Andalusia College Exploding Spook

Image from Theocracy of the Pale
Dr. William Chapman ran a school for boys in the early 1800's in a building that was the forerunner to Andulasia College in Bensalem, Bucks County. He did a good job relating to his students, but not so well with his missus.

She and a lover - some tales say it was a Spanish vagabond, others say a student - had an affair, and in 1831 decided that three was a crowd. So they poisoned the doc with arsenic.

They might have gotten away with it, too, except they poured the evidence into the dirt outside and the ducks got into it. They starting dying, which led into an investigation. It's a sign of the times that a person could suddenly croak without question, but when fowl play was suspected...

At any rate, the guy was hung, although Mrs. Bowman finangled her way out of the mess. The building eventually became a boarding house, and that's where the ghost story begins.

A lawyer named Horace W. Eshback was sleeping when a glow woke him up. To his dismay, he saw a head and torso - no legs - with a white mantle wrapped around it floating by his bed. In a bit of a panic, he said "What do you want?" to the spook.

Wrong question. It's response was to punch him in the mouth and then explode! It's ghostly remains dissipated through the ceiling. Must have been quite a wallop. The glow gradually diminished, and Eshback woke up with a fat lip.

Was it the shade of one of the Chapman's? The hung Romeo? Or perhaps a spirit of one of the nameless souls that called the school/boarding house home? Tough to tell, although if you're in the area and spot a legless spook, don't give it any lip, unless you want yours fattened.

The wooden structure is long gone now, as is its pugnacious phantom, replaced by St. Charles Borromeo Church. Read all about the eerie encounter in the December 4, 1886 NY Times.

Midnight Mary

Ah, nothing like a classic resurrection tale along the lines of The White Lady of Wopsy Mountain or Chicago's Resurrection Mary, the momma of them all. Toss together a young woman, an untimely end, a bit of a morality play, and viola - a resurrection legend is born. We love them all.

In 1935, Gertrude Spring and her date were on their way to, or maybe from, the prom. But their car skidded off the Bordentown Pike in Bucks County and splashed down into the depths of Penn Manor Lake (known by the locals as Tulleytown Lake or Van Sciver Lake), killing them both.

An alternate tale claims that the pair had a spat, and he dumped her off at the lake to find her way home to Bristol. She hitched a ride with another boy who was drunk (well, it was prom night) and he veered into the lake waters, killing them both.

The car and the body of the boy were recovered, but Spring was never found, according to both versions. We'd take that last bit with a grain of salt, since her grave site is pretty well known, and unless it's empty...

Some say they have seen Spring's spirit floating above the lake in her pink prom dress to this day, accompanied by the strains of ballroom music. They add that sometimes she seems to dance on the water.

Others have seen her on Bordentown Road, thumbing a ride. She's wearing a wet pink dress and is obviously distraught, telling the drivers that she has to find her Bobby. She eventually disappears, leaving behind a puddle in the car and sometimes a corsage.

She's buried in St. James Episcopal Cemetery, and her grave is still a popular stop.

The biggest mystery is why they call the wraith Mary. We're sure it's just for the alliteration. Midnight Gertrude just doesn't have the same ring. Now Tulleytown Trudy or Gertie's Ghost, hmmmm, they have some spooky potential....

Bolton Mansion

Image from Friends of Bolton Mansion
The 500 acre Pemberton estate dates back to 1683 (they called it Bolton in memory of their English home in Bouton, Lancashire. We guess with the accent it came out as Bolton.) The Mansion was built in 1687 in what is now Levittown, Bucks County.

The home itself is sort of a hodge-podge of design. It was added to and modernized at least four times up to the 1860s. It lasted as a working estate until 1938 when it was given to the University of Penn. It quickly changed hands, going to U.S. Steel as a guest house ten years later and then to suburban innovator William Levitt in 1952.

He in turn gave it to Bristol Township, which used it as a municipal building until 1966. It sat vacant for decades, and now it's a National Historic Landmark being renovated by the Bucks County Conservancy. And it does have its' ghosts.

One spirit that roams the grounds is a lady in a long dress and cloak. She's seen at night and is surrounded by a soft aura. Another woman also walks the grounds, crying to herself as she searches the area. A little girl has been spotted on the second floor of the Mansion running from window to window and peering out each one. Patty Wilson in Haunted PA thinks the pair may be a separated mother and child looking for each other. One reader wrote and said that he and his friend saw the shadow of a woman in red go by; sounds a lot like one of the girls to us.

But the most famous ghosties are those of the rebel soldier and his girl. It was said that the owner of the estate disowned his son for enlisting to fight for the South during the Civil War. When the war ended, the son returned home.

But his father refused to forgive him. Distraught, the young man hung himself from the second floor stairwell. His body was found by his childhood sweetheart Mary, a house servant, who shot herself after making the gruesome discovery.

But this tragic tale seems to have a happy ending. A visiting psychic investigator sensed some activity on the stairs and shot a series of photographs. When the pictures developed, the images shown were of a soldier dressed in a Confederate uniform posing with a lady in a Civil War era dress at the top of the steps. It seems as if the star crossed pair that couldn't lay claim to home and happiness in life managed to do so in death.