philadelphia Ghost Tour guide Jason Williams says of the Bishop White House, considered the most haunted house in Independence Park. "Mrs. Boggs, who was Bishop White's maid in the 1790s, matches their description."

Williams has been leading groups of specter-seekers to the spookiest spots in Old City for five years on the Philadelphia Ghost Tour.

"All the stories I tell are true," he says.

The house of Bishop William White, a founder of the Episcopal Church in the U.S., is just one of many haunted locations in Old City. Williams says that many visitors claim to have seen a meowing kitten that vanishes into thin air when they try to pet it, and that numerous park rangers have reported seeing a tall, thin man with a grim face in the third floor window -- the window of the mansion's library, where White died in 1830 at the age of 85.

"I'm normally pretty skeptical about these sorts of things," Williams admits. "But you can't prove that something doesn't exist."

One especially inexplicable phenomenon is the phantom that is rumored to stand over the five unmarked graves in the cemetery of St. Peter's Episcopal Church, located at 313 Pine Street and built in 1761. It is suspected that the supposed phantom, whom many say can be seen every night at 9 p.m., protects the spirits of the five Indian chiefs buried there.

Franklin once worshiped at St. Peter's and was buried at the Christ Church cemetery at Second and Market streets, but many say his spirit now haunts Library Hall on Fifth Street below Chestnut Street. Some people say they have seen him walking around the library carrying a load of books, not to mention the 19th-century claim that the colonial ladies' man continued to fondle beyond the grave.

"Hugh Hefner has nothing on Ben," Williams says, continuing that the nation's most famous jack-of-all-trades fathered 68 children before dying of syphilis in 1790.

Philip Physick, America's first surgeon, was not quite so amorous toward his emotionally ailing wife, who now reputedly haunts the Physick mansion at 321 South Fourth Street. In the midst of a divorce in the 1790s, he continually medicated Mrs. Physick on opium and left her alone to wander the back yard, where she would sit by her favorite tree. When he cut the tree down, she died soon after, and now, centuries later, some claim they have spotted her in the yard, wearing a beige and lavender gown and sobbing.

But don't spend too much time looking for Mrs. Physick, or you might get hit by the swatting cane of the Hag of Pine Street, Williams says. Some claim Society Hill's own undying crotchety old lady "screams at little kids, harasses young lovers and yells at anyone who plays their piano too loud."

The greatest number of souls, however, reportedly dwell at Washington Square at Sixth and Walnut streets, the home of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. The square served as Philadelphia's burial ground for most of the 18th century, and about 10,000 bodies lie six feet below the surface, including American Revolutionary War soldiers, prisoners from the old Walnut Street jail, British soldiers and victims of the yellow fever epidemic that scourged the city in 1793.

Leah, a Quaker woman, protected the square centuries ago from grave robbers, but some people swear they still see her hobbling around in the night. In 1994, a Philadelphia detective reported that he spotted a woman in a cloak roaming the square with no face under her hood, and that as soon as he blinked, she was gone.

So next time you and your friends take a cab down to Old City for a night out on the town, keep your eyes open. If you decide to have a few beers at the City Tavern, watch out for the ghost of a waiter who died in a gory brawl over 200 years ago and now appears from time to time at the bar, Williams says, with a bloody stain on his shirt and his arm across his front, holding in his innards.

And if you're too young for the bar, take a group picture with your pals outside of the tavern. Since the building was rebuilt in 1973 after burning down during a wedding in 1854, some people allege that an extra face appears when they develop their group photos -- the face of the pretty young bride who died in the fire.

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Old City is not the only supposedly haunted area of Philadelphia -- in fact, the Eastern State Penitentiary, at 22nd Street and Fairmount Avenue, is among the most legendary hotbeds of paranormal activity.

MTV filmed its reality show "Fear" in the penitentiary last year because of the former prison's hair-raising reputation.

And although the television crew created most of the special effects to scare the cast, some of the mysterious occurrences were not so planned.

A cameraman who believed he was alone installing equipment in the locked-up penitentiary said he was pushed mysteriously from behind, according to Norman Johnson, a criminologist who recently spent time in the prison's cell blocks researching his biography on Chicago gangster Al Capone.

"Some people have seen and heard things," Johnson says, explaining that he knows many others who have come across what they believe were ghosts.

"But I haven't," he adds. "I slept in Al Capone's cell, and I didn't hear anything."

Capone spent eight months in Eastern State Penitentiary in 1929 and is one of the thousands of criminals who occupied the prison, which operated between 1829 and 1971. Stories of the brutal treatment of its inmates have left not only a disturbing mark in Philadelphia's history, but also a slew of unsettled spirits, according to several witnesses of bizarre encounters.

"The Eastern State Penitentiary is housing many souls that have lived in the prison," says Emily Bittenbender, the president of the penitentiary's board of directors. "It's been a very unusual situation of tortured tenants.... There's an amazing presence here."

The penitentiary was the first major institution to employ solitary confinement as a means of reforming criminals.

"There's a deep undercurrent of human suffering that's left a deep emotional imprint," Bittenbender says.

Bittenbender is one of many who say they have seen and heard incomprehensible sights and sounds in the dark confines of the penitentiary's 30-foot-high, eight-foot-thick stone walls.

"I've had a few personal experiences in cell blocks 12 and one," she says. "The most significant was when I saw two ghost dogs in cell block 12."

For some, the Eastern State Penitentiary has been the locale of truly terrifying altercations, but during the Halloween season, the former prison hosts a fun fright-fest for even those who reject the notion of the supernatural. Through pitch-black corridors and black-lighted rooms swarming with blood-covered ghouls hiding behind every corner, crowds tour the prison for a holiday jolt.

"It was really scary," says 10-year-old Stacy Wanerman, who, like many other Eastern State Penitentiary visitors, believes in ghosts. "It seemed like it was real."

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With Philadelphia's long history of frightening phenomena, you can appreciate its spookiness whether you believe in ghosts or not.

So on Halloween night, take a second glance at that mysterious figure in the shadows, and determine whether it's a kid in a costume or yet another unexplained sighting for the city's records.

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