It’s twilight in the City of Brotherly Love, and I’m on a tour offering what you might call a different perspective of Philadelphia’s colonial history. I’m standing outside the American Philosophical Society Library with a statue of native son Benjamin Franklin flanking a stack of books. It was Franklin who founded the Library Company of Philadelphia, America’s first lending library, but what I hear this evening is something I never read in the history books. “The building is not original. It burned down, but they rebuilt it to the original specifications with the original materials,” explains tour guide Steve Miller. “And the ghosts are still original as well,” he quips. “Franklin famously haunts the stairwell and also his office in the back of the building.” Yes, Miller is a guide with Philadelphia Ghost Tour and adds that sightings of the famous founding father are different throughout the year. “He shows up for a couple seconds and then he disappears. Sometimes he appears aggressive or confused,” says Miller. A short time later, we have a twilight view of America’s most famous statehouse, Independence Hall, with its whitewashed columned clock tower. Framed by the leafy trees of this section of Independence National Historical Park, the famous 1753 Georgian architecture-style building is where delegates signed both the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. But on this night, I learn it was also used as an ad hoc hospital during the American Revolution. And the tour’s version is again about spooky sightings. “The ghosts will show up wounded at the top of the stairs at the landing,” Miller says. “This cloud starts to form and out of it they’ll see this man in war clothes sometimes tattered and sometimes injured and a limb will be missing because amputation was very common back then.” While I frankly find it hard to believe in such ghostly sightings, the tour does reveal some of Philadelphia’s macabre and darker moments. Philadelphia Revisited The Founding Fathers Revealed Story and Photos by Richard Varr
The Philadelphia skyline as seen from the top of the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
For example, we stop in Washington Square, now a pleasant shaded park with benches and walking paths, which was in fact once a burial ground. Miller raises the grisly scenario of how bones sometimes surface due to soil erosion from flooding rainfalls. That’s because several thousand bodies including Revolutionary War soldiers and victims of the city’s 1793 yellow fever epidemic were interred here in shallow graves. Today, the Tomb of the Unknown Revolutionary War Soldier with an eternal flame sits on one side of the square. The ghost tour was just one activity during my four-day visit to one of America’s most historic cities, and my most extensive touring since I lived there and researched and wrote the Dorling Kindersley Eyewitness Travel Guide to Philadelphia and the Pennsylvania Dutch Country 20 years ago. From Old City’s Independence Hall, Liberty Bell, and Christ Church where the founding fathers worshipped, to Center City’s glistening skyline and the Rocky movies-made-famous grand 72 stone steps leading up to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, it seems not much has changed. While there are a few more skyscrapers and seemingly forever- changing restaurants like in any town, the major attractions remain must-see things to do. What I did find new since my last Philly visit is the Museum of the American Revolution, opened in 2017. With dioramas and artifacts including 18th-century muskets, personal diaries and letters, to name a few, the museum traces the events leading up to the 13 Colonies revolting against England and the timeline of the war. But the highlight and must-see exhibit is Gen. George Washington’s Revolutionary War Tent,
PHILADELPHIA REVISITED
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