In Brief
Baleroy Mansion in Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia holds a roughly 200-year-old blue wing-back chair its owners called the Death Chair. About four people are said to have died after sitting in it, including the curator, who said a ghost named Amanda followed him to the end.
The Full Story
In the Blue Room of Baleroy Mansion, a 32-room stone estate in the Chestnut Hill section of Philadelphia, sits a blue upholstered wing-back chair roughly 200 years old. The family that owned the house called it the Death Chair, and they meant it literally. About four people are said to have died after sitting in it.
George Meade Easby, the longtime owner, eventually draped the chair with rope so no one else could sit down. The Chestnut Hill Historical Society is cited as corroborating three of the deaths: a housekeeper, a cousin of Easby's, and a friend. The fourth was Paul Kimmons, the mansion's curator, and he was a skeptic. By the account that survives him, Kimmons toured the house with a psychic, watched a woman in red mist come down the staircase, and then could not stop seeing her. She turned up in the house, on the street, in his rearview mirror. He died of heart failure about two weeks after sitting in the chair, and in those final weeks he told several people he was being followed by the ghost of a woman named Amanda. The chair, the story goes, is hers. She does not like anyone else in her seat.
The Easbys treated the house as haunted long before any tourist did. They bought it in 1926, and shortly after they moved in, two brothers were at the courtyard fountain when one boy's reflection turned into a skull. He died in 1931, still a child. After his father's death, Easby found a note tucked in the old man's papers. It read: "The ghosts are here. Don't be afraid."
By Easby's own telling, the rest of the family never left either. The ghost of Thomas Jefferson is said to stand by the grandfather clock in the dining room. An elderly woman in black, leaning on a cane, walks the second-floor hallway. A visiting minister, the story goes, was struck by an antique pot thrown hard enough to be described as flying like a missile.
The chair was supposedly two centuries old, and supposedly once Napoleon's, though nothing on record holds up either claim. Easby died in 2005. The house sold in 2012, and the antiques were scattered to auction houses and museums, the Death Chair among them. Four people are said to have died in a chair that no longer sits in the room, in a house no one can tour anymore. Wherever it ended up, someone is sitting near it.
