In Brief
The Betsy Ross House in Old City Philadelphia is built around the flag-maker. But the violence people report traces to 1980, when a security guard was shot in the basement of the adjacent gift shop and left overnight to die. The moans started after.
The Full Story
The most violent thing tied to the Betsy Ross House in Old City Philadelphia has nothing to do with the Revolution. In 1980, two security guards argued in the basement of the gift shop next door. One shot the other three times and left him there overnight to die. Ever since, people working that part of the site report voices, cries, and moans coming up from below.
No newspaper or police record of the killing has ever turned up. The date, the three shots, the long night alone, all of it circulates through ghost-history sites and the people who work the building, not the archives. The names of the two guards are gone too. But the moans are the most-reported thing here, and they come from a real basement.
The house itself went up around 1740 in the narrow Pennsylvania colonial style, winding staircases and small rooms. Over the centuries it held a shoemaker, an apothecary, and eventually the German Mund family, who ran a tailor's shop and a tavern out of it. An 1876 ad for that tavern called the place "Original Flag House, Lager, Wine and Liquors." Betsy Ross, an upholsterer, is believed to have rented here roughly 1776 to 1779. Whether she ever lived at 239 Arch Street, and whether she sewed the first flag, historians have doubted for over a century. The flag story came from her grandsons around the 1876 Centennial, with nothing contemporary to back it. Two million Americans donated dimes to save the house anyway, in 1898.
What visitors report has held steady for decades. A woman in colonial dress on the narrow staircase between floors, usually taken for Betsy. Sewing sounds in the upstairs rooms where she ran her upholstery trade. In the attic, where the director's office sits, one former director felt a hand grab her shoulder, and another got so frightened she climbed out the window onto the flagpole.
In December 2008 the Ghost Hunters team spent a full night inside. A K2 meter pegged throughout the basement. They heard footsteps overhead and a loud moan near the cellar. In the attic they recorded a woman's voice saying "thousands," and another saying "you'll find it in this wall."
The museum's own director, Lisa Acker Moulder, had heard the stories for years. "I have to admit to being absolutely shocked by the results of the TAPS investigation," she said. The house is built around a woman nobody can prove lived here. The things people actually hear came from the basement next door.
