Walking through America’s most haunted city
My roommate likes to call me a “scaredy-cat.” I, however, prefer to think of myself as “conscious of mortal peril.” Either way, I’m a huge fan of scary stories and have always had a sort of masochistic obsession with the macabre.
Naturally, I decided that taking a ghost tour in what some say is “America’s most haunted city” was the best way for me to spend a Saturday evening. Determined to face my fears, I hopped on the computer and bought a ticket for the 7:30 p.m. Candlelight Walking Tour offered by Ghost Tours of Philadelphia, a company that runs many different ghost tours throughout the city, including a graveyard tour and a Valentine’s Day-themed tour.
Regular adult tour tickets are $17 in person or $15 online or over the phone. There is also the option to add the $14.99 book “Ghost Stories of Philadelphia, PA” (which contains the stories told on the tour, among others), or the $10.99 book “Edgar Allan Poe’s Last Days in Philadelphia” to your ticket package.
All stories told on the tour are guaranteed to be true ghost stories. Whether you believe in ghosts or not, a story is considered “true,” according to my tour guide Lisette Longo, if it’s historically accurate and involves people who definitely existed. The ghostly aspect of each story must also be verified by at least three sightings within the past 20 years by people who are 18 years or older, sober, and unaffected by mental illnesses that could cause hallucinations.
I picked up my tickets around 6:50 p.m. at Ben & Betsy’s Coffee & Gifts, a cute gift shop on Chestnut Street (between 4th and 5th Streets) that sells everything from touristy souvenirs, to ghost tour tickets, to coffee. For the next half hour, I chatted with Longo, a woman outside the shop wearing a colonial-era costume. I was delighted to learn that she would be my tour guide.
Hailing from the United Kingdom and having grown up across from a graveyard, Longo said she had always been fascinated by ghost stories. The 31-year-old has been leading ghost tours since 2006, when she was part of a history research team in Ocean City, N.J. She has also guided tours in such locations as London, England; Glasgow, Scotland; and Galway, Ireland.
“You meet a lot of weird people,” she said.
That was entirely true of my group, which included a surprising number of children. In addition to several other adults, there were at least five teenagers on the tour, along with a 10-year-old girl. But overall, I’d say I was lucky to be stuck with such a group; the kids’ attempts to capture ghosts on camera made the entire experience even more fun.
We began our tour in front of the Second National Bank of America, then moved to Carpenters’ Hall. The story behind the haunting of Carpenters’ Hall inspired Edgar Allan Poe’s famous short story “The Tell-Tale Heart,” dismemberment and all, but that’s not even the scariest part. According to the story, the victim’s poltergeist haunts the building, seeking revenge on the man who killed him. For this reason, said Longo, male caretakers of the building are often driven to leave their job—dead or alive.
From there, we walked down the alley behind Carpenters’ Hall (Longo calls it the “Alley of Shadows”), past the late reverend and doctor William White’s home and the adjacent spot where the home of doctor and Founding Father Benjamin Rush once stood.
The stories surrounding the area behind Carpenters’ Hall are all connected by one thing: Disease. Back in the late 1700s, Philadelphia was hit by an epidemic of yellow fever, resulting in a mass evacuation of the city. According to the story, Rush would treat those affected no matter their social class and would even pay for poor healthy citizens to evacuate. However, according to Longo, Rush was anything but the kindly doctor he was believed to be. As a result, the ghosts of the diseased are said to haunt the alley behind Carpenters’ Hall, suffering as they were at the end of their lives.
From there, we walked around the front of these houses, past the old Saint Joseph’s Church, to Saint Mary’s Church, then to Washington Square Park (the site of multiple mass graves from the colonial era) and, finally, back to Signers’ Garden.
In the end, I found that this 90-minute walking tour that looped around Philadelphia is more geared toward those who love scary stories, rather than those looking for an adrenaline rush. Fortunately for me, there were no ghostly actors popping out at us, something for which other attractions in the area are notoriously known.
However, the stories told on the tour are quite dark, including acts such as murder and desecration of corpses. If you know that these topics seriously affect you, I would recommend taking it into consideration before embarking on a ghost tour.
My personal opinion? The experience was definitely worth the money. I would happily walk that loop again just for more spooky stories.
