Baleroy Mansion

A chair once owned by Napoleon. A spirit called Amanda. Four people who sat in it died soon after, including the skeptical curator.

Paul Kimmons was the curator. He was skeptical. He had toured Baleroy Mansion with a psychic and, the way he told it later, saw a woman in red mist float down the staircase behind them. After that he saw her everywhere. In his own house. On the street. In his rearview mirror driving home. One afternoon, tired, he sat down in a blue upholstered chair in the room where he first met her, just to rest his legs. He was dead within the month.

The chair is supposedly two hundred years old and once belonged to Napoleon. The Baleroy family called it the Death Chair. Four people who sat in it died soon after, Kimmons among them. George Meade Easby, the last Easby to own the mansion, eventually had the chair roped off. He went to a medium who named the spirit in residence: a woman called Amanda, who had taken a shine to the chair and resented anyone else using it.

Take that story at whatever temperature you want. What is not in dispute is that Baleroy, a thirty-two room Chestnut Hill estate built in 1911, was considered strange by its own owners long before any tourists heard about it. The Easby family bought it in 1926. Their genealogy runs back to 12th-century Yorkshire and forward through three signers of the Declaration of Independence; they came to America on the Welcome with William Penn in 1683. They were not nervous people. And then they moved in.

Shortly after, brothers George and Steven Easby were playing at the courtyard fountain when Steven's reflection turned into a skull. George's did not. Steven died in 1931 of a childhood disease no one could quite identify. That was the family's first read on the place.

The rest accumulated over decades. A grandfather clock in the dining room had the ghost of Thomas Jefferson standing next to it often enough to be considered a regular. An elderly woman with a cane paced an upstairs hallway. Objects flew, sometimes violently: a visiting minister was hit by an antique pot thrown hard enough to be described as a missile. After Major Easby's death, his son George found a note in his father's papers. It read, "The ghosts are here. Don't be afraid."

George Meade Easby died in 2005 at eighty-seven. Baleroy sold in 2012. The antiques were auctioned off, the Death Chair included, and nobody tracked where it went. The current owner has described the place as quiet, with old-house noises and the occasional knock he cannot place. Whether Amanda moved with the chair or stayed with the house is not a question anyone has answered.