“How still the spiderless city./The earth is immemorial in death.”–from “Philadelphia: Spring, 1885,” Sonia Sanchez
It doesn’t cost a cent to visit Independence Hall. That building, with its worn staircases and buzzing (out-of-place) light bulbs, is a national park, shared American history open to the public.
However, for a little less than $20, a tourist can have access to a different kind of American story: the ghost story.
We met a woman wearing a cape at a corner in front of Signers’ Park. In July, a quarter past seven is not the spookiest time of day; the sun still shone brightly, and cars rumbled back and forth on the narrow streets. Our tour guide was careful to offer a disclaimer about the stories she planned to tell us. Indeed, Philadelphia has a long and complicated history, but the ghost tours don’t necessarily reflect the views and beliefs of the city.
These were the renegade stories, and we were about to follow a mercenary storyteller.
Our group tripped over cobblestones and perched on the steps of museums. We paused outside of graveyards with crooked and broken headstones. We heard stories featuring celebrity ghosts: Ben Franklin haunts his books (and still gets fresh with the ladies) at the library built in his honor. The story of the ghost who protects the bodies of the unknown soldier(s) in the old potters’ field is heartbreaking; homeless people now sleep in the park built atop that mass grave. That everlasting flame at the monument is not enough to keep them warm.
By the time night fell, our storyteller had led us to an old house full of regrets. There’s a maid haunting the bishop’s house, eternally sorry for possibly causing the deaths of his children. And at the City Tavern, the place where the revolutionaries stuffed themselves with ale and audacity, a woman burned to death the night before her wedding. According to our guide–and not the City of Philadelphia–she shows up in the photographs of people who marry at the restored tavern.
These stories do not inspire the same awe and patriotism as the stories of the people who used language to shape this nation. These are the stories that aren’t noble enough to become cultural myths. We hear these after dark (or close enough to after dark), when we are feeling most vulnerable, most human.